It was all weedy shadows and frogs croaking in the blackness as I walked along the narrow path that, according to the directions given to me, led to Severini’s place. I left my car parked alongside the road where I saw the vehicles of the others. They had all arrived before me, although I was not in the least bit late for this scheduled artistic event. But they had always been anxious, I had long before noticed, whenever a Severini visit was planned, all that day fidgeting with some restless impulse until nightfall came and they could leave the city and go out to St Alban’s Marsh.
I expected to see a light ahead as I walked along that narrow path, but all I heard were frogs croaking in the blackness. The full moon in a cloudless sky revealed to me where I should next step along the path leading to the shack at the edge of the marsh. But even before I reached the clearing where the old shack supposedly stood, my sense of everything around me began to change. A warm mist drifted in from either side of the path like a curtain closing in front of my eyes, and I felt something touch my mind with images and concepts that were from elsewhere. ‘We are sympathetic organisms,’ I heard from the mist. ‘Draw closer.’ But that narrow path seemed to have no end to it, like those passages in my delirious episodes which extended such great distances in the misty darkness of a tropical landscape, where on every side of me there were exotic forms of life spawning and seething without restraint. I must go to that place, I thought as if these were my own words and not the words of another voice altogether, a voice full of desperate intensity and confused aspirations. ‘Calm yourself, Mr Severini, if you insist I still address you by that name. As your therapist I cannot advise you to pursue this route… chasing miracles, if that is what you imagine… this “temple,” as you call it, is an escape from any authentic confrontation with…’
But he did find his way to freedom, although without properly being discharged from the institution, and he went to that place.
‘Documentes. Passportas! ’ Looking around at those yellow-brown faces, you were finally there. You went to that jungle island, that tropical sewer, a great temple looming out of the misty darkness in your dreams. It rained in every town, the streets streaming like sewers. ‘Disentaría,’ pronounced the attending physician. But he was not like any of the doctors whom you sought in that place. Amoebic dysentery — there it was, the nightmare continued, so many forms it could take. The way into the nightmare is the way out. And you were willing to follow that nightmare as far as you needed in order to find your way out, just as I was following that narrow path toward your shack on the edge of St Alban’s Marsh to enter that same nightmare you had brought back with you. The Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. Your shack was now a gallery of the nightmares you had inspired in the others with your sleeptalking and the fluctuations of your form, those outrageous miracles which had not outraged anyone. Only when I was alone in my apartment, imaginatively recreating what the others had told me, could I see those miracles as the nightmares they were. I knew this because of my delirious episodes, which none of the others had known. They were the sympathetic organisms, not I. I was antagonistic to you, not sympathetic. Because I would not go into the nightmare, as you had gone. The Temple of Tantric Medicine, this is what you dreamed you would find in that tropical sewer — a place where miracles might happen, where that sect of ‘doctors’ could minister with the most esoteric procedures and could carry out their illicit practices. But what did you find instead? ‘Disentaría,’ pronounced the attending physician. Then a small group of those yellow-brown faces told you, told us, about that other temple which had no name. ‘For the belly sickness,’ they said. Amoebic dysentery, simply another version of the nightmare of the organism from which none of the doctors you had seen in the past could deliver you. ‘How can the disease be cured of itself?’ you asked them. ‘My body — a tumor that was once delivered from the body of another tumor, a lump of disease that is always boiling with its own disease. And my mind — another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism. Where are you taking me!’ you screamed (we screamed) at the yellow-brown faces. ‘Fix the belly sickness. We know, we know.’ They chanted these words along the way, it seemed, as the town disappeared behind the trees and the vines, behind the giant flowers that smelled like rotting meat, and the fungus and muck of that tropical sewer. They knew the disease and the nightmare because they lived in that place where the organism flourished without restraint, its forms so varied and exotic, its fate inescapable. ‘Disentaría,’ pronounced the attending physician. They knew the way through the stonework passages, the walls seeping with slime and soft with mold as they coiled toward the central chamber of the temple without a name. Inside the ruined heart of the temple there were candles burning everywhere; their flickering light revealed an array of temple art and ornamentation. Intricate murals appeared along the walls, mingling with the slime and the mold of that tropical sewer. Sculptures of every size and all shapes projected out of the damp, viscous shadows. At the center of the chamber was a large circular altar, an enormous mandala composed of countless jewels, precious stones, or simply bits of glass that gleamed in the candlelight like a pool of multi-colored slime molds.
They laid your body upon the altar; they knew what to do with you (us) — the words to say, the songs to sing, and the esoteric procedures to follow. It was almost as if I could understand the things that they chanted in voices of tortured solemnity. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. There are two faces which must never confront each other. There is only one body which must struggle to contain them both. And the phantom clutch of that sickness, that amoebic dysentery, seemed to reach me as I walked along that narrow path leading to Severini’s shack at the edge of St Alban’s Marsh. Inside the shack were all the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum, the paintings lining the damp wood of the walls and the sculptures projecting out of the shadows cast by the candles which always lighted the single room of that ruined hovel. I had imaginatively recreated the interior of Severini’s shack many times according to the accounts related to me by the others about this place and its incredible inhabitant. I imagined how you could forget yourself in such a place, how you could be delivered from the nightmares and delirious episodes that tortured you in other places, even becoming someone else (or something else) as you gave yourself up entirely to the fluctuations of the organism at the edge of St Alban’s Marsh. You needed that marsh because it helped you to imaginatively recreate that tropical sewer (where you were taken into the nightmare), and you needed those artworks in order to make the crumbling shack into that temple (where you were supposed to find your way out of the nightmare). But most of all you needed them, the others, because they were sympathetic organisms. I, on the other hand, was now an antagonistic organism who wanted nothing more to do with your esoteric procedures and illicit practices. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. The two faces… the one body. You wanted them to enter the nightmare, who did not even know the nightmare as we knew it. You needed them and their artworks to go into the nightmare of the organism to its very end, so that you could find your way out of the nightmare. But you could not go to the very end of the nightmare unless I was with you, I who was now an antagonistic organism without any hope that there was a way out of the nightmare. We were forever divided, one face from the other, struggling within the body — the organism — which we shared.