Chapter 1 

Chance meetings always brought interesting characters into my domain. I would learn the bare facts of things. Ah, this one was born in San Francisco, joined the army, worked at a small engineering firm, and now was unemployed for several years. Never married. Liked music. A bit of a crack pot but sincere and harmless.

He believed that the places one decides to live are chosen by the fidelity of ghosts who lie in wait in the wood and stone, attracting similar types of people. I couldn't argue with him. I was prepared to meet the strangness of life after having lost more than a few of its rationalizaations.

These characters always seemed to appear during transitions when the mind is laid open and presented a vast array of choice in a world of shrunken alleyways. I accepted the character, no matter what. Whatever the person had to give, whatever positive sign they had developed became mine in a manner of speaking. After all, I saw myself as a stroy teller who had a finite of stories in his own head and needed much more input from the people. The people who existed in fact and weren't figments of imagination or found in books. Who had, for instance, been interviewed by the FBI because he subscribed to a radical publication.

He walked across the park in a curious, self-conscious way his shoulders jerking up and out sporadically. It looked at though he was talking to himself but no he was thinking earnestly, he was full of ugly thoughts perhaps or the heavy lid of problematica. After he disappeared I tried remembering everything I had read about the occult, Herman Hesse, and Carl Jung.

The occult. What a strange underground that had, for a moment, broken ground from novels, secret societies, lonely aristocrats and their reveries, to live among the most normal of people who believed it was absolute truth. I remember what one character in Ulysses had said: "It all started with the Blavatsky woman."

I left the park and caught the #51 bus for College Avenue, toward Lewins Metaphysical Bookstore that I had passed more than once. I wanted to find out more about the occult after my chance meeting with the odd neighbor. I needed a specialist. I knew what some people believed but I didn't know why and I didn't know why they threw off the ordinary explanation or orthodox religion.

Bells above the door surprised me. A black cat leapt from an old chair covered in purple and brushed against my leg.

The wrinkled up middle-aged woman behind the desk warned me not to pet the cat or it'd bite my finger. She cackled a bit.

The store had an over-clean smell to it; some odor lingered that was not pure. It seemed so ancient to me that I was thrown off-guard when a car drove by the splendid window, filled with books only the cognoscenti knew about. It was a room of stark silence as though a jovial laugh would disturb the sleep of some hidden ghost. A pall of an incense stick hung over the tables and chairs where, in fact, no one sat. It mixed with a pall of sadness as though, after all, it was only about finding something in the middle of nothing. It was the revenge of a bruised ego, many bruised egos floating through time with no place to stop. Ah, they are here now, like trees that have been taken from a great forest and stuck in the center of the city in celebration of a holiday no one understands.

So I wandered between the aisles of books. There were many astrological charts, books of doom, psychology, mythology, Tao Te Ching, Finnegan's Wake, even Arthur Powell's The Etheric Double.

I was shown the excerpt of a famous man's journal or, so it was alleged. One never knew these days and the old woman had something of the sinister about her. She had held a book by Wilhelm Reich to my face, shaking it with great emotion, "This one almost broke through, yes, he almost got to the other side!"

January 14th: From the visible to the non-visible. That is, something moving inside while the air is still. The world is narrow. The world is a great shutter flapping closed to a hot something, vast, and outside the shutters that capture the world: A few chips of wood, a little paint, a faint odor. Under certain conditions, colors appear, a strange shape; vision that is induced by necessity. It becomes necessary to see the world on the other side of the shutters. Then, to stand on the other side. Some moment has occurred. The shutter has sealed in quite a few. It's not as benign as seeing the world good or beautiful or ugly. Or, as a pearl from the cosmos. These views are no longer privileged. There is hardly an aristocracy of the soul. No churches can be built around revelation. No, the world is too large and narrow for that. It's getting smaller. A tiny hole. A pin hole that looks black from a distance. But, up close, infinite! Then comes language through the hole. A kind of perfume. A secret to the soul.

Everything has access to the strange moment. No! Not until the strange moment convulses itself, turns inside out, is made visible. The soul has broken out... all over. But, it lacks substance. This is a curious thing. Infinite means everything through the soul. Once it has become manifest it becomes lazy because it's so new, so strange to sensibility, especially a captured sensibility.

Advance must be made through objects, no question. All objects, including words; especially words. The soul has to become firm and utterly alone.

It was obviously written by someone very young and exposed for the first time to inner realities. Perhaps he had surrendered to them and was now in a stupor, surrounded by the mad and maniacal of the deeps. Perhaps he had given up his fame and worked for the poor in the 3rd world. I was curious about it but decided to buy, "The Death of Christ," by Reich and read it on the bus, between the somber commuters hanging on to the side railings or snapping newspapers open in disgust or dreaming. It's amazing that the dreaming mind, in the daylight, can pick up so much rich material!

I was under the influence of California for a long time. California represented "make it new!" It represented, "do that which expresses what you are and what you feel and believe," rather than follow the dead road of some ambiguous authority. California represented beauty in nature. Nature the Magnificent. California was an attempt to re-find and re-new the foundations of a big, old, ugly thing. That was the belief in California at any rate. What else are solar power, computers, and environmental awareness but these very things?

It was, without question, nature. Ah nature! Nature pushing back, nature possessing the minds of the young and working through them to push back against the stupidities of the culture; nature as a sustainer, nature as a god or goddess. And what is a god or goddess to a people who have lost any inkling of what they are? Nature is no substitute. Nature is a teacher and we embrace our teachers. At least, the one's who have shown us the truth. Nature is the patience of a billion years. It is that part of the mind that strives toward life that exists elsewhere.

David Eide
January 24, 2014