Also, the over-valent idea can arise-not as a problem or imaginary problem-but as a solution.
If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need.
There exists very little likelihood that you will travel in a loop between your parked car and your bedroom for the rest of your life, but there is a very great possibility that if you are tormented by guilt and pain and self-doubt-and vast floods of self-accusations that hit every day without fail-that a fixed idea as solution will, once it is happened upon, remain. This is what I next saw with Kirsten and with Tim, upon their return to the United States from England, their second return, after Kirsten got out of the hospital. During the period that they lived in London that second time, an idea, an over-valent idea, one day came into their minds, and that was that.
Kirsten flew back several days before Tim. I did not meet her at the airport; I met her at her room on the top floor of the St. Francis, on the same noble hill of San Francisco that Grace Cathedral itself enjoys. I found her busily unpacking her many bags, and I thought: My God, how young she looks! In contrast to the last time I saw her ... she glows. What has happened? Fewer lines marred her face; she moved with deft flexibility, and, when I entered the room, she glanced up and smiled at me, with none of the sour overtones, the various latent accusations I had become familiar with.
"Hi," she said.
"Boy, do you look great," I said.
She nodded. "I quit smoking." She lifted a wrapped package from a suitcase open before her on the bed. "I brought you a couple of things. More are on the way by surface mail; I could only fit these in. Do you want to open them now?"
"I can't get over how good you look," I said.
"Don't you think I've lost weight?" She went over to stand before one of the suite's mirrors.
"Something like that," I said.
"I have a huge steamer trunk coming by ship. Oh, you've seen it. You helped me pack. I've got a lot to tell you."
"On the phone, you hinted-
Yes," Kirsten said. She seated herself on the bed, reached for her purse, opened it and took out a package of Player's Cigarettes; smiling at me, she lit a cigarette.
"I thought you quit," I said.
Reflexively, she put out the cigarette. "I still do it now and then, out of habit." She continued to smile at me, in a wild, yet veiled, mysterious way.
"Well, what is it?" I said.
"Look over there on the table."
I looked. A large notebook lay on the table.
"Open it," Kirsten said.
"Okay." I picked the notebook up and opened it. Some of the pages showed nothing but most of them had been scribbled on, in Kirsten's handwriting.
Kirsten said, "Jeff has come back to us. From the other world."
Had I said, then, at that moment: Lady, you are totally crazy-it would have made no difference, and I do not castigate myself because I failed to say it. "Oh," I said, nodding. "Well; what do you know." I tried to read her handwriting but I could not. "What do you mean?" I said.
"Phenomena," Kirsten said. "That's what Tim and I call them. He sticks needles under my fingernails at night and he sets all the clocks to six-thirty, which was the exact moment he died."
"Gee," I said.
"We've kept a record," Kirsten said. "We didn't want to tell you in a letter or over the phone; we wanted to tell you face-to-face. So I waited until now." She raised her arms in excitement. "Angel, he came back to us!"
"Well, I'll be fucked," I said mechanically.
"Hundreds of incidents. Hundreds of the phenomena. Let's go down to the bar. It started right away after we got back to England. Tim went to a medium. The medium said it was true. We knew it was true; nobody had to tell us but we wanted to be really certain because we thought possibly-just possibly-it was only a poltergeist. But it isn't! It's Jeff!"
"Hot damn," I said.
"Do you think I'm joking?"
"No," I said, with sincerity.
"Because we both witnessed it. And the Winchells saw it, too; our friends in London. And now that we're back in the United States, we want you to witness it and record it, for Tim's new book. He's writing a book about it, because this has meaning not just for us but for everyone, because it proves that man exists in the other world after he dies here."
"Yes," I said. "Let's go down to the bar."
"Tim's book is called From the Other World. He's already gotten a ten-thousand-dollar advance on it; his editor thinks it'll be his bestselling book by far."
"I stand before you amazed," I said.
"I know you don't believe me." Her tone, now, had become wooden, and edged with anger.
"Why would it enter my head not to believe you?" I said. "Because people don't have faith."
"Maybe after I read the notebook."
"He-Jeff-set fire to my hair sixteen times."
"Wow."
"And he shattered all the mirrors in our flat. Not once but several times. We would get up and find them broken but we didn't hear it; neither of us heard anything. Dr. Mason-he's the medium we went to-said that Jeff wants us to understand that he forgives us. And he forgives you, too."
"Oh," I said.
"Don't be sarcastic with me," Kirsten said.
"I'll really truly try not to be sarcastic," I said. "It is as you can see a great surprise to me. I am left without words. I'll certainly recover, later on." I moved toward the door.
Edgar Barefoot, in one of his lectures on KPFA, discussed a form of inferential logic developed in India by the Hindu school. It is very old and has been much studied, not just in India but also in the West. It is the second means of knowledge by which man obtains accurate cognition and is called anumana, which is Sanskrit for: "Measuring along some other thing, inference." It has five stages and I will not go into it because it is difficult, but what is important about it is that if these five stages are correctly carried out-and the system contains safeguards by which one can determine precisely whether he has indeed carried them out-one is assured of going from premise to correct conclusion.
What especially dignifies anumana is step three, the illustration (udaharana); it requires what is called an invariable concomitance (vyapti, literally "pervasion"). The anumana form of inferential reasoning will only work if you can be absolutely certain that you indeed possess a vyapti; not a concomitance but an invariable concomitance (for example, late at night you hear a loud, sharp, echoing popping sound; you say to yourself, "That must be an auto backfiring because when an auto backfires, such a sound is created." This precisely is where inferential reasoning-reasoning, that is, from effect back to cause-breaks down. This is why in the West many logicians feel that inductive reasoning as such is suspect, that only deductive reasoning can be relied on. The Indian anumana strives for what is called a sufficient ground; the illustration requires an actual-not assumed-observation at all times, holding that no concomitance can be assumed which fails to be exemplified). We in the West have no syllogism exactly equal to the anumana and it is a shame that we do not, because had we such a rigorous form by which to check our inductive reasoning, Bishop Timothy Archer might well know of it, and had he known of it he would have known that his mistress waking up to find her hair singed does not, in fact, prove that the spirit of his dead son has returned from the other world, from, in essence, beyond the grave. Bishop Archer could and did fling around such terms as hysteron proteron because that logical fallacy is known in Greek-which is to say, Western-thought. But the anumana is from India. The Hindu logicians distinguished a typical fallacious ground that wrecked the anumana; they called it hetvabhasa ("merely the appearance of a ground") and this deals with only one step in the anumana out of five. They found all sorts of ways to fuck up this five-stage structure, any one of which a man with Bishop Archer's intelligence and education would have-or should have-been able to follow. That he could believe that a few weird unexplained events proved that Jeff was not only still alive (somewhere) but communicating with the living (somehow) shows that, like Wallenstein with his astrological charts during the Thirty Years War, the faculty of accurate cognition is variable and depends, in the final analysis, on what you want to believe, not what is so. A Hindu logician living centuries ago could have seen at a glance the basic fallacy in the reasoning that argued for Jeff's immortality. Thus the will to believe chases out the rational mind, when ever and wherever the two come into conflict. This is all I can assume, based on what I now was seeing.