Alice Hickey:

Between Worlds Justin Spring

WINNER

John Ringling Towers Award for Literary Arts

Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press

Copyright 2011 Justin Spring Library of Congress Control Number: 2011905144 ISBN#: Soft Cover 978-0-9717374-9-5 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press P.O. Box 5932 Sarasota, Florida 34277 Phone: (941) 306-1119 E-Mail: soulspeakspring@gmail.com WEB Page: www.soulspeak.org Printed in the United States of America by Royal Palm Press http://rppress.com Distributed by Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press http://sptpress.blogspot.com Spring, Justin, 1939Alice Hickey: Between Worlds/by Justin Spring ISBN 978-0-9717374-9-5 For More Information on the Artistic Activities of Justin Spring: http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com This book is available in three (3) formats from SOULSPEAK: Paperback, Amazon Kindle E-book, or a free, fully featured PDF: http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com

This is a multi-media book. To access multi-media components: http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com

Heres what readers are saying about Alice Hickey: Few books allow us to really feel what encounters with the psychic world are like. Castaneda comes to mind, of course, and that is his enduring gift to us. Here is a book that has that same power, but it is not set in the austere Sonora desert, but the nutty, everyday world of poet Justin Spring who brings us smack into his humpty-dumpty world of supermarkets, intuitives, treasure hunters, bars, poets, preachers, Starbucks, pawnshops, drunks and dopers as he travels between Florida, Sedona, California, Mexico, Panama, and the Florida Keys trying to make sense of a series of psychic events triggered by a mysterious encounter with psychic Alice Hickey. This is a book you wont want to put down. It is visionary in its scope and devilish in its pace. Scylla Liscombe Poet, Dancer, Artist, Mystic

This is a book that masterfully crisscrosses reality and fantasy until they blur into each other completely. I would say the same for the writer and for most of the characters portrayed, including myself. Maybe especially myself. It is a book that shuttles back and forth from head to heart, never missing a beat. Welcome to the world of the mystical. It is no more or less crazy and funny and engaging than the world we call real life. Joan Adley Performance Artist, Author, Intuitive

Acknowledgments This book would never have been possible without the aid of Jane Washington, Joan Adley, and Diane Randall, not only for their insights as intuitives, but also for advising me on the early manuscripts and, of course, Alice Hickey, without whom this book would still be turning itself over and over in the halls of my mind. My special thanks to Diane for guiding me through the intricacies of psychic dreaming and to Scylla Liscombe for guiding me through the small but formidable forest of Alices poetry. I also want to thank Shaw Waltz for her tough-minded criticism on just about everything, writer Barbara Smith for her constant support and encouragement, and finally, Jan Dorsett, my scrupulous editor, for mercilessly slapping my prose whenever it wandered.

For Alice

Table of Contents Authors Foreword Chapter 1: Alice Hickey Chapter 2: A Visitor from Sedona Chapter 3: The Witnesses Log Chapter 4: The Myth Chapter 5: Jane Washington Chapter 6: Pinga Dentista Chapter 7: Hallucinations Chapter 8: The Red Light Bar Chapter 9: Speaking and the Psychic Roots of Poetry Chapter 10: Eve Is the Serpent Chapter 11: Speaking Chapter 12: Diane Randall Chapter 13: Witnessing Chapter 14: Mercedes Noriega Chapter 15: ISLAUGGH Chapter 16: Jane Beats Me with My Own Myth Chapter 17: I Take the Ball From Jane And Run Chapter 18: Fruitville Road Chapter 19: The Market Chapter 20: A Measured Retreat Chapter 21: A Distant Retreat Chapter 22: Starbucks Chapter 23: ISLAUGGH and San Blas Chapter 24: Alice Speaks Chapter 25: I See the Muse in a New Light Chapter 26: Alicia La Verne Chapter 27: The Other World Chapter 28: The Beatles and the Witnesses Chapter 29: Alice and Betty Fill in Some Blanks Chapter 30: BruderMann Chapter 31: Leaning With Fate Chapter 32: Alice in Mexico Chapter 33: Alice in Chains Chapter 34: Alice Explains the Female Spirit Chapter 35: Alice Hands Me a Notebook Chapter 36: Alice Finally Gets Around to ISLAUGGH Chapter 37: I Uncover the Myths Hebraic Connection Chapter 38: Jesus, You Got Some Life Alice Chapter 39: I Have Some Doubts about Alice Chapter 40: Jane Pulls Out Smokey Robinson Chapter 41: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on a Soap Box Chapter 42: Alice in Chains Redux Chapter 43: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on the Soap Box One More Time

1 4 5 9 13 21 25 31 35 38 41 43 45 50 54 60 63 67 74 77 82 85 88 94 102 104 110 115 126 132 138 145 148 155 158 166 173 179 186 193 196 201 207 209

Chapter 44: Alice Shows Me Some Poems Chapter 45: I Explain Duck-ness Chapter 46: I Visit Graves Chapter 47: Alice Leaps to Her Death Chapter 48: I Become a Chimpanzee Chapter 49: Alice and The First Mother Chapter 50: I Confess My Ignorance Chapter 51: I Face My Primitive Soul Chapter 52: Alice Confesses Chapter 53: Heralds Chapter 54: Charon, the Ka, and Witnessing Afterword Appendix Appendix A: Photographs Appendix B: Excerpts from the Authors Journal About the Author Web Links

211 218 223 228 232 239 248 252 255 261 275 282 287 288 289 290 292

ALICE HICKEY

Authors Foreword The psychic world, the Other World, the world of the collective unconscious, the souls world, is real. It is continually visiting us whether we want it to or not. The central problem for us, as modern humans, is were not quite sure who, or what, is visiting us. Or why. We dont have the ready answers our forefathers did. Nor did I. I was totally unprepared for what happened to me in March 2000, when an elderly womana complete strangerapproached me and did something so incomprehensible it completely upended my rational worldview. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that incomprehensible event triggered others. Inexplicable things started happening to me that were not of this world. As disturbed and bewildered as I was by these psychic intrusions, the poet in me decided to let what was happening unfold of its own accordas if it were a poem insinuating itself into the landscape of my mind. I also decided to record what was happening in somewhat the same way by giving the Muse her head, which accounts for the somewhat serpentine movement of this book. It is movement of which I have become very fond. If those psychic intrusions had been the end of it, I probably would have gone about my life pretty much as before, but with an increased awareness of how mysterious our lives really are. That was not to be the case, however, because nine months after those events a long, enigmatic poem that was completely beyond my understanding suddenly came to me. I couldn't get a grip on it until I realized it was a myth, although I was at a loss to say exactly what kind of myth. Whats more, I couldnt even rightly call it a myth; after all, time is the great arbiter in that. All I can say is that it felt like a myth. As I began to unwind its skein over the years, it indeed seemed to have many of the characteristics of our ancient myths. Here is an excellent summation of those characteristics by author Robert T. Mason in The Divine Serpent in Myth and Legend:
Myths are stories, usually, about gods and other supernatural beings. They are often stories of origins, how the world and everything in it came to be in illo tempore [Eliade]. They are usually strongly structured and their meaning is only discerned by linguistic analysis [Levi-Strauss]. Sometimes they are public dreams, which, like private dreams, emerge from the unconscious mind; they more often reveal archetypes of the collective unconscious [Jung]. Myths are symbolic and metaphorical, and they orient people to the metaphysical dimension, explain the

ALICE HICKEY

origins and nature of the cosmos, and on a psychological plane, address themselves to the innermost depths of the human psyche.

The myth, which I called The Witnesses Log, had those same qualities, and spoke of the same things, so it was clear to me it wasnt just a lot of tasty, unconscious gibberish. Yet we may have a difficult time accepting one of the things The Witnesses Log saysthat very early humans had a much different consciousness than ours, one that was in constant interplay with the psychic world. We see our current rational, self-reflective consciousness as one in which our making sense of the world has become self-powered, needing only the physical world and the application of reason as necessary for knowing. But that is an illusion. That other, older way of knowing is still there beneath the veneer of our modern consciousness, and it is as strong and as vibrant as ever. Jung has taught us that, as have many thinkers before and after him. Our greatest poets have taught us its power as well, but in a more fundamental, more intuitive way, as poetry must. Unfortunately, we have lost our taste for poetry because we have lost sight of the soul, and with it we have also lost sight of the fundamental role of poetry: it is the way that the soul, the unconscious, the unknowable, speaks to us. And here's the really mysterious partit's the way we speak back. Poetry holds a special place in the pantheon of arts. It is the primal seed from which all our other arts have come. Poetry, in its initial tribal form, was a fullblooded, communal oral poetry that contained other primal forms (mask, movement, mime, music, song) that eventually developed into the separate arts we have today: It is not only the most human of our arts, it is also the mother of those arts. It has been my experience, moreover, that when we allow ourselves to surrender to something like that early, primal form of poetrya form of poetry that was an integral part of our early consciousnessit will speak to us in a way like no other. In short, it will speak to us the way poetry should. Poetry gives us a way of knowing that bypasses the traps of the rational mind and strikes zero at the bone. It gives us a transcendent way of knowing that allows us to feel truths that are beyond logic: Death is Life. Love is Pain. More than anything, this older way of knowing tells us we are not a cosmic accident. It is a way of knowing that has nothing to do with logic and facts, but everything to do with the intimations of the soul, with the transcendent feelings that are continually visiting us through poetry, continually whispering: We belong.

ALICE HICKEY

There is something else Id like to say about this book: it wouldnt have gone anywhere if I hadnt created it communally. I dont mean it was written with others; there was no need for that. I knew how to write, and I could sense the story was going to have the energy of a poema long extended narrative poem and that I was the one who was supposed to write it. What I needed, though, was psychic guidance. I knew something extraordinary was taking place, something not of this world. As fate would have it, I was able to obtain help initially from three friends who were gifted intuitives: Joan Adley, Jane Washington, and Diane Randall. All it took was a few words and they gathered around me like dancers in a play. And then, some four years later, the stranger reappeared, and as Jung would say, completed the quarternity. She was the fourth, final dancer, and she was just in time. I was in desperate need of the kind of guidance only she could supply. Im not embarrassed to admit that I often became so lost I had to rely almost entirely on their guidancewhich they unfailingly supplied me with all the assurance of sleepwalkers. I cant tell you how beautiful and unusual those experiences were. You might say I had many Muses this time and not just the one I ordinarily rely on.

ALICE HICKEY

Chapter 1: Alice Hickey March 2000, Sarasota The first time I saw Alice Hickey I didnt know she was Alice Hickey. She was just a bony, gray-haired old woman rummaging through the same large bin of tomatoes. Youd remember her though. She was a type. Twenty-five years ago, youd see women like Alice on a regular basiswomen whod been living here long before the palmetto scrub was paved over with malls. Crackers would be the correct description. Theyd drift into town late Friday night from the farms and ranches for groceries, and they were all business. Just like Alice: long, straight hair, weathered face, bony hands, dont talk to me. I was about to give up on finding anything that even resembled a ripe tomato when a voice inside my head whispered, Blood Eggs. For some reason, I dont know why, I looked up at the old woman. I never got past her eyes. They were almost colorless, like high, thin air. I couldnt stop looking at them. It was like she was looking right through meor I was looking right through her, I couldnt tell which, but the effect was unnerving. I tried to look away, but she stepped closer and whispered, You havent found anything, have you? To which I stammered back something like, No, I havent. No sooner had I said it than her face seemed to simplify itselfthats the best way I can describe itand then her eyes seemed to get larger, and then I heard a voice inside my head say very clearly, Not yet. Right then my mind stopped. I instinctively knew the voice was not of this world. There was no thinking involved in coming to that realization. I simply knew. Then, suddenly, I was myself again, looking at an old, bony woman who kept asking me, Are you OK? as if I had just stumbled, or slipped. I nodded yes, or at least I think I did, but before I could say anything else she strolled out of the market as if nothing had happened. That was the last time I saw her until four years later when Diane Randall called and told me someone by the name of Alice Hickey wanted to see me.

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Chapter 2: A Visitor from Sedona June 2000, Sarasota I would have liked to dismiss what had happened at the market as some kind of neural short circuit, but I couldnt. Although I dont consider myself particularly psychic, I am familiar with psychic voices. My own come to me in times of stress or high creativity. I view them as guides, interior companions. This voice, though, was not a companions voice. It was a psychic voice of an entirely different order. I had immediately felt its authority, its truth, and had instinctively bent to it, Yet I couldnt help thinkingas crazy as it soundsthat it had somehow come from the old woman, which was impossible. How could she have spoken to me from inside my mind? Supposedly only aliens can do that, and she was anything but that. The only explanation that made any sense at all was that the old woman had somehow triggered, or caused the voice to erupt in my head, but that was just a stab in the dark. There was nothing in my experience that could explain what had happened. To add to my mystification, I didnt have the slightest idea what, Not yet. meant. I knew it wasnt about the tomatoes. It had to have been about something else, but what? I knew if I hoped to get any inkling as to what was going on, it would probably have to be through a state of heightened awareness. Joan Adley, a fellow poet and frequent collaborator, was visiting me from Sedona. She was also extremely psychic, so I asked her if shed like to join me in a few sessions of heightened awareness and the answer was, of course, yes, when do we start? Ive always liked working with Joan. We have a friendship thats deep and very easy. There is a stillness about her that puts me immediately at ease. Our feelings on most matters are so similar theres generally very little need to talk them out. Our everyday conversations, when they do occur, usually consist of a few short thoughts about art and then, every once in a while, these funny little riffs that seem to come out of nowhere. Wicked is the only word for them. I began seeing Joans spirit face over the days we spent together. I had seen it before, but now it was quite vivid, usually appearing when we were lying in the dark: her spirit face would hover just above her real face. It always had a bluegray luminous cast to it. I discovered Joan had two spirit faces: a kitten, which fits her playful, feline personality, and then she had another facea face with no features. Nothing. No matter how much I stared at it, I could never get past that blank, amorphous surface.

ALICE HICKEY

It was an uneasy experience. Sometimes I got the sense that there was nothing behind it, and by nothing, I dont mean the idea of nothing, but nothing itself: non-existence. If you want some idea, try to feel what nothing, what non-existence is. The mind crumbles before it. Whenever I tried to look deeply into that numb, unyielding face, I could feel my entire being resisting. Something in me didnt want to go there. Ever. I mentioned the face only once to Joan. She listened somewhat impatiently and said nothing. I never brought it up again. The only thing I was ever able to conclude about the face is that it had something to do with her uncanny ability to empty herself and acquire, or absorb, the feelings of others, to be a sort of psychic tabula rasa. That ability is so acute its literally impossible for her to not feel what you feel, even if she doesnt want to. Sometimes, in intense situations, you can see those emotions rippling across her face in a tangle of shadows: fear, love, laughter, pain, surprise, sorrow. Those empathetic powers have also made her extraordinarily sensitive to the Stream, as she calls the psychic world, and once she hooks into it, all kinds of things happen creatively. I would say that Joan has a predilection, almost an addiction, for latching onto creative energy of any kind. Some of the most original, creative things Ive donecomplete artistic shiftshave been the result of simply being with her and somehow slipping into the Stream with her. There are no outward signs when the time is right. It just happens. Ive learned over the years to be attentive and surrender to it immediately. You might think that kind of intimacy and closeness would be reflected in our personal lives, but Joan and I had a long history of being close and then pulling apart and then coming together again. At a younger age, I might have been disturbed by those cycles, but I was at a time in my life where I had long ago accepted that what I had with Joan was probably how it was going to be. I like collaborating with women creatively, and have had long, fruitful artistic relationships with several talented women. But my personal life with women has been less successful. I had to go through two marriages to good women before I realized I simply didnt have what it takes to make a marriage work. I was too self-centered, childish, independent, mean-spirited, opinionated, angry, you name it. My second wife said it best: You look friendly, but youre not. You fool people. I think if you blend that remark with my earlier idyllic portrait of Joan and me, youll have a better sense of how Joan and I actually fit together. I can assure you it is a very complicated Garden. Some time ago, I recorded a conversation with her about the Stream. Joan can be extremely chatty, but getting her to explain psychic things in detail is like pulling teeth. She is the most miserly transmitter of psychic information I have ever met. She doesnt think or see anything. She feels it with her body. She will tell you, for

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example, that surrendering to the Stream comes as a physical experience, not a visual, or verbal one: whatever message she gives you is based on that feeling. So if you try to dig deeper, you immediately hit her body and thats the end of the game. I asked her once if she could tell me more about what she meant when she said the Stream is female creative energy, and she said, I cant tell you any more than that. I just know what the Stream feels like, and it feels like female creative energy to me. What does the Stream look like? I asked. I dont know; I cant see it, she said. I only feel it. Well, what does it feel like then? Like a presence. What kind of presence? The Goddess. What Goddess? Female energy. But what does that feel like? Like an orgasm. But slower. Does it move toward the light? Yes. Does it move toward anything else? The dark, but not as strongly. What else does it move toward? Everything. Its the energy of Creation. How do you find it? I dont. It finds me. How? I dont know. What do you do when it finds you? I surrender to it. What happens then? Everything. One full moon night, I could feel something was about to happen. I was alone; Joan had left for a few days to visit friends. Around midnight, I dont know why, I went into my bathroom to look in the mirror, a favorite technique of mine for seeing spirit faces. You have to stay a certain distance from the mirror. Its about the distance in conversation where you begin to get uncomfortable if the other person moves any closer. You can move in and out and watch it appear and disappear. Joan says mine looks like a pig. Im sure shes right, but Ive never seen it. I told her I must save it just for her and she laughed. It was one of those laughs that said: Youll see.

ALICE HICKEY

She was right. When I looked in the mirror I saw something I wasnt expecting. Staring back at me was an ancient, numinous figure with long, gray hair. He was wearing a coarse, simple robe and was bathed in a gray, dusty light, almost as if he had been accumulating the dust of centuries. My first instinct was that he was an ancestor, a Celt. Then the word messenger came to mind; and right behind it the pale eyes of the old woman at the bin. I kept looking at the figure in the mirror. He didnt move an inch, just stood there looking back at me. I could feel an incredible sadness about him, a burden. This happened three evenings in a row. After the second evening I tried to make sense of what was happening. Later, when I tried to picture what the figure had looked like, I realized he had no mouth, something I had somehow accepted as normal. I also remembered there was something about his nose that I had also somehow accepted as normal, and then it came to me: his nose had been shaped something like a boars snout. I immediately thought of Joans comment about my piggy face, but this piggy face had nothing to do with my greedy little bouts of selfishness. This was a survivors face. One last thing: on the third evening, as I stared at the figure in the mirror, I heard a voice inside my head say, Witness. The voice was clear and flat, without any particular inflection, but it wasnt the voice of the figure in the mirror. It was another voice: a knowing, clarifying one. I hear voices like that frequently, usually when Im in a highly creative state. They seem to come from a deeper part of me. But I had no idea what Witness meant. Was it a command, or a description? I couldnt tell. Was the figure a witness to some ancient horror? Why did he have no mouth? And why had he come to me? Or was the figure a reflection of the inner me? Or did Witness mean something else? Did it mean I should bear witness to the figure? Was I supposed to tell others about him? But what? Tell them that an apparition of an ancient figure with a boars snout and no mouth had appeared to me in my bathroom mirror? When I told Joan about all this and asked her what it meant, something like wonder and then regret rippled across her face. Its about a birth, she said. What kind of birth? I asked. A rebirth. Whose rebirth? Yours, she said. But what kind of rebirth and why me? I dont know that. All I know is its yours and its a rebirth. What about the piggy nose? I quipped, hoping that her sense of humor would loosen her up. Thats yours too, she laughed, just like the birth.

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Chapter 3: The Witnesses Log December 2000-January 2001, Santa Monica, California Joan called at the end of November. She was depressed. She had just moved from Sedona to Santa Monica. She was lonely, needed company, and besides, Id like it there she said, the apartment was only a few blocks from the beach. Why didnt I fly out? It sounded inviting. I needed some time out anyway. My head was still spinning from the figure in the mirror, not to mention the old woman at the tomato bin. There were times I thought the message, Not yet. referred to the figure in the mirror that had appeared shortly afterwards, but even that didnt make much sense. For one thing, I hadnt been looking for him, and even when he appeared it only served to raise more questions. I needed some time out. It was possible Joan might be able to help me figure out what was going on. A few days later I was on my way to Los Angeles. I was in an up mood when I arrived. The change of scene felt good. I had friends in Los Angeles I hadnt seen for years, and besides, Ive always liked California. When I last visited in the seventies it felt new: open, independent, full of energy. When I saw Joan, however, I knew something was wrong. I could see a weariness and confusion. Her guides were not being kind to her. They were shifting her from place to place faster than she could handle it: from Sarasota to Sedona to Santa Monica, all in the space of a few years, and although I didnt know it at the time, she would soon pull up stakes again and move to a small town in Sonora, in Mexico, without knowing a word of Spanish. Our routine soon settled down to Joan staying in bed until noon and me going for long walks in the park overlooking the beach, breathing in the bright sun and cold, damp Pacific air and then joining her for a late lunch at one of the little eating places on Montana. Then Id usually drop her off at the apartment and go walking again through the neighborhoods. I never tired of looking at the beautiful, old homes; there was something magical about them: the bright flowers, the perfect green gardens. One night, after Joan had gone to bed, I pulled up my web page to see if any new poems had been posted. I had read three or four new entries when a short poem suddenly came to me. I entered it. It seemed abstract, at least for me. A second poem followed immediately, then another and another, until I had entered a total of twelve short, abstract poems that somehow seemed oddly personal. They didnt look anything like my normal written poetry, which tends to meander in a chatty kind of way, like a man with too much on his mind.

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But these poems were short, almost telegraphic. Nor did I understand why such a collection had chosen to come to me in writing, as I had all but given up the writing of poems in favor of spontaneous oral composition. And then there was the deliberate way they arrived: perfectly complete, one after the other. Like eggs in a carton. As I looked at the poems, I realized they made up a myth of some sort, and then the title simply popped into my head: Witnesses Log, and then, right behind it, like a bell in the night, the ancient figure in the mirror. Something unbelievable was unfolding right in front of me but I didnt know what. I was too close to see. The next morning I told Joan what had happened and showed her the twelve poems. In the past, she always seemed to understand what was happening when my work took a strange turn, but this time she seemed confused. I realized her depression was deepening. She wouldnt be able to help, not now. Id have to wait. I wanted to correct some misspellings and grammatical errors in my entries, but because of the way my web page works, I had to completely re-enter the twelve poems. When I did, they changed all by themselves, some very slightly, some dramatically. I had no choice in the matter. All I can say is that they wanted to clarify themselvesbecome more beautifulmore trueand I let it happen. The two versions are still there on our web page, locked in time, circling each other. Like twin stars. By this time, it was clear to me that not only was something unusual happening, but also that the poems made up some kind of creation myth. I became restless and began searching for an explanationlooking for some ancient myth that might roughly parallel this onebut I could never find one that even came close. I was up against a wall. One thing was for sure: I knew that the myth had come to me on the web for a reason. I didnt know what that reason was, but I knew it wasnt an accident that I had entered it there. I remember having the distinct sense, right after I had entered the poems, that they were supposed to be shared, and then a word had appeared in my head: sacrifice. I took it to mean the poems were supposed to be cannibalized, pulled apart, used by others to create their own myths. I put a message on our web page next to the myth asking anyone who wanted to use it in this way to follow certain conventions so Id be able to detect their entries. A few days later, I began to get the feeling that the myth should have an oral form as well. That didnt surprise me. For a number of years, I had been attempting to create poems by speaking them as they came to me, and had become proficient at it. But in this case, there were a number of problems associated with creating a speaking, which is what I had come to call these spontaneous oral poems. I never create a speaking with any preconception of what I am about to do. I like to operate the same way all preliterate poets did, by simply surrendering to

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whatever the Muse has in mind. Think of it as something like the artistic version of Zen no mind. The only way I could see of getting around this dilemma was by trying to forget the written version as much as was humanly possible and see what happened. Then I began listening to some of the hundreds of music tracks I carry with me, hoping one would strike a chord and suggest a beginning. One did: a track given to me by Bruce Baughman and Chris Sittel, two Sarasota artists. The track contained what I like to call industrial music: discordant, percussive, driving. Its something I wouldnt normally use, but it kept calling me. I asked Joan to join me because her empathetic powers make her a wonderful antiphonal responder. We tried thirteen times, but none of them took. Either the written version kept coming back to me and spoiling it, or the music was too discordant, or Joan wasnt able to catch fire and the whole thing would wind down like a spent music box. Maybe I was trying too hard. I decided to get out of the apartment for a while and asked Joan if shed like to take a trip to Venice Beach, a few miles down the road. We were wandering along the boardwalk when I heard a sound that went right through me. It was a guitar of some kind, but with an unearthly sound. I pushed my way through to the sound and there in front of me was a slim, long-haired, street musician strumming a Fender electric in one hand and what looked like an Indian sitar in the other. There were several CDs on the table. He said his name was Levi Chen. I asked him which CD had the song he was playing and I bought it immediately, along with several others. (You can never be sure, I kept saying to myself.) I told him how Id like to use the music to help record a poem, a myth, that the music seemed perfect, and he said no problem, have at it. I returned to Venice several times after that, hoping Id bump into him, but I never saw him again. Not once. It was almost as if hed come down to the beach that day just for me. I knew I had found the missing music; it was pure poetry. That evening I set up a mixer to bring in my voice and Joans along with the two pieces of music and hit start. The window opened and there was the Stream. Finally. The fourteenth speaking took without a hitch. Both Joan and I were astounded. The two pieces of music had fit perfectly together. Whats more, I had finally been able to reach down to the core of the myth, way past the written version, and let the oral version form on my lips like a visitor from another world. And somehow, Joan was able to momentarily rise out of her depressionyou can hear it on the recordingand we created something that bordered on the miraculous. We tried the next night and were successful again. This time Joan opened with a long soliloquy about awakening from a long, dark sleep that was so subtle and beautiful I still marvel at it to this day. We tried seven more times and finally gave up on the twenty-second try. Joan was clearly exhausted and I was close to

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it. I realized the Stream had moved on and nothing more was going to happen. Somewhere in my mind, I sensed there were supposed to be three oral versions of The Witnesses Log, but I realized it wasnt going to happen in Los Angeles. I thought of Jane Washington, a poet and singer I worked with in Sarasota. Maybe she could do the third version, I said to myself, and thats how it eventually worked out. When Joan and I sat down the next night to listen to the two oral versions we had created, I was stunned. I always know when I have done something good. I can feel it. But speaking is such an unconscious process that my conscious memory of the event is always a bit vague. The recordings were overwhelming. Everything fit together beautifully. It seemed almost impossible. After we had listened to the recordings a few times, I looked at Joan and said, Well, what do you think? Its beautiful, she said. But what does it mean? I asked. What is it all about? She paused for a moment as if trying to capture something working its way through her body. Its a Bible, she said. A new Bible: a Bible for our time. She was undoubtedly onto something, but I hadnt the slightest idea where she was going with it. I wanted to know more. I dont know any more than what I told you, she said. What about the figure in the mirror, I asked, and the voice in my head that said Witness as I looked at him? They both have to be connected to the myth, right? Why else would the myth have wanted to call itself The Witnesses Log? All I know is what I told you. Dont be so piggy.

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Chapter 4: The Myth December 2000-January 2001, Santa Monica, California

A Brief Summary of the Myth: The myths primary contention is that we became human not when our skeletal structure changed, or we began to use fire, or tools, or logic, but when we began to create stories. When we became witnesses to creation. The myth implies that all the things we have come to see as particularly human: tool-making, belief in God, knowledge of good and evil, logic, language, came out of this inexplicable and unprecedented change in our previously animal consciousness. This change has never occurred again in any of the thousands of animal species we are aware of. We are the only animals that can say: This happened, or more spectacularly, Once upon a time. Although we hold stories in small regard today, preferring the logic of science, the myth is very clear that it is our ability to witnessto observe, and to report that distinguishes us from the animals, indeed from the very animals we evolved from. This change from animal to human consciousness, according to the myth, occurred when we became aware of the Listeners, an invisible, unapproachable, felt presence we sensed as having an unknowable interest in our feelings. The myth is very elusive, as a good myth should be, about the exact nature of our relationship with the Listeners. But it is very clear that it was our awareness of the Listeners existence that brought about our sudden change in consciousness, a change that has absolutely no counterpart in all of evolutionary history. Everything else, including the change from fins to fingers, is small potatoes. The myth goes on to say that once we became Witnesses, we also became aware of a second metaphysical presence: the Visitors. Unlike the passive, unknowable Listeners, whom we might think of as the truly unknowable, or the Gods before there were Gods, or perhaps our previous animal consciousness, the myth portrays the Visitors as continually coming into time: think of spirits, visions, angels, demons, aliens, poems, prophecies, intuitions. The myth then goes on to say that the appearance of the Visitors caused a further development in the consciousness of some of the Witnesses: they became Dreamers, which is the myths term for those capable of directly witnessing the psychic world. Think of Black Elk, Buddha.

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Early human consciousness was one in which all of these intelligences were in free interplay within our conscious and unconscious minds, if we can use Jungian terminology for a moment. You might say if you took off the top of the head of very early man, these are the players that would be inside. Essentially, these intelligences were in free float, constantly influencing one another. That free-float was what allowed us to know the world by feeling it rather than logically explaining it. That ability is no longer with us, at least in the ancient sense. Rather it is buried beneath our current modern consciousness, where it has been receding since the advent of writing and all of its stepchildren.

The Witnesses Log I In the beginning, there was nothing. Only the sound of darkness. And us. We were like moss clinging to the mountainside. We were waiting to be remembered. We were waiting for the sun.

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II When the Listeners came, we changed. We became Witnesses. We heard the Listeners entering the darkness in the valley far beneath us. We could feel them moving beneath the dark folds of light.

III When the Visitors appeared, some of us became Dreamers. No one knows why.

IV The Visitors are from the Other World. When we asked them why they had come, they looked down at the darkness in the valley far beneath us and then they went to the top of the mountain and became like dark stars, like fires, everywhere.

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V The Dreamers travel to the Other World. They are sent to places of darkness and places of light. When they come back, they bring back pieces of the Other World. The pieces comfort us when we are lost. They speak to us. One of the pieces spoke to us in a language no one understood. Someone said it sounded like blood, or water. The Dreamers said that is what The Listeners sound like when they speak: Like blood, or water. No one knows how to speak like that, the Dreamers said. No one knows how to speak like blood, or water. No one.

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VI No one has ever seen the Listeners. The Visitors say the light in the valley far beneath us is too dark to see. But we know they are there, moving beneath the dark folds of light. We can feel them, listening. The Visitors say they sound like water moving into darkness from far, far away

VII The Listeners hear everything we feel. Everything. They hear us when were crying in the silence of our minds. They hear us when were giving up just before we die.

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VIII The Visitors say we are bound to the Listeners by promises. What promises? we asked. No one knows that, they said. Not even us.

IX Some of the Visitors have large flat eyes like the tails of comets. We can see them in the corners and the byways of our minds, watching us. The Dreamers say the Visitors with large flat eyes are useless to us, that they have come to kill us. The other Visitors are different. If you ask them, they will let you hold their eyes. If you do, youll see things you cant describe. Not to anyone.

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X The Visitors know many things. And so do we. The Visitors believe the Listeners have been here forever. But they are wrong. We were here before the Listeners came. When they came, we changed. We became Witnesses. We heard the Listeners entering the darkness in the valley far beneath us, we could feel them moving beneath the dark folds of light. This we know. And this as well: When we leave, the Listeners leave.

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XI The Visitors tell us one day they will fade away and then, in time, come back again. When will you come back, we asked? When we are like dark stars like fires everywhere, they said. When will that be, we asked?. No one knows that, they said. No one.

XII The Visitors are fading now. They are like memories or ghosts pressed against the glass. Only the Dreamers can hear them. The Dreamers say they sound like soft, distant thunder from far, far away, that is what the Dreamers say: they sound like soft distant thunder from far, far away.

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Chapter 5: Jane Washington March 2001, Sarasota Jane Washington has two striking physical characteristics. One is a shiny, blue/black complexion that seems to reflect every light in the room. The other is a body scent reminiscent of very strong peppermint. They grab your attention immediately and dont let go. Let me put it to you this way: when youre talking to Jane, your mind doesnt wander unless she wants it to. Jane had left Nigeria around age seven to live with an aunt in Phoenix. She said it had felt like shed arrived in heaven, but after a few months she was sure she was living in hell, and I dont think she was talking about the climate. Living in Phoenix, however, hadnt put the slightest dent in the graceful, African lilt and sway of her voice. But that same lilt could instantly turn into a bark, because Jane walked a very straight line, and had little patience with those who didnt. Like many of my friends, Jane was highly intuitive. But unlike Joan, who was vague, hard to pin down, Jane had very specific, very detailed visions. She was organized. We had met years ago at an event in Newtown, the black section of Sarasota, where I was talking about the spontaneous oral composition of poems. She told me she had recognized my speakings for what they were as soon as she heard them. They had that soulsound, even if they were the wrong color, was her way of putting it. That was good enough for me. We began working together after that. Few people really understand why I attach such significance to the spontaneous, oral creation of a poem. Whats the big deal, they ask, you write the poem, memorize it, and speak it. But Im not talking about that. Im talking about the spontaneous spoken composition of a poem out of no mind. No forethought of any kind. Just load and go. There are no books around to tell you how to do that. What Homer and every preliterate poet did has been completely forgotten. You have to feel your way. To give you some idea of the territory, let me just say that speaking in tongues is somewhat related to the art of speaking. If you want a finer feel for the nature of speaking, I would say that it lies about halfway between written poetry (as we know it today) and the act of speaking in tongues. That should give you some idea of the territory you have to traverse in order to speak. The act of speaking bound Jane and me together. I had talked to others about speakingand the Witnesses Log myth as wellbut it was never easy. I didnt care for some of the looks Id get back. It made me very uncomfortable. Thats what happens when you travel too far from the mainstream. Jung says you hit a

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very real wall of communal disapproval and are presented with a choice: either you rejoin the herd, because the isolation is too painful, or you take your chances and keep going. According to Jung, those who keep going do so because they sense they must honor what is happening to them, no matter what. In other words, its beyond reason. The way I finally saw it was this: to turn away would have been tantamount to suicide; I may as well have never been born. As painful and as frightening as that path became at times, I was never really alone. Somehow, Jane always managed to appear in front of me or in back of me or on the telephone telling me its OK, what do they know, this is real, barking at me if I complained. I had learned early on that she had an unerring instinct as to where I should be going, which was towards the soulsound, as she called it, and if there was one thing she was determined to do, it was to keep me from straying from that sound, from becoming too conscious, too thinky in my art. She didnt mind fighting with me about it either. But as soon as she blew up, shed forget about it. After a while, I simply accepted our relationship as one that would always be smooth and nice then bumpity-bump. Anyway, that was the message I kept getting. When I played the oral myths for her she had a mixed reaction. She thought they were going in the wrong direction, towards an emotionless, metaphysical poetry. All that talk, is how she described it, and she was right, in a sense, but that wasnt the point. These poems are important I told her. I agreed that the tone was distant, but there was also an extraordinary longing that balanced it, and besides, thats the way its supposed to sound. I went on and on. It didnt help. She didnt like the sound. It was too dark, too cold, too thin, too grim, too thinky. Its a backwater, she said. Its from Joan. Get rid of it. When I told Jane about Joans comments on the boar-faced man in the mirror, that he symbolized my rebirth, she looked at me as if I had just accepted two nickels for a quarter. Its not a re-birth, she said. Its an honoring, a reconnection. Wake up. But arent they the same thing? I asked. Not where I come from, she snapped. Where I come from you squat to give birth. To make matters worse, Jane kept repeating she didnt really know if she could do a third oral versionthat she and Joan were too different in terms of sound and approachthat it didnt make any sense. I kept telling her I was aware of that, but she could do the responding in any manner that felt right to her and she finally, reluctantly, said OK, she would do it. Then she told me she was going to speak it, not sing it, and that she didnt want me to use her name on the CD. Use some other name, she said. I dont care what it is; make it up. We had to try several times before a new version of the myth finally formed itself.

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As I had expected, it had a completely new sound and dramatic approach. Janes version illustrated perfectly how ancient oral myths were created. Preliterate myths werent remembered verbatim, as many scholars would have us believe, but were recreated virtually from the ground up out of story-telling memory. Whats more, certain elements were deemed sacred and remained constant, while others changed with the poet and time. This is exactly what happened with the third version created with Jane. In many respects, Janes version was similar to the first two, but it had substantial differences in tone and approach. The totality of all the versions was the real myth, which was what I wanted to create and others to feel: how mysteriously alive myths are in their native, oral form. I was happy. I had somehow produced the three oral versions and one written version I instinctively felt were the final, correct way for the myth to be experienced by others. Dont ask me why or how I knew this. I just did. I was very happy. Jane, on the other hand, was happy and unhappy. I was prepared for a bit of heavy going. I asked her what she thought of the myth now that she had actually created one. She was again standoffish, mumbling I was going in the wrong direction. But I persisted and she struggled with something and then scribbled out on a nearby pad: like a snake / like a bone beneath flesh / bare bones / cold poem. When I asked her to be more precise about what she had written, she became impatient, as if she were irked with me about something. Finally she blurted out, I keep seeing a skeleton whose bones are perfectly articulated, she said. What kind of skeleton? I asked. Its human but not human. What do you mean by that? The bones seem alive, wet, glittery. I cant explain it any other way, she said. What did you mean when you said the myth is like a snake? Thats the part of the bones thats not human. What does that mean? I asked. It means the bones are special. How? Flesh swims on them, becomes alive. What flesh? I asked. The flesh of the other myths, she said. You know the ones: the myths where the hero walks through fire and survives, or talks to God and dies, those myths. The Wrath of Achilles, Black Sambo. Thanks, I said. I think I understand what youre saying. Youre telling me this is the mother of all myths. I didnt say that. But you meant it. No I didnt. What did you mean then?

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What I meant was what I said. The bones of this myth are special: the flesh of other myths swims on them. Thats all I know. She was right about the bones being special. They didnt look like the bones of any myth Ive ever seen. I told her how strange the myth seemed to me, that it was unlike anything else I had ever done, that it didnt seem to have any roots in me. I know, she said. Ive been watching you. Think about this: maybe the poem isnt yours. Maybe it belongs to somebody else; thats why you cant understand it.

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Chapter 6: Pinga Dentista April 2001, Tavernier Key I needed a change of scene. I called Pinga Dentista, an old friend in the Keys, told him Id like to go snorkeling for a few days. Sounds good, he replied, I havent been out of the house for a week. Pinga was an unlikely friend. His only real interest was diving for treasure, which consumed him. Like his 17th century counterparts, he was sure that somewhere just off the Keys, Spanish galleons laden with treasure were sailing along, waiting to be boardedexcept, in Pingas case, the galleons were sailing very, very slowly far beneath the shifting sands. Everything about him reflected his obsession with piracy and treasure, even his house. It was on the bay side of Tavernier and consisted of four old aluminum Airstream trailers arranged in a large X. Just above the X was a very large bed of flowers shaped like a skull. Unless you were in a plane, however, you couldnt see the flowers nor make out the grand design of it all, because from the front driveway, it just looked like a graveyard of old Airstreams nosing each other. It was only when you climbed up on the watchtower he had built that you saw the complete Skull and Crossbones. It was a beauty. Pinga may have been born 400 years too late, but he wasnt budging an inch. Estoy El Pirata (I am The Pirate) was painted above his front door. Every morning and evening he would roll a joint, climb the watchtower, and scan the horizon for God knows what. It was quite an act. I loved it. It didnt stop there. Inside the house, treasure maps were all over the walls, along with NOAA charts of the Caribbean, side-band sonar strips, pictures of Mel Fisher, you name it. I told him once that we were in the same business, we were both dreamers, and he looked at me like I was nuts and then he disappeared somewhere behind his eyes and then he reappeared and said, You could be right, Whitey, you could be right. That isnt to say Pinga didnt have substantial side interests, like cheap strip bars and smoking good dope. But his real side interest was doing deals. It never stopped. It didnt make any difference what the deal was as long as it made money with a minimum amount of effort. Pinga called it low-hanging fruit. He was addicted to it. One piece of low-hanging fruit he particularly liked was buying old, non-working cars from widows and reselling them to junkyards. You wouldnt think there would be any money in that, but there is if you dont pay anything for the car, and there was no one better than Pinga in convincing a

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grieving widow that letting him get rid of her late husbands old, junky Buick was almost as good as going to heaven. The rest involved finding some high-school dropout who viewed twenty bucks as big money for towing the car a few miles. Needless to say, the promise of some good smoke helped Pinga locate those particular gems. What was really amazing about it was that Pinga never left his house. It was all done on the phone while he watched the soaps or NASCAR, take your pick. On any day there would be three or four old cars on his front lawn waiting to be towed away to the highest bidding junkyard. And believe it or not, the junkyards loved him. He knew cars, and he always delivered what he promised, and with the correct papers, even if he had to make the corrections himself. Never any hassle with Pinga. Yet for all his wheeling and dealing, he always left everyone feeling like a winner, a rare thing today. You couldnt beat it. People just liked doing business with him. It was the best hall of mirrors Id ever seen. He also had an uncanny way of disappearing in photographs. I took some pictures of him one day when we were out diving with some of his buddies and they came out fine, except for his face, which was either blurred, or slipped, or unrecognizable. At first I thought it was just an accidentmaybe he moved, or I did, or the camera screwed upbut after looking at maybe twenty or thirty pictures I had taken of him over the years, I realized I didnt have any clear pictures of his face. I have several of him posing as a pirate with my little grandson Kelby at the Gasparilla Festival in Tampa in which everything is crystal clear except for Pingas face. Either he looks like someone else or his face is turned or blurred or distorted. When I mentioned it to him one day all he would say was, I dont like pictures of me. Why is that? I asked, somewhat bewildered. I just dont like pictures of me, thats all. Very polite but that was the end of the conversation. Ever since I had known him, Pinga had lived with his mother, Kiki. She was small, dark, like a crow, and looked just like him. She adored him. It didnt bother her that most days he was stretched out on the couch watching the great, humming wheel of NASCAR on a TV screen that took up half the trailer. She didnt even find it odd. I asked her once if Pinga watched anything else, ever. Why should he? she answered, Its on twenty-four hours a day and he likes the goddamn crashes. But then again, she had some strange habits herself. In all my years visiting Pinga, I never saw her lying down or resting. Her bedroom looked new, almost unused, like a furniture showroom. I remember getting up once in the middle of the night for a drink and seeing her sitting in the kitchen with a cigarette hanging from her lip, talking a blue streak to the microwave. I think it was Portuguese but I never asked.

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Kiki had died suddenly in February. It was completely unexpected. Pinga seldom talked about her death; he was closed that way. But for some reason I could still feel her sharp, quick eyes. It was as if she were still with us in the living room, watching the great wheel of NASCAR, telling me what Pinga should do, something she often did when she was alive. You think hed listen to me, but he wont; hes too goddamn stubborn, she used to say. For sure she was with us the day Pinga began telling me about a long, complex treasure deal he was working on. Its a kind of barter deal, he said, but everythings going to work out fine. It may take three or four years, but the guys OK; you can trust him. You jerk, I suddenly snapped, hes a goddamn crook. Wake up. But it was so quick and dismissive I knew it wasnt me talking. Pinga did too. At least I think he did. But just to make sure I said, Hey, that wasnt me. I dont even know the guy youre talking about. To tell you the truth, I think it was your mother. Or maybe it was my mother, I added, knowing he was sensitive about me bringing up his mother. He didnt say anything. He didnt have to. He knew who it was. It amused Pinga that I was a babe in the woods on almost everything that mattered: engines, cars, construction. Every once in while, Id catch him smiling to himself, like he couldnt believe something Id just done. If it really amused him, hed start hopping up and down on one leg like a four year old needing to take a leak. It was a sight because he couldnt control it. Jane Washington didnt know what to make of his hopping up and down when she first met him. One time, after hed left, she blurted, That man, you know what he is? Hes a little Eshu, thats what we call them in Nigeria. Hed be an elf in your world, but a very tricky elf. You wouldnt think it to look at him, but that one is full of the devil. She was right. Pinga was always up to something. Always. I remember being introduced to the devil in him right after I had met him. It was on a long sailing trip to Key West with several mutual friends, including a lifelong, treasure-diving friend of his, Angelo de Marza. Over the years they had become a sort of comedy team, with Angelo being the overweight, anxious bear and Pinga the small, cocky terrier. When one of them couldnt come up with a punch line, they resorted to a lot of rapid, back and forth face slapping, which they found hilarious. The act never stopped. On our trip down to the Keys from Sarasota, they had drawn the bleary midnight to dawn watch, and the idea of them alone on the deck yukking it up wasnt exactly reassuring. The waters approaching the Keys were very tricky. Yet we somehow arrived at the correct channel marker just as the sun rose. God knows how they did it, because all I could hear from down below was a nightlong stream of laughing and face slapping.

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After we docked, Angelo began jabbering at the Dockmaster for a better rate, while Pinga and I raced ahead to a nearby hotel to shower before heading out to Duval Street. Just as we were leaving the hotel, Angelo raced in, begging us to wait, that he didnt want to miss anything. Pinga told him not to worry; hed call to let him know where we were. Which he did, because as soon as we got to Captain Tonys, he called Angelo to tell him we were waiting for him at the southern tip marker. I couldnt believe it. If you know Key West, you know Captain Tonys and the marker are at opposite ends of the town. When he hung up the phone, Pinga began hopping up and down laughing. I told him Angelo would never find us. I remember Pingas words, Oh hell find us, itll just take him a little longer, and he started hopping up and down laughing again. We were back at the hotel hours later when Angelo burst into the room laughing and screaming at Pinga. The face slapping went on for hours. So when Pinga suggested I go to Panama with him, it would be fun, I hesitated. I could see myself wandering around the dark barrios looking for him, so I put him off. But he kept building the trip up, telling me that there was a shallow wreck just off the enlisted mens beach he wanted to scoutthat it was only a few miles from Panama City. It sounded interesting, but I was also aware he knew I had family in Panama City, family with connections in case things got tight, as they always did in the treasure business. The soup was getting a little too thick for me, so I told him, OK, but not now, Im all traveled out; well go later this year. I have to get there eventually; there are some things I have to talk about with my aunt Mercedes. Indeed I did. Mercedes and I had been visiting each other regularly since the death of my mother. She and Mercedes had been very close as young women. After my mothers death, I kept getting intimations I should visit Mercedesthat there was something she was supposed to tell me. So I flew down to Panama. On that first visit, I didnt know what to expect. I hadnt seen her since I was a young boy. Yet, despite the years, she was pretty much the same: funny, stylish, and shrewd as evermaybe too shrewd, as my mother was fond of saying. The other thing that struck me, but perhaps it shouldnt have, was Mercedes house, which I had never seen. It was right out of Dickens: very elaborate outside, in the old Latin tradition, with a courtyard and gardens, but inside it was dark and cramped and cold, like a cave. Here is a poem from that first visit:

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PANAMA JOURNAL August 13, Lunch, The Courtyard By noon, the din in the courtyard has become unbearable, like an opera composed entirely of arias. Today, there is Mercedes' repeated, whimsical complaint that the parrot no longer knows Spanish: No more Amor y Sangre, she claims, only the melodies the Indian maid coos through the bars. By now, that aria has become permanently engraved on my cortex. As soon as lunch is finished, I make my excuses: I must write, go to my room, I say. But it is nice in the garden, you could write here, no? No, I say, I need my papers, my books. But it's the dark I need, the dark, curio-filled room where I go every day to lie down and listen to the sound of my own breathing, as if each exhalation were keeping the room from crawling across the floor with its hundreds of silver-framed pictures and dishes and crosses of palm and the pink elephant soaps and the six broken telephones, because I am living in a midden bristling with someone else's life. But the walls are slowly making room for me. Little by little, I have carved niches for my things. There is space now for my books, for Dubie, and Stern. And my journal. And the small radio that bleeds love songs all night.

That will give you some idea of what it was like living within Mercedes orbit. She was quite a package. By all appearances, she was every bit the au courant society matron: designer clothes, expensive shoes, winters in Vail. She ran a bit deeper than that, though. Id discovered as a very young boy she could do things like look into the futureand very accurately I might add. I told Pinga I wanted to hold off visiting for a bit. Panamas not so nice since the Army left, I told him. Ive just been down there. Everyones broke. And hungry. The only safe place to stay is the new city, and we dont have enough money for that. Wed have to stay downtown, near the barrios, probably at the Covadonga.

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He knew I was afraid of the area around there. Stop worrying, he said. Somebody jumps you, you bite their ear off. I laughed. Sure. Hey, Im not kidding, he snapped back, You bite their ear off. Or rip it off. You rip from the back forward. It comes right off, like a shingle. I laughed again, but I knew he was telling the truth. I could tell. Listen, he says, When I was in the army, some fat fuck cold-cocked me for being a spic. I was just a kid. All of a sudden I was on his neck biting his ear off. What happened? I asked. It came off, he said. He went crazy, crying like a baby, holding his ear up, You bit my ear off, you bit my ear off, but he never went near me again. Hey, its easy. Let me show you, he said and he grabbed my ear. I bolted away screaming laughing scared (I never knew if he was kidding or not). He loved it. He was hopping up and down. He told me he couldnt believe my expression. Sometimes hed tell me stories so strange and yet so plausible I had no idea what to make of them. I had told him about my grandparents coming from Ireland in the late nineteenth century, and hed said his were Portuguese, that theyd come from the Azores. They had been goldsmiths for years. Specialists. They had a shop on the waterfront where they bought gold teeth and melted them down. People would bring them teeth from all over. They never asked questions, he said. It was just a business as far as they were concerned. He told me his grandparents started it up again when they came to America and settled in Marthas Vineyard. Even my father and mother used do it, right here in Florida. But I never took it up. It wasnt me. He told me he still received teeth in the mail from relatives or friends addressed to Kiki. Here, look, he said, and he reached up and pulled out a small box filled with gold teeth. They were weird and beautiful. Some had emerald stars.

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Chapter 7: Hallucinations August 2001, Sarasota I know some will see what had been happening to me as nothing more than a series of unfortunate hallucinations, which is our way of dealing with psychic events. I didnt see them as hallucinations, though. They didnt feel like products of a neurological or psychological disorder. If anything, they moved toward the light: there was a truth to them. After all, what distinguishes a psychic event from a hallucination is that sense of a felt truth. There may be a thin line between a psychic event and the neurological/psychological disturbances we should rightly call hallucinations, but it is a very real one. In a psychic event, we always experience a felt truth, a truth that has an unmistakable authority. There is nothing deranged or confusing about it in the least. On the contrary, it is always deeply comforting, as our recognition of a truth always is. So I had no problem seeing them as psychic events, visitations from another reality. That was easy. By this time, I had long since given up believing that the only reality is that of the physical world. What I didnt know was what the visitations meant. It is ironic that in our enlightened culture, one so bound up in the principle of logical truth seeking, that we have been so sloppy in defining the nature of psychic events. The best place to see this is in our popular culture, because that is where that thinking takes imaginative form. Our popular culture depicts the psychic world as consisting largely of demons that are constantly breaking into this world. Psychics find this laughable, because the psychic world consists of what can best be described as non-physical presences, or intelligences, or more simply put, intelligent feelings, not demons. Some of them may be horrific, as some of the events in our world are, but they are no more the norm than they are in our world. What the Hollywood demon-driven view is really saying is that the psychic world is inherently dangerouslife threateningwhich couldn't be further from the truth. After all, our great religions and spiritual insights are the result of psychic events. So why the demons? The demons pop up because our rational worldview is threatened by psychic events. After all, if the psychic world exists, our current worldview, which insists there is only this world, the world of physical events, would be seriously endangered. Wed be standing on quicksand. A psychic is someone who has a unique sensitivity to psychic events as well as a unique ability to interpret them. Some of that interpretation is automatic, such as Diane Randalls reflexive description of ghosts as see-through people, which is

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how she sensed them as a child. But much of what is sensed remains a feeling, or takes the form of metaphoric images or words, all of which can be difficult to interpret. A psychics interpretative skill can be all over the place. That fact was brought home to me by the intuitives I was working with. Not only did their sensitivity to the psychic realm vary, they each had completely different ways of interpreting their experiences. Jane was very precise but extremely terse. Diane Randall was more easy-going and informative in her descriptions. Joan, on the other hand, was as languid about psychic events as she was about everything. She didn't really like to go any further than describing her feelings, and seldom did. Over time, I became better at figuring out whom to approach about what. That was the real trick. We often talk about the two worlds, but perhaps realms would be a better term when talking about psychic events, because world suggests a physical location. The fact of the matter is that no one knows where the psychic realm resides. It is invisible to us. It may be within us, a part of us, like our organs, or outside us, or both. No one can really say. More importantlyand here indeed is the rubit cannot be controlled as our physical world can. Nor is it a realm that can be easily viewed and objectively shared as we can events in this world, where a group of us can view and talk about a duck until we come to some kind of conclusion about the duck. What's more, and this is crucial, the psychic realm only becomes apparent to us when it chooses to. It is completely unpredictable. We have no say in the matter. So you can see why the psychic realm is science's worst nightmare: it is not of the jointly-observable physical world, which is the only world within which science can operate. Recognizing that we have no control over the psychic realm whatsoever is crucial if we wish to understand its essential nature. Popular culture loves depicting psychics summoning the psychic world by drawing symbols and grunting and grimacing as if they're horribly constipated. The real truth, however, is that a psychic event occurs when the conscious mind is exceptionally still. Forget all that pentagram-drawing stuff. This doesn't mean you have to sit like a guru in deep meditation for hours. The stillness doesn't have to last more than a second. Quality, not quantity, is what counts. The ability to access that stillness, by the way, is the main difference between psychic people and those of us who are not overtly psychic. Psychic events can happen to anyone; all it takes is an instant of the right kind of stillness and the crack between the two realms can open. You might think I am one of those people who is overtly psychic. But I'm not. Where I may differ is that I have never been closed to those who spoke to me about psychic events. I may not have been able to understand why or how those

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events had logically occurred, but I never dismissed them out of hand. I had no significant psychic experiences as a child or adult until the events surrounding the myth occurred. Why the psychic realm waited until I was sixty to make an appearance I have no idea. In the end, all I can say with any certainty is that the events happened. They were real. I wouldn't be telling you the entire story, however, if I didn't tell you I had experienced a few fleeting psychic experiences five years before that, around age fifty-five. I didn't know what to think about them at the time. The first occurred after I had read a review in The Whole Earth Catalog of a book, Journeys Out of Body. It was by a businessman, Robert Monroe, who had started to lift out of his body spontaneously, with absolutely no warning and no knowledge of psychic events. It was my first detailed introduction to the psychic world. A few years after reading it, I went to visit a non-profit psychic research center he had founded in Virginia Beach. It was my first experience with people interested in psychic events. I was amazed at the range of interests. There were doctors and nurses interested in pain control, ordinary people who had been suddenly gripped by inexplicable visions, curiosity seekers like myself, and finally, a whole spectrum of those who were obviously psychic, some extraordinarily so. I spent five days learning audio-feedback techniques for stilling the mind and opening myself to the psychic realm, but nothing extraordinary happened. I had a few vague time-traveling experiences, one of which turned out to be quite accurate, but was never able to do much more, including lift out of my body, which was what really interested me. Looking back on it now, it's clear I was trying too hard. I was grunting and grimacing if you will. I was lucky to have experienced what I did. The second experience occurred a few years later, when I came across a small slim book in The Manatee County Library. I remember it had a dark scarlet cover, like many old books. It had been printed around 1900, and, because of that, used terminology from the spiritualist movement of that time (clairvoyance, astral projection, sensitive, and the like). It had a curious, comforting, small town flavor, having been written by an English country doctor, and was totally devoid of the hype that runs through much of our psychic literature today. It consisted of ten or so straightforward recollections of psychic events reported to the doctor over the years. I trusted the book immediately. As I was lying in my bed reading it, or maybe not reading it, I started to lift out of my body. It was so unexpected I was seized with absolute fear. I don't know how, but somehow I managed to gain control of myself and the lifting suddenly went away. All I can

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tell you is this: I was never the same. I have never been so scared. Shitless is the correct term. As frightening as that experience was, what really shook me later was my realization that the page I had been reading had nothing to do with lifting out of body. I don't even know if I was reading anything at the time, perhaps just musing. What had happened then? What made me suddenly start to leave my body? Something within me kept insisting against all logic that it was the book itself, the physical book, which was responsible. But how could that be? All I could figure out was that I must have entered one of those very still moments, just lying there, and somehow, something about the book had triggered my lifting out of body. But how? Then it came to me with an undeniable force. As unthinkable as it might be, the catalyst had to have been some form of psychic energy attached to the book itself. But that was clearly impossible. A book is a book: ink, paper, glue, nothing more. Yet everything in me said that some form of psychic energy had been attached to the book by somethingsome reader, or the librarian, or the printer, or the person who made the ink, maybe even the country doctor, I had no idea. Once you enter the psychic realm, anything is possibleall the rules of time and space go completely out the window. I may not have known the exact cause of my lifting out of body, but I had no doubt that the catalyst was the book. It shook all my ideas about time and space right there and then. So what did I do? I'll tell you what I did. I did what any right thinking logical person would do. I pushed it way back in my mind and tried to forget it. Yet that event never went away completely. All I had to do was tilt my head a certain way and the whole impossible experience would come rushing back like a runaway train. I couldn't walk away from it. It kept telling me the world was different from what I had been taught. A psychiatrist, of course, would be tempted to say it was an unexpected, neurological short-circuit that caused me to hallucinate I was lifting out of body, but that is scientific mumbo jumbo. Something extraordinary had happened. I had no idea it was just the beginning.

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Chapter 8: The Red Light Bar October 2001, Tavernier Key Pinga had been bugging me for I dont know how long about a bar hed uncovered in south Miami. Hed go on and on about why I should visit it. The general spiel went something like this, OK, its a dump, but listen, thats not important, whats important is its completely red inside, everything, even the lights, and everybodys dressed in black suits like undertakers, and at three in the afternoon. Jesus, its like the goddamn Twilight Zone! So I figured, why not? We drove up US 1 towards Kendall and sure enough, there it was, just off the road to the right: The Red Light Bar. It was like stepping into a thick, pink, electric glow. At first, all I could make out was a fuzzy image of the red velour wallpaper and the red leather bar, and then a second or two later the glow sort of assembled itself into four or five white, pasty faces in cheap black suits staring at us like aliens. They were one ugly, shit-faced bunch. Lets go. I dont want any part of this, I told Pinga, but he kept telling me there was more. Youll see, youll see, he kept saying as he elbowed some space for us between two of the faces. He struck up a conversation with the guy next to him, but I didnt even like looking at the one next to me. He looked like a corpse under the pink light. We dont let niggers in here, he said to me, maybe as a declaration of principle, or maybe just to fuck with me. Cmon, lets go, I kept motioning to Pinga, but he wasnt going anywhere. He loved the place: The Red Lights! The Suits! he kept saying, like he couldnt believe it. So there I was, in Miamis Last White Redoubt, surrounded by a bunch of piss-smell drunks in black suits. I needed some breathing room. I asked Pinga where the mens room was and he motioned towards the other end of the bar, but when I got there I realized the bar was really just a room in an old house, because the bar room led to another room which led to another, like a dream. I finally came to a room that must have been the bedroom at one time, because over in the corner was the half-opened door to a private batha real gem from the fifties pink sink, pink toilet, pink tiles. A skinny, pimple-faced kid with an electroshock Mohawk was leaning against the sink smoking a huge joint. The underpaid stock boy, no doubt. A few bucks and we were fast friends. Me and my bud Travis. As I floated back into the bar, I noticed a small woman at the end who looked remarkably like Kiki, those same dark, quick eyes, but she was very pale-skinned, with fine, white hair. I took her for the owner, the way she was going over the books with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. She must have caught me looking at her, because she called me over and asked, Did you find what you

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were looking for? I didnt know whether she meant the joint, or Travis or the pink bathroom, so I figured Id cover all my bases and muttered, I think so. Right then she moved her face so close to mine I lost focus and then I heard a voice inside my head say to me very clearly, No, not yet. I froze. I remember thinking: This cant be happening again, and then the world suddenly reassembled itself and I was myself again, staring at a very old woman who looked like shed just woken up from a terrific bender. I knew that the voice Id heard was not of this world, and yetas impossible as it seemsI couldnt shake the impression that the woman standing in front of me, like the one in the supermarket, had spoken to me inside my mindor at the very leastsomehow triggered the voice, made it happenbut again I was just grabbing at straws. The truth was I had absolutely no way of understanding why, or how, an extraordinary psychic voice had once again come out of the blue to tell me I wasnt quite where I should beand with almost the same words. Things like that just didnt happen. Not in this world. I was beside myself. Terrified is more like it. Excuse me, I blurted out, but how did you do that? She immediately became defensive, Do what? Who the hell are you anyway? Justin Spring. Im Justin Spring. Well, Im Betty Hagan and I own this bar. Get some manners or get the hell out. I apologized for being so abrupt, which she acknowledged by grunting. Then I said to her, as politely as I could under the circumstances, I just felt youor somethingspeak to me from inside my mind; it said to me, No, not yet. How did you do that? She looked down at her feet like an embarrassed child. I dont really know how it happens. It just does. And believe me, it wasnt me that spoke to you. All I know is I hear a buzzing and then I go blank and something takes over. I can hear something like a voice but I cant really make it out, its like in another room, you know. Its been happening to me all my life. At first, I didnt know what the hell was going on, I was just a kid, and then a few people told me what I had done and thanked me for helping them but I never really knew how except I always felt good after it happened, like the sun had just come out though I always got a little spittle in the corners of my mouth whenever I did it, because Id see it in the mirror afterwards. I didnt get any on you did I? What was it I said to you anyway, was it important? Jesus, what was going on? Had Pinga set the whole thing up? But how? It was simply impossible. What had just happened was as real as what had happened at the tomato bin. There was no doubt in my mind I was being guidedexcept I didnt have the slightest idea why, or by what.

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I became very agitated. I told Pinga again I wanted to leave, but he was in no mood to go. He was into repeating himself, something that inevitably happens to him after three or four drinks. He kept pointing to the red tiles, the red wallpaper, the red leather seats, and asking me over and over, So waddoyou think now? The fucking Red Light Bar! He loved it. He would have gone on all afternoon if I hadnt snapped his money off the bar. On the way back to Tavernier, I asked him about the woman at the end of the bar, if she was a relative or sister of Kiki. I dont know, he said, She looks a little like Kiki, I noticed it too, I asked her once but she said, no, her names Hogan, something like that, anyway shes Irish, not Portuguese, lived there all her life, right in that house. So what did I tell you, isnt it too goddamn much? The Red Light Bar! The fucking Red Light Bar! And the suits! The goddamn black suits! If that wasnt bad enough, a few miles outside Tavernier he starts shouting, So whaddoyou think now, Whitey, so whaddoyou think now? which is what he calls me when he sees Im completely over my head. He had me. I didnt know what to think. Not anymore.

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Chapter 9: Speaking and the Psychic Roots of Poetry March 2002, Sarasota Let me step back. I began this book with the old woman at the supermarket, but that was not the real beginning. The real beginning happened some months before, and I have only alluded to it. The real beginning occurred when I made my final breakthrough into the world of speaking. It was a momentous event, and a psychic event in every sense of the word. I had been limping along for several years attempting to compose spontaneous oral poems, and then one day, a true speaking suddenly appeared on my lips and proceeded to complete itself of its own accord, just as a dream does. Right then, all my ideas about the nature of poetry changed. And so did I. I realized much later on that it was also the lynchpin that had set everything in motion: the old woman at the tomato bin, the figure in the mirror, and finally the appearance of the myth itself. I am convinced that without that breakthrough into the world of speaking, none of those events would have occurred. It may be difficult for some to imagine that the act of speaking could have such power. But when I was finally able to let go and truly speak, I knew I would never turn backspeaking poems was like charged quicksilver. I was in awe. I knew I had uncovered the mother of all poetry. It had been a long journey. For some time, my attempts at speaking had remained partly rooted in the familiar conscious world of written poetry and partly rooted in the unfamiliar unconscious world of oral poetry. I became a poetic Frankenstein of sorts. Friendsespecially those who were poetsdidnt know what to make of my efforts. Theyd listen, shake their heads, walk away. I was still blind to the fact that everything required for the creation of a spontaneous oral poem was already within me, and that I had to completely abandon everything I consciously knew about written poetry before a true, unpremeditated oral poem could emerge. I didnt realize that all I had to do was simply surrender to the instinct to Poetry and speaking would happen all by itself, just like gossip happens, but from the unconscious rather than the conscious self. About the same time as I had begun my attempts at spontaneous oral composition, I had begun reading Julian Jaynes groundbreaking book on preliterate consciousness. I was intrigued by his description of that early consciousness, which, it seems, was much different from ours. Jaynes believedbased on a great deal of accumulated evidencethat early man existed in something like a state of natural meditation, a state that would suddenly change to a heightened

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attentiveness when he experienced the internal, authoritative voices he took to be the voices of the Gods. One of Jaynes revolutionary assertions is that those voices issued from a now defunct language facility in the right side of our brain, at least that is how he accounts for what seems to have been a real phenomenon, It may come as a surprise to some that our first consciousness was different from our current self-reflective consciousness. Yet, according to Jaynes and his successors, there is mounting evidence this was the case. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is to say that early man was not self-reflective, or as Julian Jaynes says in The Origin Of Consciousness, he had no subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Thus our early consciousness lacked the self-reflective capabilities that aid us today in plotting and deciding on a course of action. In its place was a consciousness that viewed the world in something like a state of meditation. Which was fine as long as we were doing familiar tasks. But when we encountered a new situationa crossroads of some kindand didnt know how to proceed, the Gods broke through and spoke to us: advised us, directed us. Jaynes further asserts that despite the overwhelming tenacity of our current consciousness, there is considerable evidence that remnants of that early consciousness still exist, and that those remnants can come into being under certain circumstances. He cites the voices associated with schizophrenia as one proof of this, and the voice associated with the act of poetry (the Muse) as another, and I doubt any true poet would disagree. Unlike our current consciousness, which is tenacious in its hold on us, our early conscious and unconscious minds seem to have been conceptually separated by a very hazy membrane that allowed preliterate humans to slip between the two in the blink of an eye. In other words, preliterate humans were always surrendering to their unconscious. As to how that early consciousness may have felt, it probably felt very fluid compared to ours because we are super conscious, with a rigid separation of our conscious and unconscious minds. We may daydream, but that is a conscious activity. If we ever suddenly slipped into our unconscious with the same ease as preliterate humans, I suspect most of us would be frightened beyond belief. I think its safe to say that the ease and familiarity that early humans experienced in slipping between the two states was a hallmark of our early minds. I would even go so far as to say that the waking state and dreaming states of very early humans were quite similar.

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This may account for the importance preliterate man gave to his dreams. Our contemporary dreaming state, on the other hand, is completely different from our waking state because the unconscious is highly unstable in matters of time and space, the cornerstone of our waking state. This is one reason our dreaming state seems so illogical, and why we give so little weight to it. One of the unfortunate prejudices of our modern world-view is that it prejudices us against acknowledging the existence of the psychic world, the world we experience in our dreams. That same prejudice has almost destroyed poetry. Poetry is the way the soul speaks to us of the psychic world, which is also our world, our other world. If we dont acknowledge that fact, and honor it, poetry eventually shrivels into much of what we have today: poetic, conscious thoughtsnice, but no brass ring. That is why speaking changed my life. It allowed me to experience the act of poetry in something like its purest, most primal form. Speaking also opened up a path to the psychic world for me. The two are inseparable. That is why speaking has a sound all its own, and why Jane Washingtons reaction when she first heard me speak was not an isolated case. Anyone attuned to the life of the soul generally has a similar reaction upon hearing a speaking. They instinctively sense it is a sound that comes not from the world of the self, but the soul. There is a slight, but undeniable, alteration in the sound of the human voice that somehow comforts us. You can actually hear that alteration, although feel it might be a better term. If you are a blues fan, it is the difference between the singing voice of Blind Willie Johnson and that of Leadbelly. If you can hear, or feel, that difference, that is the sound I am talking about. Johnsons singing came from the soul, the unconsciousyou can feel it. Leadbellys singing, as striking as it is, comes more from the conscious mindit may excite us, arouse us, disturb us, anger us, sadden us, but it seldom comforts us. Only the souls song can comfort us. It tells us we belongthat we are not cosmic accidents but a mysterious part of the utterly unknowable mystery of Creation.

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Chapter 10: Eve Is the Serpent July 2002, Sarasota Julian Jaynes also believed the heightened state we experience when a poem enters our mind is a remnant of consciousness in which the gods spoke to us with a reality that was overwhelming. I found his arguments compelling, even more so after I began speaking. I started to read as many myths about consciousness as I could find, hoping Id learn more about its early form. I turned first to Genesis since it is, among other things, a myth about consciousness. Adam and Eves seduction by the serpent and subsequent banishment from Paradise is a metaphor for the emergence of our self-reflective consciousness in which we no longer hear the Gods, but have to figure out what to do by our own wits. Re-reading the story of Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent, I was struck by how little Adam says or thinksin fact nothing whereas Eve is chock full of ideas. When I mentioned this to Jane, she snapped, Of course shes full of ideas, she said. Eve is the Serpent. What do you mean Eve is the Serpent? I dont know, she said, that just came to me. Leave me alone. And then she blurted out, The Writers pulled them apart. What writers? I asked. The Bible Writers. Why did they pull them apart? They were afraid. Afraid of what? I dont know, she snapped, and then, very slowly, as if it were coming to her from somewhere else, she said, They were afraid to admit their dependence on womenafraid to admit women are more powerful than men. More Amazon talk, I thought to myself, and shot back, How can they be more powerful? Men have always been physically stronger. Im not talking about muscles, she said, Im talking about psychic energy women are like Gods in that respect. That is why, in the beginning, in the stories before the Bible Writers, Eve and the Serpent were one. What do you mean, were one? I asked. I mean early man understood that the Serpent of Creation was driven by female energy. The male energy was there, of course, but it wasnt dominant the way it is today. Female energy is intuition, inspiration, birth, love, caring, she said, while making her left hand undulate like a snake. Early man instinctively understood

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that without that energy, without the constant voice of something beyond himself, some intuition, some inspiration, he could never become God-like. Early man was smarter than his modern counterparts, she snapped. You included.

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Chapter 11: Speaking September 2002, Sarasota I have never been at all sure why speaking seized me the way it did. I do know a large part of its initial attraction was the physical nature of the act. As emotionally powerful as writing a poem can be, speaking is such a physical, elemental act that neural pathways I had never used suddenly became flooded with feeling and energy. We may have forgotten oral poetry as a culture, but our bodies havent. I have never liked studied things. Speaking is so primal, so emotional and so unfettered it appealed to me immediately. The ecstatic moment associated with creating a poem is also markedly different. In creating a speaking, that moment is much more diffuse and lasts much longerfor the duration of the speaking to be exact. I would even go so far as to say it comes close to the kind of generalized, full-body orgasm women often describe. The tactile immediacy of speaking appealed to me immensely. Writing poetry quickly lost its attraction. I remember saying to Jane, You know what writing poetry feels like now? It feels like Im making love by remote control. Since when do you know making love by remote control? You been holding out on me? It was just a figure of speech, Jane. I know you got your kinky bits. Thats not one of them. Thats what you say. Jesus, Jane! What is it with you? What Im trying to say is that the ecstasy of speaking feels something like the full-body orgasm women describeand you know thats trueyou said so yourself. Thats not what I saidI said you could feel speaking all over. Anyway, since when are you so big on full-body orgasms? Where you going with that anyway? Jesus, Jane. I was just trying to describe the feeling. Listen to me, Mister Two Times Divorced, dont be telling me what women feel. Better you stick with what you know, which isnt much. Yep. Nice and smooth then bumpity-bump. If my desire to speak was intense, I still had no idea where I was going with it. I could feel something guiding me, pulling me in a general direction, but I was never quite sure if it was north, or north by northwest. I had to feel my way toward the act of speaking, and I say act because speaking is as much a spontaneous intuitive act as an art, and is as natural as gossip or

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prayer. The art, believe it or not, has nothing to do with mechanics or theory or anything intellectual. It has to do with becoming more sensitive to the soundless whispers of the soul, of the unconscious. The machinery within us will find the right words, the right phrasing, the right rhythm, the right voice, if we allow ourselves to become sensitive to those soundless whispers and allow them to be born as they wish to be born. That is the long and short of it. I remember Jane saying to me once that the speakings we had been doing were beyond poetry. What do you mean? I asked. I dont know, she said. It just feels older than poetry, much older, and more powerful. Like the Giants that walked the earth before us. But that, as I was to about to learn, was just the beginning. Once I learned to surrender to it and truly began to speak, my ideas of poetry changed utterly. I all but gave up writing poems and performance. I realized that speaking had little to do with either. It became clear to me that poetry (of which speaking is a pure, primal form) is a very special way in which the soul, the unconscious, speaks to usand through us. Shortly after that, the psychic visitations began.

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Chapter 12: Diane Randall November 2003, Sarasota Diane Randall has three faces. I saw the first one at a gathering Id set up to demonstrate the art of speaking. It was a shy, searching face. We spoke briefly. I felt she understood what I was trying to saythat speaking had deep psychic roots. I started to tell her that speaking was distinguished by its sound, but something in her eyes told me she already understood the soul has a sound all its owna sound our bodies recognize instantly even if our modern minds dont quite know what to do with it. I think all people knowledgeable in the ways of the soul know that sound. It is beautiful and healing and very close to the sound of true prayer. You can hear it in the sound of the voices of truly spiritual peopleyogis, mystics, gurus. You can hear it whenever anyone speaks from the soul. It is the sound of truthof deep, unpremeditated, unguarded, human expression. It is a sound that roots us, comforts us. A few months later I was going through some new poems that had been posted on our web page and noticed one by someone named Diane Randall. I couldnt place the name at first and then I remembered her eyes. I opened the poem and momentarily lost my breath. It was a response to the Witnesses Log myth I had written on our web page some three years before. I had completely given up hope that anyone would ever respond. I must have been crazy, thinking others would find the myth, read it, maybe use it to create their own myths. Yet thats how I had come to see the myth in those first few days: as a sacrifice of some kind, an offering, something others could take apart to use, to feed on. I even wrote a separate section to accompany the poems, stating what I thought the myth was to be used for and then asking any responders to code their entries a certain way so I could easily locate them among the hundreds of everyday poems entered on our web page. Here it is, word for word, misspellings and all, just as I had hurriedly entered it:
DATE: Thu Dec 14 00:13:44 2000 AUTHOR: JUSTIN SPRING SUBJECT: THE WITNESSES LOG PART ONE JUSTIN S ADDRESS: LA MESSAGE: A NOTE FROM THE POET

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on the listeners log this entry consists of a group of short poems that came to me over a period of 3 or 4 days. i somehow feel they belong on the web, because their is something about their texture and continuity that wants to be on the web so that a new community of poets can be created. i would welcome the entry of similar logs by interested poets. the logs can be wholly composed by the poet or, a group of poets, or I hope, by also using any part my log in any way you want to. In the long run, I hope that those who find the form and results interesting will see the possibilities of letting other artists us them as material. if you wish to be part of such a group, just make sure you fill in the SUBJECT ENTRY at sign in to read: XXLOG.YYNAME WITH XX, YY BEING THE LOGS VARIOUS IDENTIFIERS.THIS SHOUD BE IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED BY YOUR FIRST NAME AND LAST INITIAL. thus my own WITNESSESLOGPARTONEJUSTINS. THIS WAY WE'LL ALL KNOW THE POEMS CAN BE USED BY AS MATERIAL IN CREATING OTHER LOGS. THANKS JUSTIN SPRING 12/00

I realized that if the web version of the myth was to be a sacrifice, it was a very strange one, because it was a sacrifice that would instantly replenish itself, like the many-headed beasts of old. I liked the ideait seemed quite mystical. There was nothing mystical, however, as to how the myth would actually replenish itself. On our web page, as on most web pages, any keyed entry becomes Read Only as soon as its entered. No going back, no erasing, no remorse. Yet while it couldnt be changed, it was free to be copied and then after you had acquired your own copy, it could be rearranged, edited, cut up, added to, subtracted from, thrown away, used as inspiration. For some reason I still love that idea, that the myth is indestructible, that only its shadow can be acquired, never its essence, like Platos Ideal Forms. In those first few weeks I imagined the web version of the myth as a small, bright galaxy whirling blindly through the reaches of space. I know thats corny but thats how I saw it: that it had a life of its own. I had faith that someone, somehow, would find it and then respond, send a message back. After a few more weeks, I began to lose faith, and then after several months of waiting, I realized someone accidentally finding the myth on the web, let alone among the thousands of entries on our web page, was about as likely as one of those SETI projects

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finding an intelligent transmission from outer space. I became a bit embarrassed by my sacrifice message on the web, but there was no way I could erase it without recoding the web page. It was too much trouble. I let it stay. Who was ever going to find it anyway? And yet, years later, here was Dianes response. I have lifted it from our web page word for word.
DATE: Fri Nov 21 10:18:48 2003 AUTHOR: DIANE RANDALL SUBJECT: WITNESSES LOG PART-ENTRY UNKOWN ADDRESS: moongarden27@hotmail.com MESSAGE: This in response to WITNESS LOGS, Not sure what PART or ENTRY number this is but thanks for the inspiration!

THE WITNESSES LOG Its not about the visitors. It was never about the visitors. The listeners lay in wait In the darkness Like stars That dont exist without a witness. We are the witnesses. Nothing exists without us Without our hearts Our tears Our burning desire Burning to connect Thats why we witness why we speak To the dark burning stars Even knowing the visitors do not exist The stars do not exist The listeners dont even exist Its us, only us, that puts form and word and wonder To any and all of it And we, ha-ha! Have no existence either Just tears and desire Form and word and wonder And that creates the burning light That is And is not

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What really lifted my spirits was that Diane intuitively sensed who the entities were, something no one else had even come close to doing. Looking back at it now, and knowing what I do about her extraordinary psychic abilities, it makes sense she would have immediately recognized the world she lived in. But there was more. Not only did she give me a response, but a clarifying response, confirming many of my own feelings about the myth and what it has to say about us, the Witnesses: that without us there would be nothingthat we essentially create the world through the act of witnessing. I located her phone number and set a lunch date. That was when I got to see Dianes second face. I had remembered the shy, dark-eyed woman at the gathering, and she was still there, but there was someone else in Dianes face. I sensed an immediate friendliness, an impish humorthe kind you see in children. It was all over her face. She told me she had just moved into town. I found out she was a writer and that she worked with dreams. I also found out we viewed the world of the soul in much the same way: as a world of both darkness and light. I immediately sensed we should work together on some artistic projects but I couldnt quite figure out what. We set some tentative plans to collaborate on some theatrical improvisations involving speaking and let it go at that. When we got together to do the improvisations, I realized from the way she was improvising that she had extraordinary powers of empathy: she seemed to know where I was going before I did. In the intimacy of those improvisationswhere nothing whatever is plannedI detected another dimension hovering in the background of her innate friendliness: a deep spirituality. It radiated from her in a quiet, unassuming way. Jane detected it, too. We had all gathered one evening to do some more improvisations and Diane immediately sensed the movement of the Stream to which Jane and I were responding. Jane liked Diane; saw her as a soul mate. I began to think that speaking might be a way for Diane to engage a congregation in a deeply spiritual way if she decided to start a ministry, something she hinted at from time to time. We talked about it a bit, that it was possible, but I really didnt know if that seed would ever develop. Something eventually sprouted, but it wasnt the flower Id expected. In the weeks that followed, as we did more improvisations, I began to ask more about her work with dreams, and soon realized she had extraordinary psychic powers. I didnt realize just how extraordinary until she gave me a short autobiography she had written. It seems Diane had been walking in and out of the psychic world since she was a child, when she first became aware of the see-through people, as she used to call them. It was obvious to me that the psychic world was a territory as familiar to her as

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the house next door. I felt she might be able to help me with the myth. I told Diane about my problems in trying to explain it and asked if shed listen to the CD oral versions of the Witnesses Log myth to see if anything came to her in her dreams. She agreed. I told her I was almost at the point where the myth was finally beginning to make complete sense but I was still baffled by the Listeners. As I said this, I realized she might have seen only portions of the myth on the web, so I gave her the complete written myth as well as the three oral versions, and waited to see what would happen.

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Chapter 13: Witnessing December 2003, Sarasota Almost all of the poets I knew had a hard time accepting the art of speaking, not to mention the Witnesses Log myth. If speaking seemed incomprehensible to them, the myth seemed even more so. Only the fact that I had written some very good poems kept them from dismissing me out of hand. They would begrudgingly admit that maybe speaking was OK, maybe, but perhaps it would be best to walk away from that other thingthat myth. I couldnt walk away. I knew that something from the psychic world had brought me to this precise place in time, and that this was not the time to pull back; everything would eventually come together. It was as if I were putting together a large jigsaw puzzle that still had some blank spacesexcept I had no idea where to find the pieces that would fill them, or even what they looked like. I decided to limit my losses by only looking at small parts of the myth. I decided to bear down on the Witnessestry to fully understand who or what they represented. Were they humans, or Gods, or human consciousness itself? What does it mean to witness? I kept asking myself. I reached for the dictionary as a start, the web version of Merriam Webster in this case:
Main Entry: 1witness Function: noun Etymology: from Old English witnes knowledge, testimony, witness, from wit to know 1: attestation of a fact or event 2: one that gives evidence; specifically : one who testifies in a cause or before a judicial tribunal 3: one asked to be present at a transaction so as to be able to testify to its having taken place 4: one who has personal knowledge of something 5a: something serving as evidence or proof b: public affirmation by word or example of usually religious faith or conviction

None of these definitions, which are essentially contemporary, fit the action of the Witnesses in this myth, i.e., nobody in the myth is going to court (2), or is a member of a faith (5b), or is attempting to prove something (3, 5a). Some of the definitions, however, are closelike 1 and 4. This is probably due to the fact they are very close to the original Old English meaning of witness (knowledge) and wit (to know). But just try applying these close definitions to the template of the myth and see

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how far you get before your head starts to spin. Thats because they are too specialized. None of them really fit the myths use of the word witness. I decided to talk to Jane about it. I called her up. I could hear Al Green in the background. Jane, I said, I need some help. What? Some help, I need some help, a little louder this time. What?? Jesus, Jane, turn down the music will you! I yelled. I need some help. I could hear Al disappearing in the background. Sorry. What does witnessing mean? I asked. What? Witnessing, what does it mean? There was silence and then she suddenly barked, It means observe and report, thats what witnessing means. Observe and report what? I asked. The present. Thats a big order, I said. You bet it is. What do you mean by the present? I asked. Everything thats on your mind, she said. Everything? Yep. The past? If its on your mind. The future? If its on your mind. The present? The present is whats on your mind. Got it, stupid? I think so. Is that all? No. What else is there? I asked. Things that appear out of nowhere. Like the right path. Or God. I asked her how she could say witnessing was the observing and reporting of everything in the present. I told her it would be impossible for us to observe everything in the present, we would suffocate, like the man in Borges Parables. I didnt say we observe everything in the present, she replied. I said we observe the present, and that the present is everything that is on our minds. What do we do, then, with what weve observed? We remember it. How do we do that? We dont. Its done for us. Its automatic, unthinking, like our breathing.

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And then what? We report it. We tell a story. Why? Because we cant stop. Thats out of our control too. When it comes to witnessing, were like those tiny Moroccan desert rats that cant stop fornicating. I didnt know what to say. Fornicating rats aside, her explanation of witnessing seemed so simple as to be almost not worth considering. Then I began asking myself what the present really was, and what our automatic, unthinking, observing and reporting really entailed. At that point I began to see how incisive she had been. I eventually came to see that if witnessing was the reflexive act of observing and reporting, it couldnt possibly be random. Wed be worse than raving idiots. It became clear to me that there had to be an interest that drove our reflexive observing and reporting, an interest that was very deep. And then one day, as I was tossing the interest associated with witnessing back and forth in my mind, I heard a voice inside me say, serpent of interest with the same knowing, clarifying tone I had heard many times in my life. Something in me wanted to see the interest that guided our witnessing as having something in common with a serpent. It felt correct, but I had no idea why. I knew all the characteristics of snakes that were considered God-like by early man: the snake seemingly renewing itself by shedding its skin; the snake eating its own tail as a symbol of the interlinked mystery of creation and destruction; the snakes association with the Other World because of its cold-blooded nature. But none of these characteristics seemed to fit the template of witnessing. I sensed, however, that something Jane had told me much earlier about the nature of the serpent might help me understand the serpent of interest metaphor that had just popped into my head. At the time, I had asked her what she thought of the Witnesses Log myth; she had hesitated and then scribbled out on a pad: like a snake / like a bone beneath flesh / bare bones / cold poem. Her cryptic scribbling had confused me and I remember asking her what she meant by stating the myth was like a snake / like a bone beneath flesh. Ill repeat the conversation that followed:
I keep seeing a skeleton whose bones are perfectly articulated, she replied. What kind of skeleton? I asked.

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Its human but not human. What do you mean by that? The bones seem alive, wet, glittery. I cant explain it any other way, she said. What did you mean when you said the myth is like a snake? Thats the part of the bones thats not human. What does that mean? I asked. It means the bones are special. How? Flesh swims on them, becomes alive. What flesh? I asked. The flesh of the other myths, she said. You know the ones: the myths where the hero walks through fire and survives, or talks to God and dies, those myths. The Wrath of Achilles, Black Sambo.

As I tumbled that conversation around in my head, I finally got what she was saying. She had shot right to the heart of The Witnesses Logthat at its core it was a myth that mirrored the way myths are createdthose powerfully-charged, unconsciously-driven stories that ordered our external and internal lives for millennia. What she had seen was that The Witnesses Log is ultimately a mythic story about the nature of early human consciousness and the intelligent forces within it forces that allowed us to create stories that imitated and made sense of the mysterious forces around us and within us. And although those stories, those myths, no longer play such a powerful role in our modern consciousness, they continueas Jung and Campbell have shown usto hold sway over the deepest aspects of our unconscious lives. Unfortunately, I still couldnt quite bring Janes insight and my own serpent of interest into lockstep. I called her up and asked her if she sensed anything serpentlike about the instinctive interest that directs our witnessing. Its the way the serpent moves, she said, the way it directs our witnessing. Its the way female energy moves, effortlessly, the way it can insinuate itself so quicklyand so seamlesslyinto our liveslike intuition, or insight, or love, or a poem. Thats why we cant take our eyes off a snake: something tells us its movement is not of this world.

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Chapter 14: Mercedes Noriega December 2003, Panama City, Panama I had decided Panama would keep my mind off the myth, but I had my misgivings as soon as Pinga and I stepped out of the arrivals door. It was two oclock in the morning and the airport was completely empty, like they were holding it open just for us. Outside, a long line of shiny taxis was waiting to take us across the new, expensive, four-lane toll road. Despite my best efforts to be positive about the myth, I wasnt doing well. There were days I thought Id never be able to explain it. It had been a long time. I was a mess. The cab driver told us nobody used the toll road except the cabs going back and forth to the airport. It supported a lot of people, he said. We got the code. A few minutes later we were outside the Covadonga hotel. We dug deep, paid the driver and wept. The neighborhood was right out of a B-movie: the dark, hot streets were filled with the usual girls, cab drivers, drifters, dealers, you name it. I felt like I was signing into Hades. Despite Pingas high hopes, we got nowhere locating the wreck. Just finding the old enlisted mens beach turned out to be a problem. The army was long gone and the entire area had been cordoned off for reasons no one could explain. Every cab driver we spoke to had a different idea where the beach was. When we finally found out where it was located, we bribed a guard to get in. I took one look at the water and knew we were nuts. It was rainy season, which we should have known. The water was muddy; visibility was zero. Even if the wreck were near the surface, which it was supposed to be, it would be impossible to find. Wed have to come back in the summer when the water was clearer. Maybe if we wait for a real low tide, Pinga kept saying, maybe we could spot it. But it was just talk. We were fucked and he knew it. Fortunately, the Covadonga had a small, 24-hour restaurant on the first floor that could take the edge off just about anything. We spent a lot of time there. When Pinga was drinking, hed tell me weird, funny stories about Kiki. The one I always liked hearing was her dressing up like a nun and chain-smoking Pall Malls in front of the TV for three days before suddenly coming back from God knows where, or as she put it to Pinga at the time, From its none of your goddamn business thank you. He couldnt stop hopping up and down. Unfortunately, after a few more beers, hed begin chumming the waters for Mercedes. He had sized her up immediately as a Mafia Dona: Listen, she could call one of her buddies in the government to get us a survey of the flats. It would be easy for her to get them, her husband was an officer; believe me, she knows

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what arm to pull. I told him all that data probably went back to the states with the Army, but Id try. What I didnt tell him was I didnt have quite the pull with Mercedes he thought I had. That was long gone. Shed been eying me lately because her ledger on me had been consistently adding up to zero: dreamer. I tried to let Pinga down easy. I told him I was a bit on the outs, that she had become so pissed at me for screwing up a dinner in Miami that shed called me out right in front of the doorman: I know what you are: you are like the dogs that bark but dont bite. Jesus. I told Pinga I was glad shed said it in English, not Spanish, because I might have missed it and smiled back like an idiot. He had a pained expression. He knew Id smiled. Id promised Mercedes Id make it up to her, take her out for some nightlife on her next trip up to Miami; and so, two months later, I drove over to have dinner with her. I felt like I was going to the gallows. She was right about the type of dog I was: I didnt have the slightest idea how to find some exciting nightlife, or even what it consisted of lately, but I knew she liked the older, more established parts of Miami, so I took her out to a Latin or Spanish restaurant on Collins Avenue in North Miami (I cant remember its name; I had found it in the yellow pages at the last minute). When I arrived at the restaurant, I felt like a man who had just received a last minute pardon. The dcor was right up Mercedes alley: gold leaf and mirrors everywhere. The young waitress, who only spoke Spanish, or had decided to do so because of Mercedes, took the order from her with a great deal of attention. I wasnt surprised. I had seen it before. Mercedes had that aura of old wealth about her that Latin working women instantly recognized. She wasnt to be messed with. So it surprised me that all of a sudden there was a great deal of give and take between Mercedes and the waitress. Some laughing. Maybe some jokes about the dreamer. I asked Mercedes what it was all about. She told me the waitress had wanted to know if I was her husband and she had replied No, he is just my nephew, that was all. She laughed. But I remembered the waitress face. Either she hadnt believed Mercedes or maybe Mercedes wasnt being quite truthful, because I remember the waitress suddenly becoming very brazen and forward, like now it was one woman to another about this business of grinning gigolos. I remember the look the waitress gave me. I wont even try to describe it. That wasnt all. We were about to drive away from the restaurant when Mercedes suddenly jumped out of the car and raced back inside. I went to the window to see what was happening and saw her run over to the waitress and touch her quickly with her left hand, then run back out to the car where I was waiting for her, looking the other way, pretending I hadnt seen anything.

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What had I seen, by the way? I asked her what had gone on back at the restaurant. She looked at me as if I had a wad of gum on my forehead: The young girl stole my Love, she touched me when I was talking to her about you. I had to get it back. One thing about Mercedes, you never could predict when she was going to tell you the truth. Shed snap it out like a switchblade. I had to wonder what had ever possessed me to think there was a psychic connection between us. She could have helped me; I was sure of it. But she was never going to reveal that side of herself now, at least not to me. That hadnt been the situation, however, when I was a child. She would suddenly say things to me about myself she had no way of knowing. One instance occurred when she was visiting us in the states during the late 40s. I was about ten or so and she took me aside one night after dinner and said, You wont have to wear glasses in about a year. She knew I disliked them. I had a severely crossed left eye that had required glasses since I was five. I thought she was just being nice. But sure enough, about a year later, my left eye somehow corrected itself in a matter of days. I couldnt believe it. I didnt know what to think at the time; I didnt know anything about the psychic world, but I always paid attention to Mercedes after that. By the time I was in my teens, Mercedes had stopped coming to the states, so I lost touch with her for some forty years. After my mother died, I had the impulse to visit her, reestablish contact. I knew something about the psychic world by this time, not a lot, but enough to know she was the real thing. I also sensed there was something she wanted to say to me. It never happened. She was friendly and funny, but a wall had gone up. In all our time together she always acted the wealthy Panamanian matron, never showing me her other side except for that one time outside the restaurant, when she had suddenly realized the young waitress had been hunting her. It was a contest Mercedes wasnt about to lose. It was one of the few times Id seen Mercedes slip. But she never slipped for long. Mercedes had a fierce eye for detail. And one detail she never lost track of was my occasional, casual reference to the spirit world, hoping shed lose her reserve and begin talking to me about it. But she never did. Shed simply laugh, like I was making a little joke. I dont know how long it took me, but I eventually realized that door wasnt going to open anymore. Not as far as I was concerned. Maybe it was the fact I wasnt a child anymore. After all, I was an adult now; people would listen to me. What did she have to gain by opening herself to someone like me, someone who wrote booksa dreamer? Let me put it to you this way: there was no way she was going to put her life in my hands. Ever.

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Then the whole treasure thing crumbled and Pingas gout kicked in just for good measure. It was awful watching the pain flood up his arm. He finally decided he had to fly back to the states, despite the fact that the flight change was horrendously expensive. I had four more days to go on my ticket and even less money, so I figured Id stay. I thought I could sleep, read some books, but it was a mistake. I couldnt sleep; the myth kept coming back to me. I became distraught trying to understand the Listeners. I thought I might be losing my mind. I stayed in my room the entire four days except to go to the restaurant. My room felt more and more like a cell. It had one bed and one window with a big black television hung from the ceiling, like a monitor in a convenience store. Id lie on my bed looking up at it like I was a mental patient under observation. It flickered off and on, day and night. Here are some thoughts from my journal made during those last few days in Panama. I had momentarily put the Listeners away, and was trying to clarify my thinking on some things the myth was saying about the Visitors. It didnt make any difference. I was lost. Here are some excerpts from my journal:
The other Visitors are different. If you ask them, they will let you hold their eyes. If you do, youll see things you cant describe. Not to anyone. People who undergo a transcendent experience, a vision for instance, often cannot communicate it in a coherent, detailed story. They tell us a story, but it is one where they essentially bail out, and say: All I can tell you is that it happened but I dont know exactly what or where or how or why. In other words, they might tell us something like this: I saw things, but I cant explain them to you. All I can tell you is I knew beyond all knowing that I was loved and lived in God. That is hardly the story our consciousness wants. It wants the details. It wants to know what the City of God looks like. And where God lives. Is it a good neighborhood, or not so good? I dont mean to make light of such inquiries, but for the person who has a vision, the reality and truth of that experience is often beyond logic, beyond explaining, beyond our systems of knowledge. And beyond stories, beyond communicating to others through words. If we are lucky, however, and are standing next to the person who has had that transcendent experience, the sound of their voice, the

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sound of those words, the sound of that un-story, may bring us to another place. It was the sound, and not just the meaning of the words, that caused people to suddenly get up and follow Jesus and Buddha. This shouldnt surprise us. After all, in the stories we call poetry, the task of the words, the task of the story, the special task of witnessing, is to communicate the souls song, which is a song of feelings. There are times, of course, when people have transcendent experiences that they can communicate with words, experiences from which they can create stories. Think of Buddha or Jesus or Moses, all of whom brought back stories about the City of God, that is, stories about the nature of God and how we can align ourselves with that unknowable being. Their stories, unfortunately, are all different, which is the nature of stories about the unknowable. In this sense, we might think of them as partial, or incomplete. Part of the reason for that difference, or incompleteness, is that a true story about the transcendent can only be communicated through metaphor. To add to that, there is this complication: in the face of transcendent events, even metaphors can break down. What we get are pieces of the unknowable: partial metaphors. When we take them for an actuality is when we start mounting Crusades. It would be far more illuminating and transforming to be able somehow to stand next to Jesus and listen to the sound of his Aramaic parables for a few minutes, even if his metaphors were incomplete. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) time will not allow us that privilege. Stories are all we have. We, as humans, are locked into stories in the same way we are locked into time. To be human is to live in time and to speak in stories. Our stories can only swim in the river of time. They are inseparable. So that if we are to make sense of the world, we must make sense of it through witnessing, through stories. To be human is to be a witness. We have no choice. A transcendent experience may inform us directly, but it may also leave us isolated if we are unable to form stories about it, which is the way we ultimately create an agreed upon view of the world. That is why people who have had transcendent experiences will attempt to tell us stories about them even if it means making fools of themselves. The myth also states that the witnesses are always being visited. Another way of looking at that is to say that while the serpent of interest directing our witnessing is always with us, other serpents of interest are always arriving as Visitors. These are the startling dreams, visions and voices that cause us to see the world in a different way. You might say those serpents twine around the serpent directing our witnessingmodifying, and in some cases, like that of St. Paul, replacing our original sense of the world. That is not a new thought by the way; Shakespeare probably said it best: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Not made of, which is a nice New Age thought, but made on, which is a terrifying truth, because it implies we are merely the screen upon which the lens of the unknowable plays itself out. Or more precisely, we are not only the screen, but the audience as well. After all, God has been good to us. We get to watch our own story as if it were real. Thats what it

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means to be human.

I dont know why it took me so long, but during those last few days I finally realized that perhaps the reason the myth was refusing to yield its total meaning was because the myth was an act of the soul, not the self. If I couldnt consciously understand the song that resulted, perhaps it wasnt time. Perhaps I would never understand it. After all, the soul keeps its own time. I kept telling myself to be patient, it would come, and at the same time I wanted to take a long sleep. It was a very hard time. I was so scared. I remember staring out the fourth floor window of my room in the Covadonga counting the days to my plane, the myth spinning in my head no one to talk to the 24-hour television splattering the walls with light it was the worst time of my life.

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Chapter 15: ISLAUGGH March 2004, Sarasota I had been waiting several months for Diane to get back to me on the myth, so when we finally got together, I asked if her dreams had revealed anything. I havent had time to listen to it the way I want to, she said. My life turned upside down after we met. Im struggling with some dark issues. I figured either she wasnt ready to listen to the myth, or she knew I wasnt ready to hear what she was going to tell me. In the meantime, Joan had come up to the states from Mexico. She asked if she could stay with me for a while, that the summers in Alamos were brutal. It was evident she needed a rest. She may have been living an expatriates life in Alamos, but just barely. Her health was not good. It was clear that the guides who had led her to Mexico hadnt been kind. She simply couldnt adapt to the way of life in Alamos and her Spanish was still non-existent. How she made it through the day I have no idea. After shed been with me for a while, I asked her to listen to the myth again, see if anything came to her, that I was very close to understanding it. I told her I was beginning to suspect that the reason the myth wouldnt fit any mythic template I knew was because the myth was about very early, preliterate consciousness. But if such myths existed, I couldnt find them. I was going to have to feel my way towards an explanation. One of the things that had always bothered me about the myth was why it had come to me in the first place. I had felt from the start that the poems making up the myth were much more than personal poems. I mean the personal is in there, how could it not be? There were, however, certain aspects of the myth that suggested it contained elements from the collective unconscious. That judgment call, of course, is a tricky, highly subjective one. Some might say the myth was nothing more than a hyper-inflated description of speakinga lot of tasty nonsense put together by the poets unconscious. I have no answer for that except to say there is a restrained seriousness and elegance about the myth that doesnt normally accompany such inflations. If the Gods were having their way with me, they were surely taking the long road around. In the end, I had to go with my artistic sense that the myth had a much larger scope than the merely personal. I was guided in this by Jungs study of St. Johns Book of Revelations. In it, Jung discusses the almost insoluble problem of separating the elements of Johns vision belonging to his personal unconscious from those belonging to the collective unconscious, which is Jungs term for our

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common human memories extending back to the beginning of life itself. For Jung, that separation was critical, as the elements from the collective unconscious constituted the true vision. My conclusion, after reading Jung, is that separating them is a minefield, one not easily traversed, no matter how good your detection equipment. It seems to me that in the end you have to go with the flow because the details, whatever they may be, are just soldiers carrying the felt truth of the vision, which is what is really important. There is no doubt in my mind that this inevitable mixing of the personal and collective unconscious also affected my vision of the figure in the mirror. There were many possible meanings I could attach to his physical appearanceone being that his burdened aspect was a reflection of my own emotional state. I was not doing well: the recent failure of my second marriage and the isolation brought about by my having traveled so far from the norm were both taking their toll. I asked Joan to listen to the myth again and tell me anything that might help me. After listening to the CD a few times, she said, The myth is just above the power chakra and just below the heart chakra, thats what it felt like. Thats great, I said, but what does that mean? I dont know, she said. It just feels like its stuck there. Do you have any sense of the purpose of the myth? To bring us closer to the body, she said. What do you mean by the body? I asked. The heart, feeling, love. How do you know that? I dont know. I just do. What does that have to do with the chakras? Thats how the myth felt when I listened to it, she said. Like it was stuck just above the power chakra. It felt like it was trying to rise to the heart chakra. There was something that rang true about what Joan saidthat the tone of the myth, the feeling of the myth, was of a speaker whose existence was bound up in courage and honor and desire but somehow lacking in love and compassion. Perhaps that was a way of describing what it felt like to be me, and perhaps it was a way of describing how it felt to be in the bleak, unpredictable world in which early man found himself. Take your pick. I told Joan about the poem Diane had posted on the web about the myth and suggested we get together sometime with Diane and puzzle it out a bit further. Later on that evening Joan and I went out to a poetry reading and spotted Diane in the back row like she was waiting for us. We went for coffee afterwards and I asked Diane if anything had come to her about the myth. She told me a few nights before she had had a dream about entities locked in the creases of a dark stone called labradorite that she had stumbled upon, and she had immediately thought

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of the Listeners. She said she knew wed meet at the reading, she could feel entities crowding around her trying to reach me. She told me it was time. We talked for almost an hour, and just before we went our separate ways, I dont know why, I told Diane about my encounter with the figure in the mirror many years ago. She looked at me and blurted out, Quick, write this down. I pulled out a pen and started writing as she spelled out the letters: I-S-L-A-U-G-----H, and then she stopped and said No, its.A-U-G-G-H, thats it, I-S-L-A-U-G-GH, thats the name of the figure in the mirror. Thats when I saw Dianes third face. I looked at the strange string of letters, trying to figure out a pronunciation, and a voice inside my head said: ee-slaw.

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Chapter 16: Jane Beats Me with My Own Myth September 2004, Sarasota When the myth first came to me, I was completely baffled. I wasnt sure if it was about the creation of the world, of the God(s), of man, of consciousness, and if so, what kind of consciousness? Was it the consciousness of early tribal man, or modern man? After a great deal of research, however, everything seemed to indicate it was about the creation and nature of human consciousness. The problem was I still couldnt completely determine if it was about preliterate consciousness or our contemporary, self-reflective consciousness. Either way, I couldnt quite make all the pieces fit. There was always some aspect of the myth, some puzzling phrase or omission or odd detail that prevented it. Yet I felt it would eventually yield to my efforts. It felt true, and if it felt true, I knew I should eventually be able to explain it. I continued to examine it with a great deal of optimism and became so absorbed I seldom looked up. Unfortunately, all of my attempts eventually ended in failure. What really began to bother me, even frighten me, was that just seconds before everything fell apart, I was absolutely sure my thinking was as solid as 1+1=2. What made it particularly vexing was that whenever I felt Id finally cracked something that had been resisting me and began to write out a rigorous explanation, Id suddenly fly off in a strange direction, become lost, confused. It was as if the myth had some kind of power over my reasoning. At times I thought I was really losing my mind. It wasnt long before I began to mistrust my most trusted intuitions. I felt like I was really becoming unbalanced. There were days I became so worried about what was happening to me that I pushed the myth back to the far recesses of my mind. The only problem was I would occasionally glimpse it there, gleaming in the darkness, and that was enough to make me bring it back up. Something in me just refused to give up. It got to the point where I began attempting to explain smaller and smaller sections of the myth, sometimes line by line, trying to somehow trap the point where I would begin flying off. I never could. I was still flying off, becoming lost. I didnt know what to do. When I wasnt working on the myth, my mental and emotional stability seemed in reasonably good shape. I wasnt sitting in a corner counting spiders by any means. I guess you could say that outside of some particularly dark days when I thought I might be approaching a nervous breakdown, my creative life was in pretty good

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shape. But I wouldnt be telling the whole truth if I didnt say there were days just thinking about the myth made me extremely uneasy. Im getting ahead of myself a bit in telling you this, but I eventually did figure out what was happening. It might seem like voodoo, but it wasnt, at least not the common variety. It seems whenever I was faced with something in the myth that made no sense (which was often the case) my mind would invisibly fabricate a meaning, a sort of hazy, ontherun explanation that made that part of the myth make sense. Something like this happens, by the way, in everyday life when something were drawn to doesnt make sense. One of the most common instances is what happens when we are drawn to a pop song we cant quite understand. Out of the sound of the song (sad, happy, zany, manic) and the lyrics we do understand, the mind somehow manufactures phrases that seem to make sense and were happy as clams. Usually were not even aware of the reflexive fabrication that has taken place. Indeed, we may live with it for years, even a lifetime, unless the real lyrics somehow cross our paths. Its perhaps a trivial example of the minds ability to fabricate meanings, but its a good indication of how far the mind will go to make sense of something that interests us. I was being drawn to something a little heavier than a mush-mouthed singer, however. What was drawing me in, and quite forcibly, was a myth that consisted of simple, common words. I understood what the words meantat least I understood what they meant at the moment to me, a 21st century American. As I was to find out, however, that wasnt quite enough, because many words in the myth had meanings I wasnt aware of. Every culture generates a sea of meaning for the words that comprise its everyday language. It is an organic, ongoing, largely unconscious and almost invisible process that grows out of simply living with others. It allows us to know what words mean, not just in an elementary sense, but all of their possible nuances and associations. Sometimes the structure of that sea of meaning is influenced by a more conscious process, such as the meanings assigned by dictionaries, but a sea of meaning doesnt really need dictionaries in order to flourish, if for no other reason than dictionaries are pretty much an after-the-fact enterprise: a nice red cherry on top of the crazy, wiggling Jello of everyday language. All seas of meaning are tied to a particular culture and time. Many words that were used in Shakespeares time have very different meanings for us today. Nuances and associations are lost and sometimes much more. But we dont have

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to go back 400 years and across the Atlantic to find a different sea of meaning for the words we use every day. We can just go across town and find out we have no idea what people are talking about. When I lived in New York as a young man, I often listened to WBLS, the black R&B station in Harlem. I remember hearing a new James Brown song containing the phrase, Poppa got a brand new bag, and having no idea what it meant. My mind immediately fabricated an image of a slightly tipsy, elderly black man walking down the street swinging his wifes pocketbook. Looking back at it now, Im sure if I had ever mentioned that to the AfricanAmericans I played basketball with at the time, they probably would have laid down on the court and howled. They were swimming in a much different sea of meaning than I was. What Poppa got a brand new bag, meant to them, I found out years later, was that Brown was declaring he had a whole new outlook on life, and in particular, on the music he was making. Musicians familiar with his work say it marks the point where Brown began to fully realize his efforts to bring black music back to its primal, percussive roots. If I was confused by Browns lyrics, something similar was happening in my attempts to understand the myth. Parts of it didnt fit into my frame of reference anymore than did Poppa got a brand new bag. Whenever I encountered these bewildering parts of the myth, my mind would immediately (and invisibly) produce a fabricated meaning and I was never the wiser. How I eventually figured out what was happening is hard to say, but some of the impetus came from Jane. I was close to the edge of a breakdown one evening and probably would have gone over if she hadnt called. I was thinking about you, she said. Im glad somebody is. I dont know how to say this, but I think Im about to have a nervous breakdown. You sound like it, baby. Its the myth, isnt it? Yes. It makes sense and then, all of a sudden, it doesnt. Its like being crazy. You are crazy, didnt I tell you that? Thats not funny, Jane But you are. You know why? No, tell me. Because I keep telling you the myth isnt yours, but you never listen. I know, I know, but it feels like mine, I mean it came to me like any other poem. I mean I didnt feel anybody else; Jesus, I would have known. You dont know crap, Justin. That myth came from a dark place. I told you that once. I knowits a swamp, it came from Joan, get rid of it and all of that, but listen, if it werent for Joan, I wouldnt have the myth. Thats your problem, baby, but right now, thats not the dark Im talking about.

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Im talking about the dark where cavemen lived. What cavemen? I dont knowcavemen from way back in the beginning. Anyway thats what keeps coming to me. They look almost like apes. I keep seeing some of them coming out of a dark cave, but there are others who keep hanging back. The ones coming out keep looking back at the ones hanging back, like somethings the matter with them. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? You could shove it up your ass for one thing. And listen, mister, dont get prissy with me. Youre lucky I called.

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Chapter 17: I Take the Ball from Jane And Run September 2004, Sarasota Jane made me so angry I snapped back to something like normal. I knew she was onto something. I knew that cavemen from way back in the beginning meant the very first humans. But what was she trying to say about them? Right then I saw one of the cavemen looking back at the cave and a tumbler clicked in my head: it was about knowing. They wanted to know why they had come out of the dark, become human, while some of their brothers and sisters had remained in the darkremained animals. It must have consumed them. Whatever genetic change had taken place with the advent of human consciousness, it was probably very tentative. It was entirely possible that some of the brothers and sisters of those very first humans would have been born without the human gene. The difference would have been obvious after a few years. Any doubts I had about the myth were swept away, just like that. Janes insight had been like a laser. It had gone right to the heart of the matter. The myth was about the nature of our first consciousness; the one that formed when we changed from animal to man. I went back to reading about preliterate cultures, especially what Julian Jaynes had to say about their stories. Somewhere in my reading, another tumbler clicked. Not only was the myth about the first human consciousness, it also had all the characteristics of a story from preliterate times. It was concrete, immediate, straightforward, non-reflectiveThis happened, They appeared, We went, They said. That is why the myth seems vague from a modern, explanatory point of view. Preliterate stories were more concerned with passing on knowledge by imitating a truth than by logically explaining it. Thus the myth is content to present us with a simple drama in which the four players imitate the way our first consciousness operated. . Our modern minds want much more explanatory detail on the four players. We never get that detail, however, because the preliterate speakers of the myth arent interested in explaining anythingtheyre interested in imitating the essential drama of witnessing. Whats more, and heres the kicker, the speakers are also assuming we have a preliterate mindset and are therefore familiar with the essential drama and nature of the four players. The excellence of a preliterate poet was not based on the uniqueness of his story, but how he told it. The basic storyline of Homers Iliad, for example, would not

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have been much different from that of the scores of competing epics about the Trojan War. Everyone knew the story. What distinguished Homer was the way he told the story. Unfortunately we are 21st century humans (with a much different consciousness) and therefore arent at all familiar with either the drama or the four players in The Witnesses Log. We can only guess. If Columbus, however, had presented this myth to the preliterate tribes he encountered, theyunlike uswould have immediately recognized the four players for who they were. The myth had come from a dark place, just like Jane said. It not only reflected what had to be the essential concern of very early humanswhy they were different from the rest of creationbut the myth was also being told exactly as a preliterate human would have told it. No explanation. Just imitation. I finally had a good handhold on the myth. I may not have sewn up all the loose ends, but I no longer had any doubts the myth was about early preliterate consciousness. Nor did I have any doubts that the myth was being told from the point of view of very early man. I had no idea, however, how that point of view had found its way into the myth outside of Janes belief that it had come from a separate intelligence (something I still couldnt accept). Yet I suspected I was going to have to view it that way until I cracked the final code. It was just a matter of time, I kept telling myself. Unfortunately, I kept losing my balance. At times it was like walking through a minefield. I might have understood intellectually that the myth was being told from a preliterate mindset, but I hadnt quite grasped the full ramifications of what that meant. It wasnt just a matter of the narrative style. It also meant that the sea of meaning the myth swam in was very different from the one I swam in. This meant that even though the words in the myth were ordinary enough, and had obvious contemporary meanings, the preliterate meanings of certain key words were not apparent at all. It was this conflict that was causing my mind to automatically fabricate a meaning. The problem was I couldnt detect when it was actually happeningthe fabrications were too quick for me to catch. The one thing consciousness is truly threatened by is something it cant comprehendsomething outside of what it knows to be possibleand it will fabricate just about anything to make sure the impossible doesnt present itself. This is what was happening to me. My mind would kind of fuzz out and then immediately rebound with a fabricated meaning. These fabrications, by the way, are never rigorous or detailed. In fact theyre very quick and sort of hazy, just enough to get by, as they say. What makes them especially devilish is the fabrications somehow feel true. There

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is no warning sign that a fabrication has taken place, let alone that it is false. None. Its only when we try to explain our thoughts in some detail, or they are put under the glass of scrutiny, as in a cross-examination, that these fabrications suddenly fall apart. Otherwise they remain an unchallenged part of our memories. Heres another thing to think about. It didnt matter a bit that the part of the myth I was physically looking at on the page contradicted the fabrication in my mind, because as long as I didnt look too hard, I was momentarily blinded to what was on the page. I know that sounds like a good description of crazy, but Im afraid thats the way the mind works. I know this now, but at the time the fabrications were invisible to me. All I really knew was that things I felt absolutely sure about would suddenly crumble when I tried to explain them in a rigorous manner to someone. I would suddenly become lost, confused. Take the case of the Listeners. Whenever I encountered a passage about them that puzzled meas I had no idea what the Listeners really representedmy mind would invisibly create a fabrication for them that conformed to how I understood the world to be. Let me give you an example. I understood the word listener. It is someone who has an interest in hearing something specific as in, I was listening for the sound of her voice. The Oxford Dictionary suggests somewhat the same definition of listento make an effort to hear something, to wait alertly in order to hear a sound. I never questioned that basic meaning. It fits much of what the Listeners are about. But the word, as it was used in the myth, suggested other meanings or nuances or associations that didnt fit into my worldview at all. Undoubtedly an early preliterate mind would have been aware of them, but I clearly wasnt. In the context of the myth, the Listeners are psychic, unknowable entities, but there is no mythological creation entity I am aware of as passive as the Listeners. The Witnesses say they can feel that the Listeners have an interest in their feelings (The Listeners hear everything we feel), but that is the only activity ever ascribed to them. Were never told why they are interested in our feelings. Despite their God-like nature, the Listeners never actively enter this world to communicate with us as the Visitors do, and as all the various Gods and angels have done since the beginning of time. Yet something in me continually (and invisibly) equated the very active Gods of literate (and preliterate) man to the completely passive Listeners in the myth. I would be looking at the passive Listeners on the page while something in me was attributing all kinds of actions to them in my mind: appearing to the Witnesses, speaking to them, sending them dreams, those kinds of thingsbut a warning bell never went off in my head.

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That is how important it is to consciousness that its worldview not be disturbed. Castaneda would call that view a description of the world, or perhaps a subdescription of the majestic one he says all human beings are locked into from birththe description that makes us experience the world as we do. All of those descriptions are tenacious in maintaining their hold on consciousness. In my case, because my own worldview gave me no way of comprehending the Listeners as the myth portrayed them, my mind simply fabricated a meaning for me that made them comprehensible. For a while. No wonder I thought I was slipping into some kind of madness. None of my thinking about the myth had any stability. Sense would suddenly become nonsense. People would simply walk away. If I had no intellectual model for the Listeners, what made the whole enterprise even more vexing was that other characters in the myth (such as the Dreamers and Visitors) were somewhat understandable because they did have rough counterparts in other myths, i.e., they swam in similar seas of meaning as my own. For example, entities similar to the Dreamers (Moses, Ezekiel) and the Visitors (Angels) appear in the Bible. As difficult as making sense of the myth continued to be, it was impossible for me to even consider walking away from it. It wasnt as if somebody had walked up to me on the street and given me a quick summary of the myths basic concepts. In such a case, I probably would have been like anyone elseI would have listened and then forgotten about the whole thing. After all, at first glance, much of the myth seems simplistic (maybe even nonsensical)at least to the modern mind. The narrative poem called The Witnesses Log, however, came to me as a pure, unpremeditated poem, not as a cursory description of its concepts. Anyone who has had a truly unpremeditated poem come to them knows the feeling of being filled with its truth. It seems to be a divine giftsomething from outside our normal consciousness. It doesnt matter if you believe in God or not. It is a reflexive human reaction. That is why poets cant stop showing you their poems. It is what youre supposed to do with divine gifts. Which was why I never doubted the myth as it was coming to me. I could feel it was a true message from the soul. The possibility of it being gibberish never entered my mind. I always receive my poems emotionally, not logically, and those feelings told me I was riding the one true vein. So I kept riding. I never let my reasoning mind interfere with a poem when it is coming to me. After all, the truth we sense in a poem comes from a very deep level of the unconscious that easily absorbs contradictions. That feeling of truth from The Witnesses Log was so strong, I didnt have any doubts I could explain it. After all, it was my poem. And if it was my poem, it had roots somewhere in me.

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But I was wrong. I kept failing. What made it especially crazy was that the fabrications allowed me to keep bouncing back, feeling that now I finally understood the myth. Whats more, those same fabrications kept reinforcing my feeling that the myth had roots in me. As I was to find out, however, the myth didnt have many roots in me at all. Thats why I couldnt walk away from the myth, as many of my acquaintances kept suggesting. I have always felt that poems are true, i.e., they express a deep, soul-driven truth that comes into time from the very roots of your being. If you can feel that truth, you can eventually feel down to its roots and explain iteven if imperfectly. This may help explain why I felt I was becoming mentally unbalanced. It was very uncomfortable. Thinking you might be going crazy is not a nice feeling. Those who have been there know what Im talking about. Ironically, if I had never tried to explain the myth, just let it flow over me like rain, I probably never would have become as unhinged as I did. After all, the soul, the unconscious, can easily accommodate opposites, contradictions; its the conscious mind that cant. Our first consciousness did a much better job of accommodating contradictions, partly because it was an artistic, imitative consciousness as opposed to our modern explaining consciousness. Early humans seem to have had a very thin membrane separating their conscious and unconscious minds. They floated between the two very easily. I wasnt a stranger to that first form of consciousness by any means. Long before the myth came to me, the work of Julian Jaynes had pretty much convinced me that we had indeed gone through a change of consciousness about the time writing was being invented some 4,000 years ago. So that even before Jane pointed me way back towards that dark cave, some part of me was already sensing the possibility that the myth might not be about our contemporary, self-reflective consciousness, but the older, more primal one. Here are some early journal entries about the nature of that older consciousness:
The Witnesses Log is a myth about the creation and nature of our very first state of consciousness, the one that came into being when we changed from animal to man. Over the millennia, we have chosen to describe that new human consciousness many different ways: man became aware of himself as a being separate from nature; he became aware of a Supreme Being; he became a rational creature; he became a tool-maker. This myth doesnt necessarily negate any of those descriptions, but suggests a much different way of looking at early human consciousness. The myth says that what distinguishes early humans from animals is that we are animals who somehow became storytellers. We became witnesses to creation.

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Although modern western culture has tended to regard the nature of human consciousness as one that has remained essentially unchanged since our evolving into homo sapiens some 100,000200,000 years ago, there is growing evidence that our first state of consciousness was quite different from the one we have today. The work of Julian Jaynes in this area is extensive, and suggests that preliterate man constantly heard voices generated in the right side of his brain that guided him and that he took for the voices of the Gods. Early man didnt have a self-reflective mind space in which to plot alternatives before taking action, only the voices to guide him. I am going to also suggest that early man not only heard the Gods, but also reflexively imitated everything he encounteredthe voices, visions, the observed physical worldas a way of speaking back, of responding to the Gods. It is only when we understand this that we can begin to understand, for example, the true significance of preliterate ceremonies that involved human sacrifice. Today, we see these ceremonies as barbarous, but to preliterate man they were ceremonies that imitated, that celebrated, the essential mystery of the world: that creation and destruction were inextricably linked, and that to be human was to acknowledge this mystery by imitating it. This is another way of saying that preliterate man was essentially an artistic creature, an imitator at heart. This initial, imitative state of human consciousness guided us over tens of thousands of years until the advent of writing, about 4,000 years ago, at which time we seem to have developed our current, self-reflective state with its ability to endlessly replay our past and imagine our future. We dont listen to the Gods anymore, rather we analyze our potential and past actions and choose, we hope, the best course of action. It is this later state of consciousness that is represented in the Genesis myth when the Serpent promises Eve that eating the forbidden fruit will allow her and Adam to know what the Gods know. Eve took the bait, of course, and that change in consciousness turned us from artistic creatures to systematically rational creatures, and we have been enjoying the benefits and suffering the consequences ever since. You might say that our new consciousness was an evolution that favored explanation over imitation as a way of understanding the world, of knowing who we are. It may be news to some people that we possess a different kind of consciousness today than we possessed 4,000 years ago, but a great deal of scholarly and anthropologic evidence points that way. Im not talking about the common perception that we are smarter than stupid preliterate man could ever be, the proof being our creation of atomic bombs and the like. That type of thinking presumes that preliterate man wanted an atomic bomb in the first place. The fact of the matter is that humans at any stage of development are always smart about what is important to them. Preliterate man was always smart at imitation, just as were always smart at explanation. You just have to look at the incredible colored masks and body paintings of contemporary preliterate peoples like the New Guinea tribesmen to begin to see

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how proficient that first state of human consciousness was at imitation. That imitation took many forms, but primary among them was imitating the animals they took as soul guides, as totems. We may say that such face and body painting didnt take any talent at all, that we could do it in a snap, but wed be wrong. If you dont believe me, stand in front of a mirror naked with some paint and feathers and shells and leaves and vines and try to portray your deeper self, your soul, your shadow self. Besides your powers of imitation being weaker, youll encounter the deeper problem of having very little sense of what your deeper self looks like. Oh, youll go ahead and do it, because youre stubborn and modern, but no matter how often you try, the result will look just as stupid and incomplete as the attempts of a New Guinea tribesman to build an atomic bomb.

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Chapter 18: Fruitville Road November 2004, Sarasota Diane called. She was all over the place like she didnt know where to start. Finally she blurted, Someone called Alice Hickey wants to see you. Whos Alice Hickey? I asked, but either she didnt hear me or she ignored me, because she suddenly said, I couldnt really see her, I was dreaming but I couldnt see anything, it was pitch black, but I could feel her right in front of me pulling me in and then I felt something huge rising up all around me, and then it picked me up like a wave and I began hearing every sound in the world, except I could hear each of them separately, and they all felt alive, I mean alive in the same way I was, and then I could feel something inside me turning into something like lightI mean it felt like light, but I couldnt see it, like it was too dark to be seen if you know what I mean or maybe you dontand then everything collapsed and there was nothing except me, but only barely, because I could feel myself disappearing like a dream I couldnt quite hold onto and I knew I was dying and then something moved through me like a cold, wet finger and I became completely hysterical and started crying, Dont leave me, Dont leave me, and then I heard a voice saying, I need you. Then I woke up. It took me a long time, she continued, before I could call you. I didnt know how to even begin to explain what had happened. After a while, I began seeing pictures in my mind of some old houses and trees and it kept coming to me they were way out on Fruitville Road, on the way to Arcadia, so I drove out that way and sure enough there it was: an old, scattered grove with three or four old frame houses threaded through it, dirt roads, pick-ups, bad dog signs, that kind of thing. I drove down one road and then another and there she was, standing by a shed, looking at me. How did you know it was her? I asked. It felt like her; it was just like shed felt in the dream, in the dark. What do you mean felt like her? Everyone has a unique soul signaturewho you are. Its not who you think you are, but who you really are, what it feels like to be you. Its like a smell. If you were a dog, youd know all your fellow dogs by their signature, their smell. Im like a dog: once I know your smell I never forget it. I could find you in a snowstorm, just like I found her. But how did you know what she felt like? I didnt. Not until the dream. I could feel her in the darkness. When I did, the memory of what it feels like to be her became my memory as well. Where did the memory come from? I dont know. All I know is it became a part of me. What youre telling me is that you somehow acquired a memory of her soul,

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what it feels like to be her, right? Thats right. Its not that rare. Sometimes I visit Jane in my dreams and leave her with a memory, an imprint, of me. What does Jane do? What do you think? She calls me when she wakes up. I was just asking. Can you give me a taste of what it feels like to be you, right now? This isnt the right time. Wed have to be dreaming, unconscious, and then Id come to you. I dont really know how I do it. I just think of you and Im in your dream. What do you look like to the dreamer; do you look like yourself? I have no idea. Its out of my control. Its not really important though. The memory I would give you is not what I look like, but what I feel like. And thats out of my control too. It just happens. She saw I was a bit confused and said, If youre curious, you can get a little taste of what it feels like to be you if you pay attention when you have an orgasm. Thats something I know youre familiar with. Its very fast though. It comes and goes in the blink of an eye and then all youre left with is a sense of completeness, or emptiness, depending on the situation. But for a second you can feel your essence, what it feels like to be you. Listen Justin, some people will tell you they know who they really are, but its just a mind trip, something they made up, and its always wrong or horribly incomplete, no matter how good their intentions. What we really are, what it feels like to be us, is all but invisible to us. That would be like your mind being able to absorb your soul. Its not going to happen; the mind is too small. Its only the surface of the lakeand a very thin one at that. If no one really knows what it feels like to be them, how can they communicate it to you? Youre not listening. I just told you no one can consciously give you that kind of memory. It just happens. Thats the mystery. But as far as I know, it only happens in dreams, or a state of altered consciousness. Are those dreams, like the one you had of Alice, always terrifying? Ive never had a dream like that before and I never want to again. All the memories Ive ever been given have slipped in unnoticed. The only sign I ever have that its happened, and this may be peculiar to me, is I feel very different when I wake up, like theres something or someone in my body besides me. But thats all I know until the memory eventually reappears. What do you mean when the memory reappears? Sometimes it reappears when I wake up. Thats when it usually happens with Jane. But sometimes it reappears later. Something makes it rise to consciousness. What something? I dont know. It just does. Usually Im dreaming, or in a deep meditation, or a moment of complete stillness, or a poem starts coming to mesomething like

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thatand the memory appears, becomes a part of whats happening to me. But why does the memory appear then? I told you I dont really know. Some think that when the memory appears, it allows the poem or the dream to continue, maybe even complete itself. Others say that the memory itself is the cause of the dream, or the poem in the first place. Its like the chicken and the egg. In the case of Alice, however, I didnt have to wait for the memory of Alice to appear. It was sitting right on my chest when I woke up. She didnt have to do that. All she had to do was allow who she was to become a part of my memories. But she didnt. She almost killed me: she made me go through that horrible dying. There was no reason for that, none. I could tell by her voice she wanted to hang up, but I had to know what had happened when she drove over to the old woman. Ill tell you what happened, she said. I drove over and pulled down my window and she bent down and said, Im Alice Hickey, thats what happened. Her eyes were so pale I couldnt think. Im Diane, I stammered, and she nodded, but I dont think she knew who I was, not really. What happened then? She kept staring at me. Jesus, Justin Im telling you, her eyes were like pale moons, I couldnt stop looking at them. They kept getting bigger, and then her face went slack like she was about to fall asleep and then she moved closer and then I heard a voice inside my head say, Meet me. It went right up my spine. Then she pulled her head out of my window like she just gave me directions to Arcadia. I dont know why, but she smelled like smoke. Anyway thats who Alice Hickey is. What does Meet me mean? I asked. The message wasnt for me. It was for you. Im sure of it. It means youre supposed to meet her. Did she say where? I didnt ask. I just wanted to get out of there. I dont know who she is, but shes not nobodyIll tell you that. I could tell Diane didnt want to talk about it anymore. I told her Id let her know what happened. I could feel my body filling up with hope. There was no doubt in my mind that Alice was the old woman by the tomato bin. Shed come back. There was a reason. But no sooner had that thought passed through my mind than an overwhelming fear paralyzed me. I tried to hold it back, but couldnt. I opened the floodgates and let the dark water in.

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Chapter 19: The Market November 2004, Sarasota It was almost eight in the evening when I woke up. I knew the only place Alice could have possibly meant was the market, at the tomato bin. My memory of that first meeting was it took place around eight, so I knew it was time to go. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. Those who have experienced psychic voices know what Im talking about. In a very real sense, they are much more compelling than the everyday voices we hear as we go about our lives. Psychic voices often happen to those who dont consider themselves in the least psychic. Those voices usually occur at critical times of their lives, turning points. There is a knowing in those voices that we instinctively bend to, I dont care who you are. If youre a rationalist to whom only the physical world exists, the rational part of you may try to brush it off as some haywire neural discharge, but another part of you knows something extraordinary has taken placethat youve been spoken to by a higher intelligence over which you have absolutely no control, and no matter how much you may try to dismiss it, youre going to take it to your graveespecially if youre an extremely scrupulous rationalist who keeps reexamining his conclusions right down to the very last shovel of dirt. Schizophrenics report hearing psychic voices all the time. Julian Jaynes suggests schizophrenics suffer from a neurological aberration that allows some part of our long-buried primal consciousness to reappear and compete with our modern, selfreflective consciousness. Under those circumstances, the conflict between the two can be overwhelming because our first consciousness was one in which the Gods spoke to us. And we obeyed. In lucid moments, many schizophrenics will tell you the voices they hear are irresistiblethat it is like being spoken to by a superior being, a God. That is why analysis is useless in dealing with schizophrenics: the patients entire sense of what is right and true and good is telling them to follow the voices, to obey them. Intellectually they may understand what their psychiatrist is telling themthat the voices are not to be trustedbut their total feeling-intelligence tells them otherwise. It is a lopsided battle, because all that we really have in the end to guide us through our lives is what we feel to be true. Thus schizophrenics will tell you if they didnt follow the voices, they would be turning away from that part of themselves that had always guided them towards the truth. In short, they would cease to be fully human. They would have to rely on what others told them was true.

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John Nash, the young mathematician who descended into severe schizophrenia, eventually chose this route of relying on others in order to have some semblance of a life. It is particularly poignant once you know that when he was asked why he hadnt stopped listening to the voices much earlier, he replied, Because the voices come from the same place as the mathematics. When he made that sad, final choice to ignore the voices by force of will, Nash made it knowing he would never hear the whispers of the genius within him again. It would be hard to think of a crueler prison. Fortunately, I wasnt suffering from schizophrenia, but I was in a somewhat similar situation in terms of the effects of the psychic voice Alice had somehow brought into being. When that voice spoke to me from inside my mind, I recognized it as being above me. This wasnt something I thought about: as soon as I heard the voice I knew it was to be listened tothat it was superior. My own internal voices, on the other hand, while they have the same kind of authority, feel more like guides. There is a sense of companionship. The sound of the voice coming from Alice, however, was different. It had the authority of a leader, not a companion. There was no doubt in my mind that she was a light carrier of a whole different order. As drunk as Betty Hagan had been, the psychic voice she somehow engendered had the same effect on me. Fortunately, after I left The Red Light Bar that night, I never saw Betty again. She receded into the recesses of my memory as best she could, occasionally erupting like those bits of spittle of which she seemed so fond. But Alice was another matter. Perhaps I could have forgotten her, as I had Betty, if she had just gone awayand stayed away. Unlike Betty, though, Alice hadnt stayed awayshed come back. The best way I can describe how I felt going to meet her is to tell you I was filled with hopeand a mounting uneasiness. Although Ive had a few experiences with inexplicable messengersstrangers who have suddenly come up to me and told me something critical to my life Alice was a completely different case. Those strangers had spoken to me like any other person. That hadnt been the case with Alice. I was sure she was somehow connected to the psychic voice Id heard inside my mind. I just didnt know howor why. I never confused that voice, however, with my own internal voices; I know those voices. Socrates called it his daimon. My own daimon comes to me in times of extreme stress, or extreme intellectual creativity, as it does to many. Alices voice, however, was something else entirely. Alice might have looked like a weird old cracker lady, but once I had heard the sound of that voice inside my head, something within me recognized it as having

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a far greater authority than my normal internal voices. Let me put it to you this way: I was never able to look at Alice in quite the same way as I did everybody else. Equally baffling to me was her sudden second appearance. It was as if she had been tracking my interior life and decided it was time to make contact again. I had no personal frame of reference for something like that, only stories and myths. Yet her re-appearance had enough in common with those myths to make me wonder if Alice might be something else altogether: not one of us, but something I was utterly unprepared fora Visitor. Thousands of years ago men called these Visitors from the psychic realm angels, or Gods. Today we call those Visitors aliens, and the people who report them unfortunate victims of hallucinations. But if Alice were indeed a Visitor, she would be a very special kindone indistinguishable from the rest of usfive foot nine, female, a hundred twenty pounds, long gray hair. Since the beginning of time, men have been fooled by the apparent corporeality of the angels theyve been forced to wrestle with. If this was the case, if Alice was my Jacobs Angel, there was good reason for my feeling both exhilarated and afraid. I would have had to be out of my mind to have felt any other way. My sense of Alices power, which was considerable, had been further heightened by what Diane had said about Alice coming to her in her dream. That dream had obviously been overwhelming for Diane, perhaps the equivalent of an intense, very disturbing vision, because after she described it to me to me she never mentioned it again. But I couldnt let go of it. One day, I bit the bullet and asked her why Alice had come to her, and not me. I have no idea, she replied. None at all? Not that I want to talk about. Whys that? Because itll scare the living shit out of you, thats why. Try me. Try you? OK, try this: if Alice had come to you in your dreams, youd either be dead or laced to the gills with Thorazine at Sarasota Memorial. You think so? I know so. Jesus. Diane, I dont know how to tell you this, but I dont think the dream was meant for youit was meant for me. Really? And why is that? When you first told me the dream, all kinds of triggers went off. Why didnt you say something? I didnt know what to say. You seemed so devastated. But I knew the dream was

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meant for meI was sure of it. You know what I think? I think Alice knew the dream would be too much for me, so she let you take the hit for me. She knew youd survive and tell me the dream. Could be. Shes mean enough. Ill tell you this: I didnt volunteer. You owe me, Justin. My guilt, however, didnt stop me from wanting to know more. At first Diane resisted, but when she saw how important it was to me, she finally gave in. I wound up recording her on three different occasions. The first thing I noticed after listening to the recordings is that they were all different, and not in minor ways. When I asked her about this, she told me she had no wayno wordsto describe what had actually happened; that every attempt was at best a new try. Compare this recording with her earlier description of the dream:
It was completely dark. So black I could smell it, like it was alive. I could hear something like an animal breathing, or hissing, it was very close and I knew it was female, and then I felt something like a finger entering my body and then pulling itself out, and when it did, I could feel myself disintegrating into tiny little pieces and it really scared me so I kept trying to remember each of them so I could bring them all back together, and then I heard something like a huge wave rising up behind me, but it wasnt water, it was like every sound in the world and I could hear each of them like they were alive, it was beautiful, and then the wave swept all the little pieces of me back up together and I had an orgasm so slow and painful and beautiful I was out of my mind and then everything collapsed and I was completely alone in the dark. It was awful; I was crying, Dont leave me, Dont leave me and then I suddenly felt her presence and I knew exactly who she was and what she wanted me to do and then I began to hear a low, hissing sound, like the kind waves make when they recede from the beach, and then the hissing assembled itself into I need you, but I already knew that, I didnt need the words, not really. I guess they were insurance in case I was a slow one.

It is one thing to have an intense vision while you are still anchored to the reality of the physical world. It is quite another to do it with no anchor, which is what happened with Diane. She told me that while she was sleeping she must have somehow gone out of body when some part of her sensed Alices presence. I mentioned that Castaneda often talks about this, the danger of uncontrolled dreaming, that it can result in death or insanity. She gave me a look I wont forget. Castaneda, she said, knew what he was getting into. He had been warned. But I never knew what was going on until it was too late. Alice didnt warn me, didnt signal me, didnt do anythingshe just sucked me in and nearly fucking killed me. It was with those words ringing in my head that I climbed into my car and headed for the supermarket. When I arrived, she was standing by the tomato bin with those same pale, riveting eyes. I didnt really know what to do. I had been getting intimations over the past

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few weeks that something really ugly was about to happen, and that it involved a group of unknown women and myself, and that Alice was somehow connected with it. I began to think Dianes dark sense of Alice might be right on the mark. I waited for her to say something. Her pale gray eyes made me dizzyI felt Id lose my balance if I looked at them too long. Strangely enough, I felt very comfortable with her. I felt she could be trusted, the way a child trusts a mother, or a father. Then I suddenly became very testy. Why didnt you contact me directly? I snapped. I couldnt. she snapped back. Her voice was bone-hard. Why not? I demanded. I couldnt believe how aggressive I had become. Because I wasnt directed to you, I was directed to someone else, to Diane. It just happens that way sometimes. And dont ask me why because I dont know. I shut up. She looked at me for a moment and said, Youve almost found it, havent you? What, the meaning of the myth? Yes, that, whatever. Somethings missing though, isnt it? I can feel it. Yes. Somethings missing, but I dont know what. She moved slightly closer. All of a sudden it happened again: her eyes seemed to take me over and then a voice inside my head said very clearly, Listen to the Witnesses. Before I could say anything, she snapped, I know you want to know whats going on, but the fact of the matter is I have no idea, so dont waste your time. Nor do I have any idea how I did it, or why. Whats important is you accept it happened. That it was real. Just like you accept these tomatoes are real. No one knows why these things happen. No one. Oh, I could tell you a story, but it would only be a story. Heres the real buzz, Franklin: youre living between two worlds. And both of them want a piece of you.

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Chapter 20: A Measured Retreat December 2004, Tavernier I couldnt get over how aggressive I had been with Alice. It didnt make any sense. The only way I can explain my conduct is to say I must have been scared out of my mind and had struck back in the only way I knew how: with words. Could she really be my Jacobs Angel? I had no idea. How could I? I didnt even really know what it meant. I only knew what had happened, and it was real, not a hallucination, or derangement of some sort, at least thats what I kept telling myself. I needed some time out. I called Pinga, told him Id like to visit for a few days. He mumbled something about him being out on the reefs but come on down anyway you know where the beds are. I wasnt sure if he was saying hed be home or on the reefs, but I knew Id see him sooner or later. Where else could he be surrounded by the 10,000 horsepower throb of NASCAR? I could hear it humming in the background like a celestial choir as he hung up. Before I left, I went down to the county offices and looked through the tax rolls and voter registration lists for any name resembling Alice Hickey. Nothing. Then, as a double check, I went through three years of Sarasota phone books: Alice Hickey. A. Hickey, Al Hickey, you name it. Nothing. I called 411, to see if it was a new or unlisted number. Nothing. I did the same for Arcadia, just in case. Nothing again. I wasnt surprised. It made sense: Alice seemed to be in the business of sending messages not getting them. I thought about calling Diane to see if she remembered a street address or something, but I knew it wouldnt do any good. Alice would do the calling. It wasnt going to happen any other way. I spent some time thinking about Listen to the Witnesses. I knew it was important. The sound of those words had gone right through me. I also knew there wouldnt be just one meaning. There never is. One avenue that held immediate promise was based on the fact that hearing and feeling are constantly equated with each other in the myth: The Listeners hear everything we feel. Perhaps what Listen to the Witnesses. meant was that I should be feeling the myththe emotional core of its narrators. It was good advice. The words in a poem are just the mysterious messengers (and believe me, they are mysterious), but they are not the message. Not the real message. The real message is the feeling brought by the messengers. And the myth was no exception. Maybe I was being told that the real message of the myth lay in its sound.

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That sound, that feeling, had different effects on different people. Strangely enough, Joan liked the sound of the myth, found it both strangely erotic and yet comforting, and oddly, I found it to be somewhat that way as well. But why shouldnt it be erotic? It was, after all, a myth about creation. Jane, on the other hand, didnt like the feeling at all: too cold, too Nordic, too thinky, she kept saying to me. Jane was right in one respect: The Witnesses Log is painted in the bleak, stoic colors of a Valhalla. But supporting those gray colors were emotions we have all but discarded in our convenience store world: truth, courage, honor, longing, wonder, daring, resignation, wisdom Yet Listen to the Witnesses could just as well have meant I should be paying attention to what anyone said about the myth. After all, we are all witnesses, and help does come from unexpected places. Rightly or wrongly, however, something in me kept insisting that neither of these possibilities was the real one, that the voice meant I should be focusing on people who actually knew something about the myth; thats what witnessing representsknowing, knowledge, those who know. There were only three people who really knew the myth in addition to me: Diane, Joan, and Jane. Perhaps the message meant I should keep listening to what they were saying, or maybe pay more attention to what they were saying between the lines. As for Alice, I had no idea what she knew. I knew I was going to see her again. I just didnt know where or when. I needed some time alone with the mytha slow, cradling time. What better place than the Keys? As I approached Tavernier, I remembered Pingas refrigerator was probably empty with him on the reef, so I stopped for a caf cubano and some fried pork. I was a few blocks away from his house and just about to roll another big one when I saw I was almost out of smoke and Im thinking, Jesus how the hell did that happen where the fuck does he keep his shit anyway maybe behind that goddamn bigass TV, and then I saw his Mercedes squatting in the driveway like a fat, black scarab and I knew everything was going to be fine. When I opened the door, a familiar, pungent scent wafted out of the TV room and I heard him shouting, Hey Im in here, as if I didnt know and then I plopped down next to him and suddenly remembered there was something I had to ask him. One of my sons friends had given me a drink; he said it was from South America. From way in the back of my mind came the memory of a drink I used to get at road stands everywhere in Brazil back in the early seventies: a very rough, cheap, cane rum with lime and sugar; it was the national mainstay, like beer or Coke is here. I immediately remembered everyone called the drink pinga. I asked Pinga what the connection was. I dont know about Brazil, he said, I never went there. Pinga means prick in Portuguese. Its a nickname I got on my first treasure dive. It stuck. Everyone calls me Pinga now. Even my mother began

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calling me Pingalike I didnt have a real name until then. Why Pinga? I asked. Because I beat all the other divers to the treasure, he said, I was sure where it was, I just knew, and when I found it, I stuck a couple of pieces in my crotch, just for me, and then I started putting the rest in the haul-up. When I came back up, I had this big bulge in my trunks, but nobody said anything. Even the captain was cool with it. Who knows, maybe they heard the story about me biting ears off it gets around you know. Pretty soon the Portuguese cook started calling me Pinga; he couldnt stop laughing. That was the end of it. I became Pinga. Then Kiki started calling me Pinga, like it was my real name. So whats your real name? I asked. Its not important. It was a mistake. Thats what Kiki said. She said it wasnt my real name; that I had to wait until I was thirty-three for someone to give me my goddamn real name.

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Chapter 21: A Distant Retreat February 2005, Alamos, Mexico Despite my belief that Diane and Jane and Joan were the witnesses I should be listening to, it didnt turn out that way. Joan remained hidden away in Mexico and was almost impossible to reach. As for Diane and Jane, they said they couldnt really add anything more. Both felt my first guess was correctlisten to the narrators of the myth, get inside their skin, to which Jane added, And maybe after that you should begin thinking about getting on to something else. Yep: nice and smooth, then bumpity-bump. Without their guidance, I had no idea how to proceed. I felt like a child asked to sit in a dark room for reasons that werent quite clear. Yet that seemed to be the way things were going to play out, at least for a while. Somewhere in that gloom was a path. I knew Id never find it by looking for it; it didnt work that way. Id have to wait for it to appear, however hazily. Weeks passed. Then Pinga called. Maybe this is it, I thought. He told me he was about to take off for Panama again. He wanted me to go with him, and made some outlandish promises, not to mention outright bribes regarding Mercedes, but I told him there was no way I was going back. Then, somewhere in the middle of February, a path appeared, dimly. It was Joan. She called from Alamos asking me to visit. I hesitated; I had made the trip before. It was a long, cross-country trip to Arizona, then a backbreaking, fourteen-hour bus ride from the Nogales border into Mexico. I liked the idea of Mexico, though. There isnt a better place to wait. It may be third world physically, but I had found it to be first world spiritually, especially in small remote towns like Alamos. My last time there I had become friends with a healer and had asked her what accounted for the extraordinary sense of well being I felt in Alamos. Everyone here, except for a few of the gringos, is living in the present, thats why, she said. No ones re-living the past or worrying about the future, anyway, thats what youre feeling all around you. I liked that; I couldnt ask for better air to breathe. Besides, I wanted to see Joan. It had been a long time. Maybe she was her extravagant, fashionable self again. Luckily, it was winter and I had no problems renting my place to a freezing couple from Boston and immediately splitting for Nogales. On the map, there is always a clear line dividing American Nogales and Mexican Nogales, but its an illusion. For about seventy-five yards, the two cultures leak into each other in the weirdest ways: signs, money, dress, language, customs, you name it. Mexico feels like a weird version of America and America feels like an equally weird version of Mexico.

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One of the strangest sights I encountered was in a drugstore just over the border in the American zone. When I went to pay, I was startled by the makeup on the checkout girls face. She had powdered her dark Mexican face white, almost like a Kabuki actor. I didnt know what to think until I realized that she wanted to fit in, be taken for an American. Seeing her must have struck a hidden chord, because I was beginning to sense that the borderline between our world and the Other World, the psychic world, whatever you want to call it, is much like the Nogales border. It looks clean and straight in the books, as if the line between the two were inviolable, that each realm remains itself: heres Heaven and heres Earth. But it is anything but inviolable. Its somewhat like Nogales, in that the two worlds seem to be constantly leaking into one another. You wouldnt think it with all the books to the contrary, but my experiences over the past five years had taught me otherwise. Over the millennia, that porosity has turned figuring out what the psychic world is really like into pretty much a guessing game. You get things like the Mexican shop girl: youre standing in one world and all of a sudden youre in the other. Its been going on forever, and as far as I can tell, no one has ever gotten the upper hand on it. All we really know, and all we have ever known, is that the psychic world is real, that it exists. Beyond that, all we have are stories. That was my state of mind as the bus began squeezing itself through the crowded streets of Mexican Nogales. A few minutes later we were in the bleak Sonora desert. After five or six hours, day turned into dusk and then there was nothing but darkness and the dim glow of the drivers panel and then sleep, no sleep, sleep, no sleep. Every once in a while, a two or three light bulb town would rise up through the window and then fade away into darkness, and then, right after dawn, finally, the bus pulled into the empty, dusty Mercado of Alamos. I stumbled out onto a street bench with my duffle bags and waited for Joan. Alamosnot to be confused with the Alamo, the San Antonio fort of movie fameis a small colonial town lodged in the low mountains of the western Sonora desert. It became the center of a huge, silver mining operation in the late 17th century, an extremely profitable effort that continued into the early twentieth century, when the mines went bust. It became a ghost town until an influx of adventurous Americans in the late 1940s set about restoring the majestic, once beautiful haciendas. It is completely isolated from its neighbors, and as far as I could tell, hasnt changed much since its boom days. The only signs of modernity were a PEMEX gas station, a small bank, and a bedraggled basketball court right in the center of the Mercado. Everything else in the town had the dust of centuries on it.

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Despite her inability to speak Spanish, Joan had somehow found a colonial house with enormous ceilings and huge doors. It was over two hundred years old and beautiful. I set about making myself busy because there was very little to do besides walk and eat and sleep. Except for an occasional gringo satellite antenna, it was very much like a small farm town in America in the nineteen twenties: if you didnt carry your entertainment around in your head, you were going to be one bored boy. Fortunately, my head is always fullperhaps too full. The first thing I did was try to get Joan engaged in some recordings, but she was still too depressed. I told her what she needed was a new pair of alligator heels and a long lunch with some really funny gays. She laughed, but it was a struggle. She told me she had no idea what she was doing in Alamos. My guides brought me here, so there must be a reason, was all she would say. She was clearly having a rough time adapting to the kind of do-it-yourself attitude that surviving in Alamos required. A few months later, when she began to feel better, we did some recordings together and then I collaborated with a Mexican painter and some singers on a few video projects and then I looked up at the sky for I dont know how long and suddenly decided it was time to find Alice and get some answers. I told Joan I had to go, that I had to talk to Alice about the myth. I guess I went on a bit because I could see her becoming impatient. She didnt like it at all that I was leaving, and almost said as much, but I told her I had no choice. She looked back at me as if I wasnt even there. It was obvious she was still in a deep struggle with something that wouldnt let go. I asked her what was going on. After a few seconds, she said, I dont know. Im going to have to feel my way. And you are too. That was it. Later that night, around eleven, I dragged Joans words and my two large duffle bags onto the all-night bus heading back to Nogales.

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Chapter 22: Starbucks March 2005, Starbucks, Sarasota I called Diane and told her I had to talk to Alice Hickey. Could she find her for me? There was a pause. I knew she didnt want to have anything more to do with Alice. To my surprise she said, OK, but give me a few days. I wanted to make sure she was really OK with it, though, so I said, I hate to make you go through that awful dream again. I dont have to, she replied. I know who she is now; I can smell her. It may take some time, but Ill find her. Are you sure its OK? Yes, yes, its OK. Ill call you in a few days. Three day later she called. I found Alice. Where Youre not going to believe this. I found her at Starbucks. Starbucks? Jesus. She told me she goes there every afternoon to read the Times and have some good java, as she puts it. She has a nice sense of humor; I was surprised. What did she say about seeing me? She said shed be glad to. Where, at the tomato bin? No, at Starbucks. Which one, theyre all over the place? She likes the one on Bee Ridge. When, what time? Any afternoon, but she said dont come until three because shes not finished with the Times until then. When I walked into Starbucks the following afternoon, sure enough, there she was, sitting in the corner by the window, reading The New York Times. She looked up and nodded. Those eyes. I went over to where she was sitting. Alice, I said, I need to know some things. I bet you do, she replied, but I dont know if I have the answers. That set me back; I hadnt been expecting it. If she didnt know what was going on, who did? By this time, however, I was too pumped up to quit. I decided to start at our last meeting at the market: How did you speak to me inside my mind at the tomato bin? Arent you going to have some coffee first? she asked, holding up her cup. I had completely forgotten about ordering. Not right now, I replied, right now I want to know how you spoke to me inside my mind. I told you then what Im telling you now: its not important. Whats important is

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you accept it as real. I know it was real. Thats the problem. Its not supposed to be real, it cant happen, its impossible. Thats your problem. Its not impossible: it happened. As for me, I dont know how I do it. The Spirit directs me to the person and then it speaks through me. What do you mean The Spirit directs you? Is it a voice, or a thought? What is it? Its an entityan intelligence. I can feel it, but I cant see it or hear it. Everything brightens when it comes to melike I just discovered something and then it leaves me with a feeling of the person Im supposed to contact. What do you mean by feeling? Its like a memory of the person but much stronger. Its not a memory of what they look like, or what theyve done. Those are the kind of memories everyone has. What I get is a memory of their essence, their soul. OK, so the Spirit directs you to someone. What happens then? How do you speak inside their minds? Hold on: first I have to find them. I do that by following the memory, just like Diane does. I usually get pictures or sounds or signs that narrow it down until I eventually find the person. Sometimes its easy. The first time I found you was easy. I went to the market to buy some tomatoes and there you were. Sometimes its not that easy. You were very hard to find the second time. Why? Because I was directed to Diane, not you. Why was that? Beats me; I had no choice in the matter. Perhaps the Spirit could have left me a soul memory of you, but it didntit left me with a memory of Diane. You know the rest. Wait a minute. You knew who I was. You spoke to me years ago in the market. I may have spoken to you but I didnt have any soul memory of you. Thats what directs me. When the Spirit gave me your soul memory years ago, I used it to find you in the supermarket. But your soul memory disappears once the Spirit speaks through me. Thats how it works, and dont ask me why. So how did you get to me if you didnt have a soul memory of me? Youre not listening. The Spirit directed me to Diane, not you. When I went to Diane with the dream, she also got a soul memory of me. Thats how she found me. Did she get a soul memory of the Spirit too? You might say thats what the dream was. Jesus. But when Diane went to Arcadia to find you, how did she know it was me you were looking for, if you didnt know? Because shes Diane, remember? But I still dont understand why you were directed to Diane? Again, I had no choice. Diane was who I was directed to, but I didnt know she was an intermediary. I just knew I had to get to her. Why did you come to her in her dreams? Why didnt you just walk up to her and

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speak to her like you did to me? I dont get to choose. Sometimes I find the person in their dreams, sometimes in person. I never know which. If Im awake when the Spirit comes, I find them like I found you the first time. If Im asleep when the Spirit comes, I find them in their dreams. Outside of that, all I can tell you is the Spirit comes to me and then, one way or another, sooner or later, I find them. What happens then? If were awake, the Spirit speaks through me. What is that like? Do you hear the words and repeat them? Not quite. What I hear are muffled sounds, like someone talking in another room. What it feels like is hard to describe, but its very distinct. It feels something like an orgasma very slow, intense orgasm. So when the Spirit speaks through you, you hear muffled sounds while youre having an orgasm? You could put it that way, but I wouldnt. Let me put it this way: Im physically there, but I cant understand what is being said. Only the person the Spirit is speaking to hears it clearly. What I hear, or maybe feel is a better word, is a kind of muffled sound, like the voice is coming from behind a door. The sound always carries an emotion. It can be sad or confused or angry or loving or run the whole gamut. Its always hard remembering it exactly because of the orgasm. And dont look at me that way. You wouldnt remember much either. She had me. She was hypnotic. It felt as if she were slowly unfolding a mysterious flower, petal by petal. I had to know more. Diane says when shes dreaming she can leave a soul memory of herself with someone whos also dreaming. She calls it a psychic scent. Its just a different way of talking about the same thing. She said thats how she found you. She said she got your scent when you came to her in her dreams. I know. Diane and I talked about it. Any highly psychic person can leave a soul imprint of themselves. Can you do it for me now? No. Wed have to be dreaming, or in an altered state. Do you want me to come to you in your dreams tonight? I dont think so. Im not scaring you, am I? She let out a wild cackle. Justin, Im not the Spirit. Im Alice Hickey, an old woman. Youd wake up in the morning without the slightest idea Id come to you. Maybe something about me would come to mind, like my face, or contacting me, and then again, maybe it wouldnt. Why wouldnt it? Because youre afraid of me. Youre right. I am. Listen Justin, if the Spirit gave me a dream for you, youd have good reason to be scared. But thats not going to happen.

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Why not? Because youre too thick for the Spirits dreams. Trust me on that, will you? I dont have much choice, do I? No, darling, you dont. Alice, listen, Im still not clear why you decided to speak to me years ago at the tomato bin. Why didnt you come to me in a dream? I told you. I have no say in the matter. When I saw you at the market, I had no idea who you were. You looked like one more uptight guy looking for ripe tomatoes. Right then the Spirit gave me a feeling of you, a soul memory, and I looked up and there you were, bingo, right next to me. It happens that way sometimes; it usually means the Spirit is going to speak through me right away which is what happenedbecause I remember the Spirit rising up inside me like a hissing in my spine, and then it spoke through me. Just like that. Just like that. Except I didnt want it to happen right then and I tried to stop it, but it was impossible. I dont know how to say this to you, but trying to stop the Spirit from speaking is like trying to stop an orgasm. She laughed. Cackled was more like it. Why didnt you want the Spirit to speak to me? I was busy shopping for some Blood Eggs, you know, really ripe tomatoes, so I could make a fresh Bloody Mary. I thought you were going to beat me to them. Her reference to Blood Eggs rang in my mind: it was the inner voice Id heard saying Blood Eggs as I was browsing through the tomatoes the first time wed met. At the time I had thought it was my own internal voice clarifying what the tomatoes really were, but it obviously had come from Alice. Dont you remember anything at all? I asked. Well, I do remember your face, it was a sight, but I have no idea what the Spirit said. It was sharp though; I remember that. Like I said, its always a bit vague. I thought immediately of Betty Hagan with the spittle in the corners of her mouth and I thought, Jesus, no one knows whats going on, not even her. But I kept going, Dont you remember? You had asked me that night if I had found what I was looking for, and I said I dont think so, and then you said Not yet. Dont you remember that? OK, I remember it now. I dont really remember the words, but I remember the rhythm, the sound of it, and its just like you said. Youre a pretty good mimic, you know. Do you do imitations of movie stars? I get the biggest kick out of them. I couldnt believe her. The only one I do is Rich Little, the impressionist. I said, hoping that would put an end to it. It didnt. Oh, thats a tough one, hes so bland. Frank Gorshin is much easier. Hes so quirky.

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I remember thinking, Jesus, shes going to peel me like a tomato before this is over. I was desperately trying to keep my balance and blurted out: If you dont know what youre saying when the Spirit speaks through you, how do you do it? I told you, I dont do it. The Spirit does. And dont ask me if the Spirit is female or male or if its smart or funny or sad or whatever because I cant tell. The only spirits with personalities are usually ghosts, those who have died recently. Spirits like this one usually dont have personalities. Theyre too primal. What happens after the Spirit finishes speaking? Unless I get sick, you know, nauseous, which can happen, I check the person out to make sure theyre OK and then I let them go their own way. You mean you just go up to people, let the Spirit speak inside their heads and then walk away? Yep. Like I told you, it just happens. Its like when a poem comes to you, it just happens. But a poem is different. I should knowIm a poet. Can you do what I do? she snapped. No, of course not. Then how do you know its different? Youre right, I confessed, I dont; I just assumed it was. Well, its not. Its the same goddamn thingyou got the message didnt you? It just happened, right? Well, it just happens to me too. But I guess you could say Im more like the Muse than the poetI get to pass the thing along. By the way, I write poems too you know, but they probably have too many flowers for you. Anyway, youre half right: it is different in the sense that the feeling is a little different; its stronger, more raw is probably the best way to describe it, and it feels more direct than a poem, like a command. And it can be very strong physically. Sometimes I get diarrhea later. I nodded my sympathy, I understand, but do you have any idea, now that Ive reminded you, as to what you actually meant when you said, Not yet? You mean when I asked you if youd found what you were looking for and the Spirit said, Not yet? Yes, what is it Im looking for? I have no idea. Only you know that. But I dont know; thats why Im asking you, Alice. Maybe you dont know now, but you will. You may have to die first though. I cant describe the grin that spread across her face. It was like frosting on a kids birthday cake. Thanks for the invitation, I said, but how can you be so sure Ill eventually find what Im looking for? To tell you the truth, Im not sure. But when the Spirit has spoken through me to others, a few found me later and told me I had said exactly what they needed to know.

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Which was what? Beats me. Ask them. Can you do Rich Little for me now?

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Chapter 23: ISLAUGGH and San Blas April, 2005, Sarasota Pinga called. Im in Panama. Ive been calling you for weeks. Where the hell you been? Mexico, I replied, Whats up, you need money? Why would I be calling you for money? He had me. I was always broke. Listen, you know that face in the mirror you saw, the Islag guy? He was talking very fast; I couldnt tell if he was drunk or just excited. Its pronounced ee-slaw, not Islag, I said, correcting him. I spelled it out: I-SL-A-U-G-G-H. OK, OK, whatever. Listen Mr. College, Angelo found the name carved in a quarry here while he was taking a leak. There were a lot of stick figures too. I looked at myself in the mirror. What the hell was going on? Are you jerking me? No, no, I swear, Carl was with us, here talk to Carl. Carl Fismer, the skipper, was pretty much a straight arrow. Justin, I know it sounds crazy, but what hes saying is right. I dont know how old the carving is, but the stone is granite; its been here forever. The Indians carved on it. The locals still use it for construction. They dynamite it out. OK, OK. Thanks Carl. Could you put Pinga back on? There was a great deal of rustling as if the phone was surrounded by a horde of people, and then, finally, Pinga got back on the phone. Pinga, I asked, where exactly is this quarry? Its in the Caribbean, around San Blas. What the hell are you doing there? Arent you supposed to be on the Pacific side, around Panama City? We were, but some competition developed with these other guys and Angelo got pretty hot and then I did and then it got real ugly and the police stepped in and took everything. I tried calling Mercedes but she stiffed me. What happened? She didnt do shit. You know what she did? She told me (and here he did an imitation of Mercedes so outrageous it belonged in a South Beach drag contest), Leesen Peengo, daht is too hot for me to doo hawnyteeng. Eef you hod a trahffeek teecket or sohmteeng like daht, I could doo sohmteeng, but Peengo, eet ees el Preseedehntay, not the poleecia, I know how dese teengs go. Beleeve mee Peengo, el Preseedehntay haas all daht gold een hees Palahceeo. Eet ees too mas caliente heeven for Mercedes. Sorree Peengo. Ciao. What the hell is that noise? I asked. I could swear I heard what sounded like face-slapping going on in the background. What noise? Oh some guys are putting in a window behind the bar. OK, but why arent you still on the Pacific side?

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We figured the police might come back so we took the canal over to the Atlantic and started scanning the San Blas area with some old charts. It was so fucking hot one day we couldnt work and Carl said there was a cold quarry pool on an island about two miles up the coast so we anchored there and rowed in and there it was, just like Carl said. He says its cold because the quarrys so narrow and deep the sun never hits the water. Ill tell you one thing, it must go down to the South Pole because you dive down 10 feet your balls freeze. Anyway, Angelo was taking a leak against the quarry wall, looking up at some of the stick carvings above his head and he starts laughing, Hey, I think theres a gangbang going on here, take a look. So I went over and all these stick bodies were piled on each other and then I saw your name, you know, Islag. I couldnt believe it. We didnt have any tools for carving it out, so Carl copied it by rubbing the back of an old map with a pencil. I cant make out some of the letters, but it looks pretty close to me. Ill go to the marina and fax it as soon as we hang up. My head was spinning. I immediately suspected this was one of Pingas little jokeslike Betty Hagan. While I never doubted Betty was for real, I never quite believed Pinga had nothing to do with her being at the end of the bar waiting for me to come back from the mens room, and this call definitely felt like one coincidence too many. When the fax arrived, though, I wasnt so sure it was a prank. The rubbing was very rough, and I could make out only half the letters (the rest were very indistinct). But the lettering seemed ancient, more like slashes than letters, something like the Runic alphabet. My initial intuition that ISLAUGGH was an ancient Celt made even more sense now. One curious thing about the carving was how orderly the letters were. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. I studied the letters on the faxed rubbing: ISLA??A??G? If I took out the indistinct letters, I was left with ISLAAG, which was as close as any of the other matches to ISLAUGGH that Id found in all the Celtic-English dictionaries at my disposal. I pulled my file on what I had determined to be the possible Celtic translations of ISLAUGGH. Initially, there hadnt been even a rough match for ISLAUGGH, so I decided to break it up into two words: IS (is, am) and LAUGGH. I found some close matches using this technique, but they were never exact. The Celtic-English dictionaries I had access to didnt employ multiple repetitions of the same letter, like GG, and seemed to favor certain vowels, like O over U, but I figured that was probably due to any number of simplifying forces working over time and maybe Diane had channeled a very old spelling used long before the dictionaries were established. Here are the closest matches I found:

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is (am) hero, champion, warrior 1. Is laog 2. Is lich is (am) brought low, humbled 3. Is laghf is (am) calf 4. Is lagh is (am) order, method, law

And now I had ISLAAG, which could have been an alternative spelling of Is lag. So I had a fifth possibility. Here is the closest dictionary entry:
5. Is lag is (am) weak.

As far as the first four translations were concerned, I had quickly discarded the third (I am calf), but the first (I am warrior) could easily fit the mood of the figure in the mirror. After all, he was very sturdy and seemed to have seen horrible things. The second translation (I am humbled) was also a distant possibility because of the emotional burden the figure seemed to be carrying. The same could be said for the fifth translation (I am weak). The fourth translation (order, method) didnt make sense at first until I realized it possibly described the nature of his leadership. Unlike names in modern cultures, names in preliterate cultures were descriptive and not given lightly. Naming was a spiritual activity because the name given was seen as honoringas well as predictingthe essential character of the person coming into the world. I needed to talk to Diane some more about the spelling of the name and was about to dial her up when it occurred to me that there was a more important question if I was really going to take Pingas find seriously. The question that had to be answered first was whether it was reasonable to expect that a preliterate Celt could have made his way to Panama thousands of years ago and carved his name on a quarry wall. My immediate answer was: yes, of course it was reasonable; there was nothing impossible about the idea. We give preliterate cultures little credit for ingenuity despite such beautiful masterpieces as the 17,000 year-old cave drawings in Spain. And being a sailor, I knew Trans-Atlantic crossings werent that difficult, even in small craft. So the really important question was not how, but why someone who lived 4,000 years ago (or 40,000 years ago) would have come to Panama in the first place? (These are the dates that kept coming to me as the time of the figure in the mirror.) When I asked one scholar about the possibility of such a voyage, he waggishly dismissed it with, I think its more likely youd find the Celts kneedeep in peat bogs murdering each other around that time. No one really knows what motivated preliterate cultures. All we can do is guess

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from the surviving evidence, which is meager at best. Determining that motivation is always left to the imaginations of our anthropologists, who are sometimes the worst people to turn to, because they are almost always dealing from the slim book of science: more food, better climate, more forests, more water, more animals, those kinds of physical factors. I dont think theyve even begun to figure into their equations how spiritually driven preliterate peoples were, and that it may have been that same deep, reflexive spirituality that drove the earliest mass migrations out of Africa and into the east all the way to Australia and eventually, further eastward to the tip of South America, which seems to be the case if the 40,000 year-old Negroid skeletal remains recently discovered in Tierra del Fuego. That bold a migration would never have taken place in order to find better hunting groundsonly a fool would posit such an explanation. More likely, our ancestors were trying to find the place where the sun was born. In short, they were trying to find Creation. So we might be tempted to say ISLAUGGH was trying to reach the sun, except to reach Panama he would have had to go westward, toward the setting sun, and most of the major sea and land migrations, including the ones just mentioned, went eastward in order to reach the rising sun: the place where the sun was bornnot the place where it died. Still, there were some minor migrations that went westward, like the migration from the connecting neck of Africa toward the Balkans and then further westward into continental Europe and then the British Isles and even further westward toward Greenland and, finally, to Newfoundland and the Americas. But why this contrary migration, this movement toward the dying sun? One answer might be thats where the new land was, especially in the case of the migration through continental Europe, but that hardly explains the direction of the great westward transoceanic voyages. After all, the Vikings could have gone southit was a lot warmer, and the winds and currents flowed that way. There were undoubtedly many factors at play in all these migrations, but the one factor nobody seems to have recognized is the highly spiritual nature of these early cultures. My own sense of the matter is that they went west precisely because it was the place where the sun died. These were fierce Nordic and Celtic peoples who never shied from death, even gloried in it, so why wouldnt they continue westward toward the dying sun? You might say it was in the blood to search for the home of death, for night, for the dark side of the soul. I offer that up as the instinctive reason why early migrations may have set out

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westward upon the Atlantic. In the case of the Celts, the existing winds and currents would have taken them south and then westward into the Caribbean, just as they had Columbus. So in the case of our now suddenly peripatetic ISLAUGGH, it seems entirely reasonable that he might have wound up in Panama. One of the reasons anthropologists and archaeologists dismiss the possibility of ocean crossings by early man is the lack of physical evidence. That evidence, of course, has long been erased by the rising and falling seas. There is also a widespread belief that early man could never have built ocean-going craft. Yet there is increasing evidence (runic-like rock carvings in the Americas and the presence of cocaine in early Egyptian mummies, just to name two) that long ocean voyages were going on thousands of years before the generally accepted dates for such things. We have to remember that the Vikings did it regularly in relatively small craft, and so did the Phoenicians thousands of years earlier. And we cant forget that Caesar reported the Celts having boats more than 100 feet in length. So it was entirely reasonable, even possible, that my man in the mirror, or some Celtic warrior, had sailed into the Caribbean and left his mark. The only question left then was a personal one, namely, how many coincidences could I take? The answer was I didnt really know. I had reached a stage where I was open to almost anything. After all, just getting to where I was would have been impossible without my becoming more open, not just intellectually but emotionally, spiritually, you name it. I decided to dig on. The spellings of words are always simplifying themselves and the idea of a Celt sailing to prehistoric Panama fit the possibilities: he could have been shipwrecked, or he could have arrived safely, whos to say. Maybe he heard about the cold pool and went for a swim, just like Carl and Pinga and Angelo. After all, word always gets around about a good thing, even thousands of years ago. So here I was, positive it could have happened, but still asking the question: did it happen? And even more to the point, why was I the one discovering all this? I needed a different kind of help. I called Diane and told her about the carving, that it might be a practical joke on Pingas partthere were just too many coincidences. Who knows? she said and asked me to fax her the rubbing. When I called her back, the first thing she said to me was, Im getting something but its not about ISLAUGGH. The rubbing feels funny, not funny peculiar, but funny ha-ha. Can you get an actual picture of the carving? Probably, why?

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Id get a better reading. I think what Im picking up now is the guy who made the rubbing. Before I hung up, I told her what I thought the name ISLAUGGH meant (warrior, order) but that I was puzzled by the lack of an exact match in the dictionaries. I asked her to spell his name again if she could remember it, but she couldnt, so I spelled it out for her and asked her if it sounded correct. Yes, absolutely, it just came back to me, but listen, why do you keep saying his name? ISLAUGGH is a woman. My head spun. I had always assumed the ancient figure in the mirror was a man, but I realized it could just as easily have been a woman: there was never a beard, just long hair. My whole sense of ISLAUGGH was wiped out in an instant. What do you mean ISLAUGGH is a woman? You never told me that. I thought I had, she replied, but maybe I didnt. I just assumed you knew ISLAUGGH was a woman. Anyway, its not that big of an adjustment: the women were fighters too, in case you didnt know. Theres something else I should tell you: when the name came to me the first thing that came to my mind was the word laugh, you know, like funny ha-ha, but at the time I didnt know if it had come from the spelling or from something deeper, so I didnt think it was worth mentioning. But its something you should think about because something doesnt feel right about the carving, but what do I know? E-mail me the pictures as soon as you get them, will you? I called Pinga at the marina and asked him to take some photographs of the carvings and mail them to me. I told him to be sure he took pictures with the sun at an angle so I could use the shadows to figure out the missing letters. When the pictures arrived, I scanned them into my computer and then I enlarged them and compared them letter for letter with the spelling Diane had given me: ISLAUGGH. Some of the letters on the earlier fax had been so vague that the best spelling I had been able to come up with was: ISLA??A?G?, or, omitting the four unknown letters, ISLAAG, which was a close match of IS LAG, I am weak. Luckily, Pinga had taken the pictures at different times of day and the shadows made by the various angles of the sun gave me a much better idea as to what the missing letters were. After a few hours, I had deduced two of them. Here is what I arrived at: ISLA?LA?GO, or, omitting the unknowns, ISLALAGO, which has no Celtic counterpart of any kind in the dictionaries. I noticed, however, it was Spanish for islandlake, which was a pretty good description of the pool in the quarry, but I didnt know where to go from there. Could my supposed ISLAUGGH carving be nothing more than a description of the pool that was hammered out by some Spanish admirer? It wasnt out of the question, but something told me it was only a coincidence, and that I should keep

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pursuing the carving as if it were indeed a Celtic name. No matter how long I looked at the photographs for the two missing letters, I couldnt make them out, just smudges. If you had pressed me, I would have said there was nothing there, that the fifth or seventh positions were empty on purpose. Spaces. But I wasnt about to give up. I started with the seventh position first, and set about substituting all the letters in the alphabet for it. Here are the 26 results:
ISLA?LAaGO: ISLA?LAbGO ISLA?LAcGO ISLA?LAdGO ISLA?LAeGO ISLA?LAgGO ISLA?LAhGO ISLA?LAiGO ISLA?LAiGO ISLA?LAjGO ISLA?LAkGO ISLA?LAlGO ISLA?LAmGO ISLA?LAnGO ISLA?LAoGO ISLA?LApGO ISLA?LAqGO ISLA?LArGO ISLA?LAsGO ISLA?LAtGO ISLA?LAuGO ISLA?LAvGO ISLA?LAwGO ISLA?LAxGO ISLA?LAyGO ISLA?LAzGO

I emailed all this to Diane along with the photographs, and then I called her up. What do you think? I asked. The pictures are interesting, she replied, but Im not getting anything Celtic. I keep seeing a black man carving them and he doesnt look very ancient. He has a baseball hat on. Justin, I just dont know. How about the list of spellings I sent you, do you see anything in them. No, I dont. I just keep seeing a black man with a baseball hat on. Its red. I thanked her and looked at the list again, and then, half way down, my eyes locked onto one of them: ISLA?LArGO. If I let the one unknown letter be a space, I got: ISLA LARGO, another Spanish name, but one suspiciously close to the dreamy concoctions favored by the builders of Florida condominiums. I called

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up Pinga. Listen, I dont think this is ancient at all, just some fancy real estate Spanish. My best guess is the carving says ISLA LARGO, like maybe it was an unfinished sign for some fancy resort. There was a momentary silence and then I heard Pinga calling out for Angelo and then Angelo calling Carl and then Carl calling out for somebody named Hector and then all I could hear was a loud din like the whole bar was talking and then Pinga got back on the phone. Well, Whitey, whaddoyouknow. There was a condo development went belly up here about ten years ago, and it was called ISLA LARGO, just like you guessed. It was supposed to be a kind of New Age thing. Hector, one of the maintenance guys here, says they stopped carving when the money ran out. Sorry. Im sorry too, I muttered. You sure there was a development? I heard Pinga call out for Hector and the din rose up again and then it trailed off into a few stifled laughs and coughing and Pinga telling everyone to quiet down. Yeah, listen, he said, theyre sure. Hector says he was the foreman for a while. Sorry Whitey, it looked real. It sure did. Well, we tried. Call me when you get back, will you? Just before I hung up, I could hear a few muffled guffaws and then what sounded like face slapping and the whole bar falling off their stools laughing. Cackling was more like it.

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Chapter 24: Alice Speaks April 2005, Sarasota Starbucks I had given Alice a copy of the myth at one of our first get-togethers, hoping shed be able to help me with it, but months passed without her saying anything. Finally, I couldnt wait any longer and brought it back up. Alice, Ive been meaning to ask you if youve had any thoughts about the myth. Im still thinking about it, but there a few things I need to know. I think I understand speaking; I Googled you and downloaded your book on it. I told her shed have an even better understanding if she actually created one with me, because you had to feel it to really know it, and that speaking simply happened if the time was rightjust like the Spirit that spoke through her. You simply had to surrender to it. There was no one around except the counter girl, so I showed Alice a few simple techniques and told her to echo-respond to what I said. No sooner had I said that than my body started to buzzI could feel every cell in my body vibrating. Id felt energy like that only once before while creating a speaking. It was with someone whod just learned she was going to die; thats how intense Alices energy was. I began to speak and she began to respond, and as she did, I felt her voice lowering itself almost immediately into that OM range, surrendering to it, and then the speaking simply rose into its own world. When it ended, she looked at me and said. You were right; it is beyond poetry, at least as Ive known it. How does it compare to the Spirit speaking through you? I dont know if I can say yet. Id like to try the lead first, it seems more powerful. Take the lead then. What do I do? I showed her the techniques again, and told her to surrender to the speaking exactly as I did. Dont worry, I said, your body already knows how to do it. She began to speak. It was incredibly sad. Burdened. Its not as beautiful, she said. Whats not as beautiful? The Spirit speaking through me. Speaking poems is more beautiful; it feels more filled with light. Speaking feels something like lovemaking; its more of this world. When the Spirit speaks through me, its more one-sided. Im almost not there. Its like Im in chains. Her face suddenly became pained and I thought it best to change the subject. Alice, I have to tell you, your speaking was incredible. It went right up my spine.

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I know. I could see it in your eyes. What did they look like? I asked. I dont think I should tell you. I havent come this far to back off now. Well, you looked a little drunk or stupid and you had what looked like spittle in the corners of your eyes; I couldnt figure it out. Jesus, are you kidding? No, go ahead, wipe your eyes. It was spittle or something like it. I didnt know what to think. I told her about the Red Light Bar and the spittle in the corners of Betty Hagans mouth. I know Betty Hogan, she giggled and did a little imitation of Bettys crumpled lips. My mouth dropped. How do you know Betty? And by the way, her last name is Hagan not Hogan. Oh, really? I thought it was Hogan. Weve never actually met; a friend told me about her. We all seem to know about each other, one way or another. By the way, you may think Bettys out of the picture, but shes obviously still around. I think she likes you.

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Chapter 25: I See the Muse in a New Light April 2005, Sarasota While Janes insights into the preliterate nature of the myth had been of enormous help, I still couldnt understand how I had managed to create the myth exactly as it would have been created in preliterate times. I knew very little about the preliterate mind when the myth came to me. I may have absorbed enough preliterate poetry in the course of my general reading to supply my unconscious with sufficient fuel for a nice imitation of a preliterate myth, that didnt explain everything. An unconsciously imitated style was one thing; the appearance of completely alien ideas was quite another. If the myth was mine, I kept asking myself, how could many of its concepts be as alien to me as 1 + 1 = 3? One thing for sure, I wasnt ready to accept that those ideas had simply appeared out of nowhere, all by themselves. Things dont work that way. Not in this world. I continued, however, to resist Janes suggestion that the myth had come from someone else. Although I was open to the idea of psychic intelligenceshow could I not be after all Id experiencedI had always dismissed Janes suggestion for the simple reason I hadnt felt an invasion of any kind whatsoever. The only intelligence I had felt was my own. By that I mean I hadnt felt the presence of a psychic intelligence, as I had with Alice. When the myth came to me, I felt exactly like I do when any poem comes to me. There was no difference. Here is a journal entry about the matter:
. . . if the myth had come from another intelligence, as Jane had suggested, it would explain why I couldnt fully understand the poems that made up The Witnesses Log. They had no roots in what I know as me . . . I had read enough Jung to know that such things can happen if you hang around the well of the unconscious long enough. The art of speaking had made me a regular at the lip of the well. There were any number of visitors who had come up to make my acquaintance and I had never turned away. The witness in me always kept watch. But it had missed this visitor. It would have been far better if I had had a vision of some type, anything but the seamless, invisible invasion of intelligence that had occurred.

When I say I felt no intelligence other than my own, I should qualify that by saying that I am always aware of the intelligent energy of the poem itself, which I see as the unconscious intelligence that drives a particular set of feelings into the conscious form we recognize as poetry. How that happens, and why it happens at

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any particular time is a mystery, as is the final structure of the poem itself. I have always sensed that intelligent energy as being completely different from our conscious intelligence. It is an instinctive, intelligent energya desire, a hungerthat knows exactly what it has to do in order to become a poem. The best way I can describe it is this: it is the intelligence that determines the rhythm and music and emotional attitude of the poem, and here is the real mystery, it ultimately determines the correct words. Here is an entry from my journal that sums up my thinking on how poems are formed, which I see as a very special way the unconscious speaks to us:
Our conscious, rational knowing cannot directly approach the unconscious. The unconscious cannot be measured, seen, touched. It can only be sensed. And that sensing cannot be accomplished in the same way as our everyday witnessing. Poetry is a special kind of witnessing that reflexively creates a story that imitates the feelings presented to us by that unknowable reality. As an analogy, think of those 3-dimensional, many-pointed, many-faced glass stars we often see in Mexican souvenir shops. The many-pointed star is constructed of hundreds of tiny triangular and rectangular mirrors that reflect the world around it. Then think of the unconscious as a complex of feelings; imagine it to be something like a highly fluid, ever-changing shape of light and dark. Then think of the conscious mind and unconscious mind somehow coming together to place hundreds of little mirrors (words) around that complex of feelings so as to exactly capture its contours. The resulting star is a poem. Its a useful metaphor. We never see the unconscious; all we get to see is ourselvesand the world around uswhen we look at the star. The metaphor is saying that even though a poem imitates the feeling of the unconscious, it does so by reflecting the conscious knowable world. But even more importantly it consists of words or facets (reflections of the world) we can examine for meaning, but we have to be careful to remember that those facets are a metaphor, not the real thing.

Let me say something more about a poem having its own intelligence. That intelligence, that energy, is what anyone feels when an unpremeditated poem comes to them. Historically, it has been called the Muse. It is unmistakable. And the more we surrender to it, the more we can feel it, and the more it will work its way through us. There is no doubt in my mind that a poems intelligent energy comes primarily from the unconscious, not the conscious mind, and that without it, there can be no true poem. Conscious interference is the thing most likely to injure the inexpressible, unconscious balance between language and music that is at the very heart of poetry. My own experience with the act of speaking has led me to believe that if

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we simply surrender to the intelligent energy of a poem, let it twine itself around our own conscious intelligence, a poem will form all by itself. Poems are the way the conscious and unconscious, self and soul, come together so that we can complete ourselves. You might say a poem is the physical trace of that coming together. I've pretty much given up on consciously interfering with a poem in any way whatsoever. Making antimacassars for the Muses head doesnt interest me anymore. What interests me is the moment of ecstatic awareness at the heart of poetic creation. I call it the poetic moment. Much of that change in my attitude was brought about by my practice of speaking. Over the years, I have spoken thousands of spontaneous poems that created that ecstatic moment, while the restmy voice, the words, the rhythm, the musicdisappeared into air. After a while, I didn't care. I learned to let go. After all, that is how poetry was created for thousands and thousands of years before the invention of writing. I do record my speakings from time to time. Recordings allow poems to be experienced by others at a later time. But I can truthfully say that I have recorded only a small percentage of my speakings. The rest exist only on the wind and in my heart and the hearts of others who were there at the time. An elderly heart surgeon who I'd befriended once asked me what I did and I told him I was a poet. He wanted proof and asked me if I'd make a poem for him. As can happen sometimes, the Muse was with me, and the speaking was beautiful. The doctor got itI could tell by his eyes. After a moment, he became confused and started looking around. Finally, he asked, But where's the poem? I pointed to my heart and then to his and said There. It took him a moment and then he got it. He understood. But he was both happy and unhappy. His unconscious mind was happy but his conscious mind wasn't. It still wanted something to hold on to as proof. He wanted some stuff. I think that just about says it all about what's happening to us, doesn't it? Poems are very mysterious creatures. There is no pinning them down. They come when they want to and say what they want to and bring us to another place. The shame of what is happening to us is that we have forgotten how to honor that moment. Here is a poem about that. It came to me long before the myth ever appeared.
Snow Angels I was six. No, five, I was five: my first snow. I remember the angel suddenly coming together and then bleeding out beneath me like I was turning myself inside out, and then I remember awakening to a white field, because the angels

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were always a surprise to me, the way they kept falling in such peculiar positions, like someone screaming, or dying. Like the wings. Friends would take me aside, tell me the wings were a bit too much: Like a Babylonian lion's, really. Those wings, they'd say. They were right of course, but what could I say to them except I couldn't help it, that my arms always moved up and down like that whenever I fell out of heaven. Sometimes I felt like telling them maybe it would help if they thought of the angels as small relief-maps of my soul, sudden, uncontrolled curdlings that occurred whenever I stopped, opened myself to the sun, or the moon. And then there were times I didn't know what to say, except maybe they should think of the angels as detailed descriptions of another life. A life I was living but knew nothing about.

I have perhaps taken the long way around, but I wanted to make clear my feelings about the nature of poetry, because my problems in understanding why the myth took the form it did eventually caused me to question my most basic beliefs about poetry. When I did, I came to the conclusion that the reason I had felt only my own intelligenceand the intelligent energy of the poemwas because that other intelligencethe one that Jane said authored the mythwas not a separate psychic intelligence but a seamless part of the poems energy. I had always seen the Musethe poems intelligent energyas determining the rhythm and music and emotional attitude of the poemand ultimately the wordsbut I had always seen the words as coming from what I know as me from my conscious and unconscious memories. It eventually became clear to me that the intelligent energy of The Witnesses Log had fed not just on the memories of my personal unconscious, but also on memories from the collective unconscious. That may be a mouthful, but I wouldnt take back a word of it. Why I had been so blind to that possibility, I cant really say. I was aware that the great mythic poems of the distant past had to have come from the level of the

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collective unconscious, but I had never thought of the Witnesses Log myth despite its strange conceptsin quite that way. I had somehow still seen it as my poem if for no other reason than the myth felt like my other poems. As nave as it sounds, it seems I had always imagined that if a poem came to me from the collective unconscious, I would experience it as something like the voice of my daimon. But I was wrong. Despite the origin and depth of the memories that fed the myth, the Muses voice hadnt felt at all like that. What it had felt like was the voice of Poetry, the voice of the Muse, which has a very different psychic texture. So in the end, Jane had been right about everythingalthough it had taken me a long time to really grasp the whole of what she was saying. I had understood what she had meant about the preliterate nature of the myth, but I had never quite grasped what she had meant about the myth belonging to somebody else. I had automatically assumed what she meant was that the poem had been given to me by a psychic entity like my daimon, or Alice's Spirit, whose voice I would have easily sensed. I had never even considered that the intelligent energy of the poem itself could have been the carrier of the myths mindset and concepts (in the form of memories from the collective unconscious). What I had underestimated was the power of the poem's intelligent energy, or to put it another wayhow much the Muse can bring to the table. What I found out, of course, is that the Muse can bring anything she wants to, and the poet had better be prepared for the possibilities. The myth, of course, also fed on memories from my personal unconscious, which is why the myth did have some roots in me. The core of the myth, however, seems to have come from the collective unconscious. Where the dividing line lies is almost impossible to say, because as Jung takes great pains to point out, the collective unconscious always becomes visible in the company of the personal unconscious. It is what makes visions particularly difficult to decipher. Our preliterate consciousness may have died with the early cultures it created, but some form of it survived down the long, dark chain of the collective unconscious, which, as Jung points out, is the repository of all our memories going back to the creation of life itself. And some part of it chose to come back into time as The Witnesses Log in Santa Monica, California on the evening of December 14, 2000. All this took months to become completely clear to me. It didnt happen all at once. But once I saw that the intelligent energy of a poem can choose to feed where it wants and then come into time as something completely beyond the ken of the poet, I had to step back and take a breath. Im familiar with psychic intelligences, but those intelligences were, for the most part, guides to action. As

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powerful as they could be, the intelligence that formed the myth seemed in a whole other league. The myth was not a momentary directive; it was a complex, exquisitely formed poem about the nature of preliterate consciousness that had come from the collective unconscious completely of its own accord. I was simply along for the ride. When the implications of that sank in and I began to see how complete and beautiful and strange the myth was, my sense of poetry changed utterly. What I had only understood intellectually beforepoetry was the way the Gods spoke to mencame wheeling down around me like a flock of crows. Thats an unlikely statement from someone who long ago rejected the religious thought of both East and West. But Ill tell you this: I was totally unprepared for it. Every time I thought about it in the months that followed, I felt like the proverbial man downstairs waiting for the other shoe to drop.

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Chapter 26: Alicia La Verne May 2005, Sarasota, Starbucks I had gone to Starbucks several times to find Alice, but I kept missing her. Finally, I asked the girl behind the counter if she had seen Alice, the old lady with the pale eyes, and she sort of jumped a couple of inches inside her body and said, Oh, her. She just left, just a few minutes ago. There was a short pause as if she were trying to remember something and then she asked, You Justin Springer? Spring, S-P-R-I-N-G, its Justin Spring, I replied. Oh, OK, Springs, whatever. The lady said to give you this, and she held up an envelope with two fingers as if it contained anthrax. There was a short note inside. Justin: Meet me by the tomatoes. Alice I went down to the market that evening and there she was. Sorry, I messed you up, she said, but there was something I had to tell you and Starbucks wasnt the place. Its OK for talking, but not for showing. Did you do Show and Tell as a kid? No, Im afraid Show and Tell was after my time. We had nuns. We played Hold Out Your Hand for the Ruler. Oh, no kidding, that must have been fun. Then she suddenly looked at me very intently and asked, Theres something you want me to tell you, something personal, isnt that so? Alice always claimed she was just an ordinary person, but it was at times like this that I really doubted it. She seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. Yes, I want you to tell me what the hell is going on, I replied somewhat testily. I could never account for how cantankerous I could get with Alice. I was in awe of her, but that didnt stop me from mouthing off. My respect for her, which bordered almost on reverence, would simply fly out the window for no reason at all. Strangely enough, it never seemed to bother Alice. In fact, I think it amused her to some degree, which undoubtedly encouraged me to keep doing it, although once in a while she would snap back at me so fast it made my stomach jump. A few moments passed. Then she said, Im sure you would like to know whats going on, and so would I, for that matter, but thats not whats bothering you, and she fixed me with her eyes like she was looking inside me and said, No, theres something else you want to know. I saw it in your eyes: you want to know who my friend was that told me about Betty Hogan, dont you? Its Hagan, not Hogan, I snapped, trying in whatever way I could to maintain my balance. Dont play with me, she snapped back. Who cares how its spelled. And for Christs sake, lighten up, will you?

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I tucked my tail between my legs. OK. Youre right. I do want to know who told you about Betty. Its been bugging me for days. If you had been with me the day I met her youd know why. And why is that? Its not important, not really, but I had the suspicion I was being set up. By Betty? No, by a friend who brought me to her place. Listen Franklin, were always being set up, except we dont know by whom, or for what reason. I thought you would have learned that by now. She took the wind right out of me. Then she said, I know about Betty because Kiki Dentista told me about her. My mouth dropped fifteen floors. There couldnt be two Kiki Dentistas; that was impossible. Yet it seemed unbelievable she could have known Kiki. I looked at her face for some trace of humor, but there was nothing, only those pale, unreadable eyes. Alice, what is going on here? I know Kiki, at least I did know her; shes been dead for some time now you know. I know, she said, since February 17, 2001 to be exact. I miss her. She was one of the few people I could really talk to. Jesus. Now theyre bosom buddies. It was too much. And that date, pulled out of the air like a rabbit. I was sure that Pinga was mixed up in this, but how? I had never told him about Alice. But maybe it had gone the other way. After all, Alice and Kiki had been very close, so Alice was sure to have known about Pinga. Maybe she had somehow discovered we were friends and approached Pinga about a little devilment. God knows what her reasons might have been, but one of them might have been my wiseacre claim I could imitate Rich Little. I was going to pay for that one forever. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alice knowing Kiki was either entirely coincidental, or I was being set up in ways I didnt even want to think about. It was bad enough that the psychic world was driving me crazy; I didnt need any additional help from Pinga. And just the thought of Alice being involved was enough to drive me straight up the wall. I looked for signs in the sand. When did you meet Pinga? I asked. For a moment, she looked absolutely blank. I was sure I had her. Oh, you mean little Ernest. Kiki talked about him all the time, but I never met him; he was always out diving or drinking. I could feel myself losing ground. I plunged on. Were good friends, did you know that? Hes a great guy, always up for some fun. Nothing. Not a flicker. I didnt know that, but it doesnt surprise me. Kiki said he was a rascal; she

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loved him for it. If she was lying about not knowing Pinga, she was way too fast for me. It didnt seem to matter what I asked her: shed have an answer, and not just a sentence or two. She was ready to put up a whole Potemkins Village if the occasion called for it. I kept thrashing about, hoping to touch down on something solid. But how did you meet Kiki? She lived in the Keys. I know, she replied, Tavernier. Thats a nice little placedont you think? But I didnt meet her in the Keys. I met her in Boston, as a girl, while I was staying with my aunt Alicia. Kikis older sister, Kathy, lived on the second floor of my aunts house. I met Kiki through Kathy. I didnt meet Kiki right away. I had been living with my aunt Alicia for almost four years before I first met Kathy. I met Ivory at the same time. Ivory lived on the third floor. Up until then, Kathy and Ivory had been a sort of mystery because the only thing my aunt had told me about them was they were both suffering from tuberculosis and had a separate floor and entrance. I liked my aunt. She didnt pull any punches. She wasnt psychic like me, though. I asked her once. She said she just had the same color eyes but that was it; everything she knew she read in the papers. She was full of one-liners like that. My mother was in awe of her because Alicia had left home at fifteen. No note, no warning, nothing. And then, twenty years later, my mother got a letter from her saying that she had become a famous dancer and she owned a brownstone by Boston Commons and if there was anything she could do to let her know. It didnt take my mother more than two seconds. She wanted me to be successful like Alicia, so when I graduated eighth grade my mother kissed me goodbye and put me on the all-night Greyhound and the next day Im standing at my aunt Alicias front door looking up at her and she's looking down at me with all these spiky orange curlers coming out of her head and her eyebrows all tweezed out saying, Oh, Little Alice, how nice of you to visit me, your momma wrote you were coming, but I could tell the way she walked back down the hallway looking up at the ceiling shed forgotten all about it. It didnt make any difference, though. She couldnt do enough for me. It was like living in Hollywood. She had closets full of lingerie, just like Joan Crawford. And she had framed photographs of herself all over the house. Some were color but most of them were black and white publicity shots. She was always posed in a real sexy costume with high heels and lots of jewelry. Most of the photographs shed autographed with her stage name: Alicia La Verne, which I liked. It had a certain ring to it. It wasnt until three years later, when I was about to graduate, that I found out she wasnt really a dancer but a strip-tease artist, like Gypsy Rose Lee. She must have been pretty good, because she made enough to buy a brownstone in a millionaires row and become a high-class madam. It turned out the two women on the other floors werent sick, but those kind of women as my

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mother would say. I didnt discover this all by myself. Owen Feeney told me. He was a boy in my class with flabby lips who was always scratching his crotch and blowing up condoms in the back of the room. He seemed to know everything about sex, like the ways you could do it, and he had a hundred stories about my aunt and the two girls and the mayor and the bishop, people like that. Anyway, it was Owen told me everything. I didnt know what to say. If she had been acting, she should have been in Hollywood. After a moment or two I said to her, But you still havent told me how you met Kiki. Oh. I guess I didnt, she replied. You know, she was already here with me in my mind and I guess I forgot. Well anyway, after Owen Feeney told me all this, I went to my aunt and asked her if it was true. I told her everything, word for word. It was quite a confection. I didnt really care what Owen had said, because as far as I was concerned, Alicia was just about as perfect as anyone could ever be. I just wanted to hear it from her lips, not Owens. She didnt disappoint me. So Owen Feeney told you all that, did he? That little shit. The best part of that little bastard went down his fathers leg. I asked her how Owen knew all those things about her. Owens the handymans son, she said. Old man Feeney would never say anythingI pay him too much. But Owens another matter. Hes always creeping around the house like a wet rat while his fathers fixing things. I wouldnt doubt Owen has made himself a world of peepholes. Anyway, she told me everything, right down to the small hairs, and she then called up the two women and had them come down to meet me because I had never seen them, and when they appeared in the doorway it was like theyd come right out of the movies. One was a tall, beautiful blonde with almost translucent skin. Her name was Ivory Bennett. And the other was a very funny brunette with quick, dark eyes. That was Kathy Alvarez. I was about sixteen by this time. When the two women walked in, I thought Id died and gone to heaven. Ive always had a bad girl thing: I hated goody-goodies, and here I was, in bad girl Paradise. The four of us became like sisters after that. The fact I was sixteen didnt seem to matter. They treated me as a complete equal. I think it was because of the sances I used to hold for the three of them: Id just lift out and let it come through me and theyd be stomping and screaming and laughing and crying like it was a revival. That was reckless of me, but I didnt know any better at the time. I didnt know that somebody could have been hurt. Anyway, one Sunday, Kathy took us all over to her mothers in South Boston. Thats when I met Kiki. We became instant friends. She had a boyfriend named Ernie Dentista who was always giving her jewelry from his fathers pawnshop. I liked him. He had sideburns and rode a Harley like his foot was made of gas. He wanted to marry Kiki in the worst way, but she was always

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putting him off. She was her own woman. She had to be. She was very open; she couldnt control it. Shed be talking to you and all of a sudden shed lift off to who knows where. Her body was there, but she wasnt. Sometimes shed stay out for days at a time. I could talk to Kiki like I could talk to nobody else. She understood everything. When it was time for me to go back home to Florida, I thought Id never see her again, and then a few years later she wrote saying she was going to marry Ernie What The Hell, thats what she called him, and move to Floridathat he was going to open a pawn shop in Tavernier. Its funny how things work out like that. Yes, it sure is, I replied. I launched one more desperate probe: You know, its almost unbelievable that in all those years of knowing Kiki you never bumped into Pinga, or me for that matter. Maybe its because most of the time Kiki used to visit me in Arcadia. She liked getting out of the Keys. After a while, when we got older, the traveling back and forth got too much, it wore her down, so wed meet in our dreams. It wasnt as much fun, but it was easier. That last touch was perfect. The woman had answers I hadnt even dreamed of. By the way, I asked, what was it you wanted to show me when I walked in? Oh, I almost forgot, and she leaned in toward my left ear until I could barely see her out of the corner of my eye and then I heard a very distinct voice inside my head say to me, The Witnesses know everything. Alice, I snapped, what in Gods name is going on? What do you mean? I mean what you just spoke inside my head again. I told you, its not meits the Spirit. OK, but what does it mean? What does what mean? What the Spirit just said to me: The Witnesses know everything. Oh, I have absolutely no idea.

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Chapter 27: The Other World May 2005, Sarasota, Starbucks Alice must have smelled me coming, because as soon as I came in the door at Starbucks, her eyes started to float like a blind mans, which is what they look like just before the Spirit comes. I flinched like I was about to be punched and she let go of a cackle that totally unscrewed me. It sounded exactly like Kikis laugh, a totally wicked cackle; I couldnt believe how close it was. She must have seen my confusion because she suddenly barked, Hey, I was kidding! That was just a little get-back for saying you could do Rich Little. Jesus, Alice, that wasnt funny, I said, but no sooner had I said that than she shot me that same blind look and I jumped back yelling like I did when Pinga told me he was going to rip my ear off. She motioned me to sit down. You have something you want to ask me, dont you? Yes, I do, but first I want to know how you just gave me that look. You told me its the Spirit that does all that. It is the Spirit. All I can do is imitate what it feels like when the Spirit enters me. When I do that, my eyes change, but thats as far as it goes: Im firing blanks. Nothing happens. Well, most of the time. If I get the feeling exactly right, the Spirit can appear, but its kind of a long shot. She stopped and looked at me like someone training a very slow dog and said, Im not much help am I? No, no, you are, I assured her. Youre a big help except Im not quite in step with you yet: everything is still a bit patchy. I told her I knew she didnt want to talk about the myth yet, but I needed her to help me understand a vision, a figure I saw in a mirror years ago, just after we had first met in the market. I proceeded to tell her about ISLAUGGHhow he appeared to me three times but he wasnt a man like Id first thought but a woman, at least according to Diane whod told me his name or her name, its spelled I-S-L-A-U-G-G-H, but I could tell by the expression on Alices face that I was completely out of control. I didnt care. I was desperate for some kind of explanation. Alice just kept looking at me, saying nothing, so I told her about the possible meanings of the name, and then about the voice inside my head that had said Witness as I stared at ISLAUGGH in the mirror and then how Id been trying to puzzle the myth out and that I sensed everything was connected but I didnt know how, not really, except sometimes I thought I did, and then, thankfully, just as I took another breath, she held up her hand. Is that all you want to tell me? she asked. I felt like an idiot. She looked at me

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with the smile of the weary and said, Thats what trying to deal with the psychic world is like: it will fool you. You think its one thing and you go to touch it and its not there, or it turns out to be something else, like a fish in shallow water. Its never where you think it is, or the color you think, or as big as you think. But something has been standing still long enough to touch me and its been happening for years now. Oh, touching us is easy. Were like roses waiting to be picked. Its touching the other side thats tricky. OK, but listen, there has to be a reason why you keep appearing. Doesnt that seem strange to you? Yes, its never happened before, this coming back to the same person. I cant tell you what it means; Id only be guessing. She wasnt the only one in the dark. My old theory about her being the minence grise behind Dianes terrifying dream had long ago gone up in smoke. It was clear Alice had been as much a pawn as Diane. I suspected, however, that Alice hadnt quite told me the whole story. I decided to find out: You know what I think about the dream Diane had? No. Tell me. Im sure the dream was meant for me. As soon as Diane described it, my whole body lit up. You know what else I think? I think Diane took the hit for me, had the dream for me. Oh, do you? And why do you think that? Because the dream might have killed me. Diane said so. She was right about that, but she forgot to tell you your chances of receiving a dream from the Spirit are just about zero. Why is that? Youre too thick. What does that mean? Just that: youre too thick. You have to be in a very special psychic state for the Spirit to give you a dream. What state is that? Now is not the time, Justin. Why not? Because I want you to understand what Dianes dream really was. Ive already spoken to Diane about it because I had to go through the same thing she went through, although she didnt know that until I told her. Shes right. It was horrible. The Spirits dreams happen very rarely. Ive only experienced them twice. The last one was with Diane. Normally the Spirit simply wants to speak to someone. Youd think the Spirit would simply go to the person involved, but it doesnt happen that way. The Spirit cant speak directly. People like Betty Hogan and I get to be go-betweens, we get to be bridges. Jesus, Alice, get it right, will you? Its HaganH-A-G, not H-O-G.

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Oh. Anyway, as I was saying, when the Spirit wants to speak to someone, I get a memory of them when Im awake. Thats how I found you in the supermarket. When I go to someone in their dreams, its because the Spirit comes to me while Im dreaming and I somehow go to the other person in their dreams. But the Spirit doesnt speak through meit dreams through me. The Spirits dreams are overwhelming. They seem to be the soul memory, the essence, of the Spirit itself. Thats an oxymoron of sorts, as the Sprit is only essence, but its the best explanation I can give you. That essence is so primal it probably would have killed Diane. I was used as a bridge so the dream would pass through me firstso I could take some of the sting out of it. Dont ask me how that works or how these decisions are made. Primal spirits are something like lightningthey know where they want to go and will somehow find the right path, the right series of conductors, to get there. All I can really tell you is this: when the Spirit entered me in my dreams that night, the feeling was so dark I became absolutely frozen with fear. If I could have turned back, I would have, but it doesnt work that way. I had felt that side of the Spirit only once before, as a young girl, while I was staying with my aunt in Boston. I was walking home from school when a man standing in the middle of the sidewalk caught my attention. I really cant say why. He was a tall, awkward man with glasses. I remember looking at him because he was talking to himself and he had a goofy, twisted smile on his face. I watched him as he went into an office building, and then I felt him somewhere up high and to my left like he was rising through the air, and I realized he must be in an elevator and then I could feel him near water like he was in the bathroom or next to a water fountain and then something told me that I was going to come to him in his dreams. Right then, my whole body got scared. Anyway, I went home and later that night I laid down in my bed and fell asleep and then, suddenly, I was hovering above his bed, and then I was suddenly pulled into a world so dark I could taste it, and then I heard him right in front of me screaming like he was dying and I began screaming back because I could feel myself turning into darkness and I knew I was probably going to die right there, and then, suddenly, something that felt like light began to thread its way through me, like it was looking for something, and then it was sliding up my spine turning my whole body inside out. It was so beautiful I wanted to cry and then I felt the light pulling away from me like an animal pulling away after feeding and then I was floating above my bed looking down at myself crying in my sleep. I remember wanting to cradle my body as if it were a babys, and then I was suddenly back inside my body looking up at the ceiling. I didnt move for I don't know how long, maybe four or five hours. I was afraid tomy body felt like tiny slivers of light that could snap at any moment. Then I felt myself coming together, getting more and more solid, and I knew I was going to be OK. Whatever is trying to get to you is very primal. In a manner of speaking, its way back toward Creation itself. Spirits like that are capable of flooding our

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minds with intense, sometimes terrifying visions. They are so unconsciousif I can use that termthey can only communicate with us if we can make our conscious minds go away. You have to almost disappear in a manner of speaking. What do you mean by almost disappear? You have to enter a state where youre not conscious of anything. Nothing. What Zen practitioners call no mind. Primal spirits are like the weak cosmic hum left over from the Big Bang. They are very weak compared to say, a ghost, because ghosts still have remnants of consciousness surrounding them. Thats why anyone can see a ghosttheyre still somewhat like us. But only a few of us can channel primal Spirits, because they can only communicate with someone who is capable of almost disappearing. Ordinarily that wouldnt be a problem for someone as psychic as Diane. But channeling the Spirits dream is something else entirely. Im not sure Diane could have handled that. The only way to survive something like that is to go beyond Zen no mind and disappear completelyand then stay in that state for however long it takes for the Spirits dream to complete itself. If you come back too soon, you can die. The timing is everything. What do you mean completely disappear, you mean physically? No. Youre still there, but the physical world has disappeared. Its a state where you become nothingno thing. Mystics describe it as a state of pure beingthe state where we become one with the Life Force, with Creation. Do you believe that? Yes, but I see it in a slightly different way. Im a psychic, not a mystic, so I see it as a state where all things are possible. What things? Maybe it would be better to describe it as a state where all perceptions are possible. Thats all I really want to say about it though. Why is that? Because its useless to try to define it any further. Wed just be moving words around in our heads. Its more important for you to understand the nature of the Spirits dreams. Especially since youre so sure that Dianes dream was meant for you. It may have been meant for you, but you didnt get it directly from the Spirit because youre too thick, and Diane didnt get it directly because she was untested. What exactly did you mean when you said, If you come back too soon, you can die? Just that. If you try to return to consciousness before the Spirits dream completes itself, the first thin, emerging strands of consciousness wont be sufficient protection against the dreams dark energy. Before the conscious mind can completely re-establish itself, the darkness will have rushed in like flood water. And?

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You wont have any consciousness to return to, or at least any worth talking about. Youll either be dead or completely insane. But how do you know when its time to come back? I somehow learned the signals. Its a kind of rhythm that says Stay still, Stay still, Stay still, and then, finally, it says, Come back, Come back. Got it? I think so. Youd think the state I enter when I disappear would be far more fragile, more dangerous, than coming back to consciousness, but its not. The no thing state is like an open door. It offers no resistance to the Spirits dream. None. As frightening as the Spirits dream can be, Im completely safe as long as I remain in that state. But how do you know when its safe to come back? How did you learn the signals? You might say that the Spirit and I have learned to work together. But I wouldnt necessarily call it a good working relationship. I may have come back from Dianes dream at the right time, but I came back in pieces; I couldnt move for hours. The dream of the man in Boston was equally shattering. If I had any choice in the matter, Id never bridge the Spirits dreams; its a horrible experience. It might interest you to know that there are times when primal spirits dont use a bridge, where they speak directly, but theyre extremely rare. There are many stories in the Old Testament of God revealing himself to the Hebrews. It might help if you think of the God of the Old Testament as a primal spirit. The important thing is there are almost always angels of some sort involved in those revelations. You can think of those angels as bridges. You might say its the worlds oldest profession, despite what youve heard to the contrary. Moses is one of those rare cases where God is said to have spoken directly, without an intermediary. You would think Moses was an extraordinary person, like an Alexander, but if you want to know the real dope, Moses wasnt even a good Charlton Heston. There are hints throughout Exodus that he was a real mess, barely able to function in the day-to-day world. But he must have possessed extraordinary psychic abilities that allowed him to enter the deepest parts of the psychic world and survive. Lets just say that Moses was a very unconscious man. Thats why God always communicated directly with Moses and then Moses the mess, Moses the mumbler, would somehow relay it to Aaron who had enough smarts and leadership to finally relay it to the Hebrews. Its a long way around for God to takeyou wouldnt think it with God supposedly being all-powerful and all of thatbut thats the way it works and always has. Unlike Moses, however, I have no idea what it feels like when the Spirit speaks directly, because the Spirit always speaks through me, not to me. All I get to hear is the sound, but its more a feeling of a sound than a physical sound. Unlike Moses, I never get to hear the actual words. The only time Ive experienced anything even remotely resembling the Spirit speaking to me directly were the times the Spirit dreamed through me.

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When the Spirit dreamed through you, did Diane dream the same thing you did? There's no way to tell. We're different people. But we're also human beings so our dreams were probably close. But she didn't quite feel the full strength of the dream. I took some of the energy out of it as it was passing through me. The big difference was I was prepared for it. She wasn't. She was blind-sided, just like she says. But there was nothing I could do about that; I was in chains. That dream was completely dark and terrifying; it had no words or pictures, just sounds. Thats how primal it was. I dont even know how to describe it because it was completely aural, almost pure feeling. When visions are that fluid, God knows what the conscious mind will make up to describe them. All I can tell you is that I remember thinking I was going to die, that I was going to disappear completely out of time. Then I felt something enter me, like a finger, and for a moment I felt like I was going to be reborn and I remember being almost out of my mind with joy and then something grabbed me and pulled me back, but I came back in pieces, like I was made of tiny, sharp shards of glass. I couldnt even think. Im sure the same was true for Diane. . Your dream, I said, sounds something like Diane's dream, but you know, every time she tells me about the dream, it changes. Was the Spirits dream the same as yours? I dont think you can even compare the two. We dream when we surrender consciousness, but the Spirit has no consciousness to surrender. I think the best way to describe the Spirit is to say it is very unconscious, if I can use that term again. You could say the Spirit is always dreaming, but that's just a way of speaking about what is utterly unknowable. Think of the Spirit as being like your own unconscious, but more primal. Think of it as a feeling intelligence, an energy that blossomed into full existence when the Biblical God said: Let there be light, but also think of it as having an existence before God said that. Think of the Spirit as having roots way back to when The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. What do you mean by that? My sense of the Spirit is that it has roots in the darkness, just like the Witnesses do in the myth. Why do you think that? Because the Spirit's dreams have no light, no images. Just absolute darkness. Absolute dark is something like absolute Kelvin, you know what I mean by that? Of course I do; I know absolute Kelvin. Its the coldest temperature possible. What else do you know? What else am I supposed to know? That there was something else besides the darkness. What? Sound. The Spirit's dreams are filled with sounds, sounds that feel alivethat are alive, just like you're alive.

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That's right! I remember Diane saying the sounds were alive. I didn't know what to think of that. I kept seeing things as she talked, but now that I think about it, she didn't mention seeing anything, only hearing things. There werent any sight images; I guess I made those up. All she really talked about were soundssounds in the darkness and how terrifying the darkness was, like you could feel it, like it wasn't the absence of light but something with a life of its own, like the black holes astronomers are always talking about. Exactly, Alice replied, the darkness from which nothing escapes. You know, most creation myths begin with darkness of some kind, but we always take it to mean an absence of lightwhich means if we looked real hard, got our eyes accustomed to itwe'd begin to see the outlines of something. But that's not the darkness the myths are talking aboutthey're talking about the darkness from which nothing escapesa darkness that has a power and a hunger of its own, just like light does. Many of those myths also begin with sound, not light, especially those that have roots way back into prehistory. You didn't know that did you? No, I didn't. But you know, Joan said something like that once. She was doing a speaking and suddenly she said, In the beginning there was the sound, first the sound, and then body formed around it. I stopped dead in my tracks. I had no idea what it meant, but some part of me recognized it was true. Your body recognized it. Your body knows sound the way your mind knows logic. I think it has something to do with the fact that sound was very important to early humans, maybe more so than sight. It seems strange to us because we value sight so highly. We even express knowing in terms of seeing something is true. We are almost completely sight driven. In a modern culture, there is so much to seeTV, movies, bookswe can't stop looking. But early humans living in forests had to rely mainly on their hearing. If you don't believe me, go camping in a dense, heavily wooded wilderness, a place where you could be easily attacked by bears and wolves, snakes. Your eyes wouldnt be that helpful would they? What's more, they're completely useless at night, which is when most animals hunt. Maybe thats the reason, I replied, Im so attracted to the sound of poetry. Some part of my soul must belong to an earlier time. You know, most poets couldnt care less about the sound of poetryabout speaking it. Theyre completely devoted to the words on the page. Literaturethe writing of poetry is their only interest. You can see why Im odd man out in that world. Youre odd man out in more ways than you think, Franklin. Thanks. Its always nice to get an encouraging word. Dont get smart with me. I meant it to be encouragingbut youre too busy feeling sorry for yourself to see how different you are. Although I have to say you have so many contradictory traits its a wonder you dont implode. I remember you telling me once what one of your wives said about you. I thought it was an absolutely perfect description of what a darling mess you are.

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It was my second wife Pauline. She didnt mean it in a hard way; she was trying to be kind, trying to give me some insight into what it was like living with me. It was during our divorce. She turned to me and said, Let me tell you something that may help you, Justin. You look friendly, but youre notyou fool people. I looked at Alice. ThereI said ityou happy now? Maybe you should use that as your epitaph. What? ThereI said ityou happy now? No, not that; what your wife said, but slightly re-phrased: I looked friendly, but I wasntI fooled people. Honestly, Justin, I dont think you have any idea how funny you can be. Thanks. I wish I could say the same about you. If you think Im a strange bird, she shot back, you should take a good hard look at yourself one daybut I doubt thats even possible, you being you. You may look like an open door, but youre not. Youre an open door that likes to close without any notice whatsoever. Im sure youve bent a lot of fingers in your time, darling. Youre like one of those wiggling, flashy artificial baits that drive fish absolutely batty. Maybe thats why the psychic world finds you irresistible. Ill tell you this: the Spirits not finished with you. Not by a long shot. Great. Thats just what I wanted to hear. By the way, if you hear anything, let me know. I mean, dont keep it to yourself. Oh dont worry, I wont. she cackled. It was wicked. Listen Alice, I still dont really understand why the Spirit had to give the dream to Diane in the first place. The Spirit could just as well have given the dream to you and you could have told me about it, right? Right. But it didnt happen that way. My best guess is the Spirit chose Diane not only because she could handle the dreamwith a little help from mebut also because you wouldnt dismiss her. If I had told you the dream, you wouldnt have listened to me in quite the same way Youre right. Im not afraid of her like Im afraid of you. Shes more like me. I implicitly trust everything she says. I knew she had been through something horrible as soon as I heard her voice. When she finally managed to recreate the dream for me, I sensed that whatever else it was, the dream also seemed to be a confirmation of a mysterious speaking that had come to me years ago. I never completely understood that speaking until Diane told me her dream because it was about the same thing: sound and the interlinked mystery of Creation and Destruction, but in particular the interlinked mystery of Creation and Destruction at the heart of poetry. Its particularly apparent in a speaking because the poem is there and then its suddenly not there. It creates a worldand then that world disappears into the flux of timemuch like the coming and going of the ecstatic moment itself. Don't jump all over me about this, but I think the Spirit let Diane feel the essence of that mysteryits very heart. I think the Spirit wanted Diane to pass

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that feeling on to me because the Spirit wanted me to know that the mystery of Creation and Destruction feels just like Poetry feels. I saw it as a confirmation that the act of poetry, at its very heart, is part of the energy of that mystery. Heres the speaking. Its very short:
Speaking has a sound like no other. It is the sound of beauty, and the sound of truth. It is the sound the soul makes every time the world is born, and every time it dies.

If you take the speaking at pretty much face value, I continued, its saying that the sound, or feeling, implicit in the ecstatic moment of poetry is what the interlinked mystery of Creation and Destruction feels like. In todays rational world, that is a very radical statement about the nature of poetrythat it is the souls way of allowing us to feel that mystery. I hate to keep saying this, but sometimes you amaze me, Franklin. Yeah, I know. But what about the man in Bostondo you have any idea what his dream was about? I told you, I have no idea. Only he could tell you. All I can say is that his dream had the same movement: darkness, death and birth, birth and death, all with horrific beauty and power. So in the case of the man in Boston you could say that unlike me, he got to communicate with God directly, like Moses. Wrong. The man in Boston had me between him and the Spirit. Let me set you straight on a few things. She took a pad and pencil out of her purse and slowly printed the word God as GOD, and said, Thats the GOD I want you to focus on. First of all, (and here she pointed to the word GOD) the Spirit is not GOD, the Spirit is only a Face of GOD. A very primal Facebut still a Face. Second, GOD doesnt talk to anybody. What do you mean God doesnt talk? GOD doesnt talk because GOD, or whatever you want to call the unknowable driving Creation, is utterly beyond our comprehension. We dont like to admit that, but it is. We cant even begin to conceive of GOD, let alone talk about GOD. What do you mean? People are always talking about God. Theyre not talking about what Im talking about; theyre talking about something else.

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What? A very powerful intermediary. What kind of intermediary? Take your pick. You can think of them as primal spirits, but theyre usually called Faces, or Voices of GOD. Thats the God we get to see and hear. There are hundreds of them: the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, the God of Jesus, the God of Mohammad, the God of Joseph Smith. Want some more? I had never heard the psychic world described that way, but when I did, all kinds of doors opened for me. She went on to talk about Buddhism and Islam and Christianity and Judaism as being religions based on partial visions of the Other World. I asked her where she had learned all this and she told me she began studying psychic and spiritual traditions during her travels as a young woman, and that she had continued those studies through reading. I read a lot, she said. It was hard for me to picture Alice as a traveling scholar, but she knew what she was talking about. What was particularly impressive was the way she described psychic events like Jesus Transfiguration, or Buddhas Enlightenment, not only from a scholarly, cultural perspective, but also from her own personal experiences. She got right down to the psychic grit. And she didnt mind making it dog simple if the situation called for it. When I told her I thought I understood that the Faces of God were one step removed from GOD, she looked at my eyes for a moment and said, It might help if you thought of it a little differently than how youre thinking about it now. She took the pad and drew two parallel lines. And then she put the word GOD above the top line and the word Us below the bottom line, and the words Other World between them.

GOD _____________________ Other World __________________________________ Us Then she said, The lines dont really exist; its just a way of making a point, and the point is this: we never get to see GOD because GOD is totally beyond human comprehension. But theres a kind of intermediary world between us, between this world, and GOD. Some people call that world the Other World, or heaven or hell or Nirvana, or the psychic world, there are a hundred names, but its really a kind of buffer world. Its a world we dont really know in the way we know our world because its non-physical and beyond our control. But sometimes we get a

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chance to visit it, and sometimes its inhabitants visit us. We call the inhabitants of that world, spirits, ghosts, Gods, visitors, angels, aliens, allies, you name it. I prefer spirits, or guides. You might think of them as carriers of the intent of GOD. You can talk to them, just like the prophets did, and theyll talk back, but you have to remember its always in metaphor, so it can be very difficult understanding exactly what they mean. The only sure thing we can say about the Other World is that we sense its existence and we sense an order to it that we dont fully comprehend. Oh, there have been some throughout time who say they have been there and comprehended that order, that it has been revealed to them by God: Moses and Joseph Smith are pretty good examples. The only problem is all of their descriptions are completely different. As far as God talking to them goes, theyre not lying, theyre telling the truth, but theyve mistaken a powerful spirit for GOD. Dont get me wrongthose spirits, those Faces, can be very powerful: they can change civilizations, but theyre not GOD. Let me give you another example. Right now, you pretty much know where youre going when you leave me and youll probably get there. Probably. But when you go to sleep tonight you dont have the slightest idea what youll dream about. I could lay you any odds youd guess wrong. Thats because when you dream, you enter a different world and you have to play by its rules, and despite your college education, you dont have the chance of a snowball in hell of figuring them out.

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Chapter 28: The Beatles and the Witnesses June 2005, Sarasota I woke up one morning completely panicked. Id had a very disturbing dream about Alice. I knew it was important. What was particularly striking was the setting of the dreamthe George Washington Bridge. As a young man, I lived in Washington Heights, the Manhattan neighborhood where the bridge terminates. I used to regularly take evening walks on it; I could see all the way to the Battery and sometimes beyond. I never tired of the viewit was absolutely breathtaking, especially at dusk, when midtown changed to a dense forest of light. One evening, as I began walking back towards the Heights, I spotted a small metal enclosure I had never noticed before. I looked down through the barred gate and saw a series of steep stairways and platforms that seemingly led down to nowhere. I scaled the five-foot gate and worked my way down. I was stunned to find myself in an enormous concrete room the size of a small cathedral. What really stunned me, however, was not the size of the roombut what was inside it. High above my head I could see one of the bridges huge main cables entering the room and then splaying out in a fan of about fifty smaller cables that were bolted onto a huge steel semi-circle jutting out from the monstrous anchoring block embedded in one of the walls. It was eerily beautiful, like a giant lyre. Then it came to me: I was inside one of the rooms encasing the monstrous concrete blocks used to anchor the main cables. Until then, I had poetically assumed the huge towers somehow held up the bridges weight, but that was a poets fantasy. In reality, the bridge set up a giant tug of war between the monstrous anchoring blocks, the towers, and the cables holding up the roadways. To insure the anchoring held, the weight carried by each main cable was spread out onto the fifty or so anchoring points on the steel semi-circle. The result was a lyre to end all lyres. Pythagoras would have danced a jig. The wonder of that evening never left me. So forty years later, when I found myself climbing down into that same cavernous room in my dream, it didnt seem at all strange that Alice would be waiting for me. She motioned for me to come over to where the frame of the giant lyre was attached to the anchoring block and pointed to a small tunnel that had been bored into the block. It looked too small to enter, but she clambered into it and yelled for me to follow. I could hear her cackling. I was terrified Id be trapped, but crawled in anyway. The tunnel was very tight. I was shaking when I crawled out. I wanted to strangle Alice. Then I saw I had come out into an identical room. Or had I come back to

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the first room? I couldnt tell. The main cable above my head was again splayed out like a lyre of about fifty smaller cables. Alice again pointed to a tunnel bored into the anchoring block holding the frame of the lyre. This time, it was about the size of a tennis ball. The term worm hole popped into my head, the term physicists use to describe theoretical paths to parallel universes. Alice motioned for me to follow before disappearing into it. I could hear her cackling. She sounded very far away. I refused to follow. The tunnel was insanely small. I was sure there were even smaller worm holes ahead, maybe an infinite number of them. I was frozen with fear. I didnt want to go, but I also didnt want to be left alone. I began to bang frantically on the splayed cables, one after the other, like I was playing scales, and then the dream ended. The bridge was obviously a reference to Alice being a psychic bridge, but what the dream really wanted to show me was what held those bridges up: the endless anchoring lyres within the endless rooms. I took the lyres to be a metaphor for art, and in particular ancient oral poetry, which was chanted to the strumming of a lyre. I took the rooms to represent what they almost always represent in dreams: completeness, wholeness. The dream seemed to be confirming that bridging the conscious and unconsciousbringing them togetheris made possible by those endless lyrerooms, which I took as metaphors for the kind of ongoing wholeness made possible through the creation of poetry. There was one last level to the dream. Constricting tunnels are a well-known dream metaphor for the birth experiencea reminder of our terrifying journeys down the birth canal. The dream was predicting that Alice would be guiding me through a rebirth, and it wasnt going to be an easy one. Jung saw these rebirths occurring whenever the contents of the unconscious become conscious. Each time that happens, our worldview changessometimes dramatically, sometimes very slightly. Jung called this ongoing, integrative process individuation, and saw it as the goal of life. Creating a poem, of course, supplies one such avenue for integration, something the dream emphasized by showing the lyre to be central to each room. I took it to be a confirmation of everything I believed about poetry. I wasnt quite prepared, however, for the terrifying rebirth the dream was predicting. I had always seen Alice as someone who had appeared to help me unravel the myth. The myth, however, played no part in the dream. The dream was solely about my transformation. Not only was the dream telling me my rebirth would be a terrifying experience, it was also telling me that I would not

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continue with Alice. I would have a failure of nerve and attempt to seek refuge in art alone (playing scales on the lyre). The dream also clearly indicated how afraid I was of Alice. This didnt completely surprise me. Alice had always made me more than a little nervousI had absolutely no idea where her bottom was. The dream didnt do anything to lessen my apprehension. Nor was I really clear as to how much of the dream was truly prophetic and how much of it simply reflected that fear. Either way, the dream indicated I was in way over my head. This dilemma was further complicated by the fact that Alice had appeared almost insanely devilish in the dream, whereas in real life she had always been immensely helpful, not to mention rational. I wanted to discuss the dream with her, but I also felt I needed some time to sort it out. It made no sense to endanger a valuable friendship by suddenly freaking out and calling her a witch. Besides, I had other problems. I was still trying to figure out the meaning of the Spirits latest messages about the Witnesses. One avenue I had been following was that The Witnesses know everything, meant the meaning of the myth was completely contained in the myth itself and that the insights of othersas well as any later personal insights I thought valid extensions of the mythwerent needed to understand it. It didnt say the subsequent insights were wrong, simply that they werent needed. This was enormously helpful, because one of the problems I kept encountering was the continued appearance of clarifying visitations, most of which I havent included in this book. (For the curious, a few of them are in the on-line Appendix.) The problem was they turned out to be a two-edged sword, because the clarifications often turned out to be not only confusing, but contradictory. As in any good party where people keep dropping in, I decided it was time to shut the door. Diane agreed with me. She told me once an opening was established between the two worlds, especially a new one like mine, all kinds of spirits tended to collect around the edges, and the wrong ones could do some real damage. What kind of damage? I asked. You dont want to know. But if you think youre confused now, you have no idea. You cant stop them from coming in, but you can neutralize them by ignoring them. Stick them in the freezer is my advice. As time progressed, though, something kept telling me I should reopen the door on The Witnesses know everything. So I did. The fact of the matter is you can never really close the door on psychic events because you are always dealing with

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metaphors, and some of them only become apparent with time. That is the difference between insights gained through the conscious, logical mind (a process that insists there should be one solution) and insights gained via the unconscious mind. Messages from the psychic world are never a sure thing. As Joan once said to me, I always know what the voices are saying, but I'm never really sure what they mean. In short, you have to feel your way. You have to take your chances. One thing that kept bugging me was why Listen to the Witnesses and later on, The Witnesses know everything were messages about the Witnesses. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of them if for no other reason than they represented us: human beings. It was the Listeners who had me over a barrel. I could find no counterpart for them in any myth about man and creation. Perhaps there was one, buried somewhere, but I'd be damned if I could find it. And I was a very hard looker. Yet if there was anything I had learned, it was to pay very strict attention to what the voices were saying. It wasn't an accident the Spirit was re-directing me towards things I thought I completely understood. Obviously I didn't understand the Witnesses as well as I thought I did, because the Spirit seemed to be telling me I needed a course correctiona refocusing on the Witnesses because there was something Id missed the first time around. The problem, of course, was determining exactly what that something was. In our popular psychic movies, the hero always gets a specific message such as Take the path to the left, something as plain as cake. But that's Hollywood. Its one more indication of how little we understand the nature of psychic knowledge. In ancient Greece, great prophetic institutions like the Oracles were always consulted. For Greek leaders to take any significant action without doing so would be like a modern general going into battle without consulting his electronic intelligence: his satellites, radio intercepts, and the like. We often dismiss the Greeks estimation of the importance of the Oracles as irrational, yet at the same time we praise their politics and philosophy as being of the highest rational order. But you cant have it both wayseither the Greeks were rational or they werent. Alexander the Great is a good starting point. Its clear Alexander wasnt a New Age time-waster. He was a winner as we say today. Yet its also clear from the historical record that he valued oracular information perhaps even more than his own (and Aristotles) logical deductions. Why? Because the Oracles prophecies had proven to be true over and overits as simple as that. Alexander, however, was also aware that the oracular message was always in metaphorthe lingua franca of the unconscious. Modern thought has never come

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to grips with the critical ramifications of this fact. What it means is the interpretation of the metaphor was never a sure thingwhich is why so many interpreters lost their heads. And why Joseph in the Bible was elevated from stable boy to Pharaoh faster than Jack jumped over the candlestick. It also meant that Alexander always left his prophetic sessions with a tragic sense of his potential glory and his potential doom. He knew that propheciesfor all their ability to break through the fog of timewere highly volatile messages. To paraphrase Joan, Alexander and his interpreters always knew what the Oracles were saying, but were never really sure what the Oracles meant. This is something we have to come to terms with if we are to correctly evaluate psychic messages. It is a different way of knowing, one with its advantages and its limitations. To not take correct advantage of it is to be an ostrich. Forget that we can't explain how it works in modern scientific terms. The fact of the matter is that psychic insight does workwe have records of it throughout historybut we can't expect interpretation of it to be 100% accurate. Nor can we expect a logical prediction to be 100% accurate. A logical prediction, after all, is only as good as its assumptions. Both are ways of trying to understand what is happening to us and both have their limitations and advantages. I think many people do experience true psychic events, but unless the events are extremely powerful, those same people usually wind up convincing themselves it was a random hallucination because they've been conditioned to think psychic events don't exist. But hallucinations brought about by either mental illness or neural failure or chemicals like LSD are nothing like true psychic events, not even close. In a true psychic visitation, there is an overwhelming sense of a superior truth being communicated. It lacks the morbidity associated with illness and the distortion associated with chemicals and would never be confused with a hallucination by anyone who has experienced both. There's one more thing I want to say: physical phenomena and psychic phenomena operate completely differently. We cant reproduce or test psychic phenomena as we can physical events. All those laughable experiments of people trying to guess playing cards selected by someone in another room are good examples of how ignorant we are of the true nature of psychic events. We have absolutely no control over real psychic events. They occur when they occur. Nor can we simultaneously experience them with others, although that does happen on rare occasions. Examples would be the reported communal viewing of the Virgin at Fatima and Guadeloupe. Although religious people see these as miraculous spiritual events, I am really talking about the same thing when I call them psychic events. It is simply a matter of

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terminology. Some reported communal viewings of aliens would also fall into this category. Most of the time, however, we experience psychic events subjectively, within our own consciousness. Its no wonder that unless we have experienced a true psychic event ourselves, we find it hard to believe in them. Unless these things are kept in mind, any attempt to evaluate psychic events will fail. You have to be extremely strict and yet, strangely enough, very flexible in attempting to interpret psychic events. The idea is to be very strict in viewing the message, to never go outside it, yet be very flexible in the ways you allow yourself to interpret it. You have to feel your way. I tried to keep that dictum in mind as I re-examined the messages about the Witnesses. I had never considered the possibility that Listen to the Witnesses might have meant I should listen to the Witnesses in the same way as I might listen to the Beatles. Just listen to them, stupid. As soon as this thought entered my head I realized I had been concentrating on the written version of the myth in examining it because it was almost impossible to do that with the oral versions, as they didn't sit still for examination, only absorption. They affected the heart, not the head. What the Spirit was trying to tell me was to simply listen to the Witnesses in the same way as I would listen to the Beatlesas artists, as poetsbecause what the Witnesses had created was a poem, not a logical treatise. And finally, I saw The Witnesses know everything was not only telling me to stay within the confines of the myth, but it was also reminding me to remember who I was listening topoets, because poets in the preliterate world were those who knew. They were transmitters of knowledge, not rational knowledge like e=mc, but the kind of knowing that allows you to understand the meaning of love and hate and death and birth in every fiber of your body. I began re-listening to the oral myths and letting them enter me in the way only oral poetry canwhich is something I suggest for anyone who really wants to understand what I'm talking about. This was also something I expressed to Diane, telling her I had come to the conclusion I had been ignoring the obvious. She agreed. You can be very bright at times, Justin, but to tell you the truth you have a habit of thinking yourself into a corner more than anybody Ive ever met. By the way, I keep getting that Alice is here to help you understand why ISLAUUGH appeared to you; but I also keep getting Alice is probably as mystified as you. I was surprised by that, but it helped explain why sometimes when I asked Alice a question, shed come right back at me with a question of her own. I never occurred to me that Alice might also be in the dark. But then again, Id never asked.

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Chapter 29: Alice and Betty Fill in Some Blanks June 2005, Tavernier Diane may have been right about Alice being in the dark about ISLAUGGH, but I was in the dark about so many things I was starting to lose track of them. At the top of my list was why Alice and I had ever come together in the first place, and even more, why our meeting had set in motion a whole series of psychic events. It couldnt have been just an accident that right after I had finally managed to step through the looking glass into the world of speaking, Alice had suddenly appeared, followed in quick order by ISLAUUGH and then The Witnesses Log not to mention Betty with the spittle. Could all of those events have been random? Maybe, but they didnt feel random. They felt like movements in a much larger pieceexcept I had no idea what that larger piece was. To further confuse matters, I was now confronted with the fact that Alice had been a good friend of Kikis, maybe a best friend. How could that be and I was unaware of it? You would think Alices name would have come up in at least one of my conversations with Kiki and Pinga over the years. In theory, of course, there were a number of ways to explain it. I could have simply accepted it as a true statistical anomalyshit happens; forget about it. There was another possible explanation why Kiki had never mentioned Alice to me: she hadnt seen any reason to bring her up. After all, Kiki was her friend, whereas I was Pingas. At times, that explanation even made sense to me. Kiki was a very private person. You could see it in her eyes. They were very bright and very dark, like a birds, but they were always flicking back and forth, looking for a place to hide. Although I sensed early on she was psychic, she would never talk about it. Her world was her world, thank you very much. At least thats the feeling I always got. The fact that she couldnt always keep a cap on that world didnt mean she didnt try. One of the things that always amused me was how she tried to look as normal as possible whenever I was around. And then shed lose it, start hopping around, whistling like a finch or something like that. Despite all those reasonable explanations, I continued to look for evidence of a conspiracy, anything that could prove there was a reasonable explanation for at least some part of what was happening to me. Catching Pinga in the act of fooling me would undoubtedly have upset me, but at the same time, it would have made what was happening far less intimidating. Pinga, however, swore his mother had never spoken to him about an Alice Hickey, or anybody by the name of Alice as far as he could remember, and besides, he said, Kiki had a lot of friends hed never met. Maybe he was telling the truth or maybe he was having some fun with

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me, I couldnt tell. I have to believe thats why someone as overwhelmingly psychic as Kiki had doted on him so. She must have viewed him as a special gift: someone to help her turn the world upside down. It didnt matter that Pinga never spoke about his abilities. Leprechauns are never thinkers; theyre too busy pulling the rug out from underneath the world to be slowed down by anything like thinking. Not that youd ever catch them doing it anyway. Things just seem to happen whenever theyre aroundall by themselves, as they say. Thats why if you were to start up with Pinga about the psychic world, hed nod very politely and wait for the conversation to go away. Part of the tricksters bag of tricks is to make you believe hes not a trickster. This isnt a conscious maneuver; its part of the tricksters nature to blend in, to disappear among the apple carts hes upsetting: Who, me? But he wouldnt be so quick as to deny that whenever he was around, shit happened. Like any true leprechaun, Pinga was very aware he had an effect on the world. He knew there was something about him that made him succeed in what he did; he just didnt care to give it a name, or ask why, or how. He was too busy having fun. But he was also a trickster with a very quirky sense of humor. And there was nothing funnier to him than someone falling flat on his face. Especially yours truly, Mister Know It All. Maybe it was all those years of living with Kiki talking to the microwave that gave him his particular sense of humor; whos to say? One thing for sure, he seemed to have found in me the perfect dupe. I still hadnt recovered from The Red Light Bar. Not that there was anything malicious about him; Pinga was extremely goodnatured. But like any leprechaun, he couldnt stop tricking the world. That alone was sufficient reason for him to have arranged for Alice and Betty to come into my life. He knew enough of what I was going through, and he also knew enough about Alice and Betty's psychic giftsif he did actually know the two of them to have cooked up a dainty pie to set before the Spring. It wouldn't have been for any earthshaking reason eitherjust some fun. Nothing more complicated than that. Of course the other explanation I didnt even want to think about was that Pinga really didnt know Alice, exactly as he claimed, but that Alice had somehow discovered that Pinga and I were friends and approached him about having some fun with me. The possibility would have seemed like more low-hanging fruit to Pinga. Irresistible. I cant tell you the labyrinths I traveled down on that one. I eventually decided the only thing to do was put Pinga and Alice in the same pot and bring it to a boil.

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I told Alice I was planning to visit Pinga, and suggested she might want to come along. She hesitated at first, but when I mentioned I was dropping in first to see Betty at The Red Light Bar, she brightened up. It was one of the few times Id ever seen her become really excited. She was full of plans. She said shed make a basket lunch and insisted over my objections that we take her pickup. I had seen her pickup before. It was an old Ford flatbed that looked like it couldnt make it to the nearest corner, but there was no talking her out of it. Nor could I talk her out of driving it. Alice had to be around eighty, but no matter what I said, she was going to drive it, not me. To make matters worse, she didnt want to take I-75, but 41, the old two-lane blacktop. For old times sake, as she put it. As dangerous as the old road was, I was glad wed taken it because as soon as we started the truck up, it backfired and left an exhaust cloud so thick I was sure we were going to get a ticket. Fortunately, the police seemed to be focusing on I-75, so we made it to Miami without being stopped. It was only when we got to Dade Corners and pulled in for some gas that I saw the huge white exhaust trail stretching back into the Everglades. Alice said it reminded her of the space shuttle. Since there was no way to really prepare Alice for The Red Light Bar, I simply pulled open the door and let her float on in. The bar was exactly as Id remembered it. The same piss-smell suits were at the bar and Betty was at her usual perch with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. She was diddling with some figures in a ledger when I walked over and introduced myself. Betty, hi, its me, Justin Spring. Who? Dont you remember me? Why should I? She was really tanked. You spoke to me inside my mind a few years ago. So? Dont you remember me asking you how you did it? I dont remember a lot of things? But dont you remember me asking you what it meant? What what meant? What you meant when you said: No, not yet. Oh that. Youre him? Youre him? What the hell does that mean? What it means is I remember hearing someone talking about something like that. And watch your language, will you? Sorry. But who was it? Pinga Dentista? Beats me. I cant really remember. Whats your name again?

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Justin, Justin Spring. Want a beer? No, but this lady might, and I nodded towards Alice. Who are you, sweetie? Betty asked her. Alice, Alice Hickey. Youre Alice Hickey? Yes, I am. Oh, my God, youre Alice Hickey? I cant believe it. I imagined you different but I should have known those eyes, theyre just like Kiki said. It was clear Betty was in awe of Alice. As for Alice, she was immediately taken by Bettys good nature. You could see it in Alices eyes, the way they lost their steel and softened. It didnt matter that Betty was a complete drunk. Alice gave her a hug, pulled up a stool, and in a few minutes they were somewhere else. I dont think they even remembered I was standing there, so I headed towards the pink bathroom in the old part of the house. When I walked in, Travis was stooped over the sink, pulling hard on a wicked looking blunt. He heard me and looked up with a squint Wyeth would have paid to paint. He grinned and pulled out another. Ah, friendship. After about a half hour of Travis, I figured it was time to move on. I went back to the bar, and sure enough, the two of them were hugging and exchanging numbers. I was about to say goodbye to Betty, when I noticed little flecks of spittle on her lips and I looked over at Alice who raised her eyebrows as if to say, Well, what did you expect? We were halfway to Pingas before Alice said anything. Then, out of nowhere, she said, I like Betty. So I noticed. It doesnt matter shes a drunk. I didnt say that. But you were thinking it, werent you? Yes. Well, let me tell you this: Betty has a big heart. And she knows what its like to be a drunk. She told me after her father died, she painted everything red and changed all the bulbs to pink until the whole place glowed like a pink halo. She said it reminded her of the big pink playhouse she had as a girl where everything was always OK. She told me drunks liked the pink light because it calmed the killing in their heads. You know what else she told me? What? She and Kiki used to go on terrific benders. I never knew that part of Kiki. In all our years, shed have maybe half a beer, thats it. Anyway, she lived a different life with Betty. It seems theyd go out drinking until they couldnt stand up. She told me shed met Kiki when she went to Tavernier to pawn some things with

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Ernie, that it was one of those happy accidents. And just for the record, because Im sure youre writing all this down, she cackled when she told me. I can hear it. I bet you can. Anyway, it seems the locals used to pawn their wedding rings with Betty for a few extra bucks, but they seldom came back for them, so after a few years the rings began to pile up. She was afraid of taking them to a real pawnshop because theyd figure shed stolen them. Then she heard about a guy in Tavernier who bought gold and didnt ask. So she went down and showed Ernie some of the rings and he said OK, I can handle all you got, gold teeth too, which she thought was kind of funny until a few days later one of the drunks asked her if shed give him fifty bucks for his gold tooth. After that, the teeth began pouring in. The way Betty tells it, shed go down to Tavernier every few months with a small bag of rings and teeth, and then one day, for some reason, she hung around talking to Ernie and out of nowhere she felt something so strong she lifted right out of her body through the roof and when she came out the other side she saw Kiki on the sidewalk looking up at her, grinning like a kid. Betty said she and Kiki became thick as thieves after that. Every time she went down to see Ernie, the two of them would drive to Miami and go to this small, out-of-the way Brazilian bar down by the Reefer docks and do some serious drinking. For a couple of years it was cuba libres, and then one day Betty says Kiki switched to these little cane-rum drinks called pinga, which Betty thought funny because that was Kikis sons name too, so she asked her if there was any connection between the drink and her son and Kiki said no it was just a coincidence and then she started to cackle. It was wicked according to Betty. After that, as soon as Kiki entered the bar, shed start yelling out, Pinga, Pinga! to the black bartender, and hed come running over to the table like his life depended on it. And then shed start putting them away. They were ugly drinks according to Betty. Anyway, the two of them would spend the entire afternoon drinking and laughing. Cackling if you like. Betty said she loved being with Kiki because she could be the drunk she really was, and thats exactly how she put it too. Betty told me the bartender had just come over from Cape Verde, and he was terrified of Kiki. It seems she got really loud one day and he came shuffling over sideways like a crab whispering, The manager would appreciate it if you could be not be so loud, and she said something back to him in Portuguese that turned him absolutely white. Betty said it took the pink right out of her too. She said the bartender was never the same after that. He was so afraid of Kiki that he never took his eyes off her after that, not for a moment. What do you think she said to the bartender? I asked. I have no idea, but I dont think it was what she said, it was how she said it. Well then, how do you think she said it? Its hard to say. Kiki was capable of completely letting go of her conscious self, just like that.

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What happened then? Only her instincts remained; everything was directed by her unconscious. You might say she became like that famous farm chicken in the fifties; you know the oneit had its head chopped off but continued to live for years. Jesus. What does a headless chicken have to do with how Kiki sounded? Its a metaphor for no mind. I thought youd get that, being a poet and all that. I did, but I still dont understand what that has to do with how she sounded. And dont tell me she sounded like a headless chicken. I have no idea what she sounded like, because I wasnt there. Betty was. Maybe she sounded like the gates of hell opening up, or maybe the gates of heaven. The only one who knows for sure is the bartender. You should look him up. You might learn something.

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Chapter 30: BruderMann June 2005, Tavernier As we approached Tavernier, I could tell Alice wasnt looking forward to the visit. Pinga was extremely charming, but from the moment we sat down, it was clear Alice didnt want to be there. It wasnt because of Kikis absence thoughit was Pinga. I could see it in her eyes. They were absolutely flat. Whatever qualities Kiki had seen in Pinga didnt seem to be apparent to Alice at all. As for Pinga, it was clear he hadnt been prepared for anything quite like Alice. As time went on, he seemed to lose his normal bravado and began responding to Alice as if he were a small, apprehensive child. There were no funny comebacks, no sharp quipsit was almost as if Alice were an aunt who had the goods on him. The change was unsettling. I cant really say why, but right then and there, looking at the two of them staring at each other, I gave up trying to figure out if they were involved in some sort of trickery. I simply lost interest in that kind of thinking. It was possible, of course, that they were in some kind of cahoots, and it was equally possible that Pinga had colluded with Betty at the Red Light Bar, and maybe he had even set up that whole thing about ISLA LARGO and who knows what else, but it suddenly seemed inconsequential. We never really know why we do what we do. We like to think its the result of our conscious decisions, but the real truth is exactly the opposite: our conscious decisions are just the afterglow, the thin shimmer on the surface of the unconscious. Realizing that is the beginning of wisdom. My guess is that Alice came to understand this at a very early age. The world of spirits, the unconscious, the world of the soul, was a world she actually lived in, just like she lived in this one. It wasnt like the relatively safe life I was living straddling the borderline. Alice would be the first to tell you she didnt have the slightest idea why she was directed towards someone, only that it was her fate to do so. She just let it happen, let the Spirit move through her. She said to me once, The only thing I really know is that when the Spirit moves through me, I become rooted in both worlds. For a moment, the top of my head lifts off and I become who I really am. Living in that state, or close to it, seemed to me what life was all about. Any truly creative person knows that. Even someone like Pinga was attentive to the comings and goings of the trickster spirit. Thats why he was good at what he did. But as I had found out over the past five years, other spirits have a way of coming in once the door has been opened. Pinga may have thought he was laying a fast one on me from time to time, but he may also have been opening the door for other spirits. Who knows? There may well have been something besides his trickster spirit

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working through him; something meant to guide me. Pinga would have been the last to know. On our way back to Sarasota, I also realized that my almost obsessive concern with trickery had been due to my uncertainty about the psychic visitations themselves. After almost five years, however, the cumulative effect of those events had dissolved my skeptics eye. What was happening was real. That I couldnt completely explain it didnt seem to make any difference. In the midst of thinking about all this, I kept remembering how Pinga had squirmed every time Alice called him Ernest and I started to laugh because he had always been so secretive about his birth name. Maybe calling him Ernest was just an old habit, a reflex, something shed picked up from Kiki, but something told me shed done it on purpose, just to bust his nuts. When she asked me what I was laughing about, I told her and she shrugged and let out a small hairy cackle, but then she quickly became lost in thought. Finally she said, Pingas dying; hes shriveling up. He knows somethings wrong, but he doesnt know exactly what. Kiki was right about himhe has no introspective qualities at all. Im afraid its the flip side of being a trickster. The problem with tricksters is they can become too attracted to turning the world upside down, and believe me, it is a powerful attraction. The trickster is the one who shows us that the world is not to be known, that knowing is an illusion. He offers no solution to that except the possibility of joining him in laughter. Hidden within our laughter is a terrifying recognition of our situation. Thats why we have to honor comics as well as poets. The tricksters world was so attractive to Pinga that he never questioned it. Why should he? Life was great. Some of that has to do with the rewards of the trickster life, but most of it has to do with the light that Kiki supplied him all his life. The only problem was that when Kiki died, the light died too. What do you mean by light? Think of it as love. In this case you could say its a mothers love, because the two are almost indistinguishable. But you dont have to be a mother to possess light, nor to let it pass through you to someone else. No one can really tell you where light comes from. There are lots of stories of course. The Koran and the Bible are two of them. Light just happens. You might say that when we possess light, when it comes to us, when it visits us, we become rooted in the mystery of our existence. We feel we belong. Pinga felt something of that because of the light Kiki was supplying him. When that light disappeared, Pinga was lost. He didnt know where to go to get that feeling back, that light. As she was speaking, I realized I had experienced that same feeling when my own mother diedexcept I didnt see myself so much as being lost but suddenly at a

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crossroad. I said so to Alice. She replied, Thats because you were already searching for the light. Your mothers death just accelerated your need to find it. Why is Pingas case any different? Pinga never bothered to look beyond his tricks. He took the light Kiki supplied for granted, like the air. Your case is different. You never took your poetry for granted, nor your life. You were always searching for the light, maybe unsuccessfully, but thats another matter. What Fate is challenging Pinga to see is that being lost is not the end, but the beginning. Most of us experience being lost as a crisis, but its always worth remembering that the Chinese character for crisis is made up of the characters for danger and opportunity. Worrying about it only gets you so far. At some point, you have to step up to the line. That takes nerve, because its never a sure thing. You have to take your chances, because all you ever really sense is that the light pulling you forward is true, that it will lead you to your true path. But theres never any guarantee how that journey will end. Thats why its called the heros journey: it takes a special kind of nerve. For most of us, finding our true path can be fraught with difficulties. Its not something we can consciously decide to do, like going to the grocery store for a quart of beer. To find it, we have to have courage, but even more, the ability to surrender, because surrendering is the only way we have of aligning ourselves with the Stream, which is the source of all true paths. There is never any guarantee, however, that the result of that alignment will be a long, happy life, only that it will be complete. Ask Jesus, or Alexander the Great, or Joan of Arc. You took that chance when you sensed you should be speaking your poems, not writing them, even though you didnt really know why you felt that way. Oh I know you had your reasons at the time; I read all about that when I Googled you and read your book, but you and I both know those werent the real reasons. They were just a way of explaining to yourself what was beyond your comprehension at the time: that you were about to take a journey that would ultimately transform the way you saw the world. All you initially felt, however, was that vague sense of wanting something different, that the existing artistic avenues werent enough, but you had no real idea why. Youd been writing poems all your life, thats the way the world wants poetry to be created today. But when you stepped into the world of speaking, you eventually came to see that you were going away from the poetry we know today to a more primal poetryand that there was no turning back. That journey is still going on and for some reason Ive become a part of it. But I dont have any more idea than you do where youre going, or for that matter, where Im going. Thats very reassuring Alice, but you dont seem very lost to me. You seem extremely sure of yourself. There doesnt seem to be any end to what you know.

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Having knowledge doesnt mean you cant get lost. I can testify to that from personal experience. Knowledge helps, but it can only go so far. If I know a great deal about psychic matters, its because I wanted to know why I was so different. It led me down many paths, some of them you dont want to know about. They were terrifying. Even as a very young girl I knew others didnt consider me normal, but I also knew there were others like me, maybe not exactly the same, but close enough to make me think there were two races of human beings: those who lived only in this world and those of us who lived in two worlds. I started to question things seriously in my late teens. I had just married my first husband, Terry. He had a strong interest in my gifts. I think it was the reason he was initially attracted to me. God knows his parents thought he was crazy for even thinking about me, but he didnt seem to care. Terry was like thathe had his own mind. When I told him Id like to find out more about the psychic world and who I really was, he said hed do whatever it took. We traveled through Asia and Africa and Europe for almost ten years. Money wasnt a problem. Some of it came from Terrys parents because they were extremely wealthy, but Terry had plenty of his own. He was a born wheeler/dealerjust like Pinga. He was always working up schemes wherever we went usually import/export dealsand they always seemed to pay off. If I wanted to study a particular spiritual or shaman tradition, Terry would hire the best translator he could find. Sometimes I studied in monasteries, sometimes universities, sometimes one on one with holy men and gurus. Many of the universities, you know, wanted me to matriculate and wouldnt allow me to just sit in. But I just wanted to listen, ask questions; I wasnt interested in getting a Ph.D. I knew more about the psychic world and what it means to live a psychic life than most of the people teaching the courses. Sometimes Terry would have to make a gift, but sometimes, like at Edinburgh and Stuttgart, they were very stubborn about it. I quickly learned to solve that by visiting the professor in question and explaining I was trying to understand my psychic gifts. If that didnt do it, Id start telling him pretty much what he was thinking and keep going until he finally said yes. Ill tell you one thing, those particular professors always kept an eye on me after that. If I raised my hand during the lecture, theyd stop mid-sentence and wait for me to speak. Their answers were always very complete. I had a wonderful time during those years. I even had a chance to talk with Carl Jung one afternoon in Zurich. Hed heard about me from a colleague. At the time, Jungs thoughts werent in wide, popular circulation, but I had heard enough about him to want to see him. When we got together, he couldnt take his eyes off my eyes. But his were very soft, like a childs, so I didnt mind. He was a very thorough talker if you know what I mean, a real explainer, with verbal footnotes no less. Once in a while, though, hed relax and it was almost like talking to Kiki, except he wasnt as much fun. Maybe you should have asked him to yodel like the holes in their cheese. What

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did he think about you? Was he surprised? Professionally interested is more like it. He told me he wanted to talk to me directly because he liked getting the details firsthand, devil and all. He said the closest counterpart to me he had personally encountered were psychic healers who did nothing physically, but somehow allowed healing energy to flow through them into another person. The difference, as he saw it, was the form of the psychic energy that flowed through us, or to be more precise, and he was a very precise man, the form that psychic energy eventually took. He saw both the healers and me as people who were somehow able to open ourselves to specific archetypes until we became numinous, or God-like, which was pretty much on the money as far as I was concerned, only we didnt get to stay God-like for very long, maybe a couple of seconds. He felt that psychic healers opened themselves to an archetype he called Well-Being, or Balance, or at least thats what the translator finally came up with. Jung had a Swiss word for it a mile long. As for me, he said I was somehow opening myself to the Prophecy archetype. He said that in very early cultures, people like me were prized as advisors to kings, especially in critical situations, where they needed directives from the Gods. What made us especially prized, he said, was that the king got the message directly and not through the mouth of a prophet. It seems seers in those days were always under suspicion of intrigue against the throne. We talked of a great many things, but it wasnt a one-way affair. He had his interests, but I had mine as well, and what I wanted to know was the depth of his psychic experiences: I had to know if I was talking to a scholarly dilettante or the real thing. Thats when I found out he went pretty deep. What surprised me later, when his books became available in translation, was how close to the vest his writings were in describing those experiences. I think Jung was always afraid of being considered a crackpot. Thats a very Swiss concern: fitting in. He told me he had briefly considered becoming an artist as a young man, but he already sensed how unfathomable the psychic world was, and feared being dismissed as just another crazy artist. Like you. Dont remind me. You know, it always struck me as strange that he didnt consider his mandalas art. I eventually came to the same conclusion as you: he was afraid of giving free rein to the artistic side of his personality. The mandala form itself is primal enough, but to allow it to become art you have to surrender to it, not just use it as a tool. Ive seen some of his mandalas; theyre very controlled, artistically speaking. Where he had to go in his head is where the New Guinea tribesman go when they paint their faces, but I think that was completely off-limits for him. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that he seems to have had a view of art that was too confining, too intellectual. For him, Goethe was art, and Wagner, but not his mandalas. But from my point of view, the fact that they come without any noticeable conscious intervention would make the mandalas a very pure art, a very pure conveyor of the souls song.

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I think you may be right about Jung on that. He was a radical when it came to studying human consciousness, but he wasnt on most other things. It was the Swiss in him; he couldnt help it. I spent almost two hours with him, and when my time was about up, I began joking it was too bad the Spirit hadnt chosen to speak. I dont think he knew how to respond to me at first, he was so correct, and then he saw me grinning and he began to chuckle, but there was a good bit of the devil in it, almost a cackle, so I began teasing him about his earlier pronunciation of the word cracker, because it had come out something like krakaurand right then, as we were both cackling, I felt the Spirit moving through me and then it happened: I could hear the Spirit speaking through me except it was so muffled I couldnt make out the words but I could hear the soundthere was something caring about it if you know what I mean, I could feel itand then I came back to being me and Jung was sitting there looking at me like God had just spoken to him, which in a manner of speaking was what had happened. Clearly something profound had occurred. Jung was very experienced in these matters, but he was still deeply affected. Whatever the Spirit said had simply overwhelmed him. I knew he needed some time alone. And so did he. Maybe days. I said it might be best if I gave him some privacy. He nodded and went to open the door for me, and as he did, he tried to say something but couldnt, his lips moved but no words came out, and then he took both my hands in his for I dont know how long and then he suddenly moved in against the side of my face and whispered something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. What was it? I cant tell you. It was a sound Id never heard before, a sound that came from God knows where. But what did it sound like? It was somewhere between an animal sound and speaking in tongues, but I cant be any more exact than that. I knew it was my one true name. How did you know that? I just knew it. Thats hardly an answer Alice. Listen Franklin, only God can make a sound like that. If you want to know what it sounded like, ask Godor take a ticket and stand in line like everybody else. I should have known better. I asked her if Jung had ever got back in contact with her and she said yes, months later she received a brief note describing what the Spirit had said, which was BruderMann, with the two words running together. Alice said the sound of the words matched the rhythm in her memory, and that Jung had also translated BruderMann for her as BrotherMan, with the words running together as they had in the Swiss. Then Alice said, Jung told me that the sound of the voice had simply

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overwhelmed him because it was so caring, almost like a mother explaining something to a child, and that he had immediately understood what the Spirit meant: that the unconscious was the brother of man, the brother of consciousnessand that it was a brother with all the classic qualities of a brother: competitive, suspicious, friendly, jealous, loyal, lovingand that it should be honored as such and treated not as an abstract entity but exactly as we would a brother, and that the two were inseparable parts of our humanity. Jung said it made all the other confirmations of his work almost inconsequential. Jung said his second insight followed right after that, and I guess it was something that bothered Jung all his life and that was his tendency to forget that those he was studying, even the most abject schizophrenics, were his brothers, not just objects to satisfy his curiosity. Sometimes Jung was too bright. He was sixty or so when I saw him and he still had a lot of the bright boy in him. He wanted what he wanted so badly he forgot about the feelings of others. Like you do. And dont look at me that way: Im not any better, probably worse.

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Chapter 31: Leaning With Fate July 2005, Sarasota It seems Alice hadnt finished with Pinga, because one day over coffee she said to me, Pingas still on my mind. He reminds me a bit of Terry: charming, funny, always in control, always ready to wheel and deal. But right now Pinga is having trouble keeping his head above water. Hes feeling a need for something different in his life, but hes confused, afraid to act on it, because its too vague. He doesnt trust it. Hes become too accustomed to the hard edge of tricks. He doesnt know that a new Pinga will be born out of the ashes of his own death, one who will possess a new kind of knowing, one beyond the truth of tricks. At some stage of our lives, almost everyone senses there are other ways of knowing. For some, that feeling is very strongfor others, it is so weak as to barely be there. Yet few are ever willing to surrender to what they are sensing. It seems far too risky. What Pinga has in his favor is that he doesnt mind risk; in fact he thrives on it. But this is a different kind of risk. Whether he takes it or not depends on how much he can begin to lean with his unfolding fate. What do you mean? Transformations like these are very mysterious. Basically, its out of our hands. All we can really do is surrender to the world of the soul. But Pinga may be incapable of taking that kind of risk. Well see. Not only does he have to turn inward and ask himself: Where am I going? which he is probably doing at this very moment, but he also has to wait for something to appear, something I like to call a wisp of fate, and then he has to act on iteven if he can barely feel it. Thats going to be the hard part for him, because it can be a long wait. And when the call comes, he has to let go of everything and surrender to it. Completely. Pingas at the point where he has to act. If he can align himself with one of those wisps, surrender to it, hell begin to feel it telling him his fate is special, the Gods are with him, that he has found his true path. It is that promise that will keep him going, no matter how difficult things become, just as its kept you going all these years. Thats what I meant by saying Pinga has to begin to lean with his unfolding fate. Its what Hamlet feels as he swims toward his death, and what we feel as we swim along with him: that we belong, that we are somehow a meaningful part of an unknowable mystery. I asked her why she kept saying Pinga might not make it. Pingas not a loser, I added, He has as much of a chance as anyone, maybe better. Youre right, she replied, hes not a loser, hes a winner in every sense of the word, except the one that counts. One of the reasons Pinga mistrusts what hes feeling now is that he never had to handle feelings of that nature. Kiki told me she knew exactly who he was as soon as he was born, and she knew exactly what his

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weakness was going to be: a mistrust of anything not in the tricksters world. She worried what would happen to him after her death and she had good reason, because his world fell apart. Oh, he was still the same clever trickster, but now something was missing, his tricks remained tricks: they didnt go anywhere. They didnt have the energy to change lives. What do you mean? Kiki supplied him with all kinds of energy, or light that allowed his tricks to sometimes rise above being merely tricks, although I suspect he never was aware of that. What did they become then? They became tricks that offered a promise of wisdom. What does that mean? It means that the energy behind the trick keeps going and that the person being tricked doesnt merely come to the realization that things are never what they seem, but somehow, and this is the mystery of light, somehow an entirely new world begins to form out of the ashes of the old one. Betty and that whole ISLA LARGO thing are good examples. I dont know whether Pinga set you up or not, but if Kiki had been alive at the time and supplying him with light, you probably wouldnt have become so hung up trying to figure out if you had been tricked or not. Something would have allowed you to let it fall by the wayside so you could begin to see the true immensity of what was happeningthat a gathering was taking place to celebrate your approaching death and re-birth. Youre right: I couldnt see the forest for the trees. It took me a long time to let go. Luckily for you, the light eventually came. Pinga hasnt been that lucky. Maybe hes noticed that some of the energy behind his tricks has disappeared, and then again maybe he hasnt. Maybe he thinks its because hes not feeling well, or maybe it just stopped for a whilethat shit happens, as you like to say. On the other hand, he may sense he has to do something. Why dont you speak to Pinga about this? I asked Alice. Why dont you? Because Im not the one saying what the problem is. Maybe youre not saying it, but you know it. She was right. But before I could say anything, she added, It wouldnt make any difference who told him. Why not? Because hes not ready to hear it. How do you know that? I can feel it. But how does he become ready to hear it? No one knows. Some people call it grace, or luck, but whatever you call it, it feels like lighta very special light: one that opens all the doors. But it always

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arrives in its own time, and nothing you or I can possibly do will ever change that. Only Pinga is capable of doing something about it. He has to begin leaning with his fate. Alices harshness startled me. I had never seen her be so cold. So what if Pinga had been a playboy of sorts? You could say the same thing about Betty Hagan letting herself become a drunk. But Betty had never received that kind of dismissal from Alice; in fact, Alice had embraced her like a long lost sister. There was something more to Alices feelings about Pinga than met the eye, and though I wasnt quite sure what it was, something kept telling me it had more than a little to do with her ex-husband. Yet I knew Alice was right, because I had faced the same crisis as Pinga. Everyone does sooner or later, or maybe it never stops. It seemed to me, though, that Id been luckier, simple as that. For some reason, I had begun to lean with my fate. If you were to ask me how or why, Id have to tell you I really couldnt say, but it was in some way linked to the fact that I had begun working with women. I think thats somewhat natural for artists, especially those who see poetry as more than literature, who see poetry as a spiritual journey, as the way the soul speaks to us. So it made sense that I would become more attracted to women. Women are the keepers of the soul. That closeness gradually allowed me to find my way. I remember a very early speaking I called I Speak like an Indian. At the time, one of the phrases was a mystery to me:
When I was a boy, I knew what the women knew, but I knew it differently.

I knew the speaking was correct, but I didnt know why. Its meaning eventually became clear to me as my speakings grew deeper, more unconscious. When that happened, they created a kind of psychic gateway for me, the kind that many women seem to have as a matter of course, simply by being alive. It was at that point that I began to see poetry not as an end in itself, not as a form of literature, but as the way the soul speaks to us, and the way we speak back. Poetry is a very special gateway to the souls world. It is the first and most primal gateway, one that reunites our conscious and unconscious minds in a way that is impossibly beautiful and impossibly true. It roots us. It tells us we belong.

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Chapter 32: Alice in Mexico August 2005, Alamos Alice had asked me several times about the possibility of meeting Joan, but I kept putting her off because I couldnt face another grueling trip across the Sonora desert. As far as Joan coming to the states, from the look of her sparse, scribbled letters, it was highly unlikely. One day I said to Alice, The only way youre going to meet Joan is to go to Alamos; but I cant take that bus ride and I doubt you can either, and then I described it to her, including the splattered condition of the toilet at the rear of the bus, just so she had all the details. Why dont we fly down? she asked. Too expensive, I replied. I have a son who flies for Delta Air Freight, maybe he can cook something up. Use my phone. I have plenty of minutes. She hopped on the phone and began speaking to her son. Hold on a second, she said to the phone. He says he can probably arrange something for us. Whats the nearest airport? Hermosillo. We can probably have somebody pick us up there and drive us the remaining three or four hours to Alamos. Hermosillo is the nearest, she said into the phone, Send me what you find by email, OK? I love you. The next day she called and said we could catch a freight plane to Hermosillo on Friday. Well have to make a few stops and well have to sit in those little seats the attendants use, but itll be free. Where is Alamos anyway? Its in Sonora, about 600 miles south of Nogales. Some of the Castaneda books are set in Sonora. Its the ancestral home of the Yaqui Indians. Someone once told me two of the women in the books live just to the west of Alamos, near a small village called Minas Nuevas. When we got off the plane in Hermosillo, Joan was waiting for us like a Hollywood openingfive-inch heels, a long flowing black dress, and enough mascara to start a fire. It set her apart from everyone else at the gate. Everyone that is except Angel, her young, mustached gardener, who was standing next to her in an even more outrageous tuxedo de chauffeur outfit with black patent leather boots and a bikers cap right out of The Village People. All five feet of him was grinning from ear to ear. All I could think was that Joan put the outfit together and somehow talked him into it. Youd think Angel would have balked at the suggestion, but he clearly loved the whole act. Alice took the costume party right in stride. She said hello to

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Joan, gave her a hug, and then began speaking to Angel in Spanish. I thought youd never visited Mexico, I said. I havent. How do you know Spanish then? I learned it from Kiki. Well, it was Portuguese really, but theyre pretty close. Portuguese is a bit more guttural. Angel couldnt take his eyes off Alice. He had become used to Joan, but he wasnt prepared for Alice. I could see him checking her out in the rearview mirror all the way back to Alamos. We spent five days at Joans. Alice couldnt get enough of Alamos. I think the slow pace and simple ways of the town reminded her of her childhood in Arcadia. She spent hours walking around town and talking to whomever she met, which was not always an easy thing, as one look at her eyes was enough to convince some of them she was a bruja, a witch. That didnt surprise me. It had taken the town a few years to acclimate to Joan. They had never seen anything like Joan except in the movies, so it wasnt any surprise that the neighborhood children began calling her La Estrella (The Star) and it stuck. They would hold their hands out for candy and scream, La Estrella, La Estrella, mas dulce (Star, Star, more candy) whenever she came out of her house, and now they were sticking their heads through the bars of the front gate asking if they could see La Fantasma (The Ghost). I should have charged admission. Unfortunately, one day Joan ran out of candy and when she tried to explain, in her almost non-existent Spanish, that she had temporarily run out of candy, Por favor, No mas, no mas dulce, she was pummeled with a furious barrage of tiny, high-pitched catcalls. So much for La Estrella. Octavio Paz once wrote, Everyone should have a Mexican childhood, and from the exuberant, healthy looks of these kids, he was undoubtedly right. But he should have added as a cautionary postscript, Hell knows no fury like los nios scorned, because when we went out the next day, the kids were nowhere in sight. Instead, scratched onto Joans very expensive Toyota, at precisely the level of a seven-year-old hand, was a very angry Gringa Puta (Yankee Whore). Alice took one look at it, picked up a sharp stone from the street, and furiously scratched a large Fantastica right above Gringa Puta. Then she turned to Joan, who was absolutely dumbstruck, and said, Thatll give the little devils something to think about, and she side-armed a small rock down the cobbled street like she was skipping it on a lake. When it came to rest a block or so away, I could have sworn it was greeted by a little symphony of tiny, pursed lips sucking wind very, very slowly. Decisive action impressed Joan to no end. She immediately elevated Alice to the

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rank of El President and told her she wanted to talk to her about a number of things. There was a problem, however, as Joan spends most of her day lying in bed talking on the phone, or swinging a ring on a piece of dental floss. Alice solved that by simply lying down beside Joan and starting to chat. I think it startled Joan, but only for a moment, as she has a way of taking whatever happens to hereven Alices furiously scratched Fantasticaas something like a big birthday surprise, just for her. Since there was no room in the bed for me, and I didnt want to sit on the side like an attending physician, I left them alone most of the time and worked with Angel in the garden, or rather watched Angel work, as there was no way I could keep up with him. For most Mexicans in remote towns like Alamos, life is hard work and poverty, grinding poverty, both of which they seem to accept with grace and humor. But Angel must have also seen the languorous, fashionable Joan for exactly what she was: an extravagant, ongoing drama in search of actors. It obviously struck the natural actor in him because he signed on immediately and never looked back. From the looks of Joan, she was her old self again: flamboyant, playful, and ready for anything. Her long depression seemed to have finally lifted, a change I could only attribute to Angels upbeat company. Although he didnt speak any English, he had a smile that bordered on the devil, and he was so full of fun it was almost impossible to be in bad spirits when he was around. He had originally been hired to tend the grounds and garden, but as it turned out, he spent half his time driving Joan around town, which was a bit of an act because he could barely see over the dashboard. Yet Joan insisted he was fine, and there was no talking her out of it. She was deathly afraid of being alone on the Mexican roads. She must have seen too many greasy bandito movies as a kid; Im surprised she didnt get Angel a rifle. During my visit, I asked Angel if he liked wearing the ropas de chofer (drivers outfit) and he looked at me as if he was amazed I hadnt heard, Si, soy famosa ahora, me llaman Angel Tuxedo, Chofer de Las Estrellas (Yes, I am famous now, they call me Angel Tuxedo, Driver to The Stars). Joan told me that after shed made him the chauffeurs outfit, some of the wealthier gringo women in town had caught on and had also taken to having Angel drive them around town in his brothers old black Cadillac. The Cadillac, which had been used for funerals, suddenly became a big money maker for both Angel and his brother Gerardo. According to Joan, Angel enjoyed a huge celebrity with both the Mexican and gringo communities. Hed even had cards made up: Angel Tuxedo, Chofer de Las Estrellas. One evening, when I asked Joan for her impression of Alice, she told me she was stunned by Alices psychic gifts, but even more by the depth of her knowledge about psychic matters in general. She must have read everybody in the world,

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and probably talked to them too, was Joans chatty way of putting it to me. She also told me that Alice was very curious about me, not in a personal way, but from a psychic point of view, and she had given Alice whatever impressions shed gathered over the years, And I didnt forget to mention your piggy spirit face either, she added with a jab. She told me Alice was trying to figure out why she was being continuously directed towards me, as it had never happened to her before. The direction was strong enough to convince Alice being with me was important, but that she was as much in the dark as I about what was going on. She said to Joan, I dont know if Im prepared for whats going to happen; I keep feeling Im going to be blindsided. I really didnt get a chance to talk to Alice at any length until we were headed back to Sarasota. I mentioned how surprised Id been to find she was as puzzled as I about why we had been brought together. I asked her why she had never said anything to me about it. I didnt want you to get too scared. I thought it was better if you thought that at least the ground I was walking on was solid. But it isnt. Patience is required. I know we will eventually understand why we came together, but, and here she let out a small, hairy cackle, it may take forever. Then she suddenly switched bases: By the way, Joan is your anima; I can feel it. Shes a bit like Kiki in the way she can open to the Stream as she calls it, except Joan is more selective, more of a dilettante. Like a lazy gecko tonguing a fly, I replied. Once you know her for a while, you see shes hunting all the time. But its very efficient. And quick. And very selective. She likes a particular curve of the Stream, one thats rippling with creativity, artistic creativity, and she seems to know how to get to it, or as she said to me once, I know how to let the Stream find me, but I cant tell you exactly how I do that, I just open myself up. Its a special feeling Ive always known, since I was a little girl. When that happens, I can feel it moving through me, looking for somewhere to go. She told me it was usually more fun to let it flow through to someone ready to use it, like me. But she told me that much, much later. Shes so laid back, I never even thought of associating her with some of my breakthroughs until I realized things seemed to happen whenever she was around, even if she wasnt really doing anything. Sometimes shed be collaborating with me, but sometimes shed just be hanging out, grooving on God knows what. Its only recently Ive realized thats exactly why things were happening: because she wasnt doing anything. She was just there, letting it all come in. In a way, shes a creativity junky, but a very effective one. Things happen. Alice nodded, What she told you about ISLAUGGH representing your re-birth, and the myth being a new Bible was right on the money it seems to me. I know you want more details, but youre not going to get them from her. In a sense shes

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a purist: she refuses to go beyond the immediate feeling and the immediate metaphor it gives birth to. We were talking about messages, visions, intimations, poems, that kind of thing, and she said something about trying to understand them that hit the nail right on the head. She told me she never went beyond that first feeling/metaphor because they were the end of the road as far as she was concerned; to take it any further would be a waste of time, just speculation. Where we differ is that I dont necessarily think speculation is a waste of time. After all, we have to at least try to make sense of what the psychic world is trying to tell us if its not immediately clear. But we have to understand that what we come up with may not be something we can take to the bank. Joans position doesnt surprise me, I said. I used to attribute it to her distaste for doing anything that involves effort, but she may be right. Going beyond the initial message can be a slippery business. The myth taught me that. Luckily, at least for me, her strength has never been in explaining things, but in her ability to hook into the Stream. The amazing thing is, and shed be the first to tell you, she has no idea how she does what she does, or even, sometimes, if shes actually doing it. But somehow, shes always been able to hook into it and then somehow pass it on so I could go where I had to go, creatively speaking. I have no idea how that works, but its allowed me to do extraordinary things, things I had absolutely no idea I was going to do, like the myth. A few months after Id returned to Sarasota, Joan called. Youre not going to believe this, she said. What? Every morning now, young women are standing outside the gate, trying to catch a glimpse of Angel working in the garden. Like he was a saint or something. They call out his name until he appears, but when he finally comes to the gate, theyre always disappointed hes in his work clothes and not the chauffeurs outfit. I guess they expect him to be Angel Tuxedo all of the time. Angel always explains to them that when he works as a gardener he is Angel Mauricio not Angel Tuxedo, but it doesnt seem to do any good. Finally, he made up a new set of Angel Tuxedo business cards with various photographs of him posed in the black chauffeurs outfit. Real glam shots, if you know what I mean. He hands them out to the girls now when they come to the gate. Theyre in great demand, like trading cards. What does Angel think about all the attention? He likes it, who wouldnt? But thats not what Im calling about. Listen to this. He says the girls think theyre coming because of Angel Tuxedo, but theyre really coming because of me, because there wouldnt be any Angel Tuxedo without me, without La Estrella. He told me that even though he makes more on a weekend as Angel Tuxedo than I pay him for a whole month, he would never stop working in the garden because Esta como el Jardin de Paradisio (It is like the

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Garden of Paradise). He says it is the place where everything changed for him, that he would never leave it. What did you say to that? I told him that was very kind of him, but as most of his visitors were young women I really didnt think they were coming to see me. What did he say? He said I was wrong, that he would show me tomorrow. So the next day when some of the girls came to the gate, he came running into the house to tell me they were waiting to meet me. Did you go? Are you kidding? Of course not. I told him I needed a new outfit (Quiero nueva ropas) if he was going to parade me around as the owner of El Jardin de Paradisio. Besides, those little chicas can be pretty sexy dressers. I wasnt going to come in second. So what happened? You know those new Kung Fu movies where the women fly though the air in those long flowing silk things? Yeah? Well, I had Maria make me one. We rented a Jet Li movie so she could see what I was talking about. I dont know where she got the material, but it was jet-black silk, the real light kind that takes a year to float to the ground. When I walk, it goes all over the place. Its a real look. What did Angel think? He said it was perfect. (Esta perfecta para La Estrella, La Angel de Angel Tuxedo.) He had a grin on his face that was unbelievable. The next day, when he asked me to come out of the house to see the girls at the gate, I floated out the door in the black silk and the girls went crazy, I mean they were spooked. They immediately backed up about five feet from the gate, like they thought I was going to fly over it, or through it. It was quite a scene. What happened then? One of the girls calmed down enough to ask Angel if she could feel my dress, so I walked down to the gate to let her feel the fabric, and when I did, the wind suddenly picked up and my sleeves floated up in the air like huge black wings and they all started screaming Dios mio, Dios mio, esta veridad!, La Estrella esta La Angel de Angel! (My God, my God, its true, The Star is the Angel of Angel!). One of them had a camera and took some pictures. Ill mail you a few. Youll be impressed. The chicas sure were. Angel too. After the girls left, he said to me, See, I told you. Everybody knows who you are. You are La Estrella, La Angel de Angel! I didnt know what to say, but to tell you the truth. I liked being admired like that, especially after that horrible no mas dulce debacle. But it got to the point where every morning he was asking me to come to the gate to say hello. It was too much. It takes me an hour to wake up let alone put on my face and get dressed, so I told him I would only make an occasional appearance, as befits someone in my position. He said he understood, that I was right, and asked me if he could make up some picture cards of me he

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could hand out. I had them taken by the photographer who shot Angel. Ill tell you one thing. These people may be poor as dirt but they have a flair for the dramatic. The pictures really sizzled. Theyre all over town now. Just like Angels. The best thing about it is I get offered the best fruit at the Mercado now, and at Mexican prices, which just doesnt happen if youre a gringo. But even better than that, the kids have begun following me around again, screaming La Estrella, La Estrella, just like they used to, except they dont ask me for candy anymore. Angel says they dont because it would be a sin to ask anything of La Estrella, La Angel de Angel. He says I am too important now. But thats not the whole story. You know what happened a few days later? I cant even guess. By the way, are you making all this up? Of course not; Im far too lazy. Youve said so yourself any number of times. Youre not going to believe this, but Angel made up a name for the house all by himself: Casa de Luz (House of Light). He had an ironworker friend forge it in big black script and then Angel nailed it to the outside of the house, over the front door. It looks very Hollywood Mexican. Are you sure it didnt spell out Casa de Losers? Very funny. It might have, if it was your house. But listen, theres more. He wrote a little poem and had it painted on a ceramic plaque next to the door. Its only four lines, but its beautiful. Do you want to hear it? Ill translate it as I go along. OK. Sure. By the way, how come your Spanish is suddenly so good? Its because of Angel. You know how he was always chattering away at me like I knew what he was saying except I had no idea? One day, dont ask me how, I started chatting back. Go figure. Anyway, heres Angels poem, Ill translate it for you as I go along: Casa de Luz (House of Light) Esta casa nunca esta oscura. Esta casa significa la vida. Esta casa ve a travs de la noche Esta casa es una Casa de Luz. (This house is never dark.) (This house stands for life.) (This house sees through night.) (This house is a house of light.)

Jesus. Thats a pretty good poem. You sure Angel wrote it and not you? Of course he wrote it. He said it just came to him when he was working in the garden. He showed me the paper he wrote it on. But darling, you know how things work when Im around. At least I hope you do. If you still dont, go ask Alice when shes ten feet tall. Ciao, Justino.

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Chapter 33: Alice in Chains August 2005, Sarasota Id told Alice some things Jane Washington had said about the myth, and Alice immediately expressed a desire to meet her. I must not have picked up on it fast enough, however, because that Sunday Alice took it on herself to find the black Baptist church where Jane was singing and introduced herself. I can only imagine it as a kind of Dr. Livingston, I presume. Even though I had told Jane about Alice, I dont think anything could have ever prepared Jane for meeting her. At least thats the impression I got when Jane called demanding to know if I was coming over with Alice. What do you mean coming over with Alice? Alice came up to me at church yesterday and asked if she could visit. I didnt know what to say. Shes very nice, but those eyes. Anyway, are you coming too? Well, if youd like. I could feel her body sort of buzzing madly over the phone. Of course I want you to, why do you think I called? A few days later, Alice and I were standing at Janes door. When Jane opened it, I got that whiff of peppermint I always get from her, and then, when I turned to introduce Alice, I got a whiff of something like burning metal. And then I remembered what Diane said about her smelling like smoke. It was as if the two of them were giving off scents. Then, somewhere in my mind, I heard a voice say, Alice in Chains, the name of a rock band. I knew I was in for a trip. At least five minutes passed before Alice and Jane finally stopped circling each other. I wanted to talk to you, Alice said. Really? What about? The Female Spirit. What about it? I can feel it reentering our lives. I wasnt aware it had ever left. Alice laughed, Youre right, it never has. But I believe its rising now to offset the Male Spirit that has been dominating us for so long now. Jane looked at Alice as if a frog had just hopped out of her mouth. Why are you telling me all this? Jane barked. I wanted to hear your thoughts. I dont know about the Female Spirit, as you call it, but I know this: the Way of the Mother is with us. Its in the earth. I can feel it, just like I felt it in my childhood, where we still kept the old ways, even after the white man came into our lives. The way of the white man was much stronger than anything we had known. When it took root, we lost our way; we began slaughtering each other like

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devils. Were still doing it. Weve become rapacious. Weve become like the white man. I believe thats going to change, Alice replied, even if most people seem oblivious to it, nodding toward me as if I were one of those talking horses on television. Justin told me you believe the serpent is a metaphor for the nature of female creative energy. I believe somewhat the same thing. First of all, Jane snapped, I never said that. Chatty Justin must have said that. What I said was the Serpent of Creation is directed by female energy. Oh, sorry. Is there a difference? There is to me. What Im talking about is the movement of the snake, how unearthly it is. Godlike. Its all in the movement. I know all your books tell you the snake was seen as Godlike because its cold-blooded and lives underground and sheds its skin. But there are lots of other creatures that are cold-blooded and live undergroundeven replace lost limbsbut no ones calling them godlike. Its the movement. What does that movement look like? Alice asked, but she hadnt even finished asking the question before Janes arm had risen up parallel to the floor and began undulating like a snake, almost as if it were moving through the air towards Alice. Alices eyes started to get that blind, floating look they get just before the Spirit speaks and then she snapped back and said, Oh, I see what youre talking about. Youre absolutely right. Then Alices arm rose up and began undulating back towards Jane and they both started to cackle. The sound was so hairy it was indecent. For some reason Jane suddenly switched the subject and asked, What do you think of this Witnesses Log of his? nodding towards me again in my new role as a talking horse. Alice must have caught it because she shot me the funniest glance and said to Jane, I heard what you did. It was beautiful. I didnt want to do it. So Justin says. But listen, theres something you should know about the myth. Whats that? I think ISLAUGGH appeared to herald its arrival. I jumped in. You never told me that. You never asked. Besides, it wasnt time for you to know. Alice turned back to Jane. Well, what do you think? Janes only reaction was to slowly back into a small room inside herself and look out at us. Finally she said, The myth may be fine for Justin, but I dont like it. Its too dark. But thats where ISLAUGGH came fromthe shadow world, Alice offered. Its not what ISLAUGGH is likeits what the myth feels like: it feels like Joan to me: dark, useless, a waste of time, a backwater. We should be spending our time on the soulsound, not that cold, thinky thing. Dont give up on the myth, Alice replied. Its not that thinky; it just looks

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thinky. Its more like a song, a sad song, an elegy. Well maybe it sounds like a song to you, but try dancing to it. And then she put her hands up to her mouth and started laughing into them like a small child, and then, all of a sudden, Alice started laughing into hers until I thought the two of them were never going to stop. Alice even started kicking her feet. That seemed to finally break the ice. Jane leaned towards Alice and said, I just dont like the way the myth feels, Alice. I believe you; maybe its the Celt in me that likes it. Youre right, though: you cant dance to it. And you may be right about Joan, too. She seems to be a part of itfrom what I can make out shes almost always linked to Justins creativity. What youre probably picking up is the part of Joan that allowed the myth to come in. Sounds like a Sunday-go-to-meeting, Jane barked. Well, Alice quipped, it probably was something like that. By the way, what did you mean exactly when you told Justin the myth was like bare bones? Theyre special bones, perfectly articulated, like the bones of a snake or a fish, but theyre human. Theyre the bones that the flesh of all the other myths swims on. One more thing. You told Justin that Eve and the serpent were the same. What exactly did you mean by that? I meant that Eve and the serpent were the same in the beginning. In the stories. No one can ever tell me otherwise. The Bible Writers separated them. They were afraid of what we knew, and how we knew it. They were afraid of our psychic powers. They couldnt acknowledge that power; they couldnt acknowledge were serpents. It would put us too close to God. It was too threatening for them to admit that part of us is not of this world, that we move through the world the same way the Serpent of Creation does: rhythmically, invisibly, intuitively. Thats why we cant take our eyes off the snake: something tells us its movement is not of this world. That was the part of us they were afraid ofthe part that moves like a snake.

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Chapter 34: Alice Explains the Female Spirit August 2005, Sarasota I had been trying for months to get Alice to talk about the myth, but she kept telling me it wasnt the right time. Yet she had talked to Jane about it, and right in front of me, so I insisted she stop putting me off. OK, she snapped, lets talk about the myth. For some reason I snapped back, Lets talk about ISLAUGGH first. I couldnt believe myself. Here she was ready to finally talk about the myth, and I do a crazy-ass U-turn. What exactly is it you want to know? Alice asked. Why did ISLAUGGH appear in the mirror, years ago? How would I know? She appeared to you, not me. But you must have some idea. What I keep getting is she came to make you aware. Aware of what? What she represents. And what is that? The Female Spirit. But women have always been here. Im not talking about women. Im talking about a primal spirit, a primal interest, as you would say, that gives direction to the Serpent of Creation, the Serpent that is always with us. I see that primal creative force as being directed by two interrelated spirits: the Male Spirit and the Female Spirit. Those spirits are like yin and yang, or dark and lightseparate yet somehow interrelated. They make up the intelligence, the interest, call it what you will, behind everything that exists, or you might equally say, within everything that exists. The female part of that energy has been very dim for a long time now. What do you mean dim? Weak, as compared to the Male Spirit. The Female Spirit is weak because it fell beneath the horizon of our consciousness millennia ago. How did that happen? No one knows. It just did. All we know is that one waxes and the other wanes, just like the moon. About 4,000 years ago, maybe even further back, the Male Spirit began to wax, began to direct the Serpent of Creation more and more. There are lots of stories about it; our own Bible is one. But I believe things are changing. A new age is forming: the Serpent is beginning to fall under the influence of the Female Spirit. You might compare it to a shift in the earths magnetic field. We know it happens but we dont know why, or even what it feels like, or what its consequences are, but we know it happens. But if its true that migrating creatures use the earths magnetic field as a guide, the results must be catastrophic. The

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same goes for the waxing and waning of the Male and Female Spirits. When they shift, the world changes completely. What do you mean the world changes? How we see the world, how we know the world, how we act in itthe world itselfchanges. If youd like a nice wide-screen picture of what took place when the Female Spirit waned, imagine a massive emotional wave rippling through all humans over centuries. Thats what this reversal of spirit would look likelike a shift in the earths magnetic field. But it wasnt momentary, it took millennia and it resulted in the consciousness we have now, the way of knowing we have now, because that is the nature of the Male Spirit: to dominate, to know by examining, by logical description. If you want to see the difference between the Male Spirit and the Female Spirit, you can see it in the difference in the eyes of men and women when theyre mating, making love, having sex, whatever you want to call it. Im usually too busy. Nobodys that busy. Believe me; one quick look will solve a lot of your problems. When I look, will I see the Female Spirit? Dont be so smartof course not. You cant see the Female Spirit. You have to feel it. How can I do that if I dont know where to look? Listen, Mister Smarty, you dont have to look anywhere, all you have to do is listen to what Ive been telling youthat the Female Spirit is intuitive. It wants to know something by imitating it, by getting emotionally close to it rather than by picking it apartexamining it logically. That way of knowing may seem strange to us today, but its still a valid way of knowingespecially if you want to know the soul of somethingwhich is what really interested preliterate cultures. What Im trying to tell you is that imitation is at the core of the Female Spiritbecause it was a wayand in the end, maybe the best wayof getting at the often indefinable essence of something. Thats why preliterate carvings and paintings of animals were primarily concerned with imitating their essence, not their factual particulars. In the case of snakes, that essence was the way it moved. The depicted serpent might be no more than a simple line, but it was a line that slithered in coils, or waves, across the sky, or sea, or underworld. That was far more important than depicting its exact color or shape or habitation as we would do today. In a way, that imitation allowed them to become the snakein much the same way as you supposedly become Rich Little when you imitate him. OK, OK, let up on the Rich Little will you? Oh, I willonce I see it. Im still waiting, you know. How can I forget? Im sure youd like to, you little darling. Anyway, as I was saying, once you

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grasp of the nature of the Female Spirit, you can begin to see why early preliterate peoples lived as they did: they were obsessed with knowing the soulthe essenceof everything they encountered. Thats why imitating something was at the heart of knowing for them. To imitate something was to become that thing emotionally. Knowing took place via the soul, the heart, not the examining mind. Let me give you another simple example. Early cultures recognized the intimate connection between the snakes movement and female energy, just as Jane had. There was no need to explain that connectionit simply wasthey could feel it. Thats what Jane was talking about when she told you Eve was the Serpent. She saw that Eve and the Serpent were one and the same in very early cultures and only became separated much later on as our consciousness began to change. Early humans saw the Serpent of Creation as predominantly female, not male, and portrayed it that way in very early glyphs and drawings by signaling its slithering nature. Jane got that one right, too. Let me be a bit more precise, because I just saw your eyes cloud over. Early tribal peoples generally saw the Serpent of Creation as being both male and female, but the dominant energy was seen as female. They saw the male part reflected in the penis-like shape of the serpent, but they saw the female part reflected in the way the Serpent moves. Its a very simple way of portraying that dominance. To tell you the truth, I somehow missed that, but Jane didntshe recognized the snakes movement as not being of this world. Early preliterate humans recognized it as divine, Godlike, and they always associated that movement with female energy, mother energy. This may come as a surprise to you, Alice, but Ive always been interested in preliterate cultures because it was a time when poetry was at the center of life. When I began to speak and first felt the power of that very early poetry, my interest only grew stronger. But the preliterate myths I came across were almost always from a far later timeperiods in which the various preliterate cultures were changing into literate cultures. As that change was taking place, they began to transcribe their important oral story poems into writingHomers epics and the Bible being two cases in point. What we call preliterate myths are really cultural flotsam, fragments from the vast, unconscious sea of preliterate cultures that somehow managed to find their way into written form. What we dont seem to realize is how fragile preliterate cultures were. Stories were all they had, and those stories existed only on the breath of their singers. When the singers went, the culture went, and viceversa, simple as that. So whatever fragments weve inherited are highly suspect, because for a variety of reasons, those emerging literate cultures began to consciouslyand unconsciouslychange those fragments. What we have today is a hodge-podge made even worse by the fact that modern scholars insist on interpreting those fragments from the point of view of our modern consciousness. Little effort has been put into trying to look at them from something like the mindset of early man.

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Everything seems wrong about the entire enterprise, but I dont see any way around it. But, she replied, there are ways around it. Their poetry, their spoken myths were easily lost, but sometimes they came through relatively intact. Homers epics are an example of that, right? In those cases, you can approach them if you let your mind float back to something like that earlier consciousness, or as close to it as you can get, and then feel your way towards what they mean. Still another is to go back to the original spiritual declarations of early, preliterate cultures: their cave paintings, sculptures and rock drawings and carvings, which is all they had of a permanent nature. But theres a trick to going back to those glyphs and carvings. The only way to really do it, to really access the truths of those pieces of art, is to enter them through something like lucid dreaming, which I began to do. The aborigines, I replied, do something like that to access Dreamtime. Yes, but for a different reason. For me, it was the only way to really enter the heart of those early cultures and determine what those early works of art were trying to say. I see those cave paintings and rock carvings as pictorial myths that have survived into the present time completely untouched. Theyre much purer than most of the transcribed oral myths we have. One of the things those early rock carvings and drawings repeatedly portray is the Serpent of Creation. Its either a slithering serpent, or a coiled one, or entwined serpents. Theyre not necessarily very detailed, in fact they dont become detailed and actually look like serpents until late in the preliterate period. In the very early drawings theyre nothing more than simple line drawings squiggles. In some of the later carvings showing an entwined serpent, the serpent is entwined around a pole at the center of the earth, the heavens, what have you. That entwinement is a metaphor for sexual union, for the core of creativity itself, with the writhing serpent entwining the pole being the vagina, and the pole being the erect penis. Miss Manners might not like that description of intercourse, but its closer to its true nature. Unfortunately, we havent seen that kind of sex for thousands of years. It only existed when we were led by the Female Spirit, which in early cultures took the form of the Mother-Goddess, the life giver. When the Female Spirit led us, there was a real equality between men and women. You see it even in fierce warrior cultures like the Celts and the Assyrians. So in my version of sex as it was, as it ought to be, both partners are equals, both are animals, not just the man. I laughed. I like that. I know you do, but I want you to stop joking and take it seriously, because the rod/serpent metaphor is at the heart of what ISLAUGGH is all about. In fact the metaphor is so primal and enduring that it continues to appear even in very late

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mythologies, like Exodus, but in a more disguised form. In the beginning of Exodus, God opens His bag of tricks by giving Moses a rod that can turn into a serpent, which, of course, is a display of female energy. Its interesting that this transformation only takes place once, in the palace of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh matches it by having his magicians, or priests, turn Pharaohs rod into a serpent as well. I think the best way to explain what is happening here is to see the Hebrews and the Egyptians as two cultures having deep roots in the older Female Sprit-driven consciousness. The difference was that the Hebrew culture was relentlessly moving towards the new Male Spirit-driven consciousness whereas the older Egyptian culture couldnt seem to make the break. In effect, the Egyptian culture was stuck between Male and Female Spirit consciousness. It would move toward the new consciousnessand the empire it made possible then suddenly collapse back into the world of the soul. I think once you understand all that, Moses rod starts to make sense. While the rod by itself is a symbol of Male Spirit consciousness, the rod becoming a serpent is a tacit admission of the Female Spirit consciousness at the ancient core of both cultures. But once God sees that the Pharaoh can match God in that area, the rod never turns into a serpent again but remains a rod. From that point on, we are in the world of Male Spirit consciousness. In fact, Exodus can be seen as a metaphorical journey from Female to Male Spirit consciousness: a journey from many Gods to One, from muthos to logos, from an oral culture to a written one, from a tribal culture to the beginnings of an empire. Thus, later on in Exodus, it is the rod alone that allows Moses to do Godlike things, like parting the seas, or tapping a rock for water. The writers of the Bible would perhaps have liked us to forget the slithering rod at the beginning of the story, but like the jury that has been accidentally shown inadmissible evidence, we can never forget it. The Bible and the myths surrounding it are full of tacit admissions of the power of the Female Spirit. For example, the first order of angels created by God, the seraphim, translates as serpentsnot angels with white wings and snowy gowns. Angels have always been seen as carriers of Gods intent, so the seraphim, in the Hebrews own traditions, were serpents carrying the intent of God. Intent is another word for interest. Sound familiar? Again, it was one of those tacit admissions that the older way of knowing was driven by the Female Spirit. Did you know that the Hebrew word for Eve, when aspirated, sounds like the Hebrew word for serpent? Jesus, no, I didnt. In fact, the Female Spirits connection to the Serpent of Creation is constantly appearing, even today. The South American shamans who use ayahuasca tell us when they travel to the heart of Creation, they always see the same thing: two entwined serpents. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, tells us basically the same thing, but more modestly: that the structure of all life is

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encoded in a molecular double helix, two entwined serpents. The shamans way of knowing is completely different from Cricks, but they both arrived at the same conclusion as to the essential nature of creation: that it is always directed by the Female Spirit. The Male Spirit may direct fabrication, reasoning, things like that, but true creative activity of any kind is always directed by the unconscious, by the Female Spirit. I wonder what Crick would think about his helixes being entwined serpents. He wouldnt see it that way. In fact, hed probably think you were crazy. But maybe I shouldnt be so hard on him; after all, Crick reports that the idea of the entwined helixes came to him in an LSD session. The important thing to understand is that Cricks discovery and proof of the existence of DNA came about through the tools of science, while the shamans discovery came about by psychic means. Just as Cricks DNA is real to him, so the entwined serpents are equally real to the ayahuasca shamans. Thats one thing scholars dont seem to understand about the preliterate mind: that the Other World, the psychic world, isnt experienced as unreal, as a questionable phantom, but as a co-equal, co-existent reality, because thats how it feelsreal, not a hallucination. In the case of the entwined serpents, the ayahuasca shamans will tell you theyre not a symbol for Creationthey are Creation. When you peel off all the layers of the onion of existence that is what you eventually get down to: two entwined, writhing serpents. But why are some metaphors two entwined serpents, and some a serpent entwined around a pole? Both imitate how snakes mate, by twining around each other. Ever see a snake ball, when many males entwine themselves around a single female in order to mate? Your whole idea of sex will change. Its changing already. Good for you. The ayahuasca shamans vision of the two entwined Serpents is a much older metaphor. It acknowledges male-female procreation but in a very female way. It suggests the dominance of the Female Spirit, because everything is slithering. The vision of the Serpent entwined about a pole came much later, as the Male Spirit began to rise. But what does this have to do with ISLAUGGH? She represents that Female Spirit, the energy that dominated preliterate cultures. Some call it the energy of the Mother Goddess. If you think of ISLAUGGH that way, all your translations of her name will make better sense. What are they by the way? Lets see. Theyre warrior, hero, method, law. There were others though: humbled, weak, maybe calf too, if I remember correctly. They all made pretty good sense to me when I envisioned ISLAUUGH as male, a survivor of horrible events. I never really thought about the translations in light of ISLAUGGH being a representation of the Female Spirit. You mean you didnt bother, didnt even try.

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I remember trying to think about the consequences of ISLAUGGH being female, but I also remember hitting a sort of blank wall. I experienced a kind of intellectual vertigo. I couldnt seem to make the jump. All Im really comfortable with is being a man; its all I really know. You know more than you thinkbut this is not the time to go into that. Perhaps I can help you by saying that whenever youve looked at the myth in the past, youve been looking at the Female Spirit but didnt know it. You thought you were looking at the poetic state, at the act of speaking, at an earlier form of knowing, of consciousness. But the interest, the intelligence, of the Female Spirit is what formed that first consciousness. And because of that, it is embodied in the poetic state, especially in the act of speaking. Youve said it yourself many times about speaking, that its an older poetry, the first poetrythe poetry that occurred when the Gods spoke and we responded. You might also say poetry, especially speaking, embodies the Female Spirit because its an imitative actit imitates what the Muse says to usand imitation, as the way of knowing, is particular to the Female Spirit. Maybe, she continued, I can help you a bit more, although I dont think I have to, by telling you that all creative people are open to the Female Spirit. You cant be truly creative if youre not, because true creative activity is always intuitive, always imitative. I hope youre not trying to tell me that women are more creative than men because they like to imitate more then men? What about Rich Little? Listen, Mister Smarty, it has nothing to do with whether youre a man or a woman. Its a way of looking at the world that is reflexive, instinctive. You could say, in general, that more women than men are open to the Female Spirit, but thats all I want to say about it. Look at it this way: its a state of consciousness whose first reflexive action upon receiving a feeling is to respond empathetically with a similar feeling. That, in and of itself, is an imitative act. And so is responding with a story, which you know something about. Youve told me yourself that stories are what we spontaneously create when we try to communicate a feeling to someone else, right? Right. If we didnt have stories wed be locked inside the caves of ourselves. We communicate feelings by creating stories that imitate those feelings. Thats what all communication, all art is all about. So why all the confusion? I guess I had never thought about it the way youve laid it outabout our early consciousness being directed by the Female Spirit and all of that. What youre telling me is the Female Spirit makes poetry possible. Yes, but not just poetry. Its true for any creative activity that is transcendent in nature. But its not an exact resemblance because the Female Spirit is larger than

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the artistic spirit, even the poetic spirit, as old and as primal as it is, because at the core of the Female Spirit is a special form of love that makes it larger than art, larger than reason, larger than speaking, larger than all imagining. ,

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Chapter 35: Alice Hands Me a Notebook September 2005, Sarasota Alice had never said anything to me about our visit to Jane, so one day I asked her what she thought. I expected her to say something about Janes competitive, almost combative attitude, but she didnt. That didnt surprise me. She had a way of recognizing someones essence and then bearing in on it to the exclusion of almost everything else. The fact that someone might have a habit of picking his nose wouldnt have bothered her in the leastsomething I can attest to from personal experience. She simply ignored the warts. I think that happened when she met Jane. She immediately recognized her as a rare intuitive. It must have been what made her suddenly show up at the black Baptist church. I can only imagine those pale gray eyes peering out of a sea of singing black faces. It was clear she went there to meet Jane, but how she had ever figured out she was in a choir, let alone in that particular black church, was beyond me. Whatever it was that brought her there, it was clear she must have been extremely interested in what I had told her about Jane. Alice told me the psychic world and physical world were almost one and the same for Jane, that they were barely separated. Thats the way it used to be, Alice said to me, but most of us cant experience the two worlds that way anymore. Weve become too thinky, just like Jane says. I liked Janes story about the first man being a woman. Im surprised you havent picked up on it more than you have. Wait a minute! Im the one who told you about it. Besides, I never really thought of it as a story. I always saw it as a kind of proclamation. That doesnt disqualify it, she shot back, and then she suddenly switched gears and said, Justin, I want you to take a look at one of my journals, something I wrote some time ago, way before we began to talk. She handed me a large, black and white marbled notebook, the kind Id used in grade school. My mind suddenly flashed back to a glimpse Id had of her living room. We were out driving one evening and she asked me to stop off at her housefor just a second she saidand I remember her quickly opening the front door and reaching in for something and then just as quickly closing it, but I also remember seeing books everywhere, stacked from floor to ceiling, and then, off to the side, a wall that contained hundreds, maybe thousands of black and white marbled notebooks. They seemed almost surreal, like a schoolboys dream. And now, suddenly, here was one of them, dated: Journal, December 2000-January 2001.

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When I got back to my car and began thumbing through it, the first thing I noticed was her handwriting. Elegant would be the word, but very preciseno extravagant flourishes. And then I noticed there were no corrections. No erasures. No cross-outs. No mistakes for the entire hundred pages or so. It made me pay attention. I paid even more attention when I realized how close much of our thinking was. It was almost as if we had been living on opposite sides of a mirror. Here are some excerpts:
The First Man Was A Woman. December 8, 2000 The first human was most probably a woman. Even from Darwins limited perspective it would make sense, because it best answers the question: which sex would be the most likely to best initially carry on the human gene: male or female? Im not talking about the mating process, but the ensuing process of caring for the young. It is what occurs after mating that is crucial. The first human being female would give the human gene a better chance of surviving. The female instinctively protects her young, teaches them. The male doesnt. He walks away. Its as simple as that. Sometimes the male even kills the young. Even in the Bible, which is a very late male-spirit shaping of earlier myths, there are tacit admissions of the first human being a female. Why the Bible still contains those admissions is a bit of a mystery, but it is clear that the Hebrews who wrote the Book of Moses were scrupulous in incorporating the older female-driven myths. Thats why the early books are like loaves of bread dotted with small raisins of the Female Spirit. A casual glance never reveals the raisins, but its a different story when you take a good bite. The raisins are everywhere. The raisin youll taste first is that Eve is much more animated than Adam in Genesis. That raisin says to me, as it has to many others, that Eve was the first human. There is a reason Adam says nothing in Genesis whereas Eve cant stop talking. She is clearly smarter, more curious, more disposed to individual action. This assertiveness and talkativeness may have come over from earlier oral myths about the First Mother and then laid on top of the Hebrews later creation myth in which Eve is subservient, a mere rib of Adam. Thus Eve acquires many of the attributes of the First Mother, who in early preliterate cultures would have been seen as the one in control, the one with plans, the one who would have intuited there was something better. It is ironic (and yet fitting) that this overlay of First Mother attributes would be used to blur the shift from the old, Female Spirit consciousness to our new male spirit consciousness.

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Eve may have given all the wrong reasons in Genesis for wanting to become more Godlike, but her instincts were correct, because those instincts brought about a new consciousness, the one we have today, which is indeed a more Godlike consciousness. But it is also one that has become unbalanced, too concerned with the life of the self at the expense of the soul.

*** In very early tribal cultures, the Creator God was seen as female, or both sexes, but seldom as solely male. The extremely obese female figurines archeologists have found in some preliterate sites are also an expression of that primordial mother: the Great Mother. Some think they are fertility figures, and in some sense they are, but I doubt that fertility was ever directly associated with a woman being clinically obese. I also doubt that early tribal peoples, or later preliterate agricultural peoples, ever had enough food to get that fat, so the figurines are definitely a metaphor, not an actuality. I believe they are metaphors for a larger than life female the First Mother. Tribal peoples knew the animal world, and one aspect of it they knew as well as any was the bee world, and most especially the grotesque size of the queen bee, the mother bee. One bee mothering all bees: many out of onethe First Mother. Lets say the First Mother lived on long enough not only to mate, but to mate many times, perhaps for as long as three or four generations. Is there any doubt that her human offspring would see her as the giver of all human life? The later, more elaborate, preliterate celebrations of the Mother Goddess were a natural outgrowth of the initial, powerful story those children must have created about their primordial mother. We might call that initial story the Mother of All Stories, because it contained the seeds of all the stories to come: the stories of birth, love, sex and death and all their endless permutations and combinations. If we just for a moment imagine ourselves one of her human children sitting at her feet alongside some of her non-human children, we would know, even as children, that we were different, and would attribute that difference to her. She would be seen as having the power to bestow human life, or to not bestow it. The Giver and Taker of Life. That is the stuff of an overwhelmingly powerful myth. Our Primordial Mother must have also mated with her male human offspring, perhaps even preferred it. So we have Mother as Lover to add to an already heady mix. Robert Graves has a great deal to say about this in The White Goddess, which is

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what he calls the Mother Goddess. He contends the Goddess dominated preliterate cultures, and that the celebrations of her power as Mother, Lover, Creator and Destroyer of Life can be detected across cultures in the scraps of transcribed poetry that have survived into literate times.

*** God and the Human Race. January 15, 2001 Lets take a familiar story: when God comes into time, creation begins. Thats pretty straightforward. Lets add a twist to it: the universe God creates cant really exist until there is a story about it. Thats my new story. Its called Naming Creation. It expresses the central mystery about the special relationship between God and the human race. Its why God has Adam name all the animals in Genesis: because God cant do it. God can create a horse, but is incapable of naming the horse, creating a story about it. Why this is so, we dont know. The general understanding that has come down to us through our Western religions is that we were created in order to praise God, but its just as easy to say God cant be known, until there are humans to create stories about God. Another way of saying it is this: God created us in order to be known. But what does that really mean? If we forget for a moment why God wants to be known, which is the central mystery, I would venture that being known means that without us, without our stories about God, God would remain Gods dream. You might say we are bound to each other by Gods need to be known. This is not to say we are God. That is one of those idiotic New Age maxims. Rather we are somehow a part of God, the part that makes God known. Our creation allows God to be known. It means that our nature, our desire to know, and Gods desire to be known are inseparable.

*** The Nature of Creation January 27, 2001 Unlike Genesis, which contains the seeds of Western scientific and philosophical thought (in that it sees creation as a specific event in time), the creation myths of the Australian aborigines depict creation as an ongoing event, which I see as a more

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correct position, because our desire to know and Gods desire to be known are unending. The Australian aborigines have always been trying to tell us that creation is continuous, but in order to understand their myths we first have to see that the Australian aborigines are, or were, a very pure remnant of that early migration out of Africa 40,000 years ago, which is about the time the aborigines arrived in Australia. Thus we could say the aborigine myths contain the essential spiritual concepts of the African Mother Goddess cultures of 40,000 B.C. They are also living myths maintained by the aborigines themselves and not scholars, so outside of changes brought about by internal forces, they provide the clearest window we have into that otherwise very foggy time. There is no Big Bang for the aborigines, no Genesis, no specific beginning, no onetime affair. The aborigines access and understand that ongoing creationThe Dreaming not through thinking, or reasoning, but by entering it in their lucid dreams. In light of this, you can see why the anthropologists desire to stay on the outside and take notes is the wrong way to understand the aborigines view of Creation. The only way to really understand it is to actually enter the psychic world. This is the way the aborigine understands The Dreaming: by becoming a part of it. That kind of empathetic knowing has always has been associated with the Female Spirit.

***

Love and the Female Spirit. January 31, 2001 The essential question is this: if the Female Spirit driving early preliterate cultures was considered a superior one for becoming more Godlike, why did the female spirit wane and the male spirit wax? It seems to me this is one of those times when earth moved heaven and heaven moved earth, and in this case, earth moving heaven meant we sensed we were not fulfilling our deepest instinct of becoming more Godlike. Naturally, both men and women felt this, but because of the nature of the Female Spirit, it is also only natural to conclude it was felt more strongly by women. There are, of course, other theories why this cultural change took place, among them advances in agriculture, herding and metal smelting. While I see these as contributing to the change, I also see them more as a result than a cause of the change. The change to Male Spirit-driven cultures happened because of a change in

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the nature of the spiritual energy driving those cultures. Spiritual forces arent handled well by science. They dont fit easily into scientific thinking. Nevertheless, they cant be ignored. We have to face the fact that spiritual concerns were by far the dominant driving force in all prehistoric culturesand not growing more cabbages per acre. To get the complete picture, we should factor in those bread and butter concerns, but we have to keep our eye on the dominant interest of preliterate humans, which was becoming more Godlike. That concern, that interest, is very mysterious. A more contemporary way of describing it would be something like mothers wanting a better life for themselves and their children, but thats not quite right either, because it is beyond all that. It may manifest itself in saving up to get themselves a bigger house and Johnny and Sally a college education, but at its deepest level, it is aimed at helping themselves and their children to become men and women who are more Godlike. And what is driving that concern is a special, form of love. It is at the very core of the Female Spirit. I call it Primal Love. Maybe the best way to approach what I mean by Primal Love is to ask: what does it mean to love someone in a normal man/woman sense? It means I want to be who I am, but I also want to become that other person. Plato says our souls were split at some stage of our preexistence and that when we love it is because we have found our other half, and when we do, we experience love as becoming whole. A mothers love drives a mother to advance and protect her children. I see that love as being deeper than romantic love or paternal love or altruistic love or any of the other loves weve put in specimen jars over the millennia. You could say its a mothers love that moves a mother to run in front of a speeding car and kill herself in order to save her child. There is something else, however, at work in the case Ive just stated, something even deeper than a mothers love. Schopenhauer clarifies this for us by having a stranger run in front of the car to save the child, so the mothers love is absent. Schopenhauer says what makes the stranger act is an instantaneous, transcendent recognition that we are one. I would go one step further, however, and say that the stranger is also driven by a transcendent recognition that we are worth savingthat humans have a unique place in creation, that we arent mere atomic flotsam, biological accidents, happenstance animals. That sense of our special place in creation is driven by our instinctive love of the divinity within us. That is what Primal Love is. It is all but hidden from us in our everyday life. It cannot be consciously beckoned or directed. When it rises to

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protect or honor that divinity, it can be both powerful and unpredictable in the way it displays itself.

*** The Female Spirit, like the Male Spirit, also contains the seeds of its eventual waning. In the case of the Female Spirit, the Primal Love that is a part of its energyand our energyalso makes self-sacrifice possible, maybe even inevitable. When I sometimes indicate that preliterate women sacrificed themselves by allowing themselves to become subservient in the new Male Spirit-driven cultures, I dont mean to imply that their sacrifice was a conscious one. It never rose to that level. Women undoubtedly sensed they were moving in the right direction, as indeed they were, because both sexes did become more Godlike. Like Eve, however, the women never foresaw the unintended consequences of a Male Spirit-driven culture. Those consequences are what we are living with today. The more dominant the Female Spirit becomes, the more Primal Love wants to make us, and everything we touch, more Godlike, although it doesnt matter how we consciously conceive of God, or even if we believe in God. It is always there on an unconscious level, driving the human race forward in all its manifold complexity and it is absolutely out of our control. All we can do is experience it. What makes this deep, instinctive Primal Love so complex is that it not only drove St. Francis to become who he was, it also drove Hitler to become who he was. Both experienced it as becoming more Godlike. This occurred because Primal Love doesnt distinguish between the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus or the God of Mohammed. I think it is better when attempting to grasp the nature of Primal Love to think of God in a more primal way. If we conceive of God as the totality of light and dark, we are closer to what I call Primal Love. We may think we are ruled by reason, but our desire to become more Godlike is an unfathomable, deeply rooted, amoral instinct of immense power. If we are able to follow that instinct with an intense purity, we may even be able to tap into some part of the utterly unknowable, and, depending on who we are, come back either bathed in lightor bathed in darkness, or both.

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Chapter 36: Alice Finally Gets Around to ISLAUGGH September 2005, Sarasota Alice had very specific thoughts about the Female Spirit and its effect on the nature of consciousness. Most people will tell you the Male Spirit is the reason we are living in a more humane, reasoned, civilized world, she said to me one day. But that is only half the story. The other half is that the Male Spirit has also created a consciousness that has become totally obsessed with self, with the hard edge. We have become unbalanced. This is what many people and most women know today, that the world no longer echoes their deep internal world and they know that their internal world is correct; they know that instinct, intuition, feeling, are valid ways of knowing and have to be included if we are to live a truly human life. I dont know if youre aware of this, but every 2,100 years or so, a new Astrological Age occurs. There are many disputes among astrologers as to the exact start of any given ageand they can involve differences of hundreds of yearsbut its generally thought that were either in, or about to enter, the Age of Aquarius. Jung believed the transition period between these Ages contained, or signaled, a change in consciousness. He saw the transition period preceding the Age of Pisces, The Fishwhich began around 0 A.D.as signaling the change that was to be brought about by Christ. Prior to that, there was the Age of Aries, The Ram, which began around 2000 B.C. The invention of writing and the emergence of our modern consciousness were signaled in the transition period leading to the Age of Aries. More importantly, it was also somewhere around that time that the Male Spirit began to ascend and the Female Spirit began to decline. And it has been declining ever since, right up to the current time. What Jung and others saw in the two previous Ages however, may have been a coincidence. There is no evidence that any of the transitions before Aries had the kind of impact Jung saw in the two he studied. Thats because when we go back further than The Age of Aries, were back before writing was invented and the Zodiac too, for that matter. There are no recordsat least that were aware of. Yet I believe Jung was essentially correct about these great cycles: they are somehow connected to changes in the collective unconscious and, therefore, changes in the nature of human consciousness. I believe, however, we are somewhat in the dark as to the exact nature of the changes the Age of Aquarius will bring about. No one came even close to predicting the nature of the consciousness that was embedded in the Age of Pisces, and were just as baffled trying to predict what the Aquarian Age will bring. To my mind, what we need is more unconsciousness. Everything tells me the Female Spirit is ascending and that the Age of Aquarius will embody it. Jung, in a way, agreed with me. He saw Aquarius signaling a time when we will no

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longer be able to ignore the existence of Evil, which is another way of saying we will no longer be able to accept Evil as a temporary deformity that can be set right through the instruments of Reason. We will have to accept that our existence is much more complex, and more irrational, than the Age of Pisces and especially the last 300 years of the Enlightenment have led us to believe. We will have to accept that Opposites Life and Death, Good and Evil, Love and Hateare not only real but also mysteriously and eternally interlinked. One cant exist without the other. They feed each other. Jung believed that this new reality, which he called the Union of Opposites, was something our new consciousness would have to accept on an intuitive, or spiritual level, because it is a reality that is beyond reason. That means to me that our consciousness has to become more intuitive, more open to the ways of the soul, more directed by the Female Spirit. For me, that is the linkage between the Aquarian Age and the rise of the Female Spirit. One cant occur without the other. Only time will tell what that new consciousness will be like, but my sense is it will not be like our current self-driven, rational consciousness, nor will it be anything like the type of consciousness we had in preliterate times, one dominated by the Female Spirit. Rather it will be a consciousness more balanced between the Male and Female Spirit. Your vision of ISLAUGGH, I believe, was a vision of the Female Spirit, but a very particular one: it showed how weak the Female Spirit had become. ISLAUGGH herself is so weak she has lost the ability to speak. She has become powerless, mute, a victim. All she can do is stand in front of you, hoping youll feel what she feels, and what she feels is the loss of soul brought about by the products of 4,000 years of Male Spirit consciousness: the enslavement of women, the rise of armies, empires, philosophy, systematic violence, cities, writing, mathematics, science, capitalism, television, Freddy Krueger, you name it. You were blind to what ISLAUGGH was trying to tell you because you thought you were looking at a man. But see her now through a womans eyes: she has witnessed terrible things, just as you had surmised, but it wasnt just war and slaughter. What she has witnessed is the dark side of the Male Spirit: a consciousness that has become consumed and directed by the needs of the self, a consciousness that refuses to recognize the ways of the soul. If ISLAUGGH seems burdened, its because she is burdened. But thats not the complete story. Despite her condition, you still have to see her as a warrior, a very special warrior. Thats what the boars snout means. Did you know that? Know what? That the boar was a Godlike animal to the Celtsthe essence of a warrior. Did you ever hunt boar? Alice, Im a city boy. My two brothers use to hunt them. In fact, the woods around here are still thick with them. You dont ever want to mess with boars. My brothers were pretty wild

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themselves and not afraid of anything, but they were very leery of boars. Theyd work themselves up on liquor and then go out in the backwoods and set up big steel cages baited with fallen oranges. Then theyd leave for a couple of days but keep on drinking and then theyd come back completely crocked and stand outside the cage and shoot the trapped boars with bows and arrowsbig, compound-hunting bows that could kill a horse. But killing boars wasnt as easy as killing a horse. Sometimes the boars would still be banging against the cage after 7, 8, 9 arrows. My brothers would be screaming and shooting but the boars just wouldnt die. Thats when my brothers would pull out the shotgun. I think it was too scary for them to see something so strong. Thats why they got so drunk. Anyway, you can see why the Celts would take the boar as a warrior symbol. Its constant rooting with its snout also caused it to be seen as a guardian of the underworld. So ISLAUGGHs snout has a potent message: I am a warrior. I am from the underworld. Through me others pass. What do you mean, Through me others pass? ISLAUGGH is a gateway. Thats one of the reasons she has no mouth, why she cant speak, why shes almost not there. There are other spirits, stronger presences working through her. Which ones? Spirits very close to Creation. What do you mean close to Creation? Theyre like the Spirit that speaks through me. Sometimes I call them primal spirits. Remember when I drew you a two-line diagram showing the Other World as a kind of buffer world between us and GOD, the utterly unknowable? Of course I remember it. Well, when I say a spirit is close to Creation I mean the spirit is right on the line separating the Other World from GOD. What kind of answer is that? That line is imaginary. The whole thing is imaginary. You said so yourself. Since when are you against imagination; youre a poet, remember? Thats not the problem. Oh, you want some facts, do you? Well, heres one for you: there are no factual explanations for what Im talking about. Get used to it. Jesus Alice, cut me some slack will you? Let me give you a different metaphor; maybe that will help. You know the line we were just talking about? Think of it as slightly porous. Like a dotted line. You might say GOD leaks through the line separating GOD from the Other World, like a gas leaking through a very, very fine sieve. What leaks through becomes more and more diluted as it approaches us. But right at the border between The Other World and GOD, the gas is highly concentrated. That highly concentrated gas is what I mean by spirits very close to Creation. Theyre closer to the nature of GOD than to human nature. You might say theyre more unconscious, metaphorically speaking. The spirits

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closer to us are more conscious, metaphorically speaking. Theyre closer to human nature. Ghosts are example of that. Do you believe in ghosts, Alice? Of course I believe in ghosts. As a matter of fact, every time Ive visited your home over the past year or so, Ive seen one. Where? Standing just behind you, to your left. Who is it? Beats me. Come on, Alice. Who is it? Its a thin young man with dark hair, thats all I can tell you. Id know more if I were you, but Im not, Im Alice, remember? How could I forget? What else do you want to know? What are the spirits close to Creation called? Theyre like the Spirit that speaks through me; they have no names. Ghosts have names. ISLAUGGH has a name, is that what ISLAUGGH is, a ghost? Not really. Shes something else. You know Alice, ISLAUGGH gets more elusive every time we talk. Stop crying in your milk; you can handle it. Shes a very complex spirit. Thats why her name yielded so many meanings. Warrior and hero are two of them, right? Thats because shes a special hero, a warrior who continues to lead after the battle is over, like Alexander, or Napoleon, or Charlemagne, or the Celtic Warrior Queen Boadicea. But she is also a hero because she has survived to announce the reascendance of the Female Spirit. Thats why your other translations also make sense. What are they again? Well theres method and law, and humbled and weak. Those are the ones I remember right off. Right. She is the carrier of the real law, the real methodthose that embody the interest of the Female Spirit. Your other translations of her name as one who has been humbled or weak are self-evident because, in a way, shes been held underground, rendered powerless, for millennia. And finally, shes also calf, a translation you didnt mention because it made no sense when you saw her as a male warrior. But it does as a woman, because the milk-giving cow and women were tightly linked in Celtic mythology. She is also, in a way, a sacrificial calf, a symbol of the sacrifice of the Female Spirit so that the Male Spirit could rise. Dont you agree those translations of ISLAUGGHs name make more sense in light of ISLAUGGH being a woman? I thought you said she was a representation of the Female Spirit.

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I did. Well why are you saying shes a woman? I thought you said the Female Spirit has nothing to do with being a woman. It doesnt. Youre contradicting yourself then. Only in your eyes. ISLAUGGH is a woman who also happens to be a representation of the Female Spirit. Maybe thats a better way of putting it. It is. Thanks. Youre right about the translations; they do seem to make more sense if I see ISLAUGGH as a woman. And a representation of the Female Spirit. Think of her as a working woman. By the way, youre also a bit off in your pronunciation of her name. Hows that? Your pronunciation as Eeslaw isnt correct. Where did you get it? Celtic is a very guttural language, like Hebrew: theres a lot of action on the roof of the mouth. I dont know why that pronunciation came to me, but it did, right from the time Diane spelled the letters out for me and I scribbled them down. Eeslaw was what I heard in my head. It just came to me that way. Well youre a smart boy, maybe you should think about why that happened, because I cant think of any words in the English language ending in augh that are pronounced awe except the old Bears quarterback, Sammy Baugh. Now that you mention it, neither can I. But I never questioned the pronunciation, it just came to me. Well, look at it now, and pronounce it in your best guttural Celtic. By the way, is in Celtic is always pronounced iss, as in hiss, not ees, did you know that? No. Well you do now. And the double consonant gh has a number of pronunciations, but one is like ch, but with g flavor, right off the roof of the mouth. Now say it, as two words, just like youve been doing. ISS LAUGCH Say it again. ISS LAUGCH Sounds like Is Log doesnt it? Jesus. Youre telling me another way of interpreting the name is to see it could also mean Is Log. Right. Or Am Log. Remember, ISLAUGGH is a metaphor. You may think of it as a name, something you can look up in a book of names, like Jane or Joan, but thats because weve reduced names to a kind of shorthand. Theyve lost all their metaphorical magic. Only when we trace back the origins of that shorthand does some of the magic come back, because the original names were metaphors. When God has Adam name the animals in Genesis, Adam isnt naming them with words like snake, or elephant, or fish. Preliterate names are little stories: the one who swims on land and the one who moves like heavy thunder would be metaphors for snake and elephant. ISLAUGGH is just such a metaphor, and like all metaphors, it has many meanings.

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OK, but I dont know if youre entirely right about the pronunciation of her name. Why is that? I was just thinking how quickly the pronunciation came to me, without a moments hesitation. Maybe I got the IS part wrong as ees, maybe Ive been taking too many Spanish lessons, but getting the second part as laws was right on the nose. Law or method is one of the translations of her name, right? Sometimes you surprise me, Franklin. Thanks. What Im really trying to figure out, though, is what Is Log or Am Log actually means. Thats easy. You were an altar boy, right? Yep. Remember the Annunciation, when the Angel Gabriel comes to the Virgin to announce she is to be the Mother of God? Sure. Every altar boy knows that. Then you also know the Annunciation is also the moment of Incarnationof Mary conceiving Jesus. Sure. So? Well, in a way, ISLAUGGH is Gabriel. And Im the Virgin Mary? You said it, not me. Alice, excuse me, but thats completely nuts. Who the hell would believe that? Youd better, or youre going to miss the boat. It may seem nutty, but thats what ISLAUGGH really is: a herald, a messenger, just like Gabriel. Youre telling me when ISLAUGGH appeared, she was representing the unseen author of the myth and announcing the myths conception at the same time? Right. You might say ISLAUGGH is the front man for the seed man. But doesnt Am Log really mean I am the Log? Doesnt it mean ISLAUGGH created The Witnesses Log? If I didnt know so much about ISLAUGGH and the myth, Id be tempted to say youre right. The confusion is caused by her role as a heraldshes carrying a message from someone else about the myth, so in that sense she IS LOG, but she is not the authorif only for the reason that the myth doesnt have any of the earmarks of a Celtic myth. I know, I replied, the myths terse style really threw me. Its extremely spare, like the opening of Genesis. Its not a copy, though; it has its own spare style and cosmology. Still, something kept telling me the myth had a Hebraic connection far stronger than its spare style, most likely a Hebrew spirit, but I could never quite convince myself that was the case.

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Chapter 37: I Uncover the Myths Hebraic Connection September 2005, Starbucks, Sarasota I decided it was time to show Alice a journal entry I had made a few years earlier. It was about the Hebrews conception of God. Although I didnt know it at the time, the entry was to lay the groundwork for uncovering the Hebrew spirit involved in the creation of the myth. I pulled out my laptop so Alice could read the entry:
One of the first things that occurred to me after the myth came to me was that a Hebrew spirit was involvedbut I was never able to go beyond that. If there was such a spirit, it remained hidden. One thing that did become evident to me as I began studying the history of the Hebrews was the audacity and originality of the Hebrew God. It amazed me. The Book of Genesis presented a radically new vision of the relationship between humans and the unknowable. To paraphrase Joan, that radical vision was in every way a new Bible. It was light years ahead of its timeso much so that it seems to have literally come out of nowhere. Every other culture had a cyclical vision of life in which nothing ever changed and in which there were a bewildering number of animal and anthropomorphic Gods utterly unpredictable in their treatment of humans. In the Hebrew vision, there was one, eternal, all-powerful God who was the creator of everything out of nothingno mud, no mother earth, no other gods. It was a vision that erased the entire preliterate divine universe in one bold stroke. There was more though. The Hebrew God may have governed heaven and earth, but He was interested in only one thing: the Hebrews and their advancement. This was not a cyclical vision, but a directed oneone that would be acted out on the stage of history because Gods continuing behavior was bound by the conditions of a contracta covenant. That aspect alone would have stupefied the Greeks. The fact that the Hebrews behavior was also bound by that same contract doesnt lessen the audacity of the idea. Jung believed that the changing Judaic/Christian conception of God over the past 4000 years has been intimately related to our conscious development. With that in mind, one way to explain the Hebrews radical vision is to suggest that when our new consciousness began to tentatively take hold throughout the world, the Hebrews, for some unknown reason, took a huge leap into that new self-reflective, examining consciousnessand out of that aggressive, extremely capable, examining consciousness eventually came their startling conception of

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God. The same huge, inexplicable leap into the new consciousness also happened to the Greeks. Thus we see them suddenly using their new examining consciousness to create science, philosophy, mathematics, history, art, you name it. The Hebrews, however, applied their new examining consciousness to only one thing: the divine. The result is a very curious Hebrew Godone who is eternal and powerful beyond any previous conception of divine power (everything out of nothing) and yet one who is extremely parochial in His interests. Jung equated the unconscious mind with God. If we accept that equation, its possible to describe the early Hebrew mind as one that combined a very well developed, examining consciousness with an extremely powerful, almost uncontrollable unconscious. The powerful, uncontrollable unconscious that the Hebrews modern consciousness had to deal with was the same one preliterate humans had lived with for thousands and thousands of years, and had learned to accommodate in a much different way with a much different consciousness. Jung says there isnt a better record of the clash between that uncontrollable unconscious and our modern consciousness than the Bible. All the emerging literate cultures were faced with that same dilemma: having to somehow accommodate that unconscious. Most did it very slowly by balancing between their old and new consciousness. However, the two cultures that had taken a huge leap into their modern, examining consciousness, the Greeks and the Hebrews, paid a stiff price for their glory. Ive indicated the Hebrew predicament. As for the Greeks, its clear that a very dark, savage, irrational streak ran just underneath their polished logic and art. There is no better illustration of this than the fear and anxiety Olympias Dionysian ecstasies struck in the heart of Phillip and Alexandertwo men who were otherwise afraid of absolutely nothing. The Greek and Hebrew experience made it absolutely clear that our new examining, rational consciousness was a world-beaterone capable of taking on anything, even the unknowable. The fact that it took 4000 years for that to happen in our overall Western culture shouldnt surprise us. That is how long it took for our new examining consciousness to partially absorb and tame the incredible power of our lingering preliterate unconscious.

Alice looked at me with the strangest expression on her face and said, Thats a mouthful, Justin. I know. You probably think Im nuts. Nobut you are being a bit too simplistic, not to mention theoretical. The actual transition of the Hebrews from a preliterate state to the startling vision expressed in Genesis was extremely problematic. It wasnt an easy roadand it didnt happen overnight. Anyway, what does all this have to do with The Witnesses

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Log? Its just where some of my thinking went as I pursued a Hebraic connection. Where is it? I cant see it. I couldnt see it either until a few weeks ago when I happened across an article about the identity of the Bible Writers. It blew me away. What did it say? Hold on; not so fast. Youre going to love how this unfolded. I had come to believe that if a Hebrew spirit had been involved in the myths creation, it was most probably one of the Bible Writers. Where I kept running into a wall was in trying to figure out why a Bible Writer would be attracted to a celebration of preliterate consciousness. Exactly. They would be attracted to the oppositetheir new literate consciousness. Right; thats what stumped me. Writing was critical for the Hebrews. It allowed them to accurately recordand study and clarifythe particulars of their changing covenant with God. Yet something in me kept insisting a Bible Writer was involved in the creation of the myth. For one thing, it helped me explainif only to myselfwhy the written myth came to me in a style so different from the rest of my written poetryand why it echoed that of Genesis. It also helped explain why the myth first came to me in writing. I could never understand why that happened because I had all but given up writing poems in favor of speaking them. I couldnt help feeling both oddities were signals, but I also couldnt get past the fact that a Bible Writer would never have been attracted to the vision of The Witnesses Log. Exactly; it doesnt make any sense that they would favor a return to the Female Spirit of preliterate cultures. Its what they were running from. Right, I replied, and then something unexpected happened. I happened across an article that said some scholars now think one of the Bible Writers was a woman. I was floored. It made immediate sense to me on all kinds of levels. I think its one of the reasons why there are so many oblique references to the power of the Female Spirit throughout the Biblewhich is a decidedly Male Spirit-driven book if there ever was one. But why would the female Bible Writer be interested in you and the myth? To make sure I got the myth rightbecause if I got it right, I would eventually understand what it was saying. But as I found out, I couldnt do that myself; I needed you for that, and guess what? I suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Exactly. You helped me see the myth in a larger context, one that would have made sense to our female Bible writer, namely, that the Male Spirit had become too distorted, that a re-balancing was required. I cant help but think that one of her tasks as a Bible Writer was keeping

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the boys honest, if you know what I mean. Ive always felt that the Bible Writers were extremely scrupulous in maintaining the often-conflicting truths presented to them on the transcribed oral scraps making up most of their source documents. One of the major areas of conflict had to come from the stories and traditions that belonged to the preceding Mother Goddess culture. Yet as scrupulous and truth seeking as they undoubtedly were, it didnt hurt to have someone around who had a vested interest in the Female Spirit, someone who would make sure something important wasnt accidentlyor purposefully brushed onto the cutting room floor. What youre telling me is that she jumped on The Witnesses Log train because our Male Spirit consciousness had become unbalanced. Yep, exactly. Maybe she even instigated the train, who knows? She demanded a balance 2500 years ago and she hasnt changed. Its who she is. Let me put it to you this way: it was time to make some corrections and she was the one who was going to make sure it got done correctly. I know this all sounds wacky, but it feels so right I can taste it. She has to be the Hebrew connection I kept sensing. You know, I even tried using a HebrewEnglish dictionary to see if ISLAUGGH meant anything in Hebrew, but I couldnt make any headway. I even dropped the vowels. Shes as hidden as she was 2500 years ago. Sometimes you really do amaze me, Franklin. You never give up, do you? I cantits not in my nature. You know what else? Surprise me. I had always suspected Joan had something to do with why I kept sensing a Hebrew spirit. Im sure of it now. Why is that? Joans Jewish. Her married name is Irish, and she looks Latin, but shes not. Shes one of those dark, gypsy Lithuanian Jews. When I told her I kept sensing a Hebrew connection, she said she had no idea if she was responsible, but thats not unusual; she really has no idea how she does what she does. Yet its the only way I could explain why I kept feeling a spirit connection and why the written version of myth took the form it did. Joan must have opened herself and the Bible Writer came flying in. I wouldnt doubt it, replied Alice. Thats the way she seems to work, as a gateway. She told me once that she lets the Stream move through her looking for somewhere to go, and where it usually seems to go is you. Remember the poem where you called her Joan of the many arms and the many weapons? Well, thats exactly what she is. Shes a Shiva. That makes her an anima with extraordinary creative potential. I know. Ive come to accept were linked at the navel. I never told you this, but when I was visiting Joan in Alamos, I brought up the myths Hebraic style again. This time, she looked at me in the strangest way, like shed just remembered something, and said, Did I ever tell you my Hebrew name? Its YOCHEVED. Its

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the name of Moses Mother. I was stunned. Five years earlier Joan and I had spontaneously spoken out a Creation myth with similarities to Genesisthe first of the Five Books of Mosesand now she suddenly ups and tells me in so many words that she is Moses mother. I had no idea why she had suddenly brought YOCHEVED upit was completely out of the blue. I had never mentioned to her that Moses played an important part in my imaginative life, even as a young boy. When I was older and saw Michelangelos Moses close up, and saw how torn, how divided he was, that identification became complete. So when she suddenly told me her Hebrew name, one of the things that flashed inside my mind was my own mother. Ive never told anybody this, not even Joan, but a few months after I met her, which was about the time my mother died, she began unconsciously acquiring some of my mothers mannerisms. She would be Joan and then she would be my mother in the lilt of her voice, or the way she moved her hands, or, tilted her head, or laughed. It was absolutely seamless. She was both Joan and my mother at the same time. The problem was, Joan had never met my mother. I could account for some of the similarities by the fact that Joan moves her hands in the same graceful way as my mother. And shes empathetic enough to have acquired a few other traits from me. After all, I am my mothers son. But there were other traits I could never account for. Sometimes she was so much my mother as to be unnerving. The only way I can account for it is to say she somehow began slipping into the Stream and tapping into God knows what. I dont think she had the slightest idea she was doing it. I just think she wanted to please me, make me happy, and she began becoming my mother. It just happened all by itself. So not only had she somehow become my mother, but to complete my identification with Moses, she had in a way also become Moses mother. At the time, I didnt fully understand what that signified, but there were rough parallels: on the one hand, YOCHEVED had given birth to Moses who gave birth to Genesis, while on the other, Joan/YOCHEVED and I had given birth to the opening of a new Bible, The Witnesses Log. Hold on a minute, Alice shot back. Maybe I didnt know about the female Bible Writer, but I do know something about the Bible Writers. Hebrew tradition says the Five Books of Moses were revealed to Moses and written down by him around 1400 B.C., but the scholarship shows that the Torah was actually written by the Bible Writers around 900 B.C. So? So your Hebrew parallel is flawed. Moses didnt give birth to the Genesis we have today. The Bible Writers did. So Moses had a little help from the Bible Writersjust like I had a little help from Joan. You have to remember that The Witnesses Log may have come to me first in writing, but the subsequent oral versions were spontaneous, antiphonal speakings. I couldnt have done them without Joans help, without Joans

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responses. This means the parallels are even more accurate because of your comments. Listen to this: YOCHEVED gave birth to Moses who gave birth to Genesis with some help from the Bible Writers, while I gave birth to the opening of a new Bible, The Witnesses Log with a little help from Joan/YOCHEVED. I hate to keep saying this, but sometimes you really do amaze me, Franklin. I know. But Im not finished. Although one parallel ends with Genesis being written by two people and the other ends with it being spoken by two people, they are exact mirror parallels of each other. You know what I mean: right is left, left is right. Thats no coincidence, at least to my mind. This myth, this journey is filled with mirrors. Jesus, I remember someone once asking me what my first speaking felt like, and I dont know why, but I shot back without thinking: like I had stepped through the looking glass. Like Alice in Wonderland. But theres even more to the mirror parallels. Hebrew didnt exist as a written language until around 1100 B.C., so Moses Genesis had to be oral, not written. You want to see some more equations of those mirrors? Have at it. I scribbled them on a pad:
Moses oral Genesis Moses and Bible Writers written Genesis Justins written myth Justin and Joan/YOCHEVEDs oral myth

I glanced up at Alice. She had the strangest look on her face, like I had overheated and she was about to throw water on me. You never do give up, do you? No, I cant. Do you even know how? Not really, but from that look on your face I should probably find out. You said it, not me. One last thing, OK? Despite everything Ive just said, I sensed there was still more: that Joan/YOCHEVED was unconsciously gearing up for something much bigger. Id known Joan long enough to know she had an uncanny way of anticipating the future without really being aware she was doing it. I think something like that happened when ISLAUUGH appeared to me. At the time, Joan told me it signaled my rebirth. But I think on some dim level she also sensed ISLAUGGHs appearance was the opening note of a much larger birththat of the myth. When I visited her later in Santa Monica, she must have opened herself to the Stream and gone where she had to go. You might say I flew to California so the myth could be born. Id be surprised if it hadnt happened that way, Alice said. Ive never met two people who were so psychically intertwined.

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It seems to be bottomless. Almost everything that has happened to you has been of an archetypal nature. It only makes sense then that the myths creation and ISLAUGGHs visitation would also fit into an archetypal scheme. I think youre right. But do me a favor will you? Dont say anything about this Gabriel/Virgin Mary thing to Jane. Why not? Why not? Shell never stop riding me. Oh, so youre the Virgin, are you? Well, come on baby, show me your hymen. It would never stop. Jane wouldnt do that. You have no idea. Oh so what? Show her your hymen, Alice quipped. But lets not haggle. I have something important to tell you. Whats that? The whispered Witness you heard when ISLAUGGH appeared to you is a command for you to witness her for what she is. ISLAUGGH is all the things Ive been telling you: a gateway, a carrier of intent, a herald. All those names mean somewhat the same thingThrough me others pass. Id remember that if I were youespecially in light of what youve just told me about the female Bible Writer. I will. You know, what youve been telling me about ISLAUGGH being Gabriel may not be that crazy. I dont think I ever told you, but I figured out once it was almost nine months to the day between the appearance of ISLAUGGH and the appearance of the myth. As soon as I calculated it, I realized ISLAUGGHs appearance had not only signaled my re-birth, but also a rebirth of the Bible in the form of The Witnesses Log. I told you Joans right about that. And about the myth being a new Bible too although it would be more correct to say its the beginning of a new Bible, one thats more a product of the Female Spirit than the Male Spirit. ISLAUGGH brought it to you so you could become what Jane called you the other day: a herald. A herald of what? Thats up to you.

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Chapter 38: Jesus, You Got Some Life Alice September 2005, Sarasota Alices explanation of who ISLAUGGH was made me even more curious about the female Bible Writer involved in the myths creation. I asked Alice if she thought the female Bible Writer was the author of the myth. Relax, she said, were never going to know the author, thats my reading of the situation. Well, I replied, if well never know who the author was, I can tell you this, whoever it was had to be a real mumblerbecause Joan and I had to try fourteen times before we got the first oral version right. The really intriguing thing, however, is that I found out later that the writers of the Bible also werent successful until their fourteenth attempt, which really blew me away. Then I discovered that fourteen was a very formidable number in Hebrew numerology. For example, there are fourteen generations each between Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Did you know that? That was when I really began to pay attention to Joans claim that the myth was a new Bible. I told you I think Joan is right on that, and its obvious someone wanted you to see the connection as well. By the way, how did you know it was the fourteenth attempt? I kept track so I could go back to a particular attempt if I had to. There was always the possibility that the myth would come in pieces, not as a whole. That never happened, though. When it finally came, it came as a whole. By the way, Im still not that clear about this business of me being a herald. A herald is a special kind of messenger. It means youre an announcer of a truth. What truth is that? That depends on you. But you might consider this: an older way of knowing exists within all of us, a way of knowing we can access by simply surrendering to it. Most importantly it is a way of knowing in harmony with the Female Spirit, something we desperately need. You wouldnt be talking about speaking, by any chance? Among other things. Ive already tried heralding that. People thought I was nuts. Well, you are in a way. New truths are always at odds with established ways. Thats why people get burned at the stake. I know. It hasnt been easy. I dont know where Id be if we hadnt met. You may not know this, Justin, but our lives have become much more intertwined than I had ever imagined possible. I know youd like to think of me as a kind of psychic Google, someone you could pump endlessly for information, but weve gone far beyond that.

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How far? Our fates have become intertwined. Weve become linked at the navel as you like to put it. How do you know that? I can feel it. Well, I dont feel it. I wouldnt be so sure about that. Youve had dreams about me, havent you? How did you know that? She began cackling. They werent sex dreams were they? No, Alice, they werent sex dreams. And by the way, there was only one dream. It was terrifying. It predicted my rebirth. You were my guide. Oh was I now? I recounted the George Washington bridge dream with the endless anchoring rooms and lyres and her leading me though the small hole in the anchoring room wall. I went on to describe how terrified I was that Id be trapped inside it and how, when I finally came out the other end, I refused to follow her any further and began banging on the giant lyre. Was I cackling? Yes. You were almost demonic. Dont let the cackling fool you. I have to go through the tunnel too. What do you mean by that? It means you cant be reborn unless Im reborn too. I get to do it first. Did you think I was going to get a free ride in all this? I never thought about that. Of course you didnt. As usual, youre only concerned with what happens to you. No wonder your marriages didnt work. Jesus, Alice Dont Jesus Alice me. Im as scared as you are. Im going to get blindsided, Justin. I can feel it. What about me? Am I going to get blindsided too? What do you think? Its the story of your life. Youre right, it is. Listen to me Justin. What happens to me from now on is going to affect you. And what happens to you is going to affect me. Thats all I can tell you. Think about Chang and Eng if you need a visual. So far, all weve talked about are your visitations, but Im afraid theyre only half the story. Its time you knew who youre really hanging out with at Starbucks. I was a very unusual farm girl. My own visitations began when I was around six, and after that they came every twelve years or so. At first, they were terrifying and completely overpowering, but they only intensified my desire to know who I really was, how I fit in. I probably could have accepted being considered a freak, the girl who sees things. After all, thats how people like me have always been treated. But I

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had to know what my visions were all about. Sometimes they were so overpowering I couldnt talk for days; all I could do was mutely look at people, like ISLAUGGH. It scared them. It scared me. Dont bother to ask what the visions were like. I dont care to relate them. All I care to say is they were beautiful and highly sexual and yet horrible at the same time. The visions were so primal I could never really make sense of them logically, I could just feel them, and it felt like they were tearing me apart. But always in the center of all that pain was a white, intense light that seemed to know everythingthats the best way I can describe it. I could see the light far off in the distance and at the same time I could feel it opening up inside me like a flower. I eventually understood it was telling me I was going to be a part of something beautiful, and true. I say this to you now as if it was all perfectly clear to me from the start, but as a young girl I was completely dumbfounded. I didnt have any idea what the visions were about. They were absolutely terrifying, but I somehow also knew . the white light was there especially for me, because I could feel it telling me that one day I was going to be living in a world where I would be understood. That feeling had all the power and intensity of revealed truth. I bowed before it, even as a child. It wasnt until much later, when I began to study psychic and spiritual traditions, that the visions became somewhat intelligible. I began to see the visions were specific messages and that they were about the Female Spirit and that I was to play some part in its rebirth. Alice went on to talk about certain aspects of her life and psychic ability. It was one of the few times I asked to record her because I knew she didnt like the way it influenced the natural give and take of conversation. (If its important, youll remember it, was her usual reply to my requests.) Surprisingly, she agreed. Here are some excerpts from that session:
First of all, were never born knowing who we really are. Its hidden from us. If were lucky, we may get to know our one true name. No one knows why this sometimes happens. Maybe the best way of understanding this is to think of the entire universe as being all yours. I know thats the way you think about it anyway, so it should be easy for you. Heres the difference, though. Think of that universe as being an infinite piece of Saran Wrap thats pulled very, very taut. Everything on the upper side of the Saran wrap is the total conscious world. On the lower side is the total unconscious world. Now think of yourself as a marble thats dropped onto the conscious side of the Saran Wrap at birth. But where did the marble come from? From Marble World, who knows? Its not important. The important thing is the marble was dropped onto the Saran Wrap. Guess what happened then? It bounced? Right. Maybe several times, maybe more, maybe it keeps bouncing. Im not losing you am I?

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No. Im bouncing right behind you on the Saran Wrap. On one of those bounces the marble stops bouncing. It comes to rest in a small depression in the Saran Wrap. You know why? No. Why? The Saran Wrap stops bouncing back. What the hell does that mean? It means the marble is where its supposed to be. The falling energy of the marble and the snap back of the Saran Wrap come into balance. A scientist would give you a better explanation, but I think you get the idea. Its all about balance and energy. OK, so what happens then? Is the marble wrapped up to keep it fresh? These marbles dont need to be kept fresh, Mister Smarty. Theyre always fresh. Yet in your own weird way, you anticipated what I was going to say next. Which is? The marble does become partially wrapped because its partially sunk into the Saran Wrap. How deeply its sunk depends on the marble. Some marbles seem to sink in deeper than others is all I can tell you. OK. So? So each marble has its own distinct view of the universe. Some marbles see more of the top sidethe conscious worldand some see more of the bottom side the unconscious world. These arent really marbles are they? No theyre not. But I thought youd be smart enough to figure that out. Anyway, the important thing to know is that the marble always sees the unconscious world through the lens of the conscious world. Why is that? Because the marble always comes to rest on the conscious side of the Saran Wrap. If the marble is very, very light, it can only see the unconscious world directly beneath itself. Thats because the marble can only see the unconscious world where the marble and the Saran Wrap touch each other. And it always sees it through the conscious side, where the marble touches the Saran Wrap. Sometimes the depression is so slight that the marble can barely see anything of the unconscious world. But the more the marble sinks, the more of its surface touches the surface of conscious side. That means it can see more of the bottom side of the Saran Wrapthe unconscious world. If you need some help, imagine youre in a glass diving bell. The more its beneath the surface of the water, the more you see of the underside of the waters surface. OK, I said, I get it. But what does all this mean? It means who we are, how we see the world, is out of our control. It all depends on how the marble bounces. You might say the position the marble comes to rest in is your fate. A rationalist will always be a rationalist and a mystic will always be a mystic. Does that mean we cant change? How about people like Saint Paul? He changed. Saint Paul was still bouncing when he was persecuting Christians. Bouncing marbles are always confused. When he stopped bouncing, he became who he truly was. OK, but what are you trying to tell me? Stop bouncing.

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*** Im a very special kind of Dreamer: one who almost isnt there. What do you mean you almost arent there? I may look hard and crusty, but Im as thin as rice paper. Im like Kiki in that respect, or the real Moses. I have no defenses left, no hard shell of the self. Under the right circumstances, you could blow me away in a second. The Spirit has seen to that. What do you mean the Spirit has seen to that? I dont know how it happened, or why, but early on, right after I became aware of the Spirit as a young girl, I began to disappear. It wasnt anything I consciously decided; I just started to become nothing; no thing is perhaps a better way of putting it. What does that mean? I learned how to quiet my conscious mind until I disappeared, until nothing was left of me, until I became no thing. I didnt consciously try to quiet my mind, so perhaps learned is the wrong term. Lets just say I felt something calling me, and I went there. Did you physically disappear? Of course not. Only my conscious self disappeared. But you wouldnt have known the difference: youd have still thought I was there, but Id be in something like a state of deep meditation. It was only when you tried to talk to me that youd know something wasnt quite right. What do you mean by that? I mean I wouldnt respond to you. I wouldnt be there. If you werent there, where did you go? To the place of Forgetting. It exists, just like the mythic rivers of Forgetting and Remembering exist. Theyre a part of the Stream. What was it like? It was something like Hades of Greek mythology: gray, vague, almost not there. As soon as I entered it, I began forgetting everything. Everything. I had no control over it. It was instinctual. I felt myself becoming smaller. Shadowy. I couldnt stop myself. It was irresistible, like falling in love with someone whos going to do you a lot of harm. What did you do? Nothing. What could I do? It was where I was supposed to be. I could feel it. I didnt know it at the time, but I was going through a kind of baptism. The Spirit was preparing me for being no thing. Its an attitude, or state of being, something like giving up just before you die. I call it the Darkness, because you can feel it in every part of your being. There's no light, no life, no energy of any kind. When I finally got to the point where I was absolutely sure I was going to disappear, I came out the other side as something else. I felt like I was on both sides of the Darkness, if that means anything to you. What did that feel like? It felt like I did and didn't existwhich is impossible. Western mystics say its the point where we become aware that the physical world is an illusion. They report it

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to be a state of pure being; one filled with light and love. Ive experienced that state, but my usual experience is somewhat different. Why dont you see what the mystics see? Im a bridgea psychicnot a mystic. Its where my marble came to rest. The marble determines how you experience the world, remember? How could I forget it? Dont worry, you will. Thanks. But how is what you experience different? I dont feel it as filled with light and love. I feel it as intelligent energy, thats the best way I can describe it. What do you mean by intelligent energy? An energy that feels beautiful and true beyond description. I know youd like something more logical, but its the best I can do. As for myself, I feel as if I have no depth, none at all: no memories, no ideas, no sense of myself at all, only that I somehow exist but I dont know exactly where, or how, or as what. All I can really say is Im aware of that energy and that I am somehow a part of it. Is that energy the same as the dark energy of the Spirits dreams? Were talking about two different things. Yet they are related. You might say the intelligent energy is like the stillness at the eye of a hurricane. OK, I get it; but what happens then? How do you come back? The first few times, I had no idea how to come back. The Spirit pulled me back. After that, I learned to come back by turning towards myself. What do you mean, turning towards yourself? Its not a physical movement or a conscious thought. Its more of an instinctive, unconscious interest in becoming myself again, becoming other than the intelligent energy. It comes from the deepest part of my being. What happens then? Something irresistible pulls me back to the place of Remembering. And then what happens? I become Alice again. Its like waking from a deep sleep. This shifting back and forth happened over and over as I was growing up until it became second nature. One moment Id be Alice and then the next moment Id become no thing. The first person I could ever talk to about things like this was Kiki. I was almost sixteen at the time. You know what she said to me when I finished? She had the weirdest grin on her face. She said, Jesus, you got some life Alice. When she said that, I started to cry and then I began to laugh uncontrollably and then Kiki joined in with that crazy cackle of hers. We must have gone on for hours.

Alice went on to tell me that when I first showed her the myth, she recognized herself as a Dreamer, and liked the term. Before that, she said, she had simply thought of herself as being split between worlds. She thought the myths description of the Dreamers was particularly apt, especially in light of the fact that the Dreamers never know why they were elected, or selected, only that they were. I think I understand now, I said, why The Witnesses Log myth had such an impact on you: it must have been like sighting land after being lost at sea for

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years. As soon as I looked at the written version of the myth, Alice replied, I immediately recognized it as a description of that older way of knowingits a description of how I live my life. But you must have really been at a loss, because you had no way of understanding the myth initially. I must say, though, that you were beginning to get very close in your own stubborn way. When I finally heard the oral version, there was no doubt in my mind. Its an elegy, its spoken from the point of view of witnesses who are becoming more and more alone, looking back, watching their world disappear. What makes the elegy especially powerful is that it is being spoken by those who have no doubts whatsoever about the strength of that older way, and absolutely no doubts whatsoever about what it means to be human, to be witnesses. There is a sureness and boldness to the myth that went right down my spine. You were right, by the way, in thinking the myth was a description of the nature of early consciousness. In fact its a perfect description. You were also right saying its still with us, buried underneath our new consciousness. Despite being buried it still supports uslike a good mother shouldexcept the new baby has come to believe hes standing on his own two feet. But if you took it completely away, our current self-reflective, explaining consciousness would be lost. Its very proud of itself, but its nothing more than a very attractive shimmer on the surface of the waters of the deep. Wed be full of ideas with no emotional roots. Wed be crazy. Think about this, too: the speakers of the myth are telling us about that older way of knowing, but they are speaking collectively for the entire human race. And, as you discovered, they are using an older frame of reference. Thats why the entities seemed so foreign to you, and why they seem so foreign to anybody with a modern mind. Anyway, think about all that, and then think about what you told me earlier, that the central drama of the myth is identical to what occurs within us when a poem comes to us, especially a speaking, the kind of poetry ISLAUUGH would have known. Oh, one more thing. Diane was right on about ISLAUGGH meaning laugh. She shouldnt have doubted her instincts. It has nothing to do with Gaelic or Celtic, its just a good old English pun: is laugh, am laugh. Maybe it would be easier if you thought about it as I am cackling.

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Chapter 39: I Have Some Doubts about Alice October 2005, Sarasota, Starbucks Despite all that Alice had been saying to me about the reemergence of the Female Spirit, I wasnt quite convinced. I didnt have any basic doubts about what she was sayingit made sensebut her attitude was a bit too messianic for me. I wasnt a stranger to messianic moods. Id had a good taste of it after speaking first came to me. Those moods can cloud an otherwise critical mind. Which is what seemed to be happening to Alice, because Alicemore than anybodyknew time was the least reliable part of any psychic information. Yet her entire life seemed to hang on her belief that the reemergence was about to occur. What it all boiled down to was this: while I now understoodthanks to Alice that the Female Spirit was the cradle in which both the myth and poetry rocked, I didnt have much interest in pursuing it beyond that. The Female Spirit wasnt keeping me awake at nights. It was the Witnesses who were doing that. The one entity I thought I understood didnt seem quite that transparent anymore. I knew Alice would probably want to talk to me about the Female Spirit, but I was determined to head her off at the pass. As soon as we sat down, I brought up the Witnesses strange claim they were equal if not superior to both the Visitors and Listeners. The thing thats so odd about it, I said, is theyre clearly dependent on both the Visitors and Listeners for many things. Its a recurring theme in many creation myths, Alice replied. It seems were a very pugnacious lot, like barking, yapping dogs. I think its our instinctive recognition of the special place human beings play in creationthat without us, as you like to say, there would be no creation worth talking about. Early humans may have respected, even revered, their animal brothers, but there is never any doubt who was top dog. That attitude extends to the Gods as well. They were always being challenged by their human creations. Sometimes we would get away with it until the Gods gave us a well-aimed kick in the ribs. You might say that those kicks gave us something to really yap about. I can still feel them, I said. Youd think Id have seen them coming. Dogs like you never see them coming. Thanks. But listen, Alice, I wanted to say something about your seeing the myth as an announcement of the re-ascendance of the Female Spirit. I didnt say the myth was an announcement of anythingI said it was a description of the consciousness we had when the Female Spirit was dominant. If any announcement took place, it was through ISLAUGGH. Shes a very bedraggled herald if you ask me. I dont know how to say this to

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you, but I think youre pushing this reemergence thing. She looked at me as if she were trying to remember something. Oh, do you? I hope thats not true. Im way out on a limb you know. I know. She looked so vulnerable I changed the subject immediately. Alice, I need some help, I said. I thought I understood the Witnesses, but the Spirit gave me a couple of those kicks recently. I believe you were there. The steel in her eyes began to slowly drift back. Suddenly they solidifiedlike a shot. It was unnerving. You mean when the Spirit reminded you maybe you didnt know what you thought you did? Yes. Im sure you remember the messages, I replied. Listen to the Witnesses and The Witnesses know everything. I know you remember them. Not like you do. I keep telling you that, but you keep forgetting. OK, OK, I shot back, heres what I want to tell you: the more I stopped analyzing the written myth and began listening to the Witnesses as poets, poets who knew, the more magical and impressive the myth became. The myth could have come as a logical description. But it didnt. It came as a poema very economical poem. I doubt anyone would argue that. Its one of the things that convinced me the myth was not some unconscious nonsense. It was as tight as a drum. Something that has always bothered me about modern channeled entities is how wordy they are. Many of them sound like a chatty Peter Lorre on speed. But thats not at all what happens when the Spirit speaks through you, is it? No. Its very terse, at least thats how it feels. Exactly. The ancient seers were always economical, at least thats the impression left by the historical record. There was none of the circling around the target like you get with modern channels. Youre saying theyre too chatty. Right. Maybe its a modern convention, but maybe its a signal theyre not going deep enough. It may be because weve become too conscious, less comfortable with our unconscious minds. The Greeks and Romans may have celebrated rationality, but they were also very much at home with the psychic world. You know, Justin, from what I can gather, the prophecies of the Oracles were not only economical, but metaphoric and rhythmic as well. They seem to have uttered their directives and prophecies in the form of poetry. I know. But my own experience with psychic, directive voices tells me they are naturally metaphoric, but not rhythmicat least not in the way poetry is. Is that your experience as well? Its hard for me to say; Im not that much of a poet. I think that somewhere along the line, the Oracles began to encase their

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utterances in the rhythms associated with poetry. The Oracles seem to have appeared as we approached our modern, literate consciousness and stopped hearing our own internal directives. The Oracles were undoubtedly a continuation of the shamanic tradition that existed in the preceding tribal culturesshamans being tribe members with marked psychic abilitieswhat the myth calls Dreamers. The Oracles probably had a modern consciousness, or perhaps they possessed a dual consciousnessboth old and newthat they shuttled between very easily. Its clear they had marked psychic abilitieswe know they entered trance states. I suspect they may have uttered their prophecies in the rhythms associated with poetry because it helped reinforce whatever remnants of preliterate consciousness they possessed. After all, the states of poetic conception and preliterate consciousness are almost identical. The Oracles werent creating poetry, however. Let me put it this way the words they uttered werent the praise words of a poem but the rhythmic, metaphoric words of a directive. The Muse as we know her today wasnt presentjust her scent.

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Chapter 40: Jane Pulls Out Smokey Robinson October 2005, Sarasota Listening to the Witnesses, as the Spirit had suggested, was easy and hard at the same time. It was easy because the three oral versions of the myth were beautiful. Ive always felt that way about them. What was difficult was listening to something in which I was so present. It was hard to distance myself from it. The myth may have been born out of the collective unconscious, but the afterbirth of me was all over itespecially in the oral versions. Listening to someone like the Beatles, or Dylan, was much easier there was a separation between the artist and myself. But I kept merging with the myth as I listened to it. Trying to keep a critical distance from it proved very challenging. One evening, as I was listening to the myth, I heard a voice say: Poetry is prophecy is prayer. I immediately sensed its truth, but couldnt explain why. I called Jane. Jane, I need some help. Dont we all. Im trying to get a handle on poetry and prophecy and prayer. I got a message theyre the same thing. What was the message? Poetry is prophecy is prayer. Its the rhythm. Jesus. What do you mean, Its the rhythm. The beat, stupid. You been drinking? I dont drink. You know that. Then why are you acting so stupid? Im not acting stupid, JaneI am stupid. Thats why Im calling you. Maybe it would be better if you came to church Sunday. Jesus, Jane! You know I hate that sort of thing. Youre not going to be hating this. We got ourselves a real preacher last year. Hell be praising and praying and prophesying all over the place. What time? Nine-thirty. My place. Well leave from there. So there I was, in church, sitting with Jane, waiting for the preacher to appear. I had been to black churches before but I wasnt quite prepared for the Reverend LaMarc Charles. James Brown would have highfived him and then some. Unlike my days as an altar boy where the priest was careful to separate the gospel from politics and sex and just about everything else except God and the Devil, Janes preacher didnt separate anything from anything and it was all delivered in a

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raspy, breathy, primal, heart-pounding rhythm that had everyone swaying back and forth like palm trees in a hurricane. Me included. When the service was over, Jane said to me, You cleared up now? Not quite. Im still swaying. Dont you see? Its the beat, the rhythm, the movement that allows it to happen. What to happen? The poetry and prophecy and prayer. Im not quite getting what youre saying. I know the unconscious speaks rhythmically during poetic conception, but what I want to know is why my voices are telling me poetry and prophecy and prayer are the same. Because they are. They all come from the same place, the rhythm place. You mean where Smokey Robinson lives? Dont be a little smartass with meyes, where Smokey Robinson lives. But thats not what Im talking about. Poetry and prophecy and prayer are different faces of the soul. Think of them as the three Miracles, Smokeys backup group. And while youre at it, you can think of Smokey as God. You know what Im saying? Whats Motown then, Heaven? Let me slow it down for you Mister Smarty. Smokey and the Miracles are all moving to the same beat. But its Smokey's beat; he lays it down. Got it? Yep. I got it. And the words and the music are Smokeys too. Hold onthats not so. I always check the credits to see whos writing their own songs and Smokeys songs are always credited to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. So? So its not just Smokeys music. Wrong. Thats just a matter of form. God likes to spread the credit aroundyou know what I mean? Like The Book of MosesMoses may have put it down, but its Smokeys words and Smokeys music. But without Moses there wouldnt have been any Book of Moses. So? So God needed Moses to write it. Listen, Moses may have scribbled it all down on goatskin and passed it around but it was Gods words and Gods music, mister. Youre a real little bitch for fine hairs, arent you? I wouldnt exactly put it that way. Well, somebody should. Anyway, the words and music are Smokeys. Period. And the Miracles words are Smokeys words too, right? Not exactly. Some are partial echoes, riffs off his words. You understand? I think so. Smokey sings the song and the Miracles make up a riff, a refrain, to echo what hes singing. All black music is like that. How about all those jive moves the Miracles make, are they Smokeys too? No, smartass, theyre the Miracles moves. They look a bit like Smokeys, but

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theyre not. Smokey has his own moves. What do Smokeys moves look like? Thats for you to find out. Pay attentionheres how it goes: Smokey makes a move, the Miracles make a move; the Miracles make a move, Smokey makes a move. Got it? Seems simple enough to me. You think its simple you try it sometime. Jesus, Jane, lighten up will you? Ill lighten up when I want to. Right now Im getting darker, and you should be getting your ass there too. Maybe youd actually learn something. Heres how it goes. Smokey and the Miracles are always moving together except the Miracles got some special moves. The kind of moves that make your backbone float. Yep. OK. Got it. Those movesalong with the riffs, the refrains of the Miraclesare some of the faces of the soul. Think of them as the Miracles. They reflect Smokeys song in special ways. Theyre what youre calling poetry and prophecy and prayer. But poetry and prophecy and prayer are three things, not four. What is that supposed to mean? It means there are four Miracles, Miss Smarty. Three guys and a woman Smokeys wife, Claudette. You didnt think I knew about her, did you? So? So its not a very good metaphor. Its an excellent metaphor, Mister Know It All. Claudette doesnt count the same as the three other Miracles. You were an altar boy right? Of course, cant you tell? Well you shouldnt be asking such stupid questions then. Claudette is like the Virgin Mary. She was there in the beginning to give birth to baby Jesus, and then she went into the backgroundinto the studiolike Claudette did. But everyone knew she was the Mother of God. The Mother Spirit. OK so where are you going with all this? You might say Claudettes the female side of God. Shes not on the road with Smokey, but shes still there in the studio to balance out Smokeys voice, give it a little more topa little more bottom. Alice will tell you all about that, my friend. OK, OK. So shes different, shes not out there on the road with Smokey. Exactly. And the other three Miracles are all on the road with Smokey echoing parts of Smokeys song, the song of Creation. Exactly. But theyre all doing the same thing, Jane. Wrong. The riffs, the responding, the moves are slightly different for each of them. Theyre closethey got the same satin suitsbut theyre not moving or singing exactly the same. I liked the big guy, Bobby Rogers, the bestsomething about him really grabbed me. OK, OK, but pull it all together for me will you? Is Bobby Rogers prophecy, or is he prayer? Or is he poetry?

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Dont be so smart. You know what Im talking about. Poetry and prayer and prophecy are different faces of the soul. They are how we connect with God. Got it? Well I know that prophecy eventually acquired the rhythmic form of poetry. And theres no doubt in my mind that the first prayers were poems. Dont stop now. Keep working it out in that tedious way of yours. My sense of it is that when God started becoming the God we have today, you know, as God became more human, prayer as poetry began to change into something other than praise. It became concerned with supplication, and then needs and wants, and the more it did, the more it lost its connection to poetry, which in the end disappears if prayer turns into a wish list. Poetry can really only praise, which is a selfless act, a soul act. You got it. Its all about praise. It doesnt want to take any other format least in my church. Thats why black prayer is praise is poetry is song, and if it really gets cooking, it turns into prophecy. Check out some recordings of Dr. King if you have any doubts. Youll feel it in your bonesright through all those goddamn little fine hairs of yours. Hey, let up on the fine hairs will you? You know Frost, Robert Frost, the poet? No I dont know Frost, Robert Frost, the poet. Jesus, youre worse than Alice with the little imitations. I think Frost understood the heart of poetry better than any other modern poet. He called poetry a lovers quarrel with the world. Ive always liked that because he used a metaphor to describe a metaphorical art. You knowa kind of tip of the hat. He was always doing that. He couldnt stop. Youre losing me. What Im trying to say is that Frost understood that poetry was a soul act. Thats why he saw it as a lovers quarrel, not just an argument. Lovers are bound to each other; they cant escape each other. That dilemma is at the heart of all poetry. Its at the heart of the Bible. For Christ sakes its at the heart of The Witnesses Log in the struggle between the Witnesses and the Listeners. They cant escape each other. A lovers quarrel is always suffused with love. Love is at its core, not hate. Moreover, its an argument that neither side ever really winsbecause the lovers dont really want to win by crushing each other. They want something else: they want the other one to understand some slight or hurt that has occurred. But more than anything, they want to return to that love stateto the soul state. In a way, a lovers quarrel is a form of praise, a praise of loves complexitiesits quirks. Thats all very nice baby, but I got to go. Jane didnt seem that impressed with Frost, Robert Frost, the poet. I guess she figured if I didnt get it after Smokey and the Miracles, I was a lost cause. But I did get it. Like much of what Jane said, however, it was never quite spelled out the way Mr. Fine Hairs wanted it. Well, Mr. Fine Hairs had other ways of finding

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out about poetry and prophecy and prayer and one of the best was the work of Julian Jaynes.

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Chapter 41: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on a Soap Box

October 2005, Sarasota According to Julian Jaynes, preliterate man constantly heard guiding voices issuing from the right side of his brain, voices he took to be the voices of the Gods. Jaynes, who was a scientist, had an aesthetic side and felt the origin of poetry also lay in those voices. Jaynes says that when Homer invokes the Muse (Sing Muse and through me tell the story) he is requesting that those voices assist him in creating the poem he is about to speak. Jaynes comes to this conclusion not only from the historical evidence but also from his personal creative experience with poetry. Like Jaynes, poets over the millennia have reported hearing a similar internal voice. Historically, that voice has been called the Muse. Jaynes believed that preliterate poets experienced a much more formidable version of the Muses voice than modern poets, who usually report it to be fleeting. I wouldnt want the reader to come away thinking Homer parroted the Muses internal voice to create his epics, although Jaynes might lead you to think so. If hed had a poets experience with oral composition, his sense of Homers creative mode might have been a bit different. As Jane Washington so aptly put it, the Miracles are always riffing on Smokeys song, to which I will add this significant corollary: the poet is always riffing on the Muse. As a rule, only a small portion of the Muses story is handed down verbatim. Of course, on those occasions where the Muses voice comes in the form of complete, audible phrases, the poet would be crazy not to grab it. Most of the time, however, the Muses voice is a mixture of audible phrases and quick, sketchy images, all of which are imbedded in an emotional complex constantly rising up from the unconscious in search of wordsor more precisely, rising up in search of a story that will reflect those emotions. The poets task is to surrender to that rising by allowing the story to unfold itself in his conscious mind like a fitted mask upon the Muses whispers. That is no easy task. Surrendering completely to the Muse is the key, and only a few poetslike Shakespeare in his dramatic poetryhave ever mastered it successfully. Most poets only get a fleeting taste of it, which is why there are so few truly great poems. For those who know little about creating poems, let me sketch it quickly: If the

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poet is very lucky, as the Muses song begins to rise the story will begin forming in the poets conscious mind with no effort whatsoever. None. In effect, the poet and Muse have become one. This is the critical point where the poem will either fail or succeed. It will succeed if the poet surrenders to what is happening; it will fail if the poet doesnt. I have come to call this surrendering staying on the golden thread. It is almost impossible to do in written composition, but almost automatic in oral composition because it is largely an unconscious process. What the poet does afterward in the way of adding rhyme or altering language, tone, idiom, or rhythm, depends on the poet. Sometimes its extensive, sometimes minimal. Ive done both and prefer taking the baby as the baby comesand I have found this is most successfully done through speaking: spontaneous oral composition. While I have been describing the act of poetic composition as modern poets experience it, I believe that Homer heard the Muses voice essentially as I have described it, although that voice was undoubtedly more tangible than the one we experience, for the simple reason that, as Julian Jaynes suggests, Homers consciousness was different. He was more unconscious than we are. I wouldnt be as quick as Jaynes, however, to bundle the Muses voice in with the other guiding voices heard by early humans. This comes from my own experience with the two kinds of internal voices: directive and poetic. I believe the distinctive human nature of the Muses voicewhich is a more companionable voice than my directive voicesis the result of an internal modification of the directive voices that occurred in the early stages of human development. It seems obvious that when early humans heard the directing voices of the Gods they would eventually want to respond by honoring and praising them. That praising, of course, would take the form of a story, not a directive, because that is the natural way for us to express our emotions. The sound of our praising, however, wouldnt be exactly the same as the sound of our internal directive voices, because the praising would come physically from our very human voices. I believe that over time some of our internal voices modified their texture in imitation of our praising voices. They became less authoritative, more loving, more praising, more story-directed, more human. In time, those internal voices became the Muses, and eventually the Muse. Somewhere in that long cycle, as some part of our internal directive voices began to transform themselves into the story-telling Muse, we began to imitate those stories when we heard them. I believe that imitation to have been instinctiveit is our nature to imitatebut the result was monumentalno less than Yeats

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Heaven blazing into the head. These were storiesbut very different from the stories we had been telling each other. We had suddenly become godlike creators of worlds. Very small worlds for sure, but they were still worldsthat is the important thing. If my suggestion that the original, directive voices generated by the unconscious modified their sound and nature to become stories and to conform with the more human, loving texture of our praising voices seems outlandish to some, it is only because we have mistakenly come to view the unconscious as a kind of emotional sump whose only function is to be dredged for meaning by psychoanalysts and the like. It is a shallow view. Both modern and ancient investigators of the unconscious, or soul, repeatedly remind us that the commerce between soul and selfbetween our conscious and unconscious mindsis a two-way affair and always has been. We should remember that no aspect of that commerce is more two-way than the act of poetry. It is the way the two halves of usconscious and unconscious come together to make us complete. Poetry is not as much a one-way street as is prophecy. Poetry is a praise act, and in preliterate times that praising would have meant speaking it out loud, so it makes sense that the Muses voice would become more story-like, more praisingas well as more human sounding or more human feeling as we responded to it by speaking out and creating our little worlds. If this distinction seems like splitting hairs, I can assure you it is, but these are very important hairs. To anyone who had heard both the Muses voice and the daemons directive voice, the difference is monumental. It defines what it means to be human, and not only an early human. It is also true for us, except the directive voice has been replaced by our new consciousness with its powerful analytic and reasoning capabilities. For those of you who have never heard these voices, it may help if I tell you my own experience with them. The Muses voice is indeed a psychic voice, but a very human, story-telling one: Once upon a time.whereas the directive, prophetic voice associated with my daemonthough it has an unmistakable truth and authorityis relatively neutral in tone and straightforward in structure: This is what you must do. This explanation of the genesis of our poetic voices suggests that the unconscious mind changes in its commerce with the conscious mind. In other words, it grows. This is not a new thought. It is seen in Jungs thinking about the Book of Job and the changing nature of God. Jung explains the Book of Job by saying that Jobs moral leaphis wisdom in accepting he has no control whatsoever over God's conductforces God to match that leap by becoming less

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cruel, less unconscious, more human. Jung goes on to say that the Bible is, in effect, a record of God becoming more human, a process that he sees culminating in Jesus. What Jung is really saying, of course, is that our unconscious became more conscious, more human over time. I think we can say somewhat the same thing about the advent of poetry: that it changed the nature of some of the voices heard by early man. And I'll add one more caveat to that: Jung and I are really talking about the same thing. Let me ratchet up my thinking on this one more click. Not only do we want to speak back to the Muse when we hear her, but it is obvious, at least to poets, that the Muse wants to hear our responses. Poets often refer to this aspect of the Muse as the Perfect Listener, the one who understands everything. Indeed it would be almost impossible to create a poem without having a sense of this encouraging, understanding presence. Anyone who has created an unpremeditated poem knows it is literally impossible to ignore the Muses whispers. Although our response may vary from a complete poem to just a few scribbled words, the reflexive urge to respondto carry the message into the worldis automatic and out of our control. But what is it that makes us this way, which is really another way of asking: what is it that makes the Muse, or the unconscious, so hungry, so desirous, of our responses? (Our awareness of that hunger, by the way, is part of what poets feel in addressing the understanding Perfect Listener. If it will help you grasp what is going on in the poet, think of the first little stories you parroted back to your mother. What you felt. The hunger your mother must have felt.) My daemon broke through the fog. It said that the unconscious wants to hear its message come back made glittery with time. It wants to know what it feels like to be human, to be conscious, because only humans live in a world of time, which is another way of saying only humans live in a world of stories. Thus, if we can think of poetry as the way the unconscious speaks to the conscious mind, we also have to think of it as the way the conscious mind speaks back to the unconscious, because that is the true nature of poetry. It is a transcendent event that brings the two halves of us together. It is the reason why poetryof all our ways of witnessingallows us to experience our total humanity, which is another way of saying it allows us to experience our divinity. This may seem heretical to religious people, who see prayer as playing that role, but that is only because our conception of poetry and prayer have changed so utterly over time. What we now call prayer eventually grew out those very first praise poems we uttered as early preliterate humans. Initially, poetry and prayer

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were one and the same At some point in time during the late preliterate era, poetry began to separate itself from prayerbut only by a hairsbreadth. We only have to look at the work of the Greek preliterate poet Homer to see this. His two great oral epics are most assuredly praise acts, even if the surface stories take the form of adventures. Just how close poetry was to prayereven after the advent of literacy in Greececan be seen in the historical record, which is filled with reports of the way Homer was honored and respected by the Greeks. Arguments were settled and guidance determined based on what Homer said. For the Greeks, those two great epics held the same authoritative position as the Bible did for the Hebrews. Homers great narrative poems, according to Jaynes, are nothing less than celebrations of the change in consciousness the Greeks were undergoing at the time Homer chanted themwhich was about a hundred years before the Greeks discovered writing. The Iliad celebrates the heroic, non-reflective nature of preliterate culture and poetry, whereas The Odyssey, via the character of the wily Odysseus, celebrates the new (self-reflective) consciousness that was taking form. Here is a quote from an earlier book of mine about Jaynes insight:
As Jaynes points out, Homers greatness lies partly, and perhaps mainly, in the fact that his poems reflect the immense change in consciousness that was stirring among the Greeks. In this respect, his songs have the quality of myth. They represent one of those transcendent leaps that sometimes occur in truly great art. Homers epics are about the monumental transition in the nature of our consciousness. They are the Greek version of our leaving the Garden of Eden. Thus, in Homers lifetime we go from a heroic, preliterate world that is consumed by honor (while at the same time beginning to give evidence of the emergence of deceit) to a world where the hero, by comparison, will stoop to almost anything to get his way. The name Odysseus roughly translates as troublemaker. The job he does on the Cyclops is enough to give you some idea of how out of control he really was. The Greeks loved him. Theres no doubt that of all the speakings young Homer heard, the themes and characters and elements of the Trojan War must have been like gold laid at his feet. Indeed, after he created The Iliad, it was only a matter of time before he reached back and pulled out the wily, redheaded Odysseus again (only a bit player in The Iliad) and blew him up to the proportions required. When Homer finally set him loose on the world in The Odyssey it was unlike anything the Greeks had ever heard. The Odyssey is a poem whose artistry transcended Homers time. The very depth and magnitude of the mirror he held up to the Greeks is almost beyond comprehension. To the Greeks, for hundreds of years afterward, the grotesque deceptions and heroic endurance of Odysseus were impossibly beautiful and impossibly true. The man not only slept standing up, he did it with his eyes open. Odysseus is none other than self-conscious man stepping out of the eggshell and

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displaying himself in all his individualistic glory. What is equally beautiful is that Homer had a sense of humor about the whole thing. And so did the Greeks.

It is only in literate times that we see poetry begin to move away from being a praise act to one reflecting the myriad concerns of the conscious mind, so that in time, poetry became completely distinct from prayer. At the same time, prayer was beginning to move away from poetry. The collective unconscious was beginning to give birth to our great Eastern and Western religionsbut through the gateway of our new self-reflective minds. Formal, fixed texts were created for those religions as a means of permanently recording and clarifying the various psychic revelations that brought those great spiritual movements into being. Those new texts also served another purpose: to make sure that prayerthe commerce between God and manwas directed along proscribed channels and not left to the whims of the unruly and unpredictable unconscious. Controlling the unconscious was a problem for religious systems right from the start. Just how large a problem is evident throughout the Bible. One example can be seen in Moses journey to the Promised Land where, despite having been given the Commandments, his leadership was constantly threatened by eruptions of earlier, polytheistic idols. So it is obvious why prayer had to become more conscious. Prayer may have continued to imitate the form of poetry (we can see it even today in the spoken, antiphonal nature of the Catholic Mass), but that was all. Prayer became a conscious act, along consciously prescribed lines. Similarly, poetry began to feel the pressure of our modern literate consciousness, which more and more sought to exert control over what had been essentially an unconscious process, and as poetry became more written, the more our modern consciousness was ablefor better or worseto exert that control, and glory in it.

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Chapter 42: Alice in Chains Redux October 2005, Sarasota I was mulling over how beaten ISLAUGGH had looked when she first appeared, and right then I heard a voice say, Alice in Chains, just as I had when Alice and I visited Jane. Jane must have also sensed those chains. It certainly helped explain why she had suddenly become so ornery. My guess is that when Jane opened the door she felt the depth of Alices sadness and realized that somehow ISLAUGGHs burden had become Alices as well. I think it overwhelmed her. She immediately understood that losing the Way of the Mother would be like dying. As far as Jane was concerned, the Way of the Mother had never gone away. Living without that guidance would be unthinkable for her. She would probably never admit it, but my best guess is she saw ISLAUGGHs burden as something that was not her concern. To put it more bluntly, if the Way of the Mother had disappeared from the white world, that was their problem. I know thats pretty strong stuff, and Jane would probably never admit to it, but then again she might. You could never tell. I think Jane saw what had happened in Africa to the Way of the Mother in a completely different lightas something like a temporary derailment caused by outside forces. The way of the white man may have brought about great suffering, but the women hadnt given in. Theyd merely pretended to change. The Way of the Mother continued to flourish, sometimes slightly disguised, sometimes right out in the open. I also think that part of Janes competitive reaction to Alice that day was due to their differing perceptions of the psychic world. Jane shared somewhat the aborigines way of witnessing Creation. For the aborigines, the psychic and physical worlds are co-existent realities they slip between seamlessly. The aborigines are aware there is something beyond all knowing at work in their lives, and that it exists in that other world, but they also know that the two worlds are almost one and the same: echoes of each other. Like the aborigines, Jane didnt really care if earth ruled heaven, or heaven ruled earth. Shed say to me, Stop thinking so much. Wake up! Its all happening at once. Thats how un-theoretical Jane was. She would never talk about the Female Spirit. She knew what it meant, but she didnt like it. It was too dry, too thinky. She would only speak about the Way of the Mother and by that she meant pretty much the same thing as Alice meant by Female Spiritthat it was an unknowable intelligence whose presence she could feel in the everyday events and ways of her life.

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But shed never talk about it in Alices terms. As far as Jane was concerned, thinking was the enemy of feeling. It stopped feeling from blossoming to its fullest. Feeling didnt need any help from thinking, thank you. Feeling had its own intelligenceand was far superior to thinking. It could do something thinking could never do: it could find the Way of the Mother, and that was all that mattered. Jane saw anything or anyone connected to thinking as the enemy. That was it. There was no compromising. No backing down. Not one inch.

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Chapter 43: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on the Soap Box One More Time December 2005, Sarasota When Alice first suggested I look at the myth as an elegy about the end of a way of knowing fueled by the Female Spirit, it filled the holes in my understanding of the myth like water running into a rice field. I began to see the myth as not only about early human consciousness, but also about an older way of knowing, about its creation and eventual decline, and how we, as a race, handled that decline: How we handled our own internal dying as the Female Spirit descended beneath the horizon. How we witnessed it. When I looked at it that way, I saw that Alice had been exactly correct: the myth was an elegy. It also was the breakthrough that allowed me for the first time to really listen to the Witnesses as poets who knew. What these poets knewwhat they were singing ofwas this: we are the very heart of an incomprehensible mystery. Mind you, I didnt say at the very heart; I said the very heart. Theres all the difference in the world. This is what we are missing today: that song. No matter how dark, how tragic its tone becomes at times, it is a song that always comforts us on the most profound human level. Today, however, we have chosen a more logical song. We find it more convenient to think of ourselves as blobs of carbon that evolved into more complex blobs, which is why we are completely lost. It is a dismal song that only comforts the mind, not the heart, and the heart is what counts. Despite the spectacular modern art forms that surround us, even engulf us at times, not one of them has been able to take poetrys place, because none of them can touch us the way poetry can. They have merely occupied its space as we have become more and more lost. The fact of the matter is poetry cant be replaced. That is why we are living severely diminished lives. Not materially, not logically, but emotionally diminished lives. Turn on the television if you have any doubts. In theory, there is no reason why some of our spectacular modern art forms couldn't transform themselves into a new form of poetry by ingesting its essence. Videos and movies are the most logical candidates for spawning this new child of light. But its not going to happen unless our hunger for beauty and truth rises above the superficial level it occupies today. We have to begin to face how lost we are. When I say poetry is missing from our lives Im not talking about silly, clever poetry, or the poetry of our intellectual quarterliesa poetry of barely audible whispers that seldom, if ever, works its way down to the roots of our lives. Im

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talking about the kind of poetry that once flooded and fed our preliterate cultures. It was a largely unconscious poetry of such truth and beauty that it enriched and ordered our lives for millennia. We havent seen that kind of poetry for thousands of years. Nor are we going to. We cant turn back the clock. But what we can do is encourage the birth of a cultural energy similar to the energy that drove those cultures. That is the first step. It starts with how we live our livesthe kind of energy with which we imbue it. Everything else will follow, including a new kind of poetryone that is more unconscious, more of the heart. You can call that energy the Way of the Mother, or the Female Spirit, or the Mother Goddess, or whatever you want, but unless we begin to feed and value that intuitive, feeling, God-like side of us, its going to be a very long slide down to oblivion. I know there are some poets, perhaps many, who will view what Im saying as absolutely crazy, that our poetry is what it should be, and that a consciously managed poetry is what written poetry is all about and has been since it came into the world. I dont disagree. I am a passenger on the Ship of Poetry just as they are. I also know that, except for some very minor alterations, its course hasnt changed since it left the docks 2,500 years ago. Nor will it. Nor can we get offbecause the Ship of Poetry, like Western civilization itself, is in our genes. Every once in a while, however, if we so desire, we can leave the bridge with its crumpled, scribbled charts and drift back to the darkened stern where the barely visible, numinous outlines of that earlier ship of poetry can be seen far off in the distance. However attractive that ship may seem, we cant go back. That older Ship of Poetry is as bound to its culture as our own poetry is to ours. What we can do, however, is go within ourselves, where the remnants of that earlier consciousness still exist. Those remnants not only make our modern written poetry possible, they are also vibrant enough to permit the creation of a poetry remarkably similar to the spontaneous, unpremeditated oral poetry of preliterate cultures. If we wish to experience it, all we have to do is surrender to those remnants and it will happen. It will be like getting a new body on top of your other body.

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Chapter 44: Alice Shows Me Some Poems February 2006, Sarasota Alice had a folder with her when we met. I have some poems I want to show you. Really, how many? Six. Why me? Because theyve come to me over the past months. Theyre different from my other poemsno flowers, if you know what I mean. Im not sure why, but something told me I should show them to you. I opened the folder. There were six typed poems with no titles. I read the first one:
I see the colors rising from your body I see your body rising into light I see the light falling on the water I see the water falling from my eyes I see my eyes turning into flowers I see the flowers turning into gold I see the gold flowing into rivers I see the river flowing in your heart I see your heart sitting in the shadows I see the shadows sitting in your heart

Not bad, I thought to myself, especially for someone whod led me to believe her poems were filled with flowers. Can I ask who the poem is about? You. Its very flattering. Sometimes. I turned to the second poem:
There is another one another one inside me inside me the voices inside me the hatred inside me the tunnels and spiders

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the doors and the bars inside me inside me the wickedness inside me the voices inside me listen the voices inside me are flowers are rivers they are churning inside me the hatred the heartbeat the hot blood inside me the light and the fire are inside me inside me the pity, the pity oh pity inside me the rivers are flowing the blood is inside me inside me inside me

Again, I was taken off balance. The poem was a bit awkward. I said to her, I was afraid I wasnt going to like this one at first. Repetitive chanting isnt the thing writing does that well, but this one worked pretty well once it got going. You know, if you spoke it out loud, I suspect it might really catch fire. Could you do that? Sure. But do you think Starbucks is ready for it? By the way, it almost came to me orally, not exactly like a speaking, but I could hear it as it came to me, it was like a river that kept building. She suddenly picked up the poem and began reading it out loud. As soon as she opened her mouth, her voice slid down to that OM range, and then into a highly musical Irish brogue that became rhythmic, almost percussive until it began carrying itself the way water does. I was stunned. That was fabulous, I said, but why the accent? What made you do it? I dont know. I kind of heard it that way as the poems were coming to me and as soon as I opened my mouth, it came back, so I went with it. I hate to tell you this Alice, but youre a pretty good mimic yourself. It seems that way doesnt it? By the way, I think the poem is about me. Why do you say that?

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I think its my shadow self. Its hard to tell sometimes, were so blind to it. What do you think? I dont know. This woman is on fire, tortured. You seem much more collected to me. Why do you say that? You have a wisdom. I can feel it. That doesnt mean Im not on fire. I read the third poem:
There was a strange a strange welcome welcoming you me space time death travel see now before you the lamp the circle I care not about your face the light it glows around you your heart your heart the blood the flaming the flowing the heat beat the frightened the frightened

It seemed the poems were getting tighter, more twisted, convoluted. And also more artsy, which I didn't likebut these things can happen to a beginner, so I didn't say anything. Instead I asked her, Do you have any idea what this one is about? Yes, its about you and me. I saw it as the poem came to me. Were both about to lose something and gain something. What? How we see the world. Who is welcoming us in the poem? Fate. I turned to the fourth poem:

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Then they came there was terror no peace just the awful fire around me and the heat lifted me up higher and higher until I could barely feel the flames and then the ice grew cold around me and I slept a thousand years a cave of ice the rainbow walls the bears

This poem is different from the others. It seems almost like the poem of another person. It is; its ISLAUGGHs poem. She was burned and tortured. I saw it. The bears are guarding her, but I dont quite know who the bears are. Do you? I suddenly blurted out: Its you and me. But why are we bears? Because we have that same unpredictable way about usask anyone whos been attacked by bears. Not only that, shes aware of us, she knows were on the other side of the rainbow walls, waiting for her. I realized that something very unusual was happening in these poems. There was nothing very literary about them, but there was no mistaking their energy, especially when she spoke them. They were true poems, even if they were awkward at times. Part of that awkwardness was due to the fact that Alice had written the poems, something with which she was familiar, when she might have created them as speakings, because they had an inherent spoken energy and diction, something writing never handles that well. But they were also factual reports of psychic experiences. I had never encountered poetry quite like this. The psychics I knew always wanted to separate their psychic experiences from their poetry. They would have an experience, a vision, whatever, and then they would report it in what they thought was poetry but it never was; it was too after-the-fact, too conscious, an experience encased in what they thought to be poetic language. Yet even if Alice's writing was awkward at times, it was clear that the formation of the poems and the psychic experienceswhich were essentially prophecies seemed to have occurred at the same time. The result being that the images, dictions, rhythms, and voices of the various poems were quite distinct. When I told her that she said, Youre right, they did happen at the same time, well, almost the same time: the vision was a hairsbreadth ahead of the poem. There was

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no strain. It started as a vision, I could feel it, and then somehow, the energy of the Muse came in, like two rivers joining. It just happened, all by itself. I turned to the fifth poem:
Sad oh sad they cried the dark limbs the hanging how could they know the innocent the men the women the small babes hanging in the trees the stench the flies the carcasses falling to the ground the tree the falling of the leaves the rotting acorns taking root

What about this poem? I asked. It seems like ISLAUGGHs as well. It is. Its announcing the beginning. The beginning of what? Your rebirth. My rebirth. The New Age. Take your pick. The acorns? Yes. Acorns are the fruit of the oak treethe tree of the Gods. Preliterate peoples saw the acorn as echoing the shape of the penis head. Their falling and taking root symbolizes Birth out of Death. I had no doubt this was the same kind of vision/poem. It seemed extraordinary to me that she was able to bring the two rivers together. I had never experienced that, not even with The Witnesses Log, because the myth had come to me through my poetic voice and not through prophetic visions of the type Alice had obviously experienced. The only way of explaining that to myself was to say it was due to Alices psychic essential naturethat she was essentially a prophet. I asked her what it had felt like. I didnt set out to create prophecies, she replied, but I could feel it coming on, its a much different feeling than a poem, and then, in a flash, the Muses energy ignited along with it. I didnt interfere. I knew something different was happening, but I let it rip right through me. I could feel some of the poems were me and some werent, but I didnt care. I just let it happen.

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But theres a difference between poems that are prophetic in nature and a prophecyat least in my book. A prophecy is much more focused. What do you think? Ive always felt the psychic energy behind poetry to be different from the energy behind other psychic experiences, like propheciesthat prophecies are animated by an instructing or directing spirit, while poetry is animated by an imitative, empathetic, story-telling spirit. At least thats the way Ive always experienced it. They are differentbut they dont mind singing together. When they first came together though, the feeling was a bit strangelike I wasnt quite sure what I was giving birth to. I looked at the final poem:
Malice thats what they called me back then look its just a joke nobody knew my name it was always kept hidden like my extraordinary heart sometimes they said there were worms in my heart because I was mean and kicked dogs but that was it nobody picked on me ever the spit I could throw was overwhelming and it always landed some said I was the child of the devil but in fact nothing could be further from the truth I was the devil but look thats just a joke nobody knew my name

This is completely different from all the others, I said, everythingrhythm, diction, voice. Its not as good as the others either, Im afraid. Its a bit clumsy. Its Pinga; hes not a very good poet. But its also about me. Hes been on my mind. I have a lot of trickster in me, just like Pingayou too for that matter. Except youre not stuck there, like Pinga. Some people get stuck and some dont. I didnt. I somehow found my way. But Terry didnt. He was just like Pinga: he loved the wild ways, he couldnt get enough of it, and he loved shoving it in your

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face, but he was so quick and clever you never really felt it until later. Was Terry from here, in Florida? No, Terry was a pilot from China. When was this? After the war1946. I had just turned seventeen. I met him at my aunt Alicias. He was making a tour for the State Department, speaking about democracy and China, things like that, and somehow he wound up at my aunts place. The place where everybody meets. It seems so. His real name was Sun Li but everybody called him Terry after the cartoon character Terry Lee and the Pirates. We got married a year later, in Shanghai, where his family lived. They were quite wealthy. You wouldnt think it, he looked so reserved and correct, but he loved turning things upside down and then hiding his hands. And to tell you the truth, so did I. Youre still pretty good at it. Its an old habit. Theyre hard to get rid of. We were good company for a while, traveled together all over Asia, Europe, Africa. He had everything going for him, he was wealthy, smart, good-looking, hardworking, personable, but underneath all that wonderful palatial structure was a very crumbly foundation managed by the trickster part of him and underneath that was a dark heart for women. For years I was too stupid or too in love to see it, but one day I finally realized how dark it was, and how permanent. I dont even know if he knew that part of himself. It was his deepest shadow self, almost invisible to him. It had nothing to do with me. I mean it wasnt aimed at me; I just happened to be in the way. He loved me in his own way, and it was a good way, but it wasnt enough. I knew I would never completely know him. I didnt mind the dark heart; I just wanted it to come out of hiding. But then I saw it was never going to happen, that he couldnt allow it. I also knew it was slowly killing me; it was taking all my energy just to live with him. I left him one day and never looked back. Do you still see him? Yes. Did he ever change? No. Do you think he ever will? He cant. Hes a victim, just like you. A victim of what? Everything. Where do you want me to start?

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Chapter 45: I Explain Duck-ness April 2006, Sarasota

I had sensed early on that ISLAUGGH also represented a warning about my own emotional state. A little reminder, if you will. It was not a new one. Id been receiving similar intimations in my poems for many years. Here is one from some twenty years ago.

The Yellow Skiff That little skiff is swinging back and forth again. She must be light, like paper, the way the wind can drive her off so easily upon her tether. It's not going to get any better. The wind's been picking up all afternoon. Across the bay, everything is darkening, getting lower. It's gathering now. I can feel the air cooling down all around me, like ice. I dont want to think about the skiff being driven back and forth all night, shuddering against her tether. Listen to me. I'm not talking to you about him: the one who thinks he has to leave his wife. I'm talking to you about the other one. The one who's dying, the one on fire, the one that you've been hostaging.

Joan had spoken to me about that hostaging, and so had Jane: that somewhere within me I was keeping myself prisoner, but in a very special way, a way in which I was both prisoner and prison-keeper, both hostage and hostager. But the critical term is really hostaging, because it indicates some part of me is always actively and continuously bargaining with another part of me for my own release. I have never been exactly sure how that scenario plays itself out or who the

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players are, but I have no doubt the bargaining is always going on. In fact, it is so much a part of me as to be evident in the rhythm and tone and progression of almost every poem I have ever madethe way they always open slowly and then suddenly closelike a door. What was happening was so deep, so much a part of me, as to be out of my conscious control. I knew it was taking place though, which is why I never disagreed with Jane and Joan on the matter. There was no doubt in my mind that it was stopping me from being more open, more completeemotionally, spiritually, creatively. But I could never see it; it was too dark. All I could ever see were the traces, the scars it kept leaving on my life. Every scar, every injury or physical failure Ive ever experienced has occurred on the left side of my body. The number of occurrences is not small. I could list them all on a long piece of paper, starting with my left ankle and ending up at my left eye, but its unimportant. What is important, though, is this grouping: left side of the body, creativity, intuition, moon, female. I dont think anyone would argue with the correctness of that groupingit is the grouping of the soul. Opposed to it is the grouping of the self: right side of the body, knowledge, reason, sun, male. I think a psychic healer would take one look at me and come to the immediate conclusion that the healthy right side of me was living at the expense of my injured, deformed left side. She might even say that the right side of me was injuring my left by making it take the blows, and I wouldnt argue. That is why I had no doubts that ISLAUGGHs beaten, deathlike state and my own injured emotional state were very much connected. Yet I also sensed that ISLAUGGHs heralding of the myth might also have been meant for others. I never dismissed the possibility that the myth might lead others to a larger understanding of who they really were. Whether they would wind up deciphering the myth in the same way, I had no idea. I did know, however, that if they were to avoid the kind of problems I had trying to untangle it, they would need a few advance words. The main problem was that the myth had been created from a mindset much different than ours: a preliterate mindset intimately acquainted with the four main players in the myth. Unlike us, they didnt need an explanation of who the players were, or how they were related, or what the essential drama was. As I pointed out earlier, the value of a preliterate story was never based on its ideas or originality, but on the way the story was told. Homer is the best example of this: the story of the Trojan War was known to all preliterate Greeks, and undoubtedly there were many competing epic versions in the time of Homer. What distinguished Homer was the way he told the story, and the same is true of the Witnesses relating this myth. Preliterate humans listening to the myth would

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have judged it on its muthos: the felt truth it conveyed about the human condition. This helps explain why early storytelling poems are always straightforward, metaphoric, non-reflective. In other words, there is no introspection and little explanation, only declaration. In this kind of story, there is only, This happened, never an introspective Why this happened. Perhaps another way of looking at the structure of the myth is to say the speakers of the myth arent at all concerned with ideas. There are very few handles for our modern explaining consciousness to grab onto. This myth is coming from a time when there were no ideas, or theories, only directives from the Gods. It was a time when knowing was accomplished by imitating the feeling of the thing to be known, not by examining it logically. There is a world of difference between the two. Imitating something, whether it is done through movement or story or rhythm, requires that we have empathy for the thing we are going to imitate. I dont think I have to explain how deep that level of empathy can go in some individuals. Keats once wrote that he could have empathy for a billiard ball. That is one indication of the depth of his poetic sensibility. Because the poetic state and the preliterate state of mind are so close, it also sheds a powerful light on how deep the empathetic powers of preliterate humans must have been. It was that ability to deeply empathize that fueled the imitative knowing of early man. Im not talking here about the knowing involved, say, in building a boatthat would have been handed down much as it is today: you do this and then you do this. Im talking about the knowing involved in understanding what death means, and birth, and love, and fate. The preliterate Greeks called that kind of knowing muthos. Muthos meant that knowing was conveyed by story poems, by narrative imitations of felt truths. Some of those stories eventually became the great narrative poems we know today as myths. The Witnesses Log myth is no different. It conveys its truth, its knowing, through a story, through muthos. It conveys its many truths not by explaining them, but by imitating them, which in the end can only be done through poetry. One of those truths is the nature of preliterate consciousnessof Female Spirit-driven consciousness. You can think of the myth as a story poem about the four elements driving early preliterate human consciousness. Its an imitation of what that first consciousness felt like. That kind of knowing is a very difficult thing for our explaining consciousness to get its arms around. I remember a bright, young math professor of mine at Columbia many years ago talking about early Babylonian mathematics. It seems they didnt so much prove by logical deduction that the interior angles of an isosceles triangle were always equal, as the Greeks did, but by physically drawing

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many different isosceles triangles until everyone agreed about the interior angles. This amused my professor to no end, but something about it stuck in my mind. My preliterate soul must have recognized it. My professor had most likely been talking about a very early mathematics that hadnt yet begun to follow the path of the super-logical, reasoning Greeks. This was undoubtedly about the time the Babylonians discovered writing, but some part of them must have still preferred their preliterate way of knowing. In this curious case it meant imitating the thing in question until everyone felt it was true. If we really want to understand the elaborately staged sacrifices and sacred copulations of late, preliterate Babylon, or Aztec Mexico for that matter, we have to understand that they were created as spiritual imitations of the interlinked mystery of creation and destruction at the heart of all existence. They were praise acts, celebrations. These ceremonies, of course, took place at a very late stage of preliterate culture, where spectacle was beginning to replace the simplicity of participatory tribal poetry. Yet the intention was the same: to know, to feel, to understand lifes mysteries by imitating them. And that imitation, even at this late stage of spectacle, always took the form of poetry in its primal, communal form: mask, movement, music, spontaneous antiphonal speaking. I should perhaps add something more here about what I mean by imitation, just to make sure Im being clear. If I were a preliterate human I would go about understanding what a duck is, and how it fit into creation, by imitating a duck. By imitating, I dont mean merely doing a surface mimicking of its movements and sounds, which is really only a preliminary step, but by entering its duck-ness the ducks soul, its essence. This would be especially true if the duck was to be my totem, or spirit guide. I remember years ago hearing a very good actor say that for him to truly enter a character, the way that character thought, talked, and moved, he had to first imitate the characters breathing, get it down cold, which, I might add, is itself a very intuitive act, as the full character would be relatively unformed at that time. That insight allowed me to overcome a problem I was having in my early attempts to speak directly and fluently from the unconscious. At times I would take off only to sputter and lose it, but I didnt understand it was because sometimes my breathing wasnt right for the poetic persona that was attempting to speak though me, including the persona I knew as me. The actors comments rang a bell and I understood I had to surrender to the breathing patterns of whatever persona within me was attempting to speak. It is such a purely intuitive act that Im amazed to think I eventually achieved it, especially since that surrendering has to occur just prior to my physically speaking, a gap of seconds.

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The kind of imitation that the actor described, it seems to me, is very close to what preliterate man did reflexively, without thinking. It is an example of the closeness of the creative mind to that earlier consciousness. What preliterate man did in order to imitate the ducksomething that was required, for example, if the duck was to be his totem, or spiritual ally, or guidewas to enter the ducks soul through lucid dreaming, or a similar altered state, and transcendently witness the ducks soul: its essence. That is, he would observe it and then at some later stage, when he became fully conscious, report to others what he had seen. The reporting in this case wouldnt be so much verbal as physical. After all, stories can take many forms besides speech. He would move like a duck, make sounds like a duck, react like a duck. His transcendent witnessing would allow him to bring his imitation of the duck to full life. The ducks essence would now be within him as an ally, to guide and aid him. But his peers would be informed by his reporting as well. They would understand who he truly was, that he had duck-ness.

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Chapter 46: I Visit Graves September 2006, Sarasota Alice mentioned Robert Graves The White Goddess to me one day, and her description of the book whetted my interest. I had been aware of Graves as a poet most of my adult life, and had always liked the fact he chose to exist outside the academic establishment (an economic choice few poets make todaypreferring a steady position to having to scramble in the streets for pennies). Added to that was the fact that he also made a life for himself in Majorca, not cold, grimy England. Moving to Majorca when he did undoubtedly took a good bit of nerve, something that Graves didnt seem to lack, and I liked him for that as well. What I didnt like about Graves, however, was his poetry. I was prepared to like it when I first picked it up many years ago, but found I couldnt. His work was much too formal, too conscious for my taste. Poetry is a wild horse, one that doesnt want be fenced in by overly-conscious schemes. As soon as that happens it begins to die. I think some of that happened with Graves poetry. Fortunately, Graves was a bit of a wild horse himself. After all, anyone who did what Graves didunearth the Mother Goddess culture of preliterate man with his highly controversial The White Goddessmarked him as a man who was clearly willing to go against the grain. So despite my problems with his poetry, it was very clear to me after reading The White Goddess that Graves had very strong beliefs about poetry that were surprisingly close to my ownand that he was willing to back them up with whatever it took. I liked him for that. I had chosen a similar route in some respects. During the first twenty years of my adult life I not only wrote poetry but also worked in the computer business until it became clear to me I was dying. Not physically but spiritually. I saw I could no longer do computers with my right hand and poetry with my left. It was splitting me right down the middle. I sold my half of a highly profitable company to my partner and came out of it with enough to return full time to poetry with only an occasional need to scramble for pennies in the streets. And I was able to do it in my own way while living in Sarasota, which became my Majorca of sorts. And now here I was, face to face with Graves The White Goddess, which was his name for the Mother Goddess. Before I read the book, I went on the web to read whatever reviews and critical essays I could find. There were surprisingly few, and even fewer that made sense. When I began to read the book, I found out why. Graves has to be one of the most undisciplined thinkers ever. Its a wonder the book was even published. Graves reputation and incredible depth on mythic matters must have been the deciding factor, but the book is so unintelligible I can

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just as easily see his puzzled publishers tossing a coin as to whether to junk it or print it. As far as the reader is concerned, Graves disorganized style dashes any hope that A will lead logically to B and then C. But what makes the book utterly exasperating is the sheer depth of Graves knowledge about preliterate myths and culture. Unless you are steeped in the scholarship, you simply have no idea if Graves is correct in his assumptions and conclusions. I felt like a six year old who had wandered into a quantum mechanics class. I also suspect that there were few people anywhere who could match Graves breadth of knowledge, which probably explains the lack of criticism of The White Goddess. Graves simply knew too much. I was about to give up on Graves when I happened across a recording of him on the web talking about The White Goddess. I immediately liked the soft lilt of his voice and the genuine way he spoke about his beliefs. If there is one thing I have learned through the art of speaking it is that truth has a physical, audible sound, a sound like no other, and Graves had it. I signed on and went back to the book and began puzzling my way through it. As Graves saw it, there are two types of poetry, which I will loosely classify as Poems of the Moon and Poems of the Sun. The Poems of the Moon are more instinctive, the kind that raise the hair on the back of your neck. The other poems, the Poems of the Sun, are more intellectual, more of the conscious mind. Graves saw Poems of the Moon as having ancient roots back to the preliterate celebrations of the Mother Goddess. He spends chapter after chapter piecing together scraps of myth from all over England, Ireland, Wales, and Europe in order to prove it. Unfortunately, I usually found his proofs bewildering and could almost never follow them. That didnt necessarily bother me because he seemed so sure of himself. I might not have been able to follow him, but Graves never seemed to have any doubts about what he was doing or where he was going. He was a man on the hunt. I couldnt help but admire Graves for overcoming the obstacles he must have encountered in interpreting the mythical scraps that made up his raw material. What I really admired, though, was that he made no bones about accepting the frequent psychic insights that often supplied him with missing parts of a myth he was trying to untangle. He had a different name for those visitationsanaleptic thinking is what he called thembut he had no doubt as to their accuracy. And from the lack of criticism of his arguments and conclusions, it is evident his analeptic thinking was indeed highly accurate. The other thing that became apparent to me was that Graves mythic information almost always came from that borderline period between the collapse of a

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preliterate culture and its subsequent evolution into a literate one. It didnt seem to bother Graves that all his data pointing back to the preliterate White Goddess came from this much later time when those early tribal cultures had become highly organized and were at the edge of becoming literate. This is obvious from his descriptions of a poets many-faceted, court-related duties, as well as from the thirteen themes he cites as being a part of the Mother Goddess celebrations. I find it impossible to believe that poetic celebrations as elaborate as Graves outlines could ever be a part of early tribal cultures. Yet despite those difficulties and the fact he seemed completely ignorant of Jungs contemporaneous work with unconscious archetypes, and most especially the Mother archetype, Graves was able to present us with a view of the Mother Goddess myth that is, as far as I can tell, essentially correct. What saved Graves was the incredible strength of the Mother Goddess myth. The river of the Mother Goddess was wide enough and deep enough and strong enough to overcome everything thrown in its path, including the unavoidable manhandling of the literate mind. Thus, what Graves was able to give us, despite all the problems involved, is not only a good picture of the Mother Goddess, but some very interesting conclusions about the nature of poetry as well. The first is that any poet who unconsciously or intuitively imitates any of the thirteen poetic themes of the White Goddess will produce a true poema poem that makes us feel, in the words of Emily Dickinson, zero at the bone. Graves had his own way of saying it:
The reason why the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust--the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.

That is Graves explanation of why true poems produce a feeling of mixed exaltation and horror. I do have a slight problem with Graves, however, on the nature of the emotional experience caused by his Poems of the Moon. I see that experience not as one of horror, but as fear of the unknowable becoming known. And while Graves sense of exaltation is close to my own feeling of ecstatic beauty and truth, it is not as close as Id like to see it. Still, if Graves stretched his description of the poetic experience to fit his thesis, it is not worth worrying about. When you get around to the true grit of a poem, its close enough. Nor would I dismiss his suggestion that the Muse is another name, perhaps a slightly later name, for the Mother Goddess. Although this startled me

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at first, something kept telling me he was rightthat perhaps it seemed fantastical only because modern thought has completely disassociated the idea of Poetry from the idea of the Mother. As I tossed Graves Mother Goddess/Muse around in my mind, I found myself wandering back to my own grandmother, who had come over from Ireland as a young woman in the late 19th century. Storytelling was second nature to herthe oral tradition was still alive in Irelandand she was the match of anyone. My mother tells of my grandmother gathering up her seven children and the children of neighbors for long evenings of spine-chilling storiesevenings so spellbinding and terrifying, according to my mother, that some of the children would refuse to walk home alone. I had one experience of that when I was around six. At the time, my grandmother was in her sixties. What I remember is not the story so much, which was a very scary thriller involving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and some lost children, but the way she gathered us in and settled into telling it. Dame Judith Anderson could have taken lessons. There was something primordial about it. One thing that might indicate the intensity of the Mother Goddess within early, preliterate cultures as compared to, say, the Mother Gods within our own culture (like the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God), would be the fact that the Mother were talking about is both a Mother from Heaven, and a Mother from Hell and everything in between. Besides being the Mother who is the Source of all Life, this is also the Mother with a Thousand Arms and a Thousand Weapons. The Greeks have supplied us with a highly detailed, albeit indirect picture of how much the Mother Goddess was feared in their many references to women being the irrational, passion-driven enemies of reason, which the newly literate, superlogical Greeks saw as the very essence of the soul. It seems that for all their advances, the Greeks lived in a very real fear that their new literate, logical consciousness might collapse under the potential fury of the Mother Goddess. One illustration of this lies in the various tales of Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, and how her serpent-driven Dionysian practices drove both Alexander and Philiptwo men who werent afraid of anythingstraight up the wall. Olympias, a Greek princess from the Northern barbaric kingdom of Epirus who traced her semi-divine lineage back to Hercules, and who is sometimes pictured as being red-haired and of Celtic heritage, is an historic figure who is a pretty fair embodiment of the Mother Goddess. She was proud, beautiful, sexy, ruthless, mothering, controlling, murderous, loving, envious, life-giving, you name it. You didnt mess with Olympias. Here is Graves own description of the Mother Goddess:

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. . . As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procreation, and Death. As Goddess of the Earth she was concerned with the three seasons of Spring, Summer, and Winter: She animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon, in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon, and Waning Moon . . . But it must never be forgotten that the Triple Goddess . . . was a personification of primitive woman--woman the creatress and destructress. As the New Moon or Spring she was girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag.

Im sure Graves would agree it didnt stop there. All of the attributes of the Mother Goddess were a constant subject of praise, including her sexuality. Some research I did into Celtic preliterate traditions turned up a Roman account of a Celtic chief fornicating in public once a year with a white mare, undoubtedly a living representation of the White Goddess. Not exactly saying the rosary, is it? Whats more, unless the mare was very small, like a small Shetland pony, the chief must have had to stand on a box, or an altar of some kind in order to consummate the act. The disproportionate size of the participants is, again, a good indicator as to how dominant the Mother Goddess was. If you still have some doubts as to how deeply engrained Mother Goddess worship was in preliterate cultures, I suggest you mull over the scene between the chief and the mare for a while. While youre doing that, heres something else to ponder: while he was fornicating with the mare, what was the chief thinkingor even more a propos our early consciousnesswould the chief have been thinking at all?

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Chapter 47: Alice Leaps to Her Death January 2007, Sarasota I had a second vivid dream about Alice. The setting was the samethe George Washington Bridge. This didnt surprise me. I have many repetitive dreams dreams that utilize the same metaphor to represent some critical aspect of my internal life. I automatically consider them important soul messages. Some have gone on for as long as ten, twenty, even thirty years. For instance, I continue to have a repetitive dream about my catamaran, a boat I sailed most of my adult life. In the dream, it is continually being damaged usually by going agroundbut it is never destroyed. Although I sold the boat seven years ago to two women in Mexico, it keeps returning in my dreams and keeps going aground. Those dreams are so real I sometimes wake up panicked, wondering where I can find a dock for the boat. My unconscious has clearly found the catamaran a perfect metaphor for my divided soul. I knew the reappearance of the bridge wasnt an accident. It was a clear signal my unconscious was trying tell me something important. This time the dream took place late at night. I found myself alone in the huge lyre room, wondering where Alice wasI was sure she was supposed to meet me. I went over to the giant lyre to look for worm holes, but couldnt find any. Then I heard Alice cackling. It was coming from somewhere far away, far out on the bridge. I climbed back up to the walkway and again heard her. It sounded like she was laughing and crying at the same time. ThensuddenlyI was next to her. We were standing at the middle of the bridge, facing the distant city to the south. Something made me look down. Alices feet were straddling a white line. I realized it was the dividing line between New York and New Jersey. I kept mindlessly wondering whether New Jersey represented the unconscious or the conscious mind. Then I saw Alices face. It was completely expressionless. I tried some small talk, mindlessly chattering about the worm holes. She gave me a look that stopped me dead in my tracks. I realized she was going to jump. I pleaded with her, but she waved me away and said, Im doing this for you. Pay attention. She turned around and climbed up on the guardrail. Her back was to me. Her plain white cotton dress began to wind around her like a shroud. A huge orange moon was rising over the Palisades. Then the wind picked uphard. I was afraid Alice would be blown off the rail. The cables began humming, almost singing, as

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they will in a heavy wind. She turned her head towards me. Her face was white, almost featureless, as if it were under a snowdrift. She whispered, Goodbye Justin, and then she jumped. I stood there, frozen, watching her white body plummeting towards the water. About halfway down she did a sort of slow somersault, extended her arms, and began flying out over the water towards the city. Somewhere around 125th street, she did a long, slow turn and began flying back to me. When she was about three feet away, she stopped. The shroud had become a plain white cotton dress again. It rippled in the wind. There seemed to be a tremendous tension in her face and body, as if she might be torn apart by internal forces at any second. She said something, but her voice was completely unintelligibleexcept for her tone, which I somehow found oddly reassuring. After a few moments, I began making out some individual words and then everything came together all at once and I heard her say, Do you have any questions? I blurted, No, not that I can think of. Good, she replied, its time to stop thinking, dont you think? and with that she got smaller and smaller until she became a tiny point of light and then she went out. Just like that. The dream made it clear she was going to be leaving me and that I had to prepare for that event. Her last remark before she disappeared, Its time to stop thinking, dont you think? was clearly the kind of reminder youd give a disciple who was about to be on his own but wasnt quite prepared for it. The dream again indicated that Alice was to be seen as a bridge between the physical and non-physical worldsthe fact she was standing at its midpoint only further emphasized that pointbut more importantly, the dream was also saying I would no longer have the help of that bridge. It seemed to me, however, that the dream was also about something much larger. For one thing, the dream was no longer concerned with my rebirth, or her rebirth, at least not in the same way as before. This was not a dream laced with fear. It had some terrifying elements, but it was also a dream that rose from its own ashes. It was filled with wonder and hope. It was also markedly different in that I was no longer afraid of Alice. Rather, I was concerned for her emotional statethe dream reflected a deep soul disturbance in her. She seemed alternately hysterical, happy, sad, controlled, mystical. Her poem about being on fire came to mind:
There is another one another one inside me inside me

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the voices inside me the hatred inside me the tunnels and spiders the doors and the bars

The dream gave no reason for the disturbance. We both knew, however, that the time was coming when she would leave meand despite her equanimity on the matter, I sensed it would be a time of great emotional upheaval for both of us. For sure, I wasnt ready for itand I doubt she was either. Despite all that, the dream made clear her decision to leap wasfirst and foremosta conscious choice, consciously executed. I knew enough about archetypal themes to know her death scene had to have come from the collective unconscious. From the moment she climbed up on the railing I sensed a change in the dreams energy. The dramatic elements seemed of an entirely different orderthe shroud, the singing cables, the snowy death mask, the rising moon, her leap turning into flight, and then her coming back to deliver one final message before disappearing from this world. Very clearly, the dream had all of the hallmarks of a sacred, archetypal drama. It mirrored the basic elements of Jesus deathhis awareness of its coming, his allowing it to happen, his rising from the dead to speak to his followers, his subsequent ascendance into heaven. Be aware seemed to be the dreams implied commandit wanted me to pay attention to the deliberate way Alice had chosen to leave meIm doing this for you. Pay attention. The dream wanted me to understand she was acting out her death in a proscribed mannerthat something archetypal, something much larger than her leaving me was working itself out. I didnt have any doubts I was a part of the drama yet to be acted out. That evening I had a dream about something Alice had said to me months earlierI know youd like to think of me as a kind of psychic Google, someone you could pump endlessly for information, but weve gone far beyond that.our fates have become intertwined. Weve become linked at the navel as you like to put it. In the dream, we were standing together on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, waiting for a train to come. I had no idea where we were going, only that we had to go. Suddenly, Alice began to speak those same words, I know youd like to think of me and as she did, we began turning into a garish 19th century circus poster of Chang and EngBarnums famous Siamese Twins.

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Just then a train came to a stop in front of us. It was an old circus train. I could see a dimly-lit stage set inside where a very slow tableau of Eng waking up one morning and finding Chang dead kept repeating itself over and over. When the doors hissed open, I didnt move. I just stood there, looking at the slow tableau. I remember thinking there was no need to go anywhere. We were already there.

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Chapter 48: I Become a Chimpanzee March 2007, Sarasota I was getting more and more concerned about Alices stability. At times shed be her old self: balanced, rational, considerate, funny; then there were times I dreaded seeing her. I felt it might be the right time to tell her about the second dream. Perhaps it might help her regain her balancelet her see herself as I had always seen her: as an extraordinary human being. I recounted the dream as accurately as I could: the shroud, the singing cables, the snowy death mask, the rising moon, her leap turning into flight, and then her coming back to deliver one final message before turning into light. She listened very intently, and said, Youve been waiting to talk to me about this dream, havent you? Yes, but I was afraid to. The dream is mostly about you. I didnt want you to think I was interfering in your personal affairs. Youre not, she replied. Dreams are never personal if you know what I mean. Not really. I mean the dreaming self doesnt hold any grudges. Its not small-minded, or catty. I never really thought about that, but youre right. No matter how personal dreams are, theyre always impartial. Always. But heres the first thing I need to tell you about your dreamNew Jersey is the unconscious, not New York, and then she began to cackle hysterically. I was beside myself. Alice, be serious will you. This is serious. I know its serious. Thats the problem. Were going to part soon. I can feel it. The dream is a confirmation of that. But thats not whats bothering me. I always knew that was in the cards. What is bothering you then? I have no idea where Im going, she replied. You may find that hard to believe, but Im the last person to know my own future. I cant see more than a few feet ahead of myself. I never could. All I know is were going to part. What about leaping to your death in the dream? Is that actually going to happen? Ive never considered suicide. I know that whatever happens to me is never personal. Its simply something I have to go through, a lesson if you will. I think you have to see my leap and returning and finally disappearing into light as a metaphor for rebirth. Its a lesson your unconscious is giving you to balance out the wormhole terror of the first dream. Theyre both true by the way.

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What do you mean, theyre both true? Rebirth is both terrifying and wonderful. But Im not reborn in the dream, I replied. You are. Yes, but my being reborn is primarily a lesson for you: out of death comes life. Thats the archetypal part of the dream. It was meant for youto help guide you. But the dream also seems to be indicating my rebirth is going to precede yours, just like the first dream did. Is there anything else? I know youre concerned about my leaving you. I cant stop that. Nor can you. Its the way our fates are unwinding. But I want you to remember how we parted in the dream, what it felt like. Our being together is going to end in the physical sense. I did disappear. But you wont be alone and youre not helpless. You know enough now to continue on your own, although it may be a bit rocky at first. Thats what Im afraid of. Remember what I said to you in your dream? Pay attention Im doing this for you? No. Not thatthe other one. You mean, Dont you think its time to stop thinking? Yesthat one. What about it? Oh God you are a thick one! Remember to do itto stop thinking! With that blast, I figured it was best to change the subject. It wasnt that difficult. By this time I had pretty much figured out what the myth was saying and I had begun to take a hard look at what Alice had been telling me about the First Mother and the Mother Goddess cultures. I had been trying to imagine how the First Mother had created her first story because at that theoretical point in time she didnt have any words. She didnt even know what stories were. All she had were her animal sounds and gestures. I quickly realized, however, that a lack of words wouldnt necessarily have stopped her. We automatically assume we need words to tell a story because we live in a world of words. But what is really needed is a language, and language can be made up of things other than wordsgestures, for example, or mime, or facial expressions, or sounds, or some combination of those. I told all this to Alice and said, Here, let me show you what I mean. I then improvised a series of movements and animal vocalizations and gestures to tell Alice a story about my first date as a teenager. I must have become too much a chimpanzee because she broke out roaring laughing. Oh, I hope you can do better than that, Franklin. Lets try thisPut up your paws. Bark! OK, OK, so it wasnt that great, but you got the idea, right?

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I think so. Did it have something to do with unconsummated intercourse? Rightmy first date, to be exact. If you acted like that with me, I wouldnt have rolled over for you either. Thats not the point. The point is you dont need words to tell a story. In fact, wordsa verbal languagemay not have developed until some time later, because words arent critical to storytelling. What words really allow you to do is tell more complicated stories. So what youre telling me is that the First Mother told her first story in a manner similar to your story of unconsummated love, or lust, Im not sure which. Yes, but not exactlybecause the first story was a poem. How can you have a poem without words? The same way you can create a story with no words. A poem is a story. The only difference between a poem and the story I just chimpanzeed for you is that a poem comes from the unconscious, while my dating story came from my conscious mind. A story becomes a poem when it comes unbidden from the unconscious. The Great Mothers first story had to come from the unconscious, because there were no stories, no examples to follow. Somehow, something triggered the storyteller and the rest is history. The story she created would have been a howling, gesturing story completely devoid of words accompanied by heaven blazing into the head. You know, I suspect most poets would think you were crazy for even theorizing the first poem might have sounded like that. Probably. But thats because they assume that the written poetry we know today is the only poetry. They mistake a particular form of poetry for its essence. Its essence is that it is a rhythmic, metaphoric, ecstatic story that comes unbidden from the unconscious. That story can take many forms. Late preliterate oral poetry, like Homers, was very different from todays written poetry. It was spontaneously recreated and chanted to music out of storytelling memory. Prior to that, tribal poetry, which was also spontaneous, was communal and multi-voiced, consisting of music, sounds, mime, movement, and mask. Most poets today see those non-verbal elements as being of little consequence as they are creating a written poetry. For them, only the words are important. For oral poets, however, those elements were crucial; theyre nonverbal ways of telling a story. They make the verbal story richer. The proper way of thinking about them is as leitmotifs in a poetic fugue. One of the most intriguing elements, and one thats almost taken for granted, is rhythm. Where did it come from? Were the only animals with rhythm, so its not something we inherited. I believe it came from our creation of stories just like our sense of time comes from storiesbecause stories always having beginnings, middles, and ends. Im not following you.

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What I mean is that our incessant, instinctive recreation of the world in stories with beginnings, middles, and endsis the source of our sense of time; it creates our sense of the past, present, and future. Let me put it to you this way: time appeared as soon as we opened our mouths, and its been with us ever since. All our prehistoric recordings of the cycles of the sun and moon and stars and the plants and animals, all of thatright down to our atomic clocks and the prophesied Rapturecame about because we became witnesses, storytellers. Otherwise we'd be like the animals: locked in the present, unable to escape it. Intelligence and memory have nothing to do with a sense of time. An elephant has good problem-solving capabilities as well as a good memory, but they dont give the elephant a sense of time. Only witnessing can bring that about. An elephant dying of thirst may strike out towards the setting sun because he has a sense memory of water being in that direction and is intelligent enough to attempt to duplicate that path. But that is it. The elephant has no sense of how long it took last time and no sense of how long it will take this time. There is no past, present, or future for the elephant, only what is. The elephant walks until he drops or finds water. There is no sorrow, nor sense of triumph. There is only the continuous desire for water and the eventual cessation of that desire one way or another. OK. But I still dont understand how rhythm comes from witnessing. You could say that animals have rhythm because their vocalizations are often repetitive. A singing bird, or a barking dog, or a howling wolf, or a squeaking dolphin would be examples of that. But that is not rhythmit is a repeated sound. We could argue that, but I think any musical person would tell you in the end that animals dont have rhythm. Rhythm is something that humans superimpose on their sounds. Humans may also repeat sounds, but there is something else, something unique, that only humans do: they sometimes superimpose a spontaneous inflection on their words that creates what we call rhythm. I believe that the First Mothers first story may have been repetitive at timesit would be only natural. As for its having what we call rhythm, your guess is as good as mine. My own intuition is that rhythm came slightly later. To really understand rhythm, you have to look very closely at the act of witnessing. The First Mothers first story, whatever it was, would be a good starting point. The truly mysterious thing about that first story is that she would have had to instinctively combine the various animal sounds and gestures she knew into a sequence that had an implied beginning, middle and end. There was absolutely no precedent for that. To see how mysterious it really must have been, we only have to remember that those sounds and gestures were the same ones known to her animal companions. But animals can only use them to make present statements, like Im hungry, or I am angry. They dont have the ability to create a storyto spontaneously reach into memory and create a little world out of it with a beginning, middle and end using those same sounds and gestures.

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I dont know if it happened in the first story, or began occurring later, but one of the things that had to emerge to assist in creating that sequence of sounds and gestures was a sound or gesture that meant and then. I believe it was with the introduction of that elementand thenthat our first rhythm developed. Why those words? Because we instinctively emphasize themperhaps in unconscious recognition of the magical way in which they allow a story to be created. I did some translations from Melanesian pidgin of the aborigine poet Eldred Van-Ooy some years ago. Pidgins are primitive oral languages that preliterate peoples seem to instinctively make up in order to communicate with traders and the like. I had to learn Melanesian pidgin in order to do the translations and I then found out that all pidgins followed the same simple linguistic rules, no matter what language they simulated, and no matter what the native language of the natives. The linguistic structure simply appeared. What this implies is that the rules that govern the use of language are already within usat least by the time we reach the tribal state. And who knows, those rules may have been within us from the very beginning, just as our ability to form stories was within us from the beginning. But what does that have to do with rhythm? Maybe I went too quickly. The linguistic element that consistently appears in all pidgins is a word that means and or and then or but, or now. In most pidgins, its the same wordwith gestures or facial expressions or tone indicating which one is implied. This critical wordna in the case of Melanesian pidgin is the glue that holds the story together. Here, let me give you an example. I pulled out my laptop and opened one of my literal translations of a Van-Ooy poem called Homecomingor in Melanesian pidgin, Mi Go Ples Bilong Mi. I then capitalized and italicized all the occurrences of na.
Mi Go Ples Bilong Mi: LITERAL TRANSLATION Mi saevi bainbai yu wetim long mi I KNOW SOON YOU WAIT FOR ME long wanples, IN THE SAME PLACE, hed bilong yu em i-stapim haf long haus bilong rod ayan, YOUR HEAD WILL BE HALF IN THE HOUSE OF THE RAILROAD, hors i-stap baek long yu, em i-saekim yu long dor. THE HORSES WILL BE IN BACK OF YOU, PUSHING YOU IN THE DOOR. NA olsem oltaim,

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AND IN THE SAME WAY AS ALWAYS taim mi helo long yu, mi singawtim yu Uncle, WHEN I GREET YOU, I CALL YOU UNCLE, yu tokim mi yu no gat samting. YOU WILL SAY TO ME NOTHING. NA taim mi sidawn long haefsaid long yu, AND WHEN I SITDOWN BESIDE YOU, go haws bilong yu, TO GO TO YOUR HOME, laen go awtsaid long mifela olsem tudark rivar, THE LAND GOES OUTSIDE OF US LIKE A DARK RIVER, NA hors lait long munmun long baeksaid, AND THE HORSES SHINING WITH MOONS ON THEIR BACKS, NA mi no hirim singawt, tasol BUT I DON'T HEAR A SOUND, ONLY singawt long mifela i-stap. THE SOUND OF OUR BEING. NA bainbai taim fair bilong haus kamap AND SOON WHEN THE HOUSE-FIRES RISE UP olsem longwe starstar LIKE DISTANT STARS mi hirim tasol singawt bilong yu I WILL HEAR ONLY YOUR VOICE em i-kamap na fal. RISING AND FALLING. Yu singim singawt bilong yu, em i-no gat frant, i-no gat ars. YOU SING YOUR SOUND, IT HAS NO FRONT, HAS NO END. Yet mi kichim tok long singawt yu sing. YET I UNDERSTAND SOUND YOU SING. NA mi sing wantaim lon yu. NOW I SING WITH YOU. Long wonam mi sing?. Mi no saevi. WHY DO I SING? I DON'T KNOW. NA mi sing tu.

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NOW I SING ALSO.

After reading it several times, Alice said, Youre right, it is the glue that holds the story together, that propels it forward. Exactly. You simply have to watch a native speaking pidginor a very young child telling a story for that matterto see how the rhythm is set up by the use of and then or and or now or but. Its so pervasive and so necessary to storytelling that the speaker always emphasizes it. I believe that was the beginning of rhythm. In reality, it may simply have been a gesture that first indicated: and then. But at some stage, very early humans began creating a new kind of sound words, names of thingsand the word for and then was probably one of the first.

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Chapter 49: Alice and the First Mother March 2007, Sarasota Alice had been particularly helpful in unwinding the labyrinth of The White Goddess and relating it to the myth. We were sitting in Starbucks one day when she said to me, Its a shame that Graves didnt look at the Mother Goddess in Jungian terms, because it would have given him a useful structuring tool. God knows he could have used it. Archetypes form the way we see and know and act. We have no control over them. From Jungs point of view, the Mother archetype is one of the most powerful archetypes in the collective unconscious. Under the right conditions, its effect upon our behavior and perceptions can be staggering. You have a mother, dont you? What kind of questions is that? Of course I have a mother. Shes been dead for some time though. She may be dead, but shes still with you. And so is her mother. And so is every other mother. Jung saw the Mother archetype as embodying all of our collective perceptions of the mother since time began. You mean back to the First Motherthe one in Africa that everyones DNA points to? Thats as good a starting point as any. It may go back to our animal mothers. But lets not quibble. Its our collective perceptions of the First Mother. Now add in the thousands and thousands of other mothers who came into being over the millennia. While youre at it, add in the Mother Goddess, Graves White Goddess. But thats a psychic mother, not a physical mother. Since when are you so picky? The psychic entity we call the Mother Goddess developed out of the physical mothers. Thats what an archetype is: a psychic entity that creates itself around our perceptions. It may even exist before our perceptions. The Mother Goddess, the White Goddess, is one aspect of the Mother archetype, but a very large aspect. In preliterate times, you could say they were one and the same. Archetypes are nothing more than psychic representations of collective memories. Why and when they are formed and how they are formed is a mystery, yet they play a critical role in how we see and act in the world. You can think of them as human instincts that developed to supplement our basic animal instincts, such as those associated with hunger and sex. One more thingthose archetypes sometimes take form and enter our consciousness to assist us. Why this happens and how and why they take a particular form is also a mystery, but they always come in a form that is comprehensible to us a figure, a luminous presence, a voice. Got it?

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Got it. You know, Alice, Graves says the Musethe Poetry archetypeis another, later name for the White Goddess. Something tells me hes right about that, but I cant put my finger on why. Why shouldnt it be true? There's no reason why the Poetry archetypethe Musewouldnt be associated with the Mother archetype. It was the First Mother who told the first storieswho was the first witness. Right? Right. But how does she get to be the Muse? The Muse is an archetype that must have developed very early, right along with the Mother Goddess archetype. I think youre right in saying that the Muse began as an internal modification of the directive voices early humans heard. Those early directive voices, by the way, were most probably those of the Mother Goddess. I also cant help but think that the more human, storytelling voices we experienced in that internal modification also incorporated the essential nature of a mothers stories to her children, because our memories of those stories would have been such an essential part of the Mother Goddess archetype. After all, there is nothing more critical to human development than a mother telling stories to her childrenand then encouraging them to tell those stories backand listening to those stories to make sure the children understood what was said. You know, Alice, it just occurred to me that at some later stage of our development, a division occurred, and the Muse part of the Mother Goddess archetype became a distinct archetype. You know what else just came to me? I can only imagine. I think that the feeling you had when you wrote the six poems you showed me the ones where the energy of prophecy merged with the energy of the poemwas probably very close to what those early humans felt before the Muse and Mother Goddess became distinct archetypes. Franklin, your mother must have loved youyou can be one bright boy at times; did I ever tell you that? And you know what? It says to me that those particular poems were also prophetic in naturejust like mine were. Our memory of that is probably the reason why we continued to associate prophecy with poetry right up to the times of the Greeks and Romans. Your mother must have loved you too, Alice. Anything else? Thats about it on archetypes. What I really wanted to knock around with you was the First Mothers first story. Any ideas? Not really, I replied. Its a toughie, isnt it? I suspect it was about something of immense importance to herperhaps the day she discovered she was different. Not smarter than her animal companions, or a better hunter, or a stronger fighter, but different in a whole new way. So heres the questionwhat happened that made her realize she was different? I have no idea. Come on Franklin. Live a little.

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Well, shed look the same as everybody else, so she wouldnt know she was different until something happened that made it evident, but I have no idea what. Franklin, Im embarrassed at how thick you can be. Wake up and listen to your mother Aliceit happened when she tried to tell the others her first story and they didnt understand a thing she was saying. Ive had that experience with you several times by the way. Keep rubbing it in Alice. Oh, stop being so dramaticyoure a regular Streisand, you know that? Listen to meimagine the First Mother is 12 years oldold enough to mate and hunt. But what she doesnt know is that shes feeling something the others dont. And what is that? I shot back. A mysteriousand extraordinarylonging for something, but she doesnt know what that something is. Nor can she tell those around her what shes feeling, can she now? No. She cant. And why is that, Justin? OK, OK, knock it off, will you Alice? Its because she doesnt know how to describe that entirely new feeling, let alone why shes feeling it. She doesnt know yet that the mysterious longing she is feeling is pulling her towards a momentous stepreaching back into memory and creating a story. She doesnt know yet that she is capable of creating a story, or even what a story is. Nor does she have any way of knowing that she will be released from that longing as soon as she opens her mouth. She doesnt yet know that unlike her animal brothers and sisterswho can only howl and bark and yelpthat she can step out of time and create a storya little world describing what is happening to her. But shes not completely lost. She does know something. She intuitively senses that the mysterious longing shes feeling is related to the mysterious, invisible interest in her shes been feeling for years. Its a very different kind of interest, though. Its not the killing interest of an animal stalking her, or the rising sexual interest of a male in the group. Its something like the interest of her mother, and she finds herself drawn to it, but she doesnt know how to get to the source of that interest. Its invisible. Do I have to go any further? No, of course not; shes become aware of the Listeners, Alice replied, but she has no name for them yet, only a sense of something invisible that is interested in her feelings in and of themselves. I think you were right when you told me the Listeners represent the animal consciousness we left behind when we acquired human consciousness. How did you put it? When we became conscious, our animal consciousness became our unconscious. We could feel its presence, its interest in us, but we couldnt see it or touch it. I dont know why, I replied, but Ive always imagined the creation of human consciousness as a split, a tearing apart, something like the internal cell modification and division you see in cancer, with some part of our animal

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consciousness becoming human consciousness, and the other part becoming what we call our unconscious. I see the split as happening very quickly. Our first consciousness may have been very weak compared to our unconscious, but what keeps coming to me is that all the basic mechanics were there, and by that I mean the ability to witness, to observe and report, to make stories. I dont see that evolutionary jump as a gradual biological process over millennia. I have no way of proving this of courseits simply a very strong intuition. While its very likely that our early consciousness with its ability to witness was extremely tentative and fragilemost probably we were continually slipping back into our old animal consciousness and then re-emerging from itI see our basic ability to create stories as coming into existence with all the elements intact. Partial witnessing doesnt make any senseat least to me. Our ability to witnessto create narrative worlds out of memoryis such an unprecedented evolutionary jump that all our evolutionary theories pale before it. How it occurredand why it occurredis simply a mystery. Seeing it as a series of accidental, partial leaps over millennia doesnt necessarily make it any less mysterious. If anything, it makes it more mysterious because witnessing is made up of such a complex continuum of reflexive interactions. I hate to tell you this Justin, but if a scientist heard us talking like this, picturing the first human coming into being fully intact and suddenly telling stories, theyd go ape, if youll excuse the pun. Things dont happen like that, theyd tell you, they happen gradually, step by step. Thats because theyre prejudiced towards a tedious kind of truth, whereas were prejudiced towards a miraculous kind of truth. Besides, were talking about a simple conceptual model. Were not trying to rewrite evolutionary theory. Einstein used the same simplified, conceptual thinking to help him get a gut feel for the nature and effects of relativity. He used to imagine there was nothing in the universe except him riding on a broomstick next to a beam of light. Then hed let his mind wander as to what would happen to him (and the broomstick) as he approached, maybe exceeded, the speed of light. His was not a real picture of the world anymore than ours is, but it helped him to get to the essence of the situation. If that kind of thinking was good enough for Einstein, it should be good enough for us. Yet no matter how witnessing actually did evolve, just how mysterious and unique it was can be seen in the fact that it has never been duplicated in any way whatsoever by any other biological form. Theres nothing that even remotely approaches it. Some people will tell you that animals can tell storiessuch as the so-called stories the buzzing, wiggling bees tell each other regarding the location of new pollen. Unfortunately, its always the same story, told the same way except for the wiggled direction to the pollen. There is no variation in structure or tone, no imagined world, no sense of triumph or sorrow. Its not a storyits instinctive, specialized communication as to the location of prey. Let me put it this wayno

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animal ever wiggled or barked or squeaked, Once upon a time, or anything close to it. I know Im ranting, but I hate the way human evolution is treated nowadays. To put witnessing in the same basket as fins becoming fingers is to be blind to the true magnificence of what it means to be human. I know most people think my suggestion that our witnessing came into existence full-blown like Topsy is crazy, but we have to remember our first witnessings werent John Updike stories. They were probably something like: I saw him I was sad, and even that might be stretching it. But they were stories, no matter how crude they might seem by our standards. The myth suggests the same thing about witnessing, but it is very slippery as to how, or why, our ability to witness evolved. The myth simply tells us without giving any of the detailsthat our becoming aware of the Listeners was coterminous with the emergence of our human consciousness: When the Listeners came / we changed. / We became Witnesses. From that point in time we were able to express ourselves in a startling new waynot by simply declaiming our immediate emotions, which is what animals do, but by stopping time: by reflexively reaching into memory and creating a storya little worldthat reflected how we feel. You know, Franklin, what keeps coming to me is that our two minds must have worked together from the very beginningalmost as if in the process of tearing away, they spread tendrils into each other to stop the splitting from going all the way. That way, the two minds could feed each other. If they hadnt, human evolution might have stopped dead in its tracks. The conscious mind by itself isnt much. Its just the surface of a very deep lake. We would have been easy prey for just about anything. The Witnesses Log says something about that, Alice. It says our conscious and unconscious mindsthe Witnesses and the Listenersare bound to each other by unknowable promises. I cant help thinking the promises involved some kind of agreement between the two that they would never leave each other. The tendrils you sensed may represent that. Im sure of it, Franklin, I also keep getting that if those tendrils are ever completely sundered, if the promises are ever broken, it would be the end of the human race as we know it. The villain would most likely be the conscious mind, wouldnt it? After all, human consciousness is a very ingenious baby. If we ever found a way of completely isolating ourselves from the unconscious, wed find ourselves in the worst nightmare imaginable. Wed be completely lost. The unconscious is the gateway that allows us to know what is true, or beautiful, or honorable, or hateful. Wed be paper figures blown about by uncontrollable winds. Wed have no anchor. Wed be worse than animals. She looked at me for a moment like she was momentarily lost. You know, I

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forgot what we were talking about. It was about the First Mothers first story. Oh, right. What do you think it was? she asked. It was about her being different from her brothers and sisters, remember? But how do we really know that was her first story? Alice, were making this up, remember? Historical accuracy isnt the point. I know were making it up, Mr. Fine HairsOh was Jane right about thatbut the fact of the matter is the first story could have been about something else entirely. Alice. Relax, FranklinIm still feeling my way. You know, despite your merciless crushing of those poor bees, there are some very credible people who wouldnt agree with you. Theyre sure animals can tell stories because of that gorilla in Atlanta who can link together sounds or symbols to say things like, Kinko hungry for banana. I knowbut Kinkos not making stories Alice. Kinko is simply expressing her present hungry state. A story is much different. A story beginsThis happened, or Once upon a time. It means stepping out of the present and reaching back into memory to create a little worlda storya miraculous narrative linking of symbols that expresses our feelings about something. You might say Kinko is something like we were when the myth says We were like moss on the mountainside/ waiting for the sun. I bet if Kinko had her wayand not her trainers wayshed rather point to the bananaor grab it. Wait a minute, FranklinI have it. The First Mothers first story had to do with hunting! Alice, please Id have given anything to have heard it! Alice, for Christ sake, what is it with you? Calm down. I am calm. But youre rightwe really dont have any way of knowing what the first story was. So lets just say it was about her awareness she was different. She must have lifted out of herselfHeaven blazing into her head as you like to sayin creating that story. No doubt about it; and you know, Alice, it may have been done entirely with her existing animal vocabulary. But who knows, maybe entirely new sounds and gestures came to her, because were in the midst of such a mysterious act that anything could have happened. Right? Right. But thats not the important thing, is it Alice? Oh youre are a sly one, you are. You almost got me there, using my own words to knock me. Alice, have you been drinking again? Thats none of your business. OK, OK, youre right. It isnt. What I was trying to say was that the really

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important thing was no one understood her. Her story would have been completely unintelligible to her animal siblings. It would be like me talking to Janes dog. What she had done was beyond her understandingthe sounds and gestures she had always known had somehow allied themselves with memory and arranged themselves to create something entirely new: a storya little world with a beginning, middle and end. It just happened. She wouldnt have been aware of any of this, only that she had done something entirely new, something that had released her from that intense longing and moved her to an ecstatic state. If she understood anything, it was that the she had somehow created that little world within herself. And heres the other important thing: she sensed she could recreate it, add to it, anytime she wanted to, because it was hers. She must have been as terrified and ecstatic as she had been in her first matingand completely confused as to why the others had walked away. After a number of tries, she would have given up, completely baffled, almost crazy that what made sense to her and lifted her into ecstasy was incomprehensible to the others. You know, I sometimes get that feeling when I read my poetry at bookstores. Of course you do, you little darling. But its really the same thing isnt it? You said so yourselfthat our very first stories, our very first words, were poems that they rose unbidden out of the unconscious in a moment of ecstasy. I cant see it happening any other way. In a way, Emerson thought so too. He sensed that the act of poetry begot language. Language is fossilized poetry, is the way he put it. You know what, Alice? I was just picturing the First Mother retelling her story over and over about her knowing she was differentand getting absolutely nowhereand then one day looking out of the corner of her eye and seeing some younger male, maybe a brother, looking back at her with a gleam of recognition. Isnt that eerie? It would have been one glorious day, Franklin, because what youd be looking at is Eve and Adam, in that order, dont you think? In time, there would be more and more gleams. Is there any doubt that story would have been told over and over to other humans as they were born? And is there any doubt that eventually that same storythat first genesis storywould be repeated over thousands of ensuing generations? Think of it: because of her you were a human being, a storyteller, a witness, and not an animal. It doesnt take much imagination to see that these stories would eventually give rise to a much richer Mother Goddess archetype one that would also include her as storytelleras Muse. You know, Alice, what I hadnt realizeduntil you put it all together for me just nowis that those first stories about the First Mother knowing she was differentthat she was the creator of the human racewas also the soil out of

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which the Mother Goddess archetype and the Muse archetype eventually grew. It also explains why the Muse has always been intuitively sensed as a female, dont you think? It verifies Graves thesis that the Mother Goddess and the Muse were once one and the same. To tell you the truth, Alice replied, Ive always felt Graves hit the nail right on the head. I could feel it. Then one day, after you spoke to me about the Muses more human voice, I imagined I was at the very beginning of the human race, before there were any Gods, and there was only the First Mother and her young offspring. Some would have been human, some not. In the very beginning, it would have been like that because she would have had to mate with an animal. I realized then that one of the ways the First Mother would have been perceived by her offspring would be as the One who told her children stories, who knew the truth and, most especially, who always listened to their responses to see if they understoodto see if they were human or animal. Jesus, Alice, that's goddamn eerie. Isnt it though? You know what else? What? Im tempted to make one of those equations youre so crazy about. What equations? Like the one you showed me to explain Jungs statement that God, the unconscious, and the soul are terms describing essentially the same thing. I remember you showing it to me one day. It was quite impressive. You wrote it out like this, and here she scribbled out on a piece of paper: God <=> Soul <=> Unknowable <=> Unconscious Its the mathematician in me. I cant help it. I must be losing my mind to even do this, Alice quipped, but I had a dream I should be communicating with you in ways youd understand more easily. You know, the way a mother will break down complicated things like sex, so her kids will understand it without freaking out about daddys big one? With this she started cackling so wildly tears came to her eyes. When she finally came back down to earth, I asked, Alice, are you OK? Sure, Im fine. Why do you ask? Oh, nothing, really; I just thought you were having a nervous breakdown, thats all. That was last week. Im fine now. Anyway I know you really liked that diagram I drew for you about GOD and the Other World. Remember? It was the one with the two lines? It really cleared things up, didnt it? It was extremely helpful, if thats what you mean. Of course thats what I mean, you little darling. Well, heres another one, but more the way you like it. She scribbled out a long equation:

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the First Mother = the Mother Goddess = the Muse = the Perfect Listener = the White Goddess = the Way of the Mother Sometimes you amaze me Alice. Thanks. By the way Alice, whatever youre on, Id like some. Will fifty cover it? I thought shed never stop cackling. Starbucks all but cleared out. I could still hear her as I drove away.

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Chapter 50: I Confess My Ignorance April 2007, Sarasota There are two aspects of the myth I have never fully understood. The first is the exact nature of the Listeners. This may be because the myth is positioned at an early stage of our development, one where we had not yet begun to conceive of the Godswe could only sense an unapproachable, invisible presence that had an unknowable interest in us. Some religious writers, like Karen Armstrong, have suggested something of a roughly similar nature. She cites the fact that in some very early mythsas the Gods first begin to appear and speak to usan unknowable entity is already present in the distant background, This sequence of events is somewhat echoed in the Witnesses Log myth, in which the Visitors (angels, gods) dont appear until the Listeners have arrived on the scene. At one stage, I asked Alice if she could possibly approach that early state of consciousness. Maybe, she replied, but I doubt it would yield anything definitive about the Listeners. Theyre too much a part of the myth and the myth is too much a part of you. When youre dealing with things like this, she said, they never fail to be personal and unique. Its better you accept that and wait it out. All I can tell you is that sometimes answers do walk out of the mist. What made understanding the Listeners particularly difficult was that I couldnt find an exact counterpart for them in any of the mythic scholarship available to me. There was nothing I could check my thinking against. The only conclusion I could draw was that the Listeners appeared much too early to become a part of the myths that made it into our literate world. So I was left with my intuitionwhich suggested two possibilities. One possibility, which I mentioned earlier, is that our very early consciousness was aware of an unapproachable communal presence having an unknowable interest in us long before we began to sense that presence as the Gods, and eventually, as God. That is to say, the Listeners may well represent the unknowable before our developing consciousness was capable of giving it the faces of the various Gods. Another possibility is that the Listeners may represent our unconscious, which is to say, the animal consciousness we left in order to become human. If this also seems farfetched, we should remind ourselves that animals live in a sea of feelings and that the Listeners are only interested in our feelings, not our ideas, or thoughts or words. While some might question the depth and range of feelings animals possess, my own senseand the sense of those who live with animals

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is they are not minimal. In addition, the myth intimates we were highly developed animals prior to becoming human. One thing I take from the myth on this is that we were far ahead of the chimpanzees we see as our closest genetic relative. The fact that I see the Listeners as possibly representing the very early Gods, as well as our previous animal consciousness, shouldnt be a source of confusion. The myth is a metaphor, as are its characters, so we shouldnt be surprised that its characters may have many faces. The truth lies in the totality of those possibilities. The reasoning mind doesnt like that kind of untidiness. It wants one solution. But that is a prejudice of reason. In dealing with the world of the unconscious, the soul, the psychic world, whatever you want to call it, you have to get used to the fact that nothing comes in neatly tied bundles. Nothing. Let me quickly address a related subject. Although Ive alluded to it, I have never really explained why I see the dramatic structure of the mythwhich mirrors the interplay of the components of preliterate consciousnessas also being a very close representation of what takes place when a poem comes unbidden from the unconscious. Here it is: When we become Witnesses (humans, those capable of creating story poems) when we become aware of an unseen, psychic presence (Listeners = Perfect Listener) having an unknowable interest in our feelings. When visited by other psychic presences (Visitors = Muses) some of us become Dreamers (poets) capable of bringing back pieces of the Other World (poems). The important thing to take from this quick recap is this: very early consciousness felt similar to the feeling we get when a poem comes to us. It employs the same entities if you will. Theres no need to worry what those entities actually are; we only have to admit to ourselves that they somehow exist. Now back to my confession of ignorance. The second aspect of the myth that continues to puzzle me is the nature of the unknowable promises that bind us to the Listeners:
The Visitors say we are bound to the Listeners by promises. What promises? we asked. No one knows that, they said.

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Not even us.

The myth says nothing more. It is one of those areas where the myth again leaves us to our own devices. My only sense of those promises is that they were promises that our new human consciousness and the animal consciousness it evolved fromour conscious and unconscious mindswould never leave one another. How those promises were made, and to whom, and why, and when, is another question entirely. The myth says nothing. Again, we shouldnt be surprised that the myth fails to give us a clear logical explanation. I have come to the conclusion that the myth does this when it assumes we already know somethingit assumes we have a preliterate frame of mindor, and this is the case here, when something is unknowable. Dont forget that the myth is not a logical treatise. At its heart it is not dealing with the known, or what can eventually be known, but with things that are truly unknowablethat are beyond all understanding. Any unconsciously created poemand the myth is a good example of oneis never the result of an ordinary act of witnessing. It is not something consciously put together, like the reporting of a traffic accident, but a transcendent witnessing. And as such it is directed by the larger interest of the soulor the unconscious if that is easier for you to handle. It is that larger interest that makes the story rise above itself and become poetry. The only way to know that larger interest is to feel itsomething that is particularly important in the case of the mythbecause one of the things it wants us to feel is the nature of preliterate consciousness. And when we do that, according to Alice, we will also feel the interest of the Female Spirit. In some sense then, this myth is not just an elegy for preliterate consciousness, but also an elegy for decline of the Female Spirit. Keep that in mind when you read these closing stanzas of the myth:

XI The Visitors tell us one day they will fade away and then, in time, come back again. When will you come back, we asked?

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When we are like dark stars like fires everywhere, they said. When will that be, we asked?. No one knows that They said. No one.

XII The Visitors are fading now. They are like memories or ghosts pressed against the glass. Only the Dreamers can hear them. The Dreamers say they sound like soft, distant thunder from far, far away, that is what the Dreamers say: they sound like soft distant thunder from far, far away.

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Chapter 51: I Face My Primitive Soul May 2007, Sarasota Although I have come to accept the fact that there are things about the myth that I might never fully understand, I never for a moment believed it was an accident that the myth chose to rise up from the long, dark chain of the collective unconscious and enter my mind on the evening of December 14, 2000. I have a very oldcall it primitivesoul that longs for the air of the preliterate world, an air saturated with honor and desire and poetry. I have the kind of personal attributes and experience that psychologist James Hillman sees as belonging to people who are guided by their daimons, or souls. Indeed this book would never have happened if I werent one of them. I am not alone in this. There are many others. One of them was my older brother, who remained a devout Catholic while I fell away from the church and all religious systems as a young man. He believed that to surrender to the loving will of God was to live a true, meaningful life. This wasnt some kind of knee-jerk, Jimmy Swaggart belief on his part. My brother and his family lived a deeply religious life of love. Only a fool would have said otherwise. Because we led very different lives and lived a great distance from each other he was an English professor in Minnesotawe seldom touched base. Sometimes years would pass. Yet I decided to give him an early draft of this book because I valued his opinion. He told me that he found it difficult to read books like mine or like Castanedasbecause of their view of the psychic world, the world of the spirit. In particular, he found it difficult to accept the stark, unapproachable Listeners as an early form of his God. His God was a loving God. That startled me somewhat, as it meant that his loving God had always existed despite the stories to the contrary in the Old Testament, so perhaps he had a blind spot about thator perhaps he felt it was too dangerous to faith to accept stories about God that were different from Christs stories. What I found upsetting about my brothers view was that Catholicism was founded on the psychic experiences of Christ, because that is indeed what Christs experiences were. I see the spiritual world and psychic world as interchangeable worlds. Spiritual systems, religious systems, always derive their authority from the psychic experiences of their leaders, whether they are Moses or Mohammed or Jesus. Its clear from the Bible that Jesus was viewed as possessed, as indeed he was, but not in the way his detractors thoughtsomething Jung makes abundantly clear.

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I had planned on talking to him about thishis refusal to admit the validity of other psychic experienceswhen he died suddenly of a blood clot. I think I know, however, what his answer would have been: that all psychic experiences are not the samethat some, like the experiences and revelations of Jesus, represent ways of seeing and living in the world that are superior. But I also suspect he would have gone further and said that the psychic experiences of Jesus were true and complete, and that all others were partial, distorted views, although I would have to toss a coin as to whether he would have defended that latter position very vigorously. He was a sophisticated thinker. The teachings of Mohammed and Moses and Buddha changed the lives of millions as much as those of Christ, yet he might well have called those insights less complete than those of Jesus. I was distraught both by his death and the fact we never got a chance to talk. I saw our positions as almost identicalthe difference being his daimon hungered for the world of Christ and mine for the world of Homer. I had wanted to tell him that we both had no choicewe had to live in the worlds that fit our soulsand that it would be wiser of him if he saw it that way. I had planned to also tell him that all it would take was a slight tilt of my gaze and I could believe everything he did. We were separated by the nature of our soulsnothing more, nothing less. The slightness and yet enormity of that separation had been brought home to me a few years earlier. I had started a project to help young mothers speak to their babies in the wombto put them in touch with their mothering instincts in a deep and lasting way. What made this especially critical was that the young mothers were pregnant teenagers, 14-17 years old, who had been convicted of felonies. They would give birth in a Juvenile Justice lock-down. No parents, no friends, no father of the baby. To paraphrase Dickens, It was the worst of times and the best of times. The girls were so emotionally splitboth loving and hating their coming babiesthat many of them couldnt even give them a name. That project eventually helped those girls become real mothers, not make-believe mothersa living example of how powerful speaking can be. The real point I want to make, however, is that in teaching speaking to one of the girlsa tough, young black girl with scar tattoosI was taken aback by how spiritual her poems were. Speaking feeds directly on the uncontrollable unconscious. That is why religious people who are initially drawn to speaking instinctively recognizing it is a form of prayereventually become afraid of it and walk away because they realize speaking cant be controlled. They are afraid their faith might not go deep enough, afraid of what they might say. The young, black girl had no such qualms. It was evident to me after several days that her speakings were not being consciously guided in any waythat she was

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speaking directly from a deeply spiritual unconscious. I talked with her about this one day and told her how moved I was by her speakings. I told her I had believed in a personal God as a child but no longer did. I told her I was waiting for God to speak to me. She looked at me for a moment and said quietly, If you speak to God, Justin, God will speak to you. That short sentence stunned me. It said more in eleven words than all the religious arguments about the existence of God since time began. I sensed that all it would take would be a slight twist of my gaze and the world the young girl lived in and that my brother lived incould be mine as well. But I also knew that it was a twist over which I had no control, and that while it was slight it was also enormous. It could happen tomorrow or never. I was locked into my soul in the same way my brother and the young girl were locked into theirs.

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Chapter 52: Alice Confesses July 2007, Sarasota I spent the evening of July 4th with Alice, watching the fireworks on Sarasota Bay. Alice had insisted we go despite my objections that parking would be impossible. This isnt a small town anymore, Alice, in case you havent noticed. Parkings impossible, and well never find a good viewing spot. The crowds are much too large. This proved to be exactly the case, but it didnt dim her enthusiasm. To make matters worse, she insisted on stopping at the 7-11 to buy a six-pack of beer and some chili dogs. Whos the beer for? I asked. You know I dont drink. Who said it was? Its for me. Any objections? I didnt know you drank. I dont. I knew I was in for it. When we got to the bay front, she insisted on muscling her way up front so she could see, despite the crowd being some twenty deep. Normally that would have been impossible. People can get mean about things like that, especially after coming hours earlier with a carload of screaming kids. One look at her pale eyes, however, and they parted like wheat. The cackling didnt hurt either. We wound up teetering on the edge of the seawall. She sat down, opened the bag of beer and chili dogs, and began yelling for the fireworks to start. It was quite an evening. Later that night, after I dropped her off, I had a third dream about her. Again it was set on the George Washington Bridge, but it was in the daytime. I was at the New York end and she was at the New Jersey end. I could barely see her; she was just a suggestion. Yet I could see every detail of her face as clearly as I could if she were but a few feet away. Thats when I really started to pay attention. I shouted out to her, Can you see my face as clearly as I see yours? Sure, but why are you shouting? Im standing right next to you. I tried to explain she wasnt next to me, that she was in New Jersey and I was in New York. OK. Have it your way, she shot back.

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No, really, listen to me. Youre almost a mile away and I can barely make out your body, but your face seems like its right in front of me. Do I have lipstick on? Yes. Its red, kind of. What about mascara? No, no mascara. You know, I think youre onto something. But what? I have no idea. Its your dream. I was absolutely beside myself. I was desperate to have her explain something, anything. I suddenly screamed, Is New Jersey really the psychic world? Yes, she shot back. Its in Hackensack. The dream wasnt difficult to figure out. The way we were separated on the bridge again emphasized I was soon going to be on my own. With no direction home, as the song says. I wasnt looking forward to it. The crazed tone of the dream didnt help. It was one hell of a send off. The dream also seemed to be repeating what Alice had often told me: that I didnt have the chance of a snowball in hell of logically understanding the psychic world. I was completely deflated by the dream. Nothing made sense. Alice and I might as well have been Pinga and Angelo slapping each others faces. It seems that Alices earlier suggestion I should stop thinking had come back in comic form, just in case I missed it the first time around. As I was thinking about this, Dianes I Am Laughing translation of ISLAUGGH came roaring in right behind it. I had never been able to shake the possibility that all the psychic events I experienced might be completely meaningless, a lot of clever nonsense from the poets unconscious. But that was the last thing I wanted to hear, especially with Alices growing instability and my own growing uneasiness about our parting. The only thing that kept me steady is what had kept others steady: no matter what my suspicious rational mind whispered from time to time, my experiences hadnt felt like nonsense. Alices earlier suggestion had been good advice: Its time to stop thinking, dont you think? It was time to put my doubts away. Alice called me a few days later. She wanted to meet at Starbucks. When she came through the door, she almost seemed her old self again. As she got closer, however, I could see her normally clear eyes were badly bloodshot. I knew she was in trouble. I had wanted to talk about the dream, but it was clearly not the time. Alice, whats the matter? Im not doing well, Justin.

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I can see. You havent seemed yourself lately. What self are you referring to, may I ask? I have no idea Alice, but lets start with the one with the beer and hot dogs. Shes not talking today. Try another one. I was completely out of my depth. How about the one in my dream a few nights ago, is she around? Her? Oh, shes around. Shes always around. Right then, I remembered the scene in the dream where Alice kept telling me she was right next to me, but she was clearly far away on the New Jersey end of the bridge. That little scene had a very strange feeling to it. I could see her at the end of the bridge but I could also see her face right next to me. I could almost taste her, as Alice was fond of saying. So Alices hint that her dreaming self might have somehow entered my dreamas fantastical as it soundsdidnt surprise me. Nothing surprised me about Alice anymore. I wanted to talk to her about it, but decided not to. Who knows? Alice may have done it and still been completely unaware of it. From what I could gather, memory was very slippery under those circumstances. In the end, I let it go. It was time to stop thinking. I began to talk about Graves. She looked at me in the most quizzical way, as though maybe I was jerking her around, and said, I never told you, but I met Graves once. It was during my travels in Europe. He hadnt published The White Goddess yet, but someone in London who knew Terry arranged a visit. He told us he thought Graves was onto something with regard to the Mother Goddess. You knew Robert Graves? Sure. Whats so surprising about that? You never told me. You never asked. Are you putting me on? I can believe you met Jungmaybebut Graves? Im sorry Alicethats one too many. All I can say, she replied, is they werent as well known then, at least not the way they are today. Most of the people I spoke to during those years have remained pretty much anonymous, but I wouldnt say they were less helpful than Jung or Graves. Most dedicated people spend their whole lives in the trenches. Kikis a good example of that: she probably helped me understand who I really was more than anybody and who remembers her? Anyway, going to Majorca was fun. Terry and I went by boat from London. Majorca back then was like Sarasota in the fifties: sketchy, almost not there. Graves had a wicked sense of humor. He couldnt get enough of my cracker accent. Once he had me read The List of Ships from Popes Iliad. He couldnt stop howling. He was a pretty good mimic too. He couldnt do Rich Little, like you, but

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his imitation of his Majorcan maid was unbelievable. Almost spooky. I hate to say this, but he also managed to put together a pretty good imitation of me reciting The List of Ships. He couldnt stop howling at that either. He took my eyes right in stride. Maybe thats because he had pretty wild eyes himself. They could stop traffic. And women. They were all over the place. Sometimes I was afraid to look in the closets. He reminded me of a small, quick hawk, the way his eyes were always flitting around the room, like he was looking for something, or someone. Once, when we were talking about the Great Mother, I started to lift out of my body, I dont know why, and I remember looking down at him and seeing his eyes, how hungry they were, like he was starving. I learned quite a bit in the three or four days we were there. His knowledge was encyclopedic; but even more importantly, he trusted the psychic world. Our conversations were able to go all over the place. He sent me a signed copy of The White Goddess after it came out. It was a tough read. He was far better in person. In the middle of all this, I again told Alice I had some real doubts about ISLAUGGH being a herald of the re-ascendance of the Female Spirit. Surprisingly, she took it right in stride. I've been having some second thoughts as well, she said. I still believe shes a herald of the Female Spirit, but only of its weakened state, not its re-ascendance. I wont kid youcoming to terms with what ISLAUGGHs appearance really meant wasnt easy. I had invested a lot of energy in her. I wasnt completely mistaken though. The Female Spirit will re-ascend, and ISLAUGGH is a herald of it, except not in the way I originally thought. I somehow read my own desires into ISLAUGGH. She was really a sign that the Female Spirit had reached its low point, or close to it. It was a sign that had to come before any kind of re-ascendance could occur. I should have known that, but I guess I turned a blind eye to it. No one really knows when the Age of Aquarius will begin to show us evidence of a change in the nature of our consciousness. I sense were getting close, but how close is another matter entirely. Time and the unconscious are very slippery partners. Id like to be here when the Female Spirit's re-ascendance becomes truly apparent. I cant tell you what it would mean to me; it would make my life complete. What struck me was how complete Alices about-face was. No looking back. No regrets. When I mentioned she didnt seem to have any ego at all invested in her ideas, she shot back, Oh Ive got plenty of ego; dont kid yourself. I can be as stubborn as the next. But thats only when it comes to the heart of what I believethat the Female Spirit will re-ascend. Thats still intact. Her recent erratic behavior undoubtedly reflected her struggles with ISLAUGGH. Whats more, her bloodshot eyes were a good indication she was struggling with some other issues. I knew she was anxious about her future; she had predicted

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more than once she was going to be blindsided, but couldnt say by what. And while she may have given the impression that she had our imminent parting under control, I wasnt so sure. Over the years, we had developed a deep friendship. It was going to be painful for both of us. My own growing uneasiness about her leaving me was taking its toll. I wasnt sleeping wellor thinking well. I decided the best thing to do was what we had always done: talk. I guess my being a herald for the Female Spirit; thats all out the window now, isnt it? Don't be so nervous. In a way, yes, it is all out the window, but not the way you think. Youre not quite ready to be a herald anyway. I was wrong on that as well. But on the plus side, you know more now than you ever did about the nature of poetry, which is what you should be telling people about. But not quite in the way you have been. You now know that poetryand in particular the act of speakingis intimately linked to an early form of consciousness that didnt exist in a vacuum. It existed in an age dominated by the Female Spirit, by the Mother Goddess. You also know now that poetry has roots back into the collective unconscious that you had never even imagined. Your knowledge has grown tremendously about the forces at play within poetry. The Female Spirit may be at its low point, but it is still within us; and in some people, such as yourself, its very much alive, damaged as it is. I told you before that earth can move heaven, as impossible as that sounds. Our actions can help to bring about that re-ascendance. Thats how these great shifts happen anyway. They never happen all at once, out of the blue. Rather, someone appears who embodies the Female Spirit, someone whos ahead of the crowd, so to speak, and then another appears somewhere else, and then another. One by one is how it happens. Youre one of those ones, whether you like it or not, and so am I. Who knew that you would lift off the top of my head like you did with ISLAUGGH and the myth? You cant believe what that meant to me. I thought it was the sign Id been waiting for all my life. It wasnt. But it was a sign, thats the important thing. Alice was putting up a brave front, but she was hurting, I could see it in her eyes. I said to her, Somethings still the matter, isnt it? Yes. I realized how much Id been depriving myself of a real life over the years. I wanted the world to become a true home for me, a place I belonged, a place where I wouldnt be considered an outsider, a freak. I became so wrapped up in the Female Spirit I couldnt see ISLAUGGH and the myth for what they really were. Somehow I saw them as corroborating my visions. I should have known better, but I guess I started making some of the details up without knowing it. But worse than that was the box I had built around myself. What do you mean? Im talking about Terry. We still see each other. He flies down from Washington every few weeks, and we still have a good time. I know he loves me. He told me

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many years ago that he had been entrusted with me, that I was like a small, rare jewel who had appeared on his doorstep. That wasnt just a lot of sweet talk. Terry isnt like that. We got into problems not because of a lack of affection, or admiration. We got into problems because I wanted him to be completely open with me. I wanted him to let me in, even to the dark places I knew were there. But he wouldnt. Or couldnt. At the time, I was dying inside. I told him if he didnt let me in, I was going to leave and never come back. That was almost a lifetime ago. I shouldnt have punished Terry for being who he is. But thats what I was doing. Last night, a small dark light appeared inside me. It was Terry. I knew it. He was waiting to come in. He was so lost. Then she began to cry. I let him in, she whispered.

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Chapter 53: Heralds December 2007, Sarasota, Starbucks I met Alice at Starbucks one evening after Christmas shopping. She looked tired, distracted. I tried to pick her spirits up by chatting about some of the things wed experienced as a result of our coming together years ago. At one point, I asked her if shed had any more thoughts about why we had come together in the first place. She seemed unwilling to answer, and then, suddenly, she snapped, Ive already told you that I never really know why the Spirit directs me to someone. For some reason, my interest in someone, or something, flares up. Its a special interest, very keen, if you know what I mean, like when a poem begins to come to you. I just follow it. I know its the right thing to do. What happens after that is another story. Thats completely unpredictable. For some reason, my path became tied to yours, and has been for a very long time now. You might say theres something I had to learn. As to why you had to go through all of this, I dont have the slightest idea, really. If I had to guess, all I could tell you is one of the things the myth has been trying to tell you: all knowledge is communal, and some of that community is not of this world. In other words, she continued, you couldnt have done it without me, and you couldnt have done it without your voices, or ISLAUGGH, or the myth, or the Spirit, or Joan, or Jane, or Diane, or Betty, or Pinga for that matter. Somehow, a gathering of both worlds allowed you to see how mysterious our lives really are. Part of that mystery is that true knowing is tied to our ability to live between the two worlds; because that is the only way we can truly understand who we are. We can choose to ignore that fact, as much of the world does today, but we do so at our own peril. Let me paint you a picture of whats happening every moment of our lives. Think of the psychic world as an infinite tree high up in the heavensa tree whose tendril roots are always insinuating themselves downward into the world of time. Here, she suddenly raised her hand high above her head and began wriggling her fingers at the table. She began cackling, See what I mean? When the tendrils break through, they leave traces. Those traces can take any number of forms. Some are physicallike furniture flying around the room, and with that she dropped her hand down and flicked a Sweet & Low off the table. I was about to ask her if shed been drinking when she got the wildest look. She shoved her wriggling fingers in my face and cackled, However, my dear Franklin, some roots only leave traces in the mind. We call some of those traces poems, dont we? Come on now, darling, speak up; this is hardly the time to be shy.

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I couldnt take it any longer: Alice what the hell is going on with the cackling and the wriggling fingers? Have you been drinking, or something? Thats none of your damn business. Whats the matter, did I scare you? Thats none of your business. But it is my business. Every goddamn thing you do is my business. Listen Mister, I didnt ask for this job, but as long as I have it, Im going to make sure you understand whats happening. You may think you have all the time in the world to get it, but you dont. I could be gone faster than this, and with that she snapped her fingers hard, like a rifle shot. I became completely flustered and began apologizing like a schoolboy. I was about half way through my third or fourth Im sorry when she put her hand up like a traffic cop. OK, so what if I had a few drinks, she said, its Christmas. Im entitled. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you got the entire picture before we go our separate ways. When is that going to be? Soon, I can feel it. But theres no use worrying about it because its going to happen anyway. I had thought parting was going to be easier, but it hasnt turned out that way. The mind may bend to fate, but the heart doesnt let go as easily, does it? No, it doesnt. Its very stubborn. Do you remember that poem of Frosts you read me once, about the end of a love and a season? Yes. Its called Reluctance. Its one of my favorites. Do you remember the words? I dont think so, not entirely. I have my laptop here. We could Google it. I Googled it and found a copy. I began to read the poem when Alice interrupted me. Id like to read it. Could I? I turned the laptop towards her and she began reading the poem with the same rhythmic, Irish brogue shed used for her own poems. The effect was mesmerizing:
Reluctance Out through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended; I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended; I have come by the highway home,

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And lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping To ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creeping Out over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither; The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch-hazel wither; The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question Whither? Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

We both sat there for a very long time, looking at each other. That was beautiful, Alice. I owed you, she said, and with that she leaned back in her chair and seemed to slowly gather herself up into her eyes. The effect was unsettling. Theres something I have to tell you, she said very calmly. I want you to look at speaking for a moment, not as poetry, but as one of the ways we can surrender to the psychic world. If you slow surrendering way down, and look at it frame by frame, what is really happening is that we are sending up tendrils, and those upward-reaching tendrilsand the tendrils coming down from the psychic tree are entwining like serpents. This occurs whenever we surrender to the energy of the psychic world. What is actually occurring is that the two worlds are coming together. We are becoming whole again, which is the true end game. This happens in any psychic event, but its particularly powerful when a poem comes to us. Are you listening Franklin?

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Sorry, I got carried away by the tendrils. You know, I never understood poems that didnt do that. I dont know why, but it has always seemed self-evident to me that whatever else a true poem offers us, be it a celebration of love, or a loss, or whatever, it always bestows a deep sense of belonging, of comfort, of being rooted in the dark, enormous song that is all around us. That feeling of deep spiritual comfort, of wholeness, is something we seldom experience today, because it is something the conscious self can never attain by its own means. Only the soul, the unconscious, can bestow it, but we wrote that part of us off a long time ago. We have become completely lost as a result. We have become dimmer. It seems to me that is what happens when the conscious self turns away from the psychic self, the soul. Remember me telling you once, Alice interjected, about the South American shamans who use ayahuascathat they see two entwined serpents at the center of creation? Well, I saw them too: I used ayahuasca in one of their ceremonies. It wasnt easy convincing them, but I eventually got my way. It was night, and as soon as the ayahuasca, took effect I had a vision. I didnt see just two entwined serpents, however, which is what the shamans said they were seeing; I saw an infinite number. I had a kind of strange tunnel vision that kept shifting back and forth Id be deep in the earth looking up at the night sky, and then suddenly high in the sky, looking down at the earth. When I was deep in the earth, I remember looking up and seeing an infinite number of dark, writhing serpents reaching down and I realized they were the roots of the infinite tree I just described. Then suddenly I was high in the heavens looking down at a sea of serpents reaching upwards, trying to twine themselves around the serpent roots of the tree, and I realized the sea of serpents was the human race, and that I was watching the mating of the two worlds. Then I was suddenly far out in spaceway past the moonlooking at a very small earth. There were some large, intense areas of light, while other areas were much dimmer. I realized those areas were meetingsor matingsof our psychic and conscious worldsheaven and earth, if you will. I took the darker areas to be those where there was little or no communion between the two. I didnt like looking at themthey left me empty and intensely sad. But the bright pockets of light were like magnets. The light was so intense I knew it was where we all belonged. Thats what you should be telling others: that we are more than we appear, that another way of knowing exists, and it is within us, at the border between the two worlds, where the tendrils meet. Just a story about your own journey should start people to thinking about the truth of that proposition, because thats where the light is, the light that allows us to become more complete. Anyway, thats where people should be hanging out, not Starbucks. But Im still not clear what I should do with all this. Tell others about it.

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Alice, youve got the wrong guy, believe me. Oh, you think so? Im the worst possible choice to be spreading the word about the Female Spirit. Ask any woman who knows me. Jesus, Alice, just ask yourself. The fact you can be a low-life with women has nothing to do with it. Youre a poet arent you? What does that have to do with it? You mean you just went through all this, as you call it, and you still dont see the connection between poetry and the Female Spirit? I see the connection, but I dont see what it has to do with me getting on a soapbox about another way of knowing. My skin isnt thick enough. Who said anything about getting on a soapbox? Listen to me. A very primal spirit has been trying to speak through you, or to you, Im not sure which. But you didnt really get the message, at least not the way you were supposed to get it. All youve been able to hear is me and Joan and Jane and Diane and the myth and ISLAUGGH fluttering around you like a flock of crows trying to tell you theres another way of knowing driven by the Female Spirit and its dying within us. And if there's anything you should be concerned about, its that, because poetry is one of the branches of that knowing, and its dying too, in case you haven't noticed. Ive noticed it Alice, I can assure you, and so has every other poet who isnt living in dreamland. Well, its about time you got off your duff then. Poetry is one of the few remnants of our older consciousness thats especially resistant to the power of the Male Spirit. There are lots of poets walking around today. Millions. Im not talking about poets like you, Mister Big Stuff. Im talking about kids, old ladies like me. Theyre everywhere and maybe theyll never win a Pulitzer, but who cares? Whats important is that theyre sending those tendrils out, making themselves more complete, more human. So? So?? I'll tell you so. We should be encouraging poetry, because every time we do, we slow the dying down, maybe even help the Female Spirit grow stronger. Thats great, Alice. When you get some evidence together, maybe we could send it to the Academy of American Poets. Im sure theyd be all ears. Listen Mr. Smarty, just because you cant see the dying or the growing, that doesnt mean its not happening. Earth can move heaven, you know. We just never know how, or when. And it might surprise you to learn youre a part of the moving crew, Franklin. I know you like to think of yourself as just you, the poor, oppressed poet, and us as a cast of characters, but youre not just you, not in this case. Youre one of usone of the characters. The gathering is bigger than you, more ancient, and it has more serpentine roots in and out of time. Ive given up, Alice. Nobodys listening. People are so closed to what were talking about it hurts. For the past ten years Ive been a herald of sorts on the art of speaking. You know what? Once I went beyond a few people like us, no one

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cared. They thought I was nuts. Theyre happy with their liveslike prisoners whove grown used to their cells. Were the freaks as far as theyre concerned. Its this cultureits completely materialisticmoney, self, stuff. But even if people were to begin to see their lives as incomplete, the very idea that poetry might be a way of achieving that completeness seems like so much craziness. Thats because the only art they know is entertainment, the art of the self. Its almost impossible to talk to people about art that accesses the soul. They have no model for it. Thats why you have to keep telling them. And now you have a new framework to help you. Alice, listen, its just an idea, a very good idea, but nobody really wants to hear it. As far as Im concerned, its a waste. Listen to me, she snapped, you can bitch like Moses did, but in the end youre going to do it. Right then, when she said that, a vivid dream rushed back, one I had as a young man. I was in analysis at the time. I thought it was about my relationships with women, but I saw now it was much more. It was one of those prophetic dreams that keep revealing deeper and deeper layers of meaning over time. In the dream, I was on the crest of a mountain, looking out over the desert. Although my dress was modern, I knew I was Moses looking at the Promised Land. Just then a silent, transparent plane flew overhead, and it started to shoot at me, or rather at the wall of the cave I had sought refuge in. The bullets carved the outlines of a naked man and a woman standing side by side, and then flew away. I immediately realized that the figures represented a law, or rule, like the Ten Commandments that God had burned into stone for Moses. I took the violent machine-gunning of the man/woman figures on the cave wall as a warning I would never achieve a lasting relationship with a womanthat I would never reach the Promised Land. I don't know why I came to that conclusion so forcibly, but I did. I was devastated. Thats how powerful and vivid the dream was. My psychologist at the time tried to downplay my fatalistic interpretation, but I never bought it. I knew the dream was a message, and that it was correct. I told all this to Alice and then I told her that, as a young man, I had never been able to satisfactorily explain to myself why the carrier of this truth had appeared as a transparent, glass-like bomber. But I saw now it was a reference to Wonder Womans invisible plane, that it was a metaphor for the Female Spirit, and that what had been carved on the walls as a new commandment, or truth, was a picture carving that said: man and woman, side by side, equal in size.

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As soon as I told her that, I realized that as far back as thirty years ago, something in my unconscious was sending me messages about the Female Spirit. And it was something very ancient, because I also suddenly realized the message should have been in words, the modern way of communicating, but it wasnt. At the time I had the dream, the absence of words hadnt meant anything to me. But it did now. The message was in a pictorial form similar to the archaic Hebrew symbols that must have been on Moses tablets. It was a glyph: a preliterate form of rock carving meant to communicate something specific, like a king, or a God, or an enemy. Or what the correct relationship should be between men and womenor the Male and Female Spirits. I told Alice this and then I couldnt stop: The glyph has even more meanings. . For one thing, it symbolizes the importance of equality between the sexes. It isnt so much saying we should erase the distinctions between the sexes, because then there wouldnt have been the two distinct figures. Rather it was about maintaining those distinctions while also maintaining equality, which seems to me the correct , direction. Its also saying the same thing about the male and female sides of my own nature: that they should be more balanced. There is still another meaning, . and that has to do with what youve been telling me: that sooner or later a new consciousness is going to be born, one in which the Male and Female Spirit will be more balanced. If I had a gold star Id paste it on your forehead, Alice quipped. I should have been pissed at her for that, but the truth of the matter is I did deserve a star. The message blasted onto the cave walls behind me was much more of a truth than I had ever imagined. Even my association with Moses made more sense. I had always associated myself with Moses for many reasons, not the least of which was my lifelong stammer, but now I saw I had ignored a central metaphor of the dream: that I was also Moses the Receiver of Truths. Because that is what the commandments really were, truths to live by, except in my case the commandments were much simpler: man and woman, side-by-side, equal in size. There was one problem, however: unlike Moses, I wasnt a prophet. I was an artist, a loner. The truth that had been carved out for me wasnt on tablets to be given to others. The figures were inside the cave, on its walls, where only I could see them. I took this to mean the message was a private one: call it a warning shot about the condition of my emotional life. Now I saw it was much more; it was also meant to enlarge my view of the forces at play in our lives. When I told Alice this, she looked at me for a very long time. There was something about her eyes that made me very uneasy. Finally she said, Well Franklin, despite all your fancy stepping, I think youve got it right this time. Thanks. I think I finally do have it right.

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Dont get carried away now. I didnt say youve got it completely right. That dream of yours has been waiting a long, long time for you to understand it. It must have bordered on a vision. I could feel it. Like Moses, youve been shown something important, something true, but heres the rub: unlike Moses you dont really know what to do with it. Because unlike Moses, all you have is me telling you what you should do. Moses had God; it was a lot easier. Listen to me, Justin; you dont have to do anything special. All you have to do is what youve been planning to do all along: write a book about what has happened. Youve taken enough notes. Is that it, write a book? Thats it. What will happen then? Well have to see. But Alice, I feel very uncomfortable. How many times do I have to tell you Im the last person to be heralding the re-ascendance of the Female Spirit? You havent been listening to me. Who said anything about heralding the Female Spirit? Its clear its time hasnt quite come. Besides, Im not asking you to herald anything. Youre not ready yet. Not by a long shot. What I am asking you to do is write a book about what happened. Thats it. Maybe the Female Spirit will come up and maybe it wont. Well see. Good. Im glad, because my relationships with women have been a disaster. To tell you the truth, Im not even that interested in the womens movement and all of that; just surviving who I am is a full-time job. Were not talking about women, or the womens movement. I keep telling you that. Were talking about the Female Spirit, and you are very interested in that. Id say its about the only thing in this world that really does interest you. You couldnt be the kind of poet you are and not be. She was right. But it didnt make any difference. As far as I was concerned, it was a hopeless cause. Alice, please, dont give me all that poet stuff. That doesnt mean shit to anybody in this world. Nobody paid attention to Moses either, not even the Hebrews following him. What are you trying to say? Shut up and write the book. What will happen then? Someone will read it. And then? Someone else will read it. How long is this going to take? I have no idea. Two weeks. Centuries. But you keep telling me the time is now. It isfor you. My telling a story is not going to change anything. What Im telling you is that you have to begin. The heavens didnt line up like this so you could stay in bed with the covers over your head.

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Alice, stop it. I mean why me? Who said its just you? But thats what youve been telling me. No I havent. Ive been telling you that your time is now. There will be many others besides you. Hundreds. Thousands. Thats the way it works. And most of them will be as confused as you. Alice, listen to me. Im not burning up inside with a revealed truth I want to pass on to others. Thats because youre not a spiritual leader. Youre not trying to show people the waylike a Jesus or a Mohammed or a Buddha. Youre just a confused, stubborn poet who wants to be left alonein that youre like Moses. Thats why Aaron was around: to help Moses, to hold up his arms. And thats why I came into your life. Im no Aaron, but Im all youve gotso get used to it. Listen to me Justin, we dont get the chance to choose who we are. Thats out of our hands. The only choice we get is whether or not were going to live our life to its fullestif were going to crawl out of the darkness and know our one true name. Thats where you are now. Youre going to have to choose whether to walk away from what has happened or to listen to what Im telling you. But why am I resisting if its what Im supposed to do? Because youre not readynot by a long shot. I hate to tell you this, Justin, but despite all youve learned, you really havent learned anything. But I have. I know much more now because of you. You know what I think about what you know? What? You dont know Diddly. Got it? Diddly. Listen to me Franklin, all you know are some stories. Youre like a kid at the beach whos not sure if he wants to stay dry or go swimming, so you keep putting your foot in the water and then pulling it back. Thats not going to hack it anymore. Fate is waiting for you to make your move. You can stay where you arewhere its safeor you can take your chances. Its up to you. You may see yourself as a tragic figure whos never going to reach the Promised Land, but the fact of the matter is you never were supposed to reach the Land of Milk and Honeyjust like Moses was never supposed to reach it. Its not in the cards for you, anymore than it was for him. Anyway, you never gave a crap about that kind of life. You like living on the outside of town. You know what your problem is? What? For some reason you think youre normal. Your parents must have told you that and you wanted to believe them. But youre not. Youre one of us. Get used to it. You know what else? What? Here again she looked at me for a very long time. There was something about her eyes again that made me very uneasy. Finally she said to me, You didnt quite

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get the dream. You jumped the gun. What made you think the carved figures meant youd never attain a lasting relationship with a woman? Was there something you havent told me? It was just like I told you. The figures were like the man/woman figures etched onto the side of Voyager 7, standing side by side, naked, like Adam and Eve. So what made you think the figures were telling you something negative? I was stunned by her question. I really dont know. Maybe it was the bullets. I guess I somehow equated the two figures with the Promised Land Moses was never going to reach. It felt so right I never questioned it. I hate to tell you this Franklin, but you must have been so pessimistic about your relationships that something in you turned the figures into the Promised Land. Thats not the way the Moses story goes. The commandments are one thing, the Promised Land another. What the dream was really calling your attention to was the glyph and what it meant. You were right in deciphering it as you did: man and woman, side by side, equal in size. But the dream didnt say anything about your not getting to the Promised Landabout being able to have a lasting relationship. You came to that conclusion all by yourself. I cant tell you how that happened. I never doubted my interpretation. Ive carried that burden for years now. You shouldnt overlook what you thought at the timeIm sure it has some validity being the rascal you arebut I want you to separate the Promised Land from the figures, because theyre not the same. Not for you, not for Moses. But where do I go from there? The figures are very different from Moses Commandments, arent they? I told you that I thought they werent at all like the Ten Commandmentsa message meant for others. They were a private message meant just for me, which is why they were carved into the inside of the cave. Thats a very good answer, Justin. I know its a very good answer, Alice. Stop jerking me around, will you? Sorry. I shouldnt play with you like that, but sometimes I cant resist it. Listen, you only got half the dream right. You missed the other half. What other half? That something more is in store for you. Youre right about the glyph being a private messagebut you didnt take it far enough. What do you mean? The glyph isnt merely something for you to decipher and study intellectually. Stop thinking, remember? It has a deeper function. It isnt so much what the glyph is sayingas important as that may bebut where your dream placed the glyph. The cave isnt any old caveits a tomb. And the glyph isnt just any old carving. Its a tomb carving. Cave tombs were used by many preliterate cultures. It was where you were returned to the dark bowels of the earthto Mother Earth. And they often contained carvings. The Celts, for example, sometimes carved

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mysterious symbols on the walls. What your unconscious constructed in your dream was a preliterate cave tomba place where the supernatural and natural worlds meet. Your unconscious wanted to remind you something special was happening. There are no accidents in dreams. It could have constructed a group of trees, or some rocks, for you to hide behind, but it didnt. It constructed a cave for you, and then it had an invisible hand carve the Male and Female Spirits on the wall. Kind of reminds you of, Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin, the handwriting on the wall that predicted the death of King Belshazzar, doesnt it? I can assure you the resemblance isnt accidental. The glyphlike the Biblical handwriting on the wallis predicting your death, but it is also predicting your rebirth, which is why it was written on the wall of a cave, and not on the wall of a palace. Alice, where are you going with all this? To hell and back. Youre coming too. You know how were going to get there? Amtrak? You wish. Were going to take one of those circular mazes carved on the walls of Celtic tombs. Personally, I think they look more like coiled serpentsthe Serpent of Creation to be precise. It all depends on how you look at the carving. If you take the maze passage to be hollow, you see a walled maze; if you take it to be solid, you see a serpent. Every time you shift your eyes, the carving changes: serpent to maze maze to serpent. Im sure the Celts relied on that visual ambiguity. They werent concerned with creating cartoons of Paradise. That kind of thing is the product of organized religious systems like Christianity. The Celts were made of sterner stuff. They werent afraid to lock horns with the mystery of Creation. They carved symbols of itthe serpent/mazeboth outside and inside their tombs. Well thats fine for the Celts, but what about me? You can think of your man/woman glyph playing somewhat the same role as the Celtic serpent/maze. Your glyph does it by symbolically depicting the Male and Female Spirits that direct the Serpent of Creation. The same goes for the Celtic coiled serpent/maze. Both carvings are symbolic expressions of the mystery that drives all creation and to which we all return when we die. Which is what the dream was trying to tell you by placing you in a tomb: youre going to die. Its where your journey is about to take you. Dont start on me like this, Alice. Relax, you can take it. Besides, if you dont buck up, you may as well cash it in right now. And what does that mean? It means if you dont pick up your britches and start walking towards your fate, youll have wasted your life. Heres what you have to understand: your unconscious created the glyph some thirty years ago to help guide you. But you couldnt fully grasp it until just now. One of the things the glyph was designed to

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teach you is what Ive been trying to tell you: youre headed for a very dark place. And sorry to tell you this, but youre going to have to go there alone. I told you to stop playing with me, Alice. I'm not playing with you, Franklin, not now. Listen to me. Youre not going to die physically, although its going to feel like that at times. Youre going to have to forget who you are so you can remember who you truly areand that is going to take you to some very dark places. Youre going to have to die and be reborn spiritually, not physically. And when that happens, you're going to walk out of the tomb and tell others about it. You mean like Jesus? Alice, please. Dont worry. Youre no Jesus. And stop being so ingenuous; you know its the way these things happen. Then what is all this about? Its about becoming a herald. You cant be a true herald without being reborn. You mean Im going to go though all this so I can be a herald? Nope. Youre going to do it so you can know your one true name. The heralding comes with thatits part of the territory. And what exactly is it Im going to be heralding? I don't have the slightest idea. But I do know this: you're going to help others in a way that would be incomprehensible to you now. How do you know that? Because I can feel it. You're not helping me at all, Alice. Stop complaining and shut up for a minute, will you? Try to think about what I've been telling you. I am thinking. I don't mean that kind of thinking. Didnt I tell you to stop thinking? Forget about trying to figure it all out. You cant. And you never will. She looked at me for the longest time and said, Listen to me Justin, I know youre confused. Confused? I shot back, Try isolated. Try scared. You know what its like being me? Every time I make the mistake of telling a stranger or even an acquaintance what I really think, they look at me like I'm crazy. Thats not a very nice feeling because there are lots of them and only a few of me. Are you finished? No. Im not. What I think about the world is not that strange, or exotic. Anyone who has led an examined life would understand it. Yeats or Hardy or Blake would have understood it, or Shakespeare, or Emerson. What everyone wants today is a few safe ideas and more stuffmore stupid fucking stuff. Even my own family thinks Im close to crazy. If it werent for you and a few others like Joan and Jane, Id have had a nervous breakdown a long time ago. Listen, Justin, I know its been very difficult, that at times youve felt you were losing your mind. Well, in a way, you have. It had to happen for you to go forward, to get to where you are today. You might say that you had to come to

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blows with the world in order to find your way. Otherwise youd still be a part of the herd, like Moses was before he struck back. That Moses thing doesnt want to go away, does it? It doesnt seem so. Listen to me: I know youre not sure you believe everything thats happened to youI mean you dont believe it down to your roots. Youre right, I dont. But you dont have to believe it down to your roots. Its probably too early for that. You only have to believe that it happened. That it all happened: ISLAUGGH, the myth, me, Betty, the Spirit, the voices, everything that happened, happened. Thats the story: It happened. You got it? I didnt know what to say. She was right. Listen to me very carefully, Justin, she said. You only have to believe that it happened. Think about it. Anyway, its time for me to go. Its early. Lets have another coffee. No, I have to go. Where are you going, home? No. Shopping? I knew it was a stupid thing to say even before I said it. I dont know how I knew it, but I already knew I was never going to see her again. When she got up, she said to me, I dont know where Im going, but I know Im going. Terry and I have been talking about the Far East. I dont really know what to say to you. Im going to miss you. Weve been bound to each other for some time now, but that time is up. Our paths have already diverged. I can feel it. As soon as you told me the dream about Moses, I knew that whatever was supposed to happen between us had happened. Everything you have to know is waiting for you on the inside of your mind, the part that doesnt think. Thats where your next journey is going to begin. Got it? I got it, but Im not sure I can handle it. I wouldnt worry about that, she shot back. If you get in over your head, someone will eventually appear. Thats how it works, Justin. But how do I start? Jesus, how do I start walking toward my death, I have no idea. You may not, but your dreams do. Pay attention to them. Theyre going to start to kick in soon and you better be prepared. You may not get a second chance. The Gods dont care much for laggards. But how will I know which dreams to pay attention to? My God, you are thick. You have to pay attention to all of them. Heres a clue though: if you wake up one day and feel utterly alone, the kind of feeling youd get if someone you loved unconditionally turned their back on you and walked out of your life without a word, its started. It doesnt matter who that someone in the dream isit may even be you. When that happens, you really better pay attentionremember: no holding back, ever. With that, she gave me a pat on the butt and walked out of Starbucks and into the

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parking lot at what seemed a very lively pace, even for her. I even think I saw her skip once or twice before she climbed into her pick-up. The truck backfired and then slowly made a long circle around the lot, leaving a trail of exhaust smoke so thick I never really saw which exit she took. By the time it cleared, the truck was nowhere in sight. It was as if shed disappeared. Maybe gone up in smoke would be a better term.

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Chapter 54: Charon, the Ka, and Witnessing June 2008, Sarasota When Alice left that night, I knew I would never see her again. I could feel it. She never called or wrote, nor did I have any way of contacting her; but if the truth be known, the ball was always in her court on that one. I wasnt the only one in the dark, however. A few months after she left, I received a call from her son at Delta trying to reach her. What struck me at the time, knowing Alices age, was how young he soundedhe had the eager, friendly attitude of someone in his twenties. He had found some freight seats to Acapulco and thought we might be able to use them. When I told him Alice had left and I had no idea where she was, he was very consoling about it, Alice is like that. You can never really reach her. She calls when she calls. When she called last time, I hadnt heard from her for years. If she does call, tell her I have the seats, will you? Sure, OK, but I dont think shes going to call. OK, well, I understand, I do, I mean shes like that, well, nice talking to you Mister Justin. All I can physically show you of Alice today are her six poems, the excerpts from her notebook, and two snapshots of her house. I went looking for that house on several occasions, but I was never able to find it. I asked Diane to take a trip out there to see if she could locate it, but she told me it was like flying blind. She said it was as if Alice no longer had a scent, or her scent had changed. She told me that she was never able to find the house. That whole neighborhood has changed, she said. Theyre paving roads and putting in subdivisions. God knows what happened to the house, or the road, or her. I miss Alice. But everything has its cycle and time, including our time together, as magical as it was. I think Alice understood from the very beginning that we had come together in order to learn something, and that our paths would diverge as soon as that had taken place. It was time, simple as that. No apologies. No regrets. True wisdom lies in accepting that we seldom really know why our lives intersect with the lives of others. We may have ideas, but in the end they are mostly that, only ideas. All we can really do is be alert to the possibilities being signaled, because such meetings are never accidental. While it is obvious I had no idea what was going on when we first met, Alice must have sensed almost from the outset that something primal was trying to reach me and that she was to be the bridge. She never wavered from honoring that perception. I would like to think that Alice viewed me as equally unwavering, but that may be wishful thinking on my part. When it came to intensity, Alice had no match. None.

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If I were to try to describe what it felt like to be with Alice, I would have to say it was almost identical to what the gathering itself felt like: that something larger was going on, something that had a rhythm and intent of its own, like a snake slowly coiling and uncoiling itself across a floor. I dont think Alice would disagree with me on any of that. Even more to the point, when our time came to an end, I understood that the gathering itself was going to rest for a while before resuming its journey. I also sensed it was the proper time to end this book. Like the gathering, I am at a balance point in time. My deepest intuition is that something hidden is very much at play, but what that something is, and where it is leading me, I have no idea. I do know one thing, however: as Alice had predicted, my dreams have begun to change. A few months after she left, I had two vivid dreams. They were about a week apart and had the same dramatic theme: I would see my former wife, Pauline, beautiful and loving, and then I would suddenly see her with another man. She would acknowledge my presence then disappear with the other man. Those two simple dreams were so powerful and my sense of being abandoned so painful I woke up in tears, completely shattered, unable to function for hours. I couldnt understand what the dreams were trying to tell me until I realized they were about a transformationabout me leaving the self I know as me. My dreams about Pauline were not new. She has been appearing in my dreams for some 13 years, ever since our divorce. They always have the same dramatic theme: she was someone I couldnt quite reach, or speak to, or touch, or understand. It was as if an invisible wall separated us. They have always been extremely painful dreams. After a few years I began to understand that she was appearing as more than herself. I saw she was also appearing as a guide, just as she had been in the married life we shared. As the dreams became more complex, I realized she also represented the more loving part of methe part of me I couldnt reach, or speak to. In our life together, Pauline had a way of expressing her awareness of this part of me. Shed sometimes look at me at a particularly intimate moment and say with a small smile: Whitey wants to come out and play, doesnt he? She was right every time. Whitey never made it. Over the years, these dreams have become less painful, sometimes even hopeful, which I took as a sign I was slowly becoming more open to my loving side. These last two dreams, however, were unbearably painful. They were also different in another way: they took place in the citya busy place. All the other dreams about her had occurred in a room, or the country. Then, of course, there were the other

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men. They had never been there before. At first, I didnt know what to make of the two men. The young, heavy black man was dressed hip/hop style: hat, oversized black and white checkered shirt. He and Pauline were about a half block away when I saw them. She looked at me very quickly, as if to acknowledge my presence, and then disappeared into an office building. I had the distinct impression they were on their way to a subway inside the building. The second man was young, handsome, and blonde. She introduced me; then drove away in a cab with him. Unlike the black man, the blonde man was right in front of me. I liked him. I remember thinking she had done well. There was a finality to both dreams that was piercing. I have never felt so alone, so abandoned. Yet I knew the two men had no correspondence in Paulines actual life. She was happily married to a red-haired man. Then I realized the two men represented different aspects of my personalitythat left/right split again. I saw the black hip-hop artist representing the Dionysian part of me, the moon side, the left side, the more unconscious, impulsive, passionate partwhile the handsome blonde man represented the Apollonian side of me, the sun side, the right side, the more reasoning, conscious part. I understood then why Pauline had appeared from a distance with the black man. It was the part of me with which she was less comfortable. She wasnt afraid of it. She was even attracted to it, but she was also aware how dangerous it could be. Thats what the black and white checkered shirt represented: the light and the dark. I also understood that Pauline was again appearing as a spiritual guide, a Virgil if you will. The dreams were telling me that the irreconcilable left and right sides of me were about to go on a journey. One side of me was going to go deep underground, the other smack into the busy intercourse of everyday life. I understood then why the dreams had been so utterly devastating. I was about to be guided through a spiritual transformation in which those two irreconcilable sides of me were going to be changed. More simply put, the person I knew as me was going to die. I pay attention to my dreams. No one will ever convince me dreams like these are meaningless, neural discharges. They are soul messages and they are not to be taken lightly. One thing that struck me was that the journeys were to be separatethe two halves of me were to be kept apartmuch as suspects in a crime are kept apart and questioned individually. It was going to be some ride. About a month later, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I had another unsettling dream. I was given a glimpse, as they say. It was night. I was in

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the country in a small field, looking up at a dirt road just above my head. A small truck drove by and stopped. It had wooden staves holding the cargo, which I took to be animals, although I could barely see them in the shadows. The truck was very much like the small trucks I had seen in Alamos hauling pigs to market. The driver got out. Then I was suddenly next to the truck, looking between the staves into the shadows, but all I could see were dark collapsed masses on the floor. Then I saw the masses were covered by something like the flat circular hats Asian women wear in rice paddies. A blue light was bleeding out from underneath the hats. Then I was back in the field watching the driver summon one of the dark masses to leave the truck. I immediately took the dark, covered mass to be a woman. She rose to a height of seven or eight feet to become a thin, long necked figure in a blue, glowing robe. I sensed the woman was my mother. She began to move back and forth very slowly in the slow motion, otherworldly manner of a giraffe. She remained completely abstract and muteI couldnt detect any intent on her part to communicate with me. It was as if she were responding solely to commands by the driver. I tried to see her face underneath the hat, but all I could see was the lower, left side around the cheek. Her skin was the color of silvery leatherI could see the fine creasesthen the dream ended. A rush of associations came to mind. The Celtic underworld guarded by the boar was signaled by the pig truck, and then it came to me that the fine, leathery texture of the womans skin was identical to the texture of murdered Celts found in the peat bogs of Irelandexcept the skin wasnt the usual bronze, tannic colorbut silvery, the color of the moon and the Mother Goddess. I knew the dream was very special. There was something otherworldly about the motion of the womanin the same way the motion of a snake seems not of this world. I realized I had been visited by Charon, the boatman on the river Styx (wooden staves = sticks = styx) who ferried the souls of the dead to Hades. In this case, however, Charon was bringing them out of Hadesto give me a glimpse of the merchandise, if you will. To show me what the world of the dead was really like. What I had been shown was a figure even more lifeless than those depicted in Homers Hades. What I was shown by the driver were the barest traces of my mothers soul. It was clear her soul, her animating essence, was no longer there, just as her physical body had long since dissolved into the elements of the earth. What the dream was saying to me was that her soul had disappeared, become one again with the Life Force, just as her body had dissolved into the earth, into the physical manifestation of that same Force. All that Charon could show me of her was a shadow of her essencea distorted, lifeless suggestion of her long-necked

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gracefulness. What this dream reinforced for me, and what I have come to believe, is that the soul and the body are one and the same. They are undifferentiated. The soul is the body and the body is the soul. When one dies, the other does too. They both return to the Life Forcethe Serpent of Creation eating its own tailand then they eventually reappear againas themselves and not themselveswhich is about as clear a description of rebirth as I can give you. Anything more would be window dressing. The concept of an undifferentiated body and soul is not a popular one in Western thought. If we go back to the more soul-driven cultures that existed in preliterate times, the concept was more accepted. It is at the heart of Egyptian thinking about the soul, which was extensive. We could learn something from it. Here are some selections from my journal:
Julian Jaynes makes some interesting observations about the Egyptian terms for the soul, of which there are five. He builds a substantial evidential case that the modern interpretation of onethe Kaas the Life Force, leads to a serious misinterpretation of Egyptian spiritual thought. Jaynes saw the Ka as being no other than the internal guiding voices all preliterate peoples heard. Ill add my own corrective two cents to Jaynes more incisive insight. I think the Egyptians came to the conclusionat a very early stage of their spiritual developmentthat the body and soul were inseparableundifferentiated. When the body died, the soul died. You might call it one of the primal spiritual assumptions of Egyptian culture. It was no more questioned than we question our own assumption that the application of reason will eventually unlock all of natures secrets. The Egyptians might spend most of their waking hours chattering about the afterlife and various parts of the soul, but that is the outcome of a culture with an intense curiosity about them. The Egyptians were clearly obsessed with both; which is why they were also obsessed with preserving the bodies of the dead. The Egyptians must have sensedand probably convinced themselves through extensive psychic investigationthat if the dead body didnt dissolve into the elements of the earth, some part of the souland specifically some part of the Kawould remain alive. Once we understand thatthat the Egyptians believed keeping the body from disappearing would also keep the soul and its voicesits Kafrom disappearing, we can begin to really understand their elaborate burial practices. Mummification was at the center of those practices. Its real function has never been properly understood. The generally accepted explanation is that mummification would allow the physical body to be revived in the afterlife. If that

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were so, then why were the brains not preserved in Canoptic jars as the other organs were, but simply scooped out onto the floor? The Egyptians had a welldeveloped medicine; they knew the body couldnt function without the brain. The reason they didnt care about the brain was simple; mummification was designed to preserve the soulor if you prefer, the astral bodynot the physical body. What the Egyptians feared most was what my dream about Charon was saying: when the body dies, the soul dies. You might say the efforts of the Egyptians to keep the soul and its Ka alive amounted to nothing less than trying to stop the Life Force from completing its appointed rounds. When we look at Egyptian culture in this light, there is only one conclusion you can come to: the Egyptians were bold beyond all imagining.

We should be equally as bold about the soul, but not in the way the Egyptians were. We have to develop our own boldness. One suggestion comes from the The Witnessses Log, which tells us we are not an accident, mere atomic flotsam, but the bold, oddly connected twin of Creation itselfa tiny dwarf star balancing the infinitely huge star of Creation. It is our witnessing that gives us that power. That may seem an odd claim to those who cant see how truly magnificent the act of witnessing is. It sets us apart from everything else in creation. Perhaps 3000 years of ferocious rationality have made us believe that the airy fabrications we call stories are insignificant. After all, what are stories compared to the atomic bomb? It was only when I began to speak that I began to see how powerful and mysterious the act of witnessing is in its ongoing, reflexive creation of the world as we know it. Im not only talking about stories like Darwins On the Origin of Species, or Einsteins E=MC, but stories like Shakespeares King Lear, or Frosts Reluctance. It is the full, magnificent range of our witnessing that defines our humanity. Witnessing is central to our humanity. The two are not only inseparable, but undifferentiated. To be human is to witness; to witness is to be human. That realization didnt take place overnight. It took me eight long years of unwinding a long, mysterious skein that seemed to have no end. I doubt that it has one. I still dont have a complete understanding of why my life took the turn it didand despite all that Alice helped me understand, I am still not sure where I am going. All I have are some ideas. Ideas, however, are no substitute for the kind of truth that fills the body with light. That kind of truth still eludes meand may continue to do so. I have to be humble about that possibility.

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I would like to think, however, that I now have a reasonably good understanding of the myth. Yet I wouldnt be at all surprised if I uncover other layers of meaning as time passeslayers I completely missed this time around. Nor would I be surprised if others arrived at very different conclusions as to what the myth means. All I can really tell you about the myth and the psychic events that surrounded it is this: they happened. And this: I tried to be a good witness; I tried to honor them. If I have learned anything in these last eight years that I can pass on to you, it is this: we have to find a new balance between the male and female sides of our nature. Im not talking about men getting facials. Im talking about a new way of comprehending the meaning of our livesand our deaths. Were already overdeveloped in the ways of the Male Spirit, of rational understanding, of the self. An increase in the ways of the Female Spirit, of intuition, of feeling, of the soul is what we needbecause the mysterious ways and whispers of the soul offer us what we so desperately need: a more profound understanding of what it means to be human. To do this, we have to surrender to the souls waysand whispers. If we succeed, the door to the soul will open and offer us the chance of living a life that is not only worth living, but worth dying forand isnt that what its all about?

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Afterword In case youve been too busy to notice, all of us are on a very fast train called Western Civilization and there is no getting off. There are those who think they can get off by going to India, or Oregon, but that is an illusion. The train is not outside us; it is in our genes, our cells. We carry it with us wherever we go. To get a truer picture of the train, you might want to think of it as a massive gathering that first appeared about 4,000 years ago. And it is no paper tiger. It has teeth. Gatherings always do, especially one of this size. And for better or worse, we are part and parcel of it. There are those who will tell you that Western Civilization is taking us on a journey that will allow us to become more enlightened, more civilized, more the architects of our own progress; but, in truth, at this point in time we are becoming less human. We are living only half a life, while the other half, the life of the soul, is rapidly disappearing. We may soon lose sight of it entirely. One thing for sure: our inability to find some way of bringing this older way of knowing back into our everyday lives is making us dim boys in a dim room. But what is it we should do? For starters, we should turn our thinking minds off and allow ourselves to be attracted to the small, contrary gatherings that are continually forming along the edge of the larger one, like the eddies that form on the edge of a large whirlpool. It is a natural process, these smaller contrary movements. We should take heart from them. Just as we should take heart from the remains of past gatherings that occasionally bob to the surface. After all, that is what archaeological finds like the Essene Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices are: the remains of gatherings that ran contrary to the general flow. But those are the remains of relatively large gatherings. The gatherings Im talking about dont have to be large; a few souls are enough. And they dont have to have to be driven by a complex set of ideas. All thats required is an interest in becoming more complete. If that interest is visceral enough, a gathering will begin to form. There is nothing else that has to be consciously done. Everything will take care of itself, including the arrival of the other participants. Believe me. The success of those gatherings will depend upon whether they can be successfully centered on a psychic gateway of some kind. The form the gateway takes, however, isnt important. What is important is that we be open to it. Being open to the psychic world may be a real problem, however, because there is both a fear and a general confusion throughout our culture as to its nature. Let me be very clear then about what I mean by a psychic event. Rather than give

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you a logical definition, however, I am going to define it in the same way those ancient Babylonian mathematicians defined the nature of an isosceles triangle by giving many examples and letting you intuit that nature. The examples Im going to give you, however, are not going to be of my own making, but yours. I am going to ask to look at your orgasms on the most elemental level and intuit what they have in common. What youll eventually findif you float inside them long enoughis that they all have, at their very core, a brief ecstatic state in which we not only lose conscious control of our bodies but also normal consciousness itself. Something else arrives and takes its place. What that something else is, and where it comes from, and what it means, has been debated since the beginning of time. But we instinctively know it is different: it is a state of consciousness in which we, and the world around us, momentarily become one. All boundaries dissolve. For most of us, that ecstatic state is a very familiar one, even those of us who believe the psychic world is so much nonsense. But what I have just described as the essential nature of sexual orgasm is also the essential nature of a psychic event, whether it is a vision, or the act of poetry, or true mystical prayer, or meditation. The surfaces of all of these events may differ, but at their core they are all moments in which we become one with the Serpent of Creationwhich is always with usbecause that is what happens in a psychic event. What is at stake then when we turn our backs on the psychic world is the opportunity of experiencing that oneness. When we turn away, we become dimmer emotionally; which is exactly what is happening to us as a culture. We have become smarter but not wiser. We have become less complete. What I am proposing as an alternative is that we begin to consider a return to the world of the soul. We have to stop attempting to rationally know what our most basic instincts tell us is utterly unknowable. We have to go back to the old ways, and begin to feel those mysteries. There are many ways to accomplish thatbut it is my poets instinct that we should consider a return to some form of unpremeditated narrative poetry. It need not be the written form. There are many others: mime, movement, speaking, singing. They all provide a natural, two-way bridge to the unconscious. The only thing we should ask of any form is that it brings us to that ecstatic moment of awareness unique to poetry. How its actually accomplished is unimportant. What we want are the tendrils to intertwine, not win a Pulitzer as Alice was fond of saying. The fact of the matter is this: the tendrils will intertwine whenever we spontaneously create stories from the unconscious. All we have to

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do is surrender without reservation to the narrative genius of the Muse. For those who see poetry either as an archaic form of written expression or just something artsy they couldnt care less about, what I have just said must seem absurd. Yet it is the truest thing I can say about poetry. To experience it, you simply have to forget everything you know or have heard about poetry and then open yourself to the possibility that it harbors the gateway to our total humanity. It is not a complex taskthe poetic instinct is as much in us as the sexual instinct. It simply needs the proper cues to awaken it. This often involves no more than reading or hearing the right poem and surrendering to its interest. All we have to do is allow the poem to take us to the moment of ecstatic awareness that is particular to poetry and everything else will follow. Surrendering conscious control to the interest of a poem, however, may be a tall order for many. We are so dominated by the needs of the self that we view surrendering as tantamount to death itself, which in a way it is, because it involves opening ourselves to the psychic life of the soul and the psychic essence of poetry. I can assure you, however, that it is not a big riskit only appears so. There is an old parable about the man who finds himself in complete darkness hanging from the edge of a high cliff. He knows he cant climb backthat all he can do is hang there until he loses strength and plummets to his death. That is how most of us view surrendering. But, as the story goes, when the mans last ounce of strength finally gives way and he lets go, he falls but an inch or two to a ledge that was always just beneath him. That is what our situation truly is with regards to surrendering. Experiencing it and with it that older way of knowingis but a drop of inches. I wanted to say this about surrendering because of what I see all around meour mistaken assumption that the conscious mind alone can guide us to a more complete life. Perhaps in an age where the conscious mind is so valued and the unconscious so undervalued, it is the way such a journey may have to begin. But it cant remain on that level. I cant tell you how saddened I am watching what takes place in most of the seminars and retreats conducted by modern spiritual leaders. It is an entirely intellectual activitythe attendees are given something to think about. They sit there, making mental notes and the likebut the intuition, the emotions, all of the ways we naturally communicate with the unconscious, are never brought into active play. What the attendees take home with them are ideas. Most of them are safe ideas, although some may even be dangerous, the kind that could lead them to the creative power of the unconscious. The attendees,

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however, seldom reach that stage. It is not their fault, however. If the guidance comes in the form of ideas, it will most likely remain as ideas. The unconscious doesnt care about ideas. What it understands, what it cares about, are feelings. That is what poetry really isan instinctive human act that allows us to respond to messages that rise unbidden from the unconscious. What is important to understand, however, is that those messages always take the form of a complex of feelings. It is our human genius, our witnessing, that turns those feelings into language, into stories, into poems. What the unconscious wants back, however, isnt language, but the feelings carried by the poems language. To be even more specific, what the unconscious wants back are its feelings made glittery with time. It wants to feel our humanity. The healing energy contained in the act of poetry is worth a thousand intellectual seminars and retreats, because it opens the gates between the two worlds, and to paraphrase Aliceif we dont open those gateswe havent done Diddly. At some stage we have to stop thinking and act. We have to leave the world of ideas and enter the world of feeling with all of its unpredictability. We have to take our chances. I dont say this as a theoretical observation. I have worked with many people who consider themselves spiritually advanced, but the fact of the matter is they are living almost entirely in their conscious minds. They are complete strangers to the benefits that come from establishing commerce with the unconscious. How much they are strangers to the unconscious becomes apparent when I attempt to guide them in a speaking. The mere thought of surrendering conscious control terrifies them, making the speaking impossible. The exact opposite occurs when I encounter a person who is truly spiritually advanced, who is familiar with the ways of the unconscious, of the soul. Theyre ready for the leapand take it, eyes wide open. Alice talked often about a massive change in consciousness that was somewhere in the wings, but she could never say exactly when it was going to occur, or what form it was going to take. She was scrupulously honest in that regard, and we should be too. What we can do in the meantime is what human beings have always done: we can try to make earth move heaven. Alice was in favor of it, and strangely enough, I am too. But unlike some of the visionaries of the Vietnam era who predicted their efforts were going to levitate the Pentagon, we should keep in mind that trying to make earth move heaven doesnt mean we can control the outcome. The collective unconscious, as Jung so often reminded us, will respond to our efforts, but we

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never know how, or when. That is why gatherings are not for the weak of heart. All we can really do is surrender to where they want to take us. We may start out by having an interest in becoming more complete; but a gathering hasnt really occurred at that point. Our emerging interest is simply the opening gambit in a game that goes back to the beginning of time. What will happen next depends on how attentive we are to the wisps of fate that begin to appear. If we dont recognize them for what they are, or are too sluggish in surrendering to them, the gathering may never occur. If we are attentive, however, and allow ourselves to surrender to where those wisps want to take us, the gathering will begin to form. What shape it will take, and where it will eventually lead us, is completely out of our hands, and always has been. After all, if it werent that way, we wouldnt have any stories worth talking about. Not a single one.

Justin Spring March 2010, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

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Appendix

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Appendix A: Photographs

The Road to Alices House

Alices House and Pick-up

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Appendix B: Excerpts from the Authors Journal This is a multimedia book. Although it can be read as is, a web link to detailed excerpts from my journal is available for those interested in a deeper examination of my thinking about the Witnesses Log myth, and about the nature of both preliterate consciousness and preliterate poetry. In addition, special multi-media links are available for those wishing to extend the fictional boundaries of the book beyond the printed page. All links can be reached from the central link: http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com

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About the Author Justin Spring is a prize-winning poet, video artist, and writer. He is one of the few poets who works not only in the written mode of composition but also in a contemporary version of preliterate oral poetry called SOULSPEAKof which he and fellow poet Scylla Liscombe are the originators. He is also the sole originator of an allied video form called SOULSPEAK DREAMSTORIES. He considers his work in the oral and audio/visual area to be pioneering. Mr. Spring is the founder of SOULSPEAK, an organization dedicated to bringing poetry back into the everyday lives of everyday people. He was educated at Columbia College, has three children, and lives in Mexico and Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Springs poems have been published in American Poetry Review, as well as numerous anthologies such as Florida in Poetry. He is the recipient of many prizes and honors and is the author of six collections of poems, Polaroid Poems, Other Dancers, Nursery Raps, Talkies, Poems for Family and Friends, Poems of Sarasota and Florida. Mr. Spring is one of a handful of poets in the country who compose in the ancient oral mode. His seven SOULSPEAK oral poetry CDs are: Gathering, Smoke, Nursery Raps, Speakings, In Your Mind, Witnesses Log, Im Talking to You Oprah. Mr. Spring is also the author of three prose works: SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul is a ground breaking CD/book combination intended for anyone interested in attaining the deep spiritual expression possible through SOULSPEAK. ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds is a mysterious, sometimes troubling story about two strangers flung together by inexplicable psychic forces that lead them on a dizzying journey into the roots of human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry and the mysterious Mother Goddess cultures. Mirrors is a short memoir of Mr. Springs encounter with the pidgin poems of Eldred Van-Ooy, an Australian aborigine, an encounter he describes as leaving him in a shadowy garden, wondering, looking up at the leaves Among the recent poetry prizes and honors he has received are: For his written poetry: The 1997 State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Finalist 1994 Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman National Prize Finalist

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1997 Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman National Prize For his SOULSPEAK oral poetry: The 1993 Homer Award for Spoken Poetry/Tampa Bay Poetry Council The 1995 POETICA Hall of Fame Award For his DREAMSTORY poetry videos: The 2005 John Ringling Individual Artist Fellowship The 2006 State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship The 2006 State of Florida Individual Artist Enhancement award For his SOULSPEAK HEALING PROGRAMS: The 2003 Images and Voices of Hope Award The2003 Point of Life Award for Excellence For his prose: The 2009-10 Ringling Towers Literary Award for ALICE HICKEY.

Other: The Ringling 2009 Ageless Creativity award for his lifelong contributions to poetry.

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Web Links Free downloadable selections from most of Mr. Springs written poetry and prose are available at: http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com/ http://sptpress.blogspot.com/ Free downloadable selections from most of Mr. Springs SOULSPEAK Oral Poetry CDs are available at: http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com/ http://soulspeakstudio.blogspot.com/ You can hear the latest SOULSPEAK poetry and music on Mr. Springs eclectic, free, web radio station, Radio SOULSPEAK: http://www.live365.com/stations/soulspeakspring Free downloadable selections from most of Mr. Springs DREAMSTORY videos are available at: http://www.youtube.com/user/soulspeakspring http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com/ http://soulspeakstudio.blogspot.com/ Free downloadable DVDs of Mr. Springs PROGRAMS are available at: http://therapeuticsoulspeak.blogspot.com/ For Mr. Springs latest artistic efforts: http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com/ For a Directory to SOULSPEAK Programs and Videos: http://justininmexico.blogspot.com/ SOULSPEAK Web Page http://www.soulspeak.org/ SOULSPEAK HEALING

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