Connections? But how can I pin it down?
Sex is compared to so much, so much: playing cards, a Chevy Corvair, the sort of close reading generally associated with poetry, playing chess, a Ford Edsel…. Except that we actually do it from time to time, we might lose track of what sex was altogether, in an oblivion of comparisons. And along with it, Astral Projection. I remember that once, several years ago now, a Newsweek critic wrote: “Sex hovers over the movie Five Easy Pieces.” But, suggestive as the phrase is, he wasn’t thinking of Astral Projection.
PHYSICAL DETAIL
There are, in the last analysis, no physical details in Astral Projection.
AN EMOTION
fear
WHAT IT IS
Yes fear. “This soul of yours,” Dr. Joy says, “whee! Have no fear—” stop stop, I want to say, or scream. I want to punch out the radio’s clockface. Because on all the talk shows, all the phone-in shows, all, they take our ghosts and turn them to clowns. Yes fear, because their yammer even now fills the dial. Repeats endlessly, as we run the needle round the cycle. We run faster and faster and get nowhere. Don’t pretend you don’t hate them the same. Gum chewers, bonehead goobers whose idea of passion is going one-on-one for a Michelob Light. As for what can be discovered in the gray weekly newspapers, in the hollow behind the checkout counter, it’s too painful even to think about. Only keep searching through the dismal closed circle of stations and we will find them. Oh, on that you can rely. And then, finding them, I find what I fear: the insinuation of their voices. Powerful voices, an undertow of tongues, something logy and liquid and flattering that hauls you in deeper. I hate them, but I pay attention to them. Though they cut against the grain with every vapid word. I think they must deliberately pitch themselves off-key, in order to project in a way that’s so habit-forming, in order to engage your curiosity and get you drowsy at the same time, in order to send such unlikeable yet spellbinding voices over the incalculable miles of airwaves, in order to continue sounding alien even as their whispers penetrate deeper and deeper into our ear as we doze off with the sleep-switch set. Weird saturation. Painful to keep listening and yet we keep listening; weird weakness. The outsider gets let in as the rest of us tumbles away and down into the distant parts of sleep, until that voice seems to have threaded the very wrinkles of the brains, though we know it’s talking trash, idiocy, babytalk, like singing babybabybaby…and the talk runs wild like a strip of golden infection out even to the barely sensory palms of our hands, as if we could hold the sound, feel its weight, and it runs farther because we’ve nothing left to resist…and therefore fear, yes, fear is just the word.
WHAT I DID
ANOTHER EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE
“Hey, nobody dies of a broken heart. Don’t give me that. It’s not like Humpty Dumpty around here.”
…
“I mean, look, I read about that Robert Monroe. They had an article about him — it was in Penthouse. Now look, what do you think he does, once he gets back in his body? I mean, he could have been to Hell, honey babe, it’s still the same old story. Robert Monroe comes back, he picks up the phone. ‘Hi. What’re you doing tonight?’”
PLACES
Monroe has written a book, Journeys Out of the Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971). There, he separates the Astral world into three distinct “Locales.” Each Locale has its own set of rules and creatures, and its own threats. Locale I is here, meaning right here and now, but made for another set of hands. The walls, for example, become like erect sheets of water, that effective and that much fun, and within your own familiar walls there may be other “non-physical beings.” Ghosts, those would be. Locale II is the dominion of Heaven and Hell, the place where Monroe had all the sex. Locale III is another universe, which he believes is composed of anti-matter. This third Locale possesses unusual tools and no electricity, but while visiting the place Monroe experienced adultery (in this Locale sex occurs without electricity), loneliness, failures to communicate, and the pain of growing old. He concluded that in all important respects it was a universe the same as our own.
Monroe…hold on to him a while longer, a moment longer please. Granted, he’s a terrible writer, but please.
Certainly we have no way of demonstrating once and for all that he’s wrong. At least not so long as we remain in this world, in this body, asking ourselves what’s the physical proof, asking in which incident can we at last get hold of the proof and cuddle up to it tight, tight — in what incident, what detail? Certainly, against the unrelenting static of such doubt this man Monroe’s worth another moment at least. Just imagine, he travels alone. What a person. A star of the strangest magnitude. In his case there is something incredible about Astral Projection. He discovers: demons like immense hard-muscled thumbs; angels as ready to roll in the sack as any whore; the Cheshire cats of previous incarnations, grinning and grinning; the barrier at the end of the universe where all travelers, even the most sophisticated, come crashing to a stop; and other people’s dreams, which he can visit like the recurring image of a lover. He has rested in the infinite chamber that waits, reserved eternally, as his personal heaven. Granted, granted, the man then ruins the effect by comparing nirvana to a heated swimming pool, with colored lights and underwater stereo speakers. But…just the idea that we each have one…. And Monroe has braved the worst inferno of all, the whirlpool of armless sharklike souls. These spirits will remain forever unfinished, alive or dead, and they seek forever to mutilate like themselves any whole being who wanders too close.
Places, connections. Time goes by and these joints become curiouser and curiouser. I wanted to weight my story like lead holds down a line, but by moonrise I find that the harder I try to reel in the taut nylon, the faster I’m circling round it, hooked and circling round a metal I managed not long ago to carry out here inside my coat.
PLACES
I wanted to send up my life like a kite made from Scripture, but now the Gospel itself has turned to papier mache — half the King James edition was used to make the feminist erotica I saw at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Was that my own drama, embalmed inside those vulva-shaped pages?
But you’ve worked at your habits, sinking habits through the visible hours like the Times sculpts a Sunday. The habit of reading, the habit of sitting studying some unknown woman when you should be reading…. Myself, actually the voices on AM spook me too badly; actually when that clockface lights up, I’m a man for the FM. “The More The Music Changes The More You Need WBCN.” Oedipus cues the local group, Shane Champagne, “(Living In The) Shadow World.” This weekend they’re at The Underground, used to be called Lucy’s In The Sky when I went there, now it’s got a new form…Oedipus speaks “you” into his mike and that hooded syllable becomes “me,” someone that wasn’t meant yet has been made from the name, like the Mock Turtle…