“Well, he went on and on about his experience, how real it was, how he would never forget it. But the next day, he tells us that we had gotten him drunk. He’d told the story to impress us. The minute he said it, I said to myself, ‘He’s going to be ambivalent about me. He’s going to struggle with this as long as I’m here at the camp.’ And sure enough, he kept coming up to me, saying that maybe there was something to it, maybe that voice was real, maybe he did have a special power. But then he’d change his mind again, and say he’d been full of crap. He did this three or four times. And why? Because the experience was threatening to him. It was too strange, too far out, too disturbing. It didn’t fit his self-image.
“Then finally one day he came up to me and said he’d just heard about MacArthur Lane, the great running back, who claimed to see the field at times from a place above his head. Maybe his voice was like Lane’s ability. Maybe he had a special power too. Hannigan, he didn’t confabulate. Getting the experience out of him was like doing a C-section on his mind. All of us have trouble accepting capacities that our teachers, friends, or families disallow. Have you heard of the ‘strangeness curve’?”
When he said that he hadn’t, I traced this diagram on a paper napkin:
“Given these axes, what’s the shape of the curve?” I asked.
After studying the diagram for a few seconds, Hannigan shrugged, took my pen and traced a bell curve. “Aha!” I said, “but there’s more. Starting here, at the left end of the horizontal axis, which represents completely ordinary experiences, there are few—if any—reports. For example, I’m not likely to tell a golf partner that the fairway grass looks green. As my experience gets stranger, though, I’m more likely to talk about it. If the air is suddenly radiant, in a way I’ve never seen, I might tell my partner about its beauty or uncanny light.
“But if my experience seems too strange for my friend, I will probably keep my mouth shut. Say, for example, that the air around him opens into a space within ordinary space, with some sort of movement in it, I might feel it’s a risk to tell him. Or I might dismiss it, as reflected sunlight maybe, or the result of eyestrain, or the effects of hypoglycemia. And if the experience is even stranger, I might not report it to myself.” Taking my pen, I extended the right-hand tail of the curve so that it looked like this:
“Out here,” I pointed to the tail I had added to Hannigan’s curve, “there’s neither reporting to others or to one’s conscious self. This end of the strangeness curve represents experiences suppressed so completely that it takes drugs, hypnosis, or maybe someone’s sympathetic ear to remember them. Say, for example, I see an apparition around my friend and realize subconsciously that it’s interactional, that it’s caused in part by something in me! That might be too much for my conscious mind. Too much to tell myself. Maybe that’s what happened on the eighteenth hole in 1956.”
For a moment, Hannigan studied my addition to the strangeness curve. I could tell he was partly persuaded. “In America,” I said, “maybe ten million people play golf at least once a month. You know and I know that two or three out of ten want to tell you about some wonderful experience they’ve had on a golf course. That’s two or three million people. Now, if just one out of every thousand of them experienced something mystical, something truly supernormal, that would be two or three thousand such experiences in the United States, and you can add to that for other countries. We all know these experiences happen. The question is ‘How many?’ and ‘How many different kinds?’ ”
“Interesting,” Hannigan murmured, signaling a waiter for our check. “But let’s get out of here. I want to look at that picture again. It’s bothering me more and more.”
Five minutes later, we stood at his desk. “What the fuck!” he exclaimed, holding the photograph close to the light. “There is a shape. You’re right! Has somebody fiddled with this?” He turned the picture over. “There must be something wrong. I’ve never noticed it. Is it a water stain?”
“It could be a developer’s artifact.”
“No. I’ve had it since ’83. If it’s an artifact, I would’ve seen it. But maybe it’s a water stain. ‘August 6 again, but 1950.’ What did he mean? What did the old bugger mean? Is it the two-edged sword of God?” An angry expression crossed his face. “Murphy, let’s drive out there. We’ll have light until eleven and can get there in less than three hours. I want ye to see the place.”
* Phenomena of Materialization (Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1920; reprinted in 1975 by Arno Press, New York) is a collection of evidence for materialization. In 1896, its author, Albert von Schrenck Notzing, a Munich psychiatrist widely known for his studies of hypnotic suggestion, dual personality, and unconscious elements of personality, was General Secretary of the Third International Congress of Psychology, a historic event in the development of modern psychiatry. The lines cited above refer to “Eva C.,” a medium who was observed by various scientists as she materialized “teleplastic” material. One of her observers was the well-known psychologist and physician Gustave Geley, who in 1918 lectured in Paris at the Collège de France to members of the Psychological Institute on “Supranormal Physiology and the Phenomena of Ideoplastics.” In this lecture, which is summarized in Von Schrenck Notzing’s book (pages 327–36), Geley described different stages and kinds of materialization.
CHAPTER FOUR
WEARING A WINDBREAKER over his shirt and tie, Hannigan carried his photographs to my rented car. At his suggestion, we drove to my hotel where I picked up a jacket and running shoes, a toothbrush and razor, and my golf clubs and practice balls. I might want to hit shots on MacDuff’s abandoned golf course, he said. By nine o’ clock, with him at the wheel, we reached Glasgow and turned onto the A82, which would take us northwest past Loch Lomond.
It was a sun-filled evening, with a sky streaked by grey and lavender clouds, and I enjoyed the views as we drove in silence. To our right, long stretches of fir and pine covered the hills above the loch, which was silvery blue in the lingering light and framed by the rugged peaks of Ben Lomond. Rolling fields of green grass and barley, stone walls covered with rhododendrons, and villages of sturdy stone houses swept by as if on a rolling sea. Scotland was more beautiful than I’d ever seen it.
But the excitement of our search for Shivas Irons was stronger than my enjoyment of the countryside’s beauty. As the Highlands unfolded before us, the possibilities of our adventure multiplied in my imagination. Between us, we probably had more leads to Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff than anyone else on the planet, and there was no telling where they would take us. As we turned onto the A83, which went west to Inveraray, I asked Hannigan to explain why he, a scientist, was so willing to sacrifice time and energy exploring such a bizarre and tenuous set of phenomena.
“Do I have to tell ye?” he answered. “Ye spent a day with Irons. Have ye met another like him? Ye know that he and MacDuff were tryin’ for something big.”
“But what was it?”
“That’s the question, my friend. What was it? What were they really up to?”
For a moment, we didn’t speak. “Whatever it was,” he said at last, “might’ve started before they met. It could’ve started with the mother, in Africa. By all accounts, she wasn’t yer ordinary lady.”
According to the senior Ramsay, MacDuff claimed that his mother came from the Fulani, a largely nomadic people who are famous for their beauty and grace. She was born in the Sahel, not the Gold Coast as I’d remembered, at an oasis visited by Tuareg people and other North Africans influenced by Islam. Hannigan had found confirmation of this through margin notes in a book from Irons’s library. To find her prospective mate, she had traveled across French West Africa, eventually meeting him in Nouakchott, the present-day capital of Mauritania, where he’d established a trading business. According to notes in Irons’s books, she had seduced him into thinking they would produce a child who would “make a great discovery.” Having seen this in a vision, she’d been led to the adventurous Scottish mer
chant through clairvoyant practices Hannigan guessed were derived from both Fulani and Sufi esoteric traditions.*
Surprised by his openness to these possibilities, I suggested that passionate imagery might affect one’s genes. Through strongly held mental images, Catholic saints produced the wounds of Christ, and Muslim saints the battle wounds of Muhammad. Maybe through her religious practice she’d produced genetic stigmata that gave MacDuff extraordinary powers.
“It’s possible,” Hannigan conceded to my surprise. “He wasn’t a normal fellow. Yes, he might’ve had altered genes. But they also gave him a great education. When I show you some of Irons’s notes, I think ye’ll agree she taught him Fulani and Tuareg shamanism and Sufi exercises. Then his father sent Scottish tutors to teach him French and English, and brought him to Oxford when he was seventeen or eighteen. Ye got some of that right in yer book. MacDuff was there from 1888 till 1893. His name’s in the university records.”
I asked if he’d discovered anything about the early life of Shivas Irons.
“Nothing,” he said. “Checked the birth records for all of Scotland, but didn’t find a trace. The names Shivas and Shives are rare, and hardly used at all as a first name. You say in your book that his mother was Irish. Named what—O’Faolin? Did Irons tell you where he was born?”
“If he did, I don’t remember.”
“We’ll have to check in Ireland, then. If he was born in England, it could be a long search.”
“I’m surprised at your openness. Do any of your colleagues know what you’re doing?”
“Just a few. Scientists are supposed to be open to the facts, but the Irons-MacDuff variety are not the kind most of ’em like. I’m an empiricist, I tell myself, but a real empiricist. A radical empiricist, if ye will. That’s what yer William James called it. Ye want the facts? Well, here they are—but all the facts. Apparitions seen by more than one person. Telepathy. Altered states of mind. These are facts of human experience. Not theories or fantasies, Murphy, but facts. I’m open to all possibilities, my friend, though I don’t believe anything on the face of it.”
I asked what anomalous phenomena impressed him besides those related to Shivas Irons.
“There’s a lot worth studyin’ in Gurney, Myers, and the Sidgwicks.” He recited a litany of those who founded the Society for Psychical Research. “And Mr. William James. All of his essays on the subject are good. There’s a lot of material that’s been looked at by smart people, a ton of it really if ye know where to look, and all sorts of leads to the things going on with Irons and MacDuff.”
“Such as?”
“Such as that picture of MacDuff’s first fairway, the one with the funny light. There’s been a history of photographic anomalies. It goes way back, to the daguerreotype.” He paused, as if troubled by the mysterious picture. “Tomorrow or the next day, when we’ve got some time, I’ll show ye more things I’ve found.”
“I’ve got to salute you. To most people, this thing would seem crazier than looking for the Loch Ness monster!”
“It’s the pattern. The overall pattern, Murphy. And its persistence.” He shook his head with both wonder and resignation. “And the fact that it fits some of the crazier implications of my work. That’s the strangest twist of all. It fits with some of my work in physics! Can ye beat it?”
After stopping for gas, we drove through Inveraray and turned onto the A819, which would take us to Cladich, the last village we would pass before reaching our destination. He drove more slowly now, and I felt myself nodding. The long day, and residues of drink, had overcome the excitement of our adventure.
As I started to doze, images appeared that seemed vaguely connected to Shivas Irons. Many of these were centered in sports—in the San Francisco Seals baseball team of the 1940s and their first baseman Ferris Fain, the first athlete who was numinous for me because an older cousin equated him reverently with Joe DiMaggio; and Joe Sprinz, the Seals’ catcher, who’d lost his teeth trying to catch a ball dropped from a blimp during some sort of team promotion, an extrahuman figure because of that ball, invisible until it exploded from the sky through his catcher’s mitt; and Frankie Albert, whom I watched with my parents and brother in 1940, passing to a sprinting Pete Kemetovic out of the T formation presented to the world that year by Clark Shaugnessy at Stanford University. Fain, Sprinz, Albert—why were their images so vivid now as we drove through the gathering dark?
And I saw a young boy—was it me?—catching a high fly ball, which at the apex of its flight was just a speck against the sky, evanescent, almost invisible before it fell … then accelerating and exploding like a bomb in his glove. These memories seemed part of a script. What were they pointing toward? What secrets did they hold?
Then I was walking down the eighteenth fairway at Burningbush with Shivas Irons. Was my adventure with him related to events of my early life? Suddenly I was cradled in my mother’s arms, tossed in the air by my red-haired father, and lying on my back on the Big Sur coast staring at a twinkling North Star. How distant was the little light? Now it seemed inside me, a luminous speck on the curve of my eye, a shining presence in my brain. There were secrets in all this, a connection, something new and frightening.…
“God damn it ye bastard!” Hannigan woke me with a start. “Fly up yer own ass!” he shouted at a passing vehicle. “It won’t be a pretty sight!”
Closing my eyes, I settled into the seat. An image of Shivas was forming, his rugged features softened by candlelight. We were sitting at a table side by side, as we had in 1956, at supper with his friends.
“… paintin’ a picture on the sky,” he was saying in his resonant Scots inflection, “or shapin’ space as our friend Adam Greene likes to put it, is not a trivial thing. If it’s only imagination, it’s imagination as the poet described it, not mere fantasy. It’s imagination with hands, imagination that opens curtains between us and the life to come. All o’ ye know it. Every man or woman who’s played the game knows what I’m talkin’ about. It’s there in our memories, our talk, our old gowf literature. As some o’ ye know, there’s the story about that prodigious drive hit in the early nineteenth century. Hit with a featherie ball, across the icy fields o’ winter, with a baffin’ spoon on the eighteenth hole, right here, on the Links of Burnin’bush. ’Twas such a prodigious thing that a poet was hired to tell the world in the local paper.
“Accordin’ to this printed account, which I have studied carefully, the ball stayed aloft long enough for many to see. An entire gallery o’ the members, it seems, and a good part of the town was there to watch it. Seems the featherie was caught in some sort of upwind, hangin’ aloft for several minutes. It was, said the poet, ‘like a stately goose, black against the snow-white sky, movin’ like it was migratin’ to its original home.’ The poet wrote that those who watched knew it would reach its ultimate destination. For ye see, my friends, that shot was a double-eagle hole-in-one, a one on our four-par eighteenth hole, and the memory of it still lives with us. Now, I would be willin’ to bet that Angus Pattersone, the great champion who hit it, had a powerful mind to go with his mighty swing, a mind that could reach like a hand to place his featherie on that upwind.
“But we’ve all got stories to match it. All of us have painted on the golf sky, as Adam here will tell us. Curvin’ the ball to the left or curvin’ it right, shapin’ it low or high before we hit it. In all this, our mind shapes space itself. And after we shape it, nature colors it, if not black against white, as it did for Pattersone, then white against blue on a summer day, or black against grey in the morning mist, or gold in the setting sun. Ye’ll all admit it, will ye not?”
There was silence when he finished. His eloquence had quieted the group. But I was subdued for another reason. During his speech, a light had appeared around him, and had grown more dense until it formed a rosy, fleshlike envelope. Was it produced by hypnotic suggestion? Was he secretly shaping my perception? I squinted into a candle flame, making a golden halo around it, then looked again a
t him. If I could alter the aura’s appearance deliberately, it had to be an illusion. At that very moment, with that very thought, the light around him disappeared.…
“Murphy, wake up,” Hannigan said loudly, pulling off the road. “There it is. The wizard’s laboratory in all its unholy splendor.” Below us, half a mile away, MacDuff’s stone house stood on a hill enclosed by a little valley. It was clearly discernible in the evening light, though the fields around it, upon which the golf course once stood, were covered with shadows. I got out of the car. To the north, a vast amphitheater stretched for miles toward distant peaks; while to the west, we could see Loch Awe, a long silver ribbon running through dark wooded ridges. The land rose steeply behind us toward an indigo sky. It was windless and warm for eleven o’clock. A dog’s distant barking accentuated the deep evening stillness.
“Ye can see the whole place from here,” said Hannigan. “The first fairway ran from his house through that field to its left. That’s where the apparition would’ve been.”
For a while, we watched the land grow dark. The stillness now was more pronounced. There was only a rustling of grass, and a presence in which the darkening landscape seemed suspended.
Hannigan got back in the car. “It’s going to change!” he said with quiet excitement. “Let’s go.”
He drove down the hill, turned onto a narrow dirt road, and parked on a flat stretch of grass. “We’re on the property now.” He got out of the car. “It’s about half a mile to the house.”
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 5
