He sat down and listened while I told him the story about Atabet’s attack and apparent stigmata.
“Isn’t it something,” he said, “the way he manages these effects. He actually made you believe they were real stigmata?”
“He wasn’t faking it. That’s the problem. No, I actually saw it.”
“But couldn’t it have been something else? Maybe he had a fight with someone, a woman maybe. He does have a weird kind of sex life. You know I was doing that story on him and for a while we got pretty close. He told me some things he was sorry about later, like his relationship with that woman. What’s her name? Apparently he goes through these long periods without sex and she gets jealous. Maybe he had a fight with her.”
“That’s impossible. No, you’re way off there.”
“Maybe. But those marks were not genuine religious stigmata. Believe me. Things like that are very rare. No, it must’ve come from a fight or a fall.” He took a sip of scotch. “You said something on the phone about the lift he’s given you. Now I can understand that. He’s got that energy. And that charm. But tell me why you’re so disturbed.”
The sadness I felt was growing deeper. To get him talking I would have to share my misgivings. “It’s hard to give you the headlines,” I sighed. “I really don’t know what to make of him. On the one hand he’s artistically gifted. His paintings are remarkable, I think. And religiously gifted. That’s something I sense. But as you say, he’s been in a mental hospital, and has visions, so I just don’t know. What do you think about him?”
“I can tell you what happened when I tried to do that article, and what some of the people who know him say.”
“What other people?”
“Oran Bedford, the art critic. Or Deborah Von Urban. She owns one of his paintings.”
“What do they say?”
“That he’s a little bit off.” He pointed a finger at his forehead. “That he has a delusional system going. Have you heard about his voyages in the body? How his paintings are changing the shape of his cells?”
“He might’ve meant it as a figure of speech.”
“Maybe. But no, I think he really believes it. Still I can see why you might be intrigued. I know that it fits some of the ideas in your book.” He rubbed the edge of his glass on his lips. “Maybe you should let him read it.”
“I did and he liked it. You know it’s been hard to get anyone serious to like the thing.”
“Ah, Darwin.” He leaned toward me. “You’ve had a hard time with that book. That’s the reason you’re troubled. He likes your book and you’re disturbed by his funny ideas.”
I looked out the window. Through chimneys that rose from the adjoining roof, I could see lights on the hills across the Bay. “But the problem’s deeper than that,” I said. “It’s not just the book. It’s him, the way he is. That’s the simplest way to say it. He seems so solid, and yet . . . And yet, like you say, there are these things about him.”
“Yes. These quirks.” He was leaning toward me with an expression that was cruel and sympathetic at once. “Has he tried to enlist you yet in the great work?”
“Enlist me? Why no, he hasn’t tried to enlist me. Why do you ask that?”
“Because he tried to enlist me.” His mouth curved into an expression that was part contempt and part embarrassment. “After I’d spent about a week with him, he told me all about my body and the diseases he saw in it. It got to be very strange.”
“Diseases in your body? Was any of it right?”
“None of it,” he snorted. “Oh, it’s all crap! And then he tried to tell me about his visions. Did he tell you about the Book of Revelation?”
“No, he didn’t. God, it sounds like the two of you got pretty close.”
“Not close. Though I did buy one of his paintings. At first it was intriguing.” He made a sour look. “I’ve sold the thing, by the way, for much less than I paid. But then when he saw that I didn’t go along with all his ideas, well, he called the story off—which spared me the trouble. I really couldn’t’ve done it. I finally saw that his work was second-rate.”
“Has he tried to enlist anyone else?”
“Deborah’s daughter, I hear.” He smiled faintly. “Of course that might be a rumor. Though one wonders about his sex life. I’ve heard stories that he’s a closet gay. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that he’s a charming fellow, and so seductive. For a while I believed the things he said. But then—well, I finally saw how sad it was. All that inflated talk about the mystery of his body and how it’s going to be transformed. Has he told you much about it?”
“He said something about it.” My voice sounded listless. “And you said something about a network of forces he feared.”
“Yes, that. He thinks there’s something going on between this plane and the world of spirits. Some kind of alliance against what he’s trying to do. It’s always a giveaway, these ideas about persecution. He talked about suggestion at a distance, the kind of thing that Russian you told me about is doing. What’s his name—Kirov or something?”
“Yes, Kirov. But they are doing research there. That’s no delusion.”
“That they’re doing research is no delusion. But that it works—or that you’re being attacked by telepathy. Oh, it’s rubbish! And sad. Of course he thinks that there’s some kind of help on the other side, something like angels I think.” He gave a weary shrug. “You’re right to be concerned. It’s just like you said on the phone. He’s a very odd fellow, yet he’s terribly captivating. A friendship with him would be difficult.” He got up to pour himself another drink. “You would have to think like him, if you wanted to spend much time around him. I know the type. They’re absolute tyrants when you get to know them. I’ve written a couple of hundred pages about it in the book I’m working on. All this religious awakening is full of bullying characters, some of them as winning and impressive as he is.”
“Yes, I know. And I hate it.” An image of Atabet’s face had appeared before me. “But if you were going to explore the things he’s into, you would have to change.”
“Explore?” he murmured. “Explore what?”
“These new perceptions. These things he’s interested in.”
“But hasn’t it all been explored already? Haven’t these things been described a thousand times in the great religious scriptures?”
“Yes and no. Who knows what more there is to learn. The scriptures aren’t the final word.”
He turned to face me with a look of sympathy. Suddenly I could see the pleasure he took in this exchange. There had been other evenings like this, some of them centered around my book. It was on a night like this, I thought, that he had put the coup de grace to all my metaphysics.
Impulsively I stood up to leave.
“Are you all right?” He came between me and the door. “You seem upset.”
I reached out to shake his hand, but as I did I felt a stabbing pain in my chest. “It’s late,” I said. “Too late. I’ll give you a ring in the morning.” Before he could stop me I opened the door and went out.
The stairs to the street smelled of pine trees, and a breeze blew in from the sea. My sadness was turning to anger and new resolution. In spite of Atabet’s strangeness, he had a presence and beauty I could not deny. And there was no doubt that he was living many of the things I had only imagined. If I turned away from him now because he had some flaws, I might miss the opportunity of a lifetime to test my dreams and theories.
PART TWO
(July–December 1970)
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding
9
IN THE MONTH OF JULY, Atabet read the entire manuscript of Evolutionary Relationships Between Mind and Body. His reaction to it was a mixture of amazement and gratitude, for the book gave him a more coherent framework than he had ever seen with which to
make sense of his mysterious gifts. He had drawn his own maps through the years, had done his own reading about spiritual transformations, and had received considerable support from Corinne and Kazi, but never had there been an atlas of charts like mine to help him get his bearings. In spite of the doubts we might have about one another, our friendship was blossoming into a remarkable marriage of spirits.
[Editor’s note: There is a gap in Fall’s book at this point, running from around the first of July into August. Instead of the descriptions we might expect of those critical days in their friendship, there is only the summary of Fall’s book which follows.
EVOLUTIONARY RELATIONSHIPS
BETWEEN MIND AND BODY
1,723 pages long
in July, 1970
[PART ONE]
CHAPTER ONE. Bodily transformations in the yogic and contemplative life. Stigmata. Tokens of espousal. Luminous phenomena. Incendium Amoris. The odor of sanctity. The physical beauty of sanctity. Absence of cadaveric rigidity in yogis and saints. Seeing without eyes. Living without eating. Kundalini.
CHAPTER TWO. Examples from hypnosis. Mesmer and his followers. Esdaile, Elliotson and the Zoist. The Nancy School. Charcot. Modern cases.
CHAPTER THREE. From sport. A history of record breaking. East German and Russian cases. Altered states of consciousness in sport.
CHAPTER FOUR. Stigmata outside the contemplative life: conversion symptoms and gross bodily changes. Stekel. The Reichian literature. Recent cases. “Psychogenic purpura.”
CHAPTER FIVE. Physical prodigies in psychosis and hallucinogenic drug experience. Cases of apparent levitation at Agnews State Hospital. Luminous phenomena and feats of strength in manic psychosis.
CHAPTER SIX. Examples from spiritual healing.
CHAPTER SEVEN. Examples from other sources. From painters and sculptors. From actors. From dancers. From writers. From everyday life.
CHAPTER EIGHT. Anticipations of bodily transformation in paleolithic shamanism. Symbolic dismemberment and replacement of organs.
CHAPTER NINE. Prefigurations in literature, legend, myth, and fairy tale. The Rig Veda. The Odyssey. Irish tales. The Arabian Nights. Sufi literature. The Puranas. Magical Taoism. European and Chinese alchemy. Paracelsus. Kazantzakis. Rilke.
CHAPTER TEN. The discoveries of parapsychology and psychical research. Vasiliev and suggestion at a distance. Psychokinesis in gambling and the laboratory. Psychokinesis in the relation of mind to brain. Poltergeist and bodily changes. Materializations. Incombustability. D. D. Home, Eusapia Palladino, and other modern cases.
[PART TWO]
CHAPTER ELEVEN. The siddhis and vibhutis (powers and perfections) of yoga: a comparison of these with examples given above, showing how they appear in non-yogic contexts. The siddhis in everyday life. Siddhis as organs of our emerging nature.
CHAPTER TWELVE. The suppression of siddhis, both in ordinary life and the contemplative life. Examples of religious practice, belief and language denigrating the bodily life. How this suppression robs transformational discipline of interest, efficiency, power and satisfaction, thus aborting the process that such discipline triggers. Reasons for this suppression: otherworldly, ascetic aims (moksha before siddhi). A critique of the ascetic impulse: its power and necessity, and its destructiveness. Asceticism as a seduction from our larger possibilities.
[PART THREE]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The metaphysical idea behind this research. The Great Chain of Being through history: the most durable of all metaphysical ideas related to spiritual practice. Lovejoy. The temporalization of the Great Chain of Being around 1800: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Theosophy. Bergson. Richard Bucke. Henry James, Sr. Walt Whitman. Nietzsche. Teilhard. Aurobindo, and the emerging transformationalist school. Aufhebung (annihilation and fulfillment) in Hegel. Involution-evolution in Swedenborg, Henry James Sr., Teilhard and Aurobindo. Aurobindo’s “ascent and integration.” Subsumption (Aufhebung) as a model for bodily transformation through Spirit. Nirvana and evolution. “Remembering” the body’s secrets. Recreating the body, as evidenced in the examples given in Parts One and Two. Prefigurations in Swedenborg, Blake, Joachim di Fiore, and others.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Speculations about latent religious genius and its distorted manifestations. Scenarios of transformation, given more understanding of this possibility. Bernardine Neri and her “signs of the risen Christ.” The Doctrine of the Glorified Body in Christian thought.
10
“RAMAKRISHNA HAD A carnival booth,” he said, “and was making faces like a monkey. Dancing around like Gabby Hayes. Aurobindo was a lordly jowled old banker, sitting immobile at a desk, without saying a word. And Ramana Maharshi couldn’t walk. He really couldn’t, you know, for a while. But that image of Ramakrishna—it was the strangest thing . . . .”
“He was dressed like a clown?” I broke in. “It sounds like you were putting all the saints at arm’s length.”
“In the dream they seemed stunted, each in their own way. Their shortcomings were blown out of proportion. It was as if my unconscious had decided to dramatize the fact that they weren’t perfect. I’ve had the dream before, you know, starting way back—maybe fifteen years ago after I started reading about them.”
Dressed only in swimming trunks, he seemed less muscular than usual. Except for a slight bruise on his chest where the stigmatic mark had appeared, his skin had an even brown color and a sheen where the sunlight fell on it. As he moved there was a subtle play of golden-brown up and down his legs and torso. “And I’ve had it a dozen times since. It seems to go with this image.” He drew a double spiral in the sand, then an oval around it. “This tower of light I told you about. Filled with these spirals.”
“And it comes like a vision? You see it outside of yourself?”
“No. It’s more like a dream or reverie. It comes into my mind sometimes when I’m painting. Or at night, or when I’m running. At times it becomes an obsession. I’ve had different theories about it, that maybe it was an image of those towers in the old Irish tales, which always fascinated me, a symbol of gateways to the Land Beyond. Or a genie from The Arabian Nights. But I’ve never pinned down its meaning completely. Sometimes it moves, and these spirals begin to unzip.” He whirled his finger in the sand, faster and faster until there was a hole some six inches deep. “All those spirals unzipping, boring down to the heart of the world.”
Suddenly I felt gooseflesh. “It’s almost identical to the one Zimbardo had in the church,” I said. “Remember the angel he saw? He said there were spirals inside it!”
“Yes!” He looked down at the drawing. “Yes, it must have been like this. What do you think he was seeing? God, you’re right!” A haunted expression came into his face, part fear, part longing. I felt myself turning away. “I’m going to swim out to that rock,” he said. “You want to come with me?”
I said I would sit here. The water, even in August, was only about fifty degrees. He ran through a low breaking wave. “Come on!” he yelled. “It warms up right away!”
“I don’t like sharks!” I shouted back.
He turned with a wave of disgust, and started swimming toward a rock about sixty yards out. His long strokes gracefully cut through the swells and a few minutes later he climbed up on the gray outcropping. Even at this distance the lines of his body showed a marvelous grace. “It’s terrific!” he shouted. “What a view!” He turned to watch a passing freighter. At sea level the ship looked gigantic, as if it were half the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. Framed against its enormous horizon, he seemed to shrink in size.
I looked at the thing he had traced in the sand, and ran my finger along it. What did it symbolize? A tower of light, full of spirals, beckoning until his body broke into the sea . . .
I looked up to see him, but the rock was deserted. Had he jumped into the water? “Jake,” I shouted. “Are you there?”
He reappeared and waved. Two miles away, beyond the foaming swells, the brown hills of Marin County rose straight up. Framed b
y them he looked tiny. I looked back at the drawing. Had his vision meant that all of his body might vanish?
“Hey, Darwin!” he shouted. “The tide’s moving out. I’m going around that way.” He pointed toward the eastern end of the cove, then dove into a swell. His long strokes cut through the water and he went round a bend in the beach.
A trail of gulls was following the ship, swooping and billowing like sea spray. Two fishing boats were bucking the waves behind them. In the haze, the steeply rising hills beyond the entrance to the Bay seemed as distant as that tower of lights. Could his vision be a signal from the future?
“Yahoo!” he yelled and came around the point. He started to sprint at the edge of the water. “What a great swim!” He was panting as he fell on the sand. “The tide’s running strong. It runs into the rocks beyond the point there. It was tricky getting to shore.” He kicked sand on my legs. “But you should’ve come with me. There wasn’t a shark in sight.”
I shook my head resolutely. There was no way he could get me to do it.
“But the water was all full of stars,” he whispered. “They were flying all over. It never hit me while I was swimming before.” He smiled weakly, as if he were looking for reassurance.
“Stars?” I said. “It must’ve been the shock of the cold.”
He nodded down at the drawing. “Sometimes that happens. The thing starts to break open around me. For a second out there I was falling through space.” He slipped on a pair of old rubber beach sandals, and sat staring at the water. He seemed to be waiting for the shock to pass. “All right, let’s go!” He stood with a new surge of strength. “Now goddammit! You’re at least going to come over and have something to eat.”
I followed him to the car. When we got to the street he turned to face me. “But remember that part of me gave the orders,” he said. “I set it up this way—okay? Don’t you get it? These visions are set to go off like this. It’s been happening all my life.”
I got in behind the wheel and backed the car out of the little parking area. As I nosed it out into traffic I could feel him watching me. “Set to go off?” I asked. “You sound like some kind of time bomb.”
Jacob Atabet: A Speculative Fiction Page 7
