by Robert Irwin
‘A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.’
This last is not Procol Harum. That was Mr Cosmic quoting Laura, quoting Yeats. Cosmic has a truly amazing memory. It allows him to connect anything he hears with anything else he has ever learnt. So that he carries around in his head this vast cosmological encyclopedia constructed around energy waves, ley lines, chakras, Sephirotic trees and mandalic maps. He had just come out of another of Laura’s lessons on strange kissing and, while we waited to be robed, we chatted. Cosmic was beginning to get worried about the direction Laura’s teaching was taking them.
‘It’s like the living man lies down with the dead woman and kisses her, but when their union is over, it is not always the man who rises and walks away. According to the seventeenth-century neoplatonist Thomas Vaughan’s Magica Academica, “It is written of Jacob that he was asleep, but this is a mystical speech for it signifies death, namely that death which the Kabbalists call Mors Osculi or the Death of the Kiss, of which I must not speak one syllable.” Also there is something horrible called the Obscene Kiss which the Knights Templar used to be keen on. Laura says she is looking forward to being on the receiving end of this extreme form of occult kissing. I don’t like it man. It’s very heavy.’
I do not care for the prospect myself. I am not admitting to Cosmic that I am getting instruction in lethal kissing too, as that might get back to Sally. At least Cosmic has Laura whom he claims to find really cuddly. But he was saying that he had a big problem with his penis. I was all agog to hear what this could be, when we were interrupted by Ron. Ron is such a moany drip that we have as little as possible to do with him. One of his problems is that he speaks so slowly that it seems somehow insulting – his cool assumption that we have all the time in the world to listen to his drip-by-drip monotonous rubbish. This evening he was saying that he had had it with the Lodge and he was going to drop out from the apprenticeship and that we should do the same. He thought he might be able to make some money in the process by selling the story of what went on here to the papers. As politely as possible we told him to get lost. Then we returned to Cosmic’s big problem which turned out to be that he is panicking that his penis is actually shrinking, because he has contracted some oriental disease called koro. He keeps checking it with the little ruler he has in his pocket. At this rate he will even have to resign from his position as Founding President of the League of Men with Small Penises. I suggested that he attach a clothes-peg to his foreskin to stop the penis vanishing altogether.
We were still discussing the problem when we were summoned to the threshold of the Chamber of Rituals.
One by one we were summoned into the Chamber. I was the first to be so summoned. I rapped five times on the door as instructed. The thirty or so cowled brothers and sisters saluted me,
‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under the Will.’
The Master, who was acting as Lord of the West, struck the floor with the butt of his lance. He told me to strip. The Master was flanked by Felton, who, as Deacon, was robed in white and yellow and carried the book. On the other side of the Master, a woman in white, blue and gold carried the sword of the Priestess. Other figures carried candles or swung thuribles. For a moment I thought that I was succumbing to an attack of déjà vu, but then I remembered that there was a scene a bit like this in the film which Sally and I had seen only a few days ago. The ritual of the Black Book Lodge is certainly theatrical, but it is theatre with a serious purpose.
It is rare for the Master to participate in the rituals. (Incidentally, it is not true that obesity is an occupational hazard on the Path, for the Master is tall and quite thin. Lean, keen-eyed and bearded, he looks as though he might have returned from months wandering around in the Gobi Desert.) Even more remarkable than the Master’s presence was the fretted-wood screen which had been erected at the far end of the Chamber behind the Statue of Isis. I think that there may have been another cowled figure behind that screen, but that may just have been my fantasy.
Once I had stripped myself, Granville, I think that it was Granville, conducted me from point to point along the Tree of Sephiroth painted on the floor of the Chamber, until I came before the Master. He formally questioned me about my worthiness to be admitted to the Lodge – the whole thing being a ceremonial re-affirmation of the commitment which I had made to him a couple of weeks previously. (It reminded me of Dennis Wheatley, but it also reminded me of the Oxford degree ceremony.) I was questioned about the Nine Barbarous Names which I had been given to memorise. Then I was reminded that death is the penalty for the man or woman who enters the Lodge for impious purposes. Death is also the penalty for anyone who profanes a chamber which has been purified. Death is the penalty for anyone who seeks to invoke Choronzon or engage in intercourse with the larvae without the permission of the Master. Lastly, death is the penalty imposed on anyone who seeks to leave the Lodge. (We are not talking about literal death, of course. We are dealing with a metaphor here. One merely dies a little inside, if one transgresses the rules of the Lodge.) Finally, I knelt to kiss the Master’s hand once more and he pronounced my new name. A little bell rang and two zelators dressed me in a black robe bound with a white cord. My new name is ‘Non Omnis Moriar’.
One by one the others, headed by Cosmic entered and were formally inducted into the Lodge. They were all very nervous and they trembled as they did when they spoke with the Master. Alice in particular was in agonies about having to appear naked before us all. Ron took part in the ritual, even though he had told us that he was getting out of the Lodge. Cosmic’s penis, though small, was not so very terrible. He received the name ‘Vigilante’, which means ‘Be Watchful’. The whole thing did not take very long and was concluded by the Master declaiming the hymn which begins,
‘Thrill with lissom lust of the light,
O Man! My Man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!’
The hymn concluded, most of those assembled departed, but we apprentices were left with the woman who had served the Master as Priestess in the Ritual, Sister Dolorosa Mundi to us, but Maxine to those outside the doors of the Lodge. She set us to meditating on a row of consecrated mirrors. With her hands on her hips, Maxine walked up and down in front of the mirrors. She has a strong South London accent,
‘We are consecrating this exercise to Indira. According to Hindu lore, a mirror is Indira’s Net. In this exercise you must seek to see yourself as you really are, without preconceptions. And at the same time you must seek to see the reflection as it really is.’
We squatted cross-legged in the easy asana position with the cowls of our hoods thrown back and gazed into our private mirrors. As I began to gaze, I started to meditate upon myself, my reflection and the nature of reflection. Or no, that is what I thought that I was doing, but in reality my head was crowded with distracting notions – like: How long is this meditation scheduled to last? What would I look like to another person squatting in front of the same mirror? Do I like my new name? What is that faint creaking and clanking noise above me? Is ‘yes’ a noun? Should I not have eaten before coming on to the Lodge? How long has my mother got to live? If the image in the mirror inverts my face in a left-right way, should it not also show me upside down? And Felton. I wish I did not find myself thinking about him so often. When I think back on what is in these diary pages, he seems to be taking over my life.
At least I am not falling into the temptation of thinking of Sally’s slinky body, I thought, and then I realised that, in thinking that, her slinky body was precisely what I was thinking about. So there was a second level of distraction, when I recognised these distractions for what they were, temptations, or in Hindu parlance sidhis. How should I get rid of these distractions? I must not think these thoughts – and I must not think that thought either. B
ut perhaps the point is not to try to get rid of these thoughts, but calmly to recognise them for what they are.
Ten or twenty minutes ago, standing about with my fellow probationers, I had felt like a normal person, but no sooner had I been instructed to sit down and meditate than I become a latter-day St Anthony, assailed by all sorts of fantastic and horrible thoughts. The mirror vanished in front of my face, as I kept thinking of Sally’s thighs and, as I kept thinking about those thighs, I realised that I was always like this and that I thought about sex many times an hour, every hour, every day. It is nothing to do with meditation, except that the meditation makes me more aware of it. I cannot look at a young woman without thinking about sex. It is how I am and one of the many things that this diary has hitherto concealed.
The grim face in the mirror, dissatisfied with the small amount of attention that I was paying it, looked back at me. I struggled to keep that face in focus, so grim, so pure, so young, so unmarked, so perfectly designed as a mask to conceal the thoughts which raged within the skull behind the face. A mirror is a thing in which one sees everything except oneself. This thought seemed already familiar. Then I realised that I was paraphrasing Felton’s remark about the diary. It is never going to be possible for me to see myself. We all share Dracula’s fate, invisible in the mirror.
Beside me, Alice had freaked out completely and was crying silently in front of her mirror. Another distraction. I sat on and meditated in the midst of rioting phantoms of death and desire. I shall never see my face, for my face is not where I think it is. My face exists only in the eyes of others. My face is something which Sally sees. At the end of the exercise, we rose pale and stiff and performed the ritual of minor banishment over the mirrors. The whole thing had lasted only an hour and a half, but an hour and a half is a very long time in the Looking-Glass World.
I was feeling pretty serious as we left the Chamber of Rituals and in that serious frame of mind I turned to Alice,
‘You have got me wrong, you know. I’m really serious about all this.’
The reason I said this was because I had got the impression that she did not like me. Now, in a sense, this was fair enough, as I did not like her either, but, setting all that aside, it really upset me that there was actually someone in the world who did not like me. Surely, if she got to know me, then she would like me?
Alice just shrugged. So I felt that I had to stumble on,
‘I mean, when I invited you to have a drink, it was not like I meant we should have a good time and get drunk or anything. I really meant that I wanted to talk seriously about what is going on here and what is the purpose of it all.’
But Alice replied,
‘In that case you should have said what you meant. People spend far too much time saying things they do not mean and being polite.’
And with that, she hurried on ahead. So I still have no idea why she does not like me.
I returned home in a very sober frame of mind and set to writing this all up in the diary. The image I had looked at in the mirror had no soul. Therefore it looks like me when I am dead. Therefore I had spent the evening contemplating my corpse and had not even known I was doing so.
Friday, May 26
Having slept fitfully, I awoke with a tune playing silently in my head. It was hours before I could place it and the group. It was driving me mad, but just before leaving the house I got it. It was ‘Mirror’ by Spooky Tooth and at last I heard the lyric, which was about some guy who when he looks into the mirror, finds that the Devil is smiling twice. I have noticed this before, that one is walking along, humming a tune and not even aware that one is humming a tune. Then if you stop to notice that there is a tune in your head and you think hard about it, there always is a reason for the particular tune that is playing. Always. If I am on my way to see Sally, then Jeff Beck’s ‘High-Ho Silver Lining’ might be put on the silent turntable in the skull. But, if I am worrying about my parents, then the ghostly juke-box may be playing the Stones’ ‘Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?’ And so on. Wherever I walk, I am accompanied and commented on by a melody.
As I made my way to St Joseph’s and without my noticing it when it happened, the Spooky Tooth music was replaced in my head by Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and I hear without quite hearing its rhythm building to its hallucinogenic crescendo. I am on a crazy high. It has come upon me from nowhere. I am on a fantasy riff. If only all the people in the street around me, these grey little people inhabiting their grey little lives, realised that an initiated sorcerer was striding down the same street! If only they were aware of the unseen occult energies which fill the same space as the dust, winds and car fumes! If only they realised that London is one of the chosen battlefields in the unseen warfare that has been going on for centuries! A fantasy riff is what it is. It’s a Blues thing basically. I continue to play around with this same image – the sorcerer passing undetected through the drab London landscape again and again.
I spend the morning making sociological notes about the children in the playground. If this diary accurately reflected how I spent my time, then it would be full of summaries of note-taking and thesis ideas. But I cannot be bothered with it all. It is too technical and very boring for the layman. So boring – like me describing how it was for me every time that I went to the lavatory.
This morning a little gang of children came over to me to ask me what I am doing. I try to explain in very simplified terms. Then a little later, they come over again wanting to know if they are playing properly. The drive to conformity of small children is pretty weird. It blows my mind. It really blows my mind. What blows my mind? It is a dark wind from the North, a solemn wind, which has spent centuries blowing across the steppelands without encountering anything that can stand against it. It is this wind which strips my thoughts from me, like leaves from a winter tree, leaving the ultimate structures of thought exposed, as in those old medical textbooks in which one may contemplate, with fear and dreadful resolution nevertheless, the flayed heads of men who have been tortured or treated by doctors. My poor scattered thoughts are driven in sudden and arbitrary gusts across a dark, sunless sea – a sea whose rolling waves stretch on and on forever, without finding a shore to break upon. I would weep tears of gratitude, if only I might recollect those scattered thoughts which float so precariously over the dark green waves. I conceive that the height of pleasure might lie in the quiet and patient reconstruction of my blown mind, working within the sutures of the skull to reassemble its spiralling bifurcations and cross-loops and trompe l’oeil perspectives. Yet this pleasure is beyond all possibility. The wind can blow the leaves off a tree, but, twist and turn how it may, it cannot blow them back on again. Nor is the formation of a cloud to be reversed. Oh, who will deliver me from this body of death? Then there are the children at play in front of the mind that is blown, the skull whose sockets are filled with the eyes of Dr Felton. In those eyes, how delectable the flesh of very young children is, how cherishable. One would not wish them any real harm, only to offer them a taste of pleasures they can never have heard of …
I read what I have just written and I scratch my head. It is not me. It is not what I think, or how I think. I hate long sentences. I lunched at the Mangrove for a change. Then I went back to my pad and packed for the weekend. I am taking the rest of the day off from research, as I have a meeting with Granville. He takes me to a nice place in Savile Row. The walls are oak-panelled and the assistants are in pin-striped suits. Being fitted for a dinner jacket turned out to be a fantastically elaborate business. The main man, a Mr Simmons, kept tutting and clucking about how slender I was. It was like dressing a wraith, he said. He stretched the tape measure every conceivable way across my body.
‘Why he is so thin that he hardly casts a shadow!’ he cried out.
And then a little later, just when I thought he had finished, he whispered in my ear, ‘And which way does sir hang?’
And I see the gibbet at the bottom of a wooded valley, and the gr
ey clouds scudding above and, coming closer, the structure of iron hoops and chains which encloses the corpse of Peter … poor Peter … ’
But Granville interrupted,
‘He means which way do your testicles swing, you muffin-head!’
I had never given this question a moment’s thought and therefore I now had to put my hand inside my jeans for a feel and then to confirm the matter by marching around the shop with my hand continuing to monitor the hang of my balls. Granville was convulsed.
The whole business lasted almost two hours. Granville paid, or rather he put it on the Lodge’s account. I hurried on to Liverpool Station and waited for the next train to Cambridge. I have now, once again, embarked for a destination which I never wish to arrive at. I would rather just sit here in the railway carriage, scribbling and forever travelling without arriving.
Having finished bringing my diary up to date, I carried on my reading of Eros and Civilization by Frankfurt philosopher, Herbert Marcuse. But my reading was interrupted by a tiresome old man who sat next to me. He tapped me on the shoulder,
‘Young man, young man, you don’t want to be reading that young man. It is about sex, isn’t it? Excuse me, but you don’t find sex in books. It’s a girl you want. They’re the best teachers and a book is a poor substitute for a girl.’
I could not think of anything to say to him. I could have told him that I had a girlfriend, but he never would have believed me. It was obvious that, for this old codger, my interest in neo-Hegelian philosophy was a pathetic sublimation of the sex-drive. So I just sat there red-faced, while he carried on,
‘I used to read books,’ the old man announced in a loud voice for the whole carriage to hear. ‘But then I met my Nancy and I stopped. I had no need you see … ’
