I think I’m putting the pieces together, the final ones. For God’s sake, Claudia, be cautious with who you discuss this, if you do at all with anyone. I’m being super careful as to whom I’m telling this to—in all candor, just you and my wife; other people like Jamis even, and Peter Fitting and so forth—just fragments. I’m not kidding, be careful.
It’s adding up and it spooks me, for obvious reasons. As I nail it down I get more and more frightened, but then I calm down and feel very relaxed because it’s such wise stuff, such good stuff that’s coming to me at night. Last night, for example, I heard her (you know, my anima, the sibyl), singing along with a choir:
With advice like that, how can I lose? (Seriously, she did sing that, but what it means I have no idea. I don’t even own any slippers. Two nights ago I dreamed about the Goddess Aurora, who is the Greek Goddess of the Dawn. I sure have odd nights.*)
Love,
Phil
Letter to Claudia Bush, July 24, 1974
[4:73]
Dear Claudia,
I will Xerox the Philip Purser in-depth interview with me that just appeared in the London Daily Telegraph magazine.13 Then you can see what a nitwit I appear to be to foreigners. Mr. Purser in his interview notes that when Tessa brings me some eggs to eat I offer him some (not out of the same dish, just, “Would you like some?”). I guess that’s odd behavior. Eggs, too, are funny, evidently, since he comments on that. “He is seen to be eating eggs,” or words to that effect. You’ll see, once we get it to you. [ . . . ]
Anyhow, back to my obsession (you know which one; are there more than one?). Last night I woke up with an acute feeling of resentment and the scales falling from my eyes and my illusions shot to hell. I had been talked to four times already that night by Asklepios and several people with him, and all at once I discovered he was telling me the usual amount of half-truths and lies and opinions like anyone else. He was just a human being; the bunch of them standing there—I had seen them off to the right, in sort of a phalanx, with Asklepios in front doing most or all of the talking—and I had been listening to them and I now knew they weren’t gods and what they said, especially him, wasn’t holy writ.
Lying there in bed fully awake I thought, Well that is the end of all of this. I’ve seen them and they’re just people. Same as us.
I was very disappointed, and today when I was having my eggs in the living room and waiting to see what our nanny brought in—and who—I decided not to tell Tessa what happened in the night because it was such a bummer. Just people. Burn!
And then it came to me that I had actually seen them in the night, they were there, they did talk to me on and on, in particular Asklepios, and I was right: there were a bunch of them. They were not very formidable, and I felt like a kid who discovers to his shocked dismay that his parents are no different from anyone else: with, so to speak, feet of clay. Also, I now knew who it was who was addressing me on and on; it is Asklepios, the founder of Western medicine back in 600 B.C. He lacks modern medical techniques, medicine, equipment and knowledge; his practice hasn’t evolved one bit. To make up for his lacks, I guess, he has to fake it a lot.
Love, and write if you get worry I mean work. Freudian slip; sorry. Write any time.
Phil
Letter to Claudia Bush, July 24, 1974
[4:74]
Dear Claudia,
Claudia! Another letter! Guess what about!
I forgot— how could I?—to relate to you a dream I had the other night; see, the purpose of relating it is to show how many myth elements from Antiquity can, with a little effort, be disclosed.
I’m with a bunch of people in an elevator. There is, oddly, an elevator operator (we don’t have those in real life ever anymore, at least where I’ve been living the last 20 years); he’s a small man, with olive skin and black curly short hair and large eyes, the way people are depicted in the Roman mosaics. He’s wearing a brown cop uniform and is in complete charge. To his right, by the modern extremely heavy doors of the elevator is what looks like a pile of spaghetti with tomato sauce; sticking down into it is a fork. The elevator stops and I step forward to leave, but before you leave, what you have to do is extricate the fork from the pile of spaghetti, which I begin to do. But I discover it’s a three pronged trident, not a fork, and it isn’t spaghetti it is a pile of reddish yarn. As I pull, threads come with the trident.
The cop at once begins in the most commanding and frightening authority-type voice to explain that the prongs of the trident must be brought free without breaking a strand of the thread; he speaks to all in the elevator. He shows me how to extricate the trident without breaking the strands, and then he begins in his firm commanding voice to recite rhymed verse. At this I know him to be that cop, the only one; he is the most awesome of them all, and we all fall totally silent and listen with humble, almost religious, respect to his verse. Then he touches the button which opens the door. As I step through the now open portal I see the man behind me stoop down and start attempting to extricate the trident without breaking the strands twined around its prongs.
Then the next night I heard the woman singing the rhymed couplet about “You must put your slippers on/To walk toward the dawn,” with the full choir behind her, again and again and again. I said to Tessa after the elevator dream, “I guess I’m going to have to listen to some of her prophetic couplets.” And so I did.
In the elevator dream I see these Classical Myth elements:
The authority figure in charge of the “vessel” is the psychopomp, the guide of the souls who leads them across (the Styx, etc.) to the Other Side. Charon is very strict. The thread, which may be Arachne’s or Ariadne’s, must not be broken. If it is Ariadne’s, then the trident is the sword she gave to Theseus along with the thread to guide him out of the Labyrinth; if he broke it, his life was over. (If the trident is that of Poseidon then it is evident where we are in the dream: I quote from Gods and Heroes of the Greeks, p. 12: “. . . they cast lots and Zeus got heaven, Poseidon the sea and Hades the underworld.”) Both Poseidon and Hades appear then in the dream of the elevator, which is far down in the “lower floors, with darkness outside, as with the basement level,” and the trident. I see three myths right there, with the trident sticking into the “strands which must not be broken,” and then the guide who recites verse indicates that we are in the presence of prophecy, of an oracle. Also, the spaghetti tells us we’re in that part of the world. Plus the olive-colored skin and eyes of the “cop.”
I looked the citations up just now; and there is another thing which is startling, I mean beyond how many myth-sources unknown to me seem involved.
The morning after I had this dream I received a letter from my friend Philip Jose Farmer, in which he wrote:
. . . You’re among the most imaginative of men, Phil. Have you tried to use that imagination to figure a way out of the situation? . . . Think in other categories, as Ouspensky14 said; use your unconventional mind as if it were the powerful tool which it indeed is. You’re in the labyrinth, but your Ariadne’s thread is your imagination.