Copperfield listened intently. “So you could fly just by looking at the water?”
“Yes, that’s how it worked.”
“Isn’t that amazing?” he exclaimed, genuinely. “That’s exactly like my fortune-telling act! The way it works is that I just need to look at the lights.” He told me that people’s dreams often found their way into his performances. Over the years, he added, he’d done at least four different illusions that involved his becoming young.
“But those were just puffery, right?”
“Right.”
* * *
The sun shone, having nothing else to do, and Raf and I spent the rest of the day on the beach and racing around on WaveRunners. We also went swimming with the nurse sharks. As I approached them, snorkel on, they seemed nice enough. Then one of them flipped over, swishing its tail. It headed straight at me, fin quivering menacingly. Hearts racing, we scrambled up the ladder and onto the dock.
An assistant stood waiting for us at Coconut Beach, walkie-talkie in hand. Copperfield was on the other end. He wanted us to choose a film for the Drive-In theater that evening. Raf suggested Thunderball. Copperfield hemmed and hawed, saying he wanted a comedy backup just in case.
“Okay, how ’bout Scarface?” I said.
“Uh, that’s not a comedy,” Copperfield pointed out.
“Any comedy suggestions?” I asked Raf, putting my hand over the mouthpiece.
“How about some Mel Brooks?”
“No,” Copperfield retorted, “not that.”
I asked Raf to pick something else.
“Are we choosing a film, or is he?” Raf laughed, mock-exasperated.
“Welcome to our world,” said Copperfield’s assistant quietly.
“Well, why don’t you just choose something?” I suggested. After a little more back-and-forth, he said he’d find something appropriate, like an Adam Sandler film.
I handed the walkie-talkie back to the assistant, who explained that Copperfield probably wanted something new, to show off the resolution. That way we’d see how high quality his theater system was.
“Oh, so he wanted us to not pick an old movie?” I puzzled. “Why didn’t he just say that in the first place?”
She shrugged. Having established a connection, I asked if he’d ever spoken to her about the fountain of youth.
“He never talks about it with anybody.” She smiled uncomfortably. “I don’t even know which island it’s on. I’ve never asked him about it, but I know he wouldn’t tell me. He doesn’t tell anybody about it. He’s a very mysterious man. He’s so charismatic, but also very shy at the same time.”
“Yeah, for sure,” I said amicably.
“Well then, enjoy the rest of your trip!” She waved and walked away.
Diving back into the ocean, I resolved to investigate the Petrified Lake before the end of the day.
* * *
Shortly before sunset, Raf lay zoned out on the couch, watching a Cindy Crawford infomercial about antiaging cream made from French cantaloupes.
“I’m going to go turn some brown leaves green,” I told Raf. “Come put a leaf in with me, so you can back me up.”
“No,” he said, unmoving and unmoved.
“What? Why not?”
“Because I’m too lazy.”
“Come on!”
“No.” He shifted sides, chewing on some pizza-flavored Combos. “Really.”
“It’ll be weird if I do it by myself.”
“It’ll be weird if we do it together. This whole island is weird.”
“Of course I know it will be ‘weird.’ But it might be frightening.”
“Nope. Don’t care. Not coming. You gotta fly this mission solo, my friend.”
Settling into the golf buggy alone, I hung a right on Imagine Avenue. Around the zookeeper’s area, I started getting even more paranoid than I’d been since arriving. Some assistants looked up from their landscaping work. Did I seem suspicious? If they questioned me, I’d just say I was exploring. This is totally normal, I told myself. Except the sun was setting, it was grimly overcast, the wind had come untethered with the approaching hurricane, and I was sneaking into the master’s fountain of youth.
Another assistant drove toward me in a buggy and motioned for me to stop. It felt like being pulled over by the police. I smiled broadly, to cover the guilt.
“Just want to know if I can get you anything at all,” she said.
“No, I’m fine actually,” I said, exaggeratedly calm. “Just exploring.”
“Awesome—have fun!” She zipped away.
A few moments later, I came to a sign saying SANCTUARY with an arrow pointing away from the water. This was where the PETRIFIED LAKE sign had been yesterday. It was gone now. Were the signs’ comings and goings just a part of the treasure hunt, or did they have something to do with the fountain?
Fingering the dead leaves in my pocket, I walked through the brambles. The dirt path led to the postapocalyptic pond, surrounded by all those gnarled, white trees lying jagged in their boneyard heap. They’d been salt-whipped, sun-bleached, battered by the elements. The rest of Musha was so lush, but this neck of the woods was broken, brittle. Deathly. It felt like a setting from the darker pages of Titus Andronicus.
A big, crowlike bird with bright green feet flapped clumsily away. The wind howled through the spindly, brittle trees. They were frozen into place, like petrified formations. I felt a bit petrified myself, especially when I noticed Copperfield’s black aerie atop the hill. He could be watching me right now, I thought. A giddy, childish fear pulsated through my nervous system at the thought of being caught.
I took a few brown leaves out of my pocket, breathed deeply, and submerged them in the water, holding on to their stems. Umber muck swirled up through the coppery brine. I swished the leaves around a bit, then took them out. Nothing. Still brown. I tried stirring the leaves into the mud at the bottom of the lake, coating them with brown, mossy sediment. One after one, I drenched them in various ways, to no avail.
Although I’d been half-hoping that something magical might happen, I turned away with a strange sense of relief. The fountain remained a possibility, unrealized.
* * *
That evening, the storm we’d heard about in Miami intensified. Raf and I sat in the Landings, sipping tea. The captain came over to discuss transportation logistics with us. The hurricane had intensified from a tropical depression to a Category 4, he informed us. “That’s a monster. If it hit the island, it would destroy everything. But she’s supposed to be downgraded to a tropical storm by the time she gets here.”
He told us we could either spend three more days on the island or leave in the morning on a private jet. We thanked him for the update and said we’d think it over. Perusing the cloud banks, Raf made an aside about its “really gusting out there.”
“What did you say?” asked David Copperfield testily. He’d approached without us noticing, sensitive that even part of the world disgusting might be used in conjunction with anything to do with Musha.
“Um, it’s really gusting out there, like it’s really windy,” Raf explained, and turned away.
Copperfield relaxed somewhat. He told us we wouldn’t be able to go to the Drive-In unless the weather changed radically, but that we’d instead be able to watch something on the flatscreen across the room. (Later that night, he popped in Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, which he’d already seen, but as he watched, he laughed heartily, freely, like a kid, until, about a quarter of the way through, he fell asleep on the couch.)
I asked him about the bleached-white mangroves.
“They’re not mangroves,” he said with finality. He didn’t elaborate. We’d had our interview about the fountain. That was it.
Over dinner, he told us stories about being the shy kid in the corner at Andy Warhol parties: “I didn’t interact with people, I just sat there and watched.” He talked about his regret at choosing the name David Copperfield. “It was the
wrong idea,” he lamented. “Now I have to share it on Google with a Dickens character, who deserves a lot more credit. And, also, it’s too big for a marquee.” He showed us stamps with his face on them, from the Dominican Republic, from Grenada, and from St. Vincent. “All sorts of people lick my head when they send someone a letter,” he mused.
“The back of your head,” clarified Raf.
“How weird is that?” Copperfield asked, then answered himself: “Pretty fucking weird.”
He spoke about how following the path to accomplishment means drifting away from your family. He wasn’t that close to his relatives, he admitted, explaining how he’d been trying to reconnect with them. The road to stardom had been full of sacrifices. It really is lonely at the top, he added, lonelier than any fridge-magnet platitudes can express. It seemed an earnest attempt to open up, to provide me with material he didn’t normally give journalists, yet I still sensed how guarded he was, how controlling.
In his experience, he sighed, the more money one has, the more complicated things get. He had everything so many people desire—wealth, fame, success, babes—yet as he spoke, we could hear how tightly wound he was. He’d hoped this island would set him free. But one’s desire, as Freud said, is always in excess of the object’s capacity to satisfy it. Escaping from the escapes, into an illusionist’s illusion. He’d invested more than a hundred million dollars here, but now, even as the leaves tremored in the hurricane’s approach, his refuge—his place of unfettered freedom, his utopia—remained chained to the one thing he most wanted to escape: reality.
16
Technical Interlude: Magick, Eros, Symbolism
The rain, fallen from the amorous heaven, impregnates the earth… and from that moist marriage-rite the woods put on their bloom. Of all these things I [Eros] am the cause.
—Aeschylus, Fragments
I strove to seize the inmost form . . .
But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a weeping Babe became—
—William Blake, The Crystal Cabinet
MYTHOLOGIES OF all times speak of a magical liquid of life, be it chi, rasa, haoma, or amrita. This imperishable substance, the myths tell us, is the essence of immortality. Religions teach us to allow this flowing substance into our lives, to view ourselves as sustained by it, and to realize that we are actually a physical embodiment of it. All of this, of course, takes place on a symbolic level. When we view this as a literal possibility, we are thinking magically. The symbol is not the same thing as the thing it refers to.
The history of immortality and our quest for it is inherently bound up with the symbolic. Symbols are tools we use to grapple with the impossibility of understanding our impending demise. And stories that attempt to speak about what can’t be known are called mythologies. Today the word myth is synonymous with untruthfulness or falsity. But mythologies, in their original context, were symbolic stories whose truths couldn’t be conveyed any other way. “A myth is above all a story that is believed, believed to be true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie,” writes Wendy Doniger in The Implied Spider. Myths, being metaphorical, are both real and unreal, simultaneously true and untrue. They point toward some greater truth. It’s not their veracity that counts; their implicit meanings are what matter. “Only when a mythical story is considered as factually false is it of any use,” explained the literary critic Northrop Frye. “The need to see it as ‘the truth’ factually is an infection.”
Myths are concerned with something insoluble and ineffable. To discuss that which words cannot discuss, myths use symbolism. A symbol is a go-between, something that stands for something else. Symbols are multivalent; they have multiple meanings, many values, various possible consequences. We can imbue them with our own significance. By insisting that there is one real, or superior, sense to a symbol is to restrict its very nature, to neuter its power.
Using symbolism is akin to describing a dream. We can never make another person experience our dream (let alone remember everything that happened ourselves). We can only attempt to convey aspects of what happened in the dream. The words we use when speaking in dream language, or in mythologies, are symbolic.
Symbols encapsulate a fleeting sublimity that can never be fully articulated. They are incipient transitions. They float between thoughts and feelings. They connect the conscious mind with the collective unconscious, the within with the external, the above with the below. The word itself derives from a Greek term meaning “to bring together, to combine, to integrate.” It is at least two things in one.
Symbols live in our hearts, affecting us on profound, inner levels. They can also inspire us to venture further into a mystery, deeper into the wisdom concealed behind the symbol, a truth whose luminescence outshines any attempt at demystifying it. Symbols transport us past the limitations of language into inexplicable territory. Those with a scientific-mechanistic worldview think that if something cannot be defined outright or coherently, then it probably isn’t anything. This contrasts with those who consider the spirit world to be a reality full of potential.
Anything spiritual cannot be directly articulated. We can only allude to it obliquely or use suggestive descriptors. Symbols nod toward the revelatory, the transcendental. They are attempts “to translate the truth of that world into the beauty of this,” wrote Evelyn Underhill. Symbols don’t tell us what True Reality really is; they carry us beyond the expressible and ascertainable into the unseen. They link us with the cosmic. In Coleridge’s words, a true symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.”
As Coleridge knew, the symbolic language of metaphysics is also the language of visionary poetry. As Kathleen Raine put it, in her remarkable work Blake and Tradition: “The schools do not teach this learning, but the poets find it out.” Without a road map through their symbolic wildlands, the transcendental and Romantic poets can at times seem incomprehensible, which is part of the reason they are occasionally perceived as madmen rather than sages. But consider their plight: whether Dante or Shelley, they could only employ terrestrial words to approximate divine constructs. To bring us close to the heart of things, they had to use symbols. Raine’s contention is that the same key unlocks all their texts: “Each poet may have his chosen symbolic themes, but all speak one language.” It is possible, she argued, to unpack a symbol by exploring its common and traditional usages.
The trope of water surfaces repeatedly, and homogeneously, in symbolist poetry. In William Blake’s works, for example, water represented the mystery of souls entering—and then departing—human bodies. W. B. Yeats put it succinctly: “What’s water but the generated soul?” Walt Whitman saw in seashores the theme of liquidity marrying solidity, an image of the soul becoming a body.
The key to such thought, as Raine demonstrated, can be found in ancient Greek philosophy, Orphism, and Neoplatonism. A foundational work of Western literary criticism is Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs, from the third or fourth century CE. In his deconstruction of a Homeric allegory from the Odyssey, Porphyry also explores the symbolic meaning of water. He relates it to the Greek term γένεσις, meaning genesis: coming into being, being born, the act of generation, but also ensoulment, the act of souls entering into bodies. Back then, the sea symbolized bios, or the life of the flesh. The soul was referred to as a “life-fluid.” It arrived into this watery world and took on a body itself primarily composed of water. As Heraclitus noted, “Souls descending into generation fly to moisture.” To be alive was to be “wet,” awash in the sea of matter. And like Odysseus, we all had to spend years sailing the wine-dark, storm-strewn waters of existence. At death, our soul would reawaken into eternity. Our final destination was a place beyond all wave crash, a tearless place where “o
ceans are unknown,” as Homer wrote, where everyone is ignorant of the sea, where we can finally forget these salty waters.
* * *
Porphyry and other metaphysicians believed that, just as Narcissus drowns by confusing his reflection for an actual substance, souls die into life through an attraction to the wateriness of materiality. In myths about the process of genesis, your soul begins as light. It is not yet a spirit, just a kind of ethereal luminescence sleeping peacefully, dreaming pure thought.
One day the moon glides through your realm. She comes in silk and gauze, wearing a tiara of rays. Lifting her gossamer veil, she looks right through you. She’s so captivating you stir into motion. As you come together, for an instant, you feel close to everything, immersed in the sensation of complete love. But this lunar bliss gets complicated fast. Where before you were intangible radiance, just a glow, you now have an outer layer. The encasing material hardens, trapping you within a flexible diamond. Your union consummated, the Moon Goddess continues along her way.
You have entered the Chrystall Castle, becoming a spirit in its receptacle. You are in a chrysalid state, “confined and imprisoned by lawful Magick in this Liquid Chrystall,” as Thomas Vaughan put it in Aula Lucis. The container filled with your energy is an unborn soul, an entelechy, a “cocoon-like Integument.” Clothed in this hylic envelope, you are now ready to enter human life. Gravity pulls you down. It’s a shredding sensation. Breaking apart, you dissolve into flesh. Bits of you are dispersed throughout the cells of a newly fertilized ovary. You are caged into a body.
As an infant, fascinated by light, you recall fragments of how life took shape. These memories fade as you age, until you die and begin the journey back to the shores of that wave-washed coast whence you sprang. The moon bathes the clouds off you. You liquefy in Lethe’s waters. Forgetting everything, you sink back into the source.
Book of Immortality Page 26
