by Robert Irwin
But she hates me. And I don’t fancy her. This is some weird kind of magical ordeal. Alice is a sort of Loathly Lady, like the one in a story Sally was telling me. In the story (which I cannot remember properly), foolish King Arthur has been trapped into promising to marry the Loathly Lady. She is all fat and warty and generally disgusting. Then Sir Gawain nobly steps forward and offers to take the King’s place. Since Gawain is young and good-looking, this is OK with her. So then, the hitching ceremony having taken place and they are about to go to bed together and presumably Gawain can feel his scrotum curdling between his legs, but he gives her a quick kiss and, lo and behold, she turns into a beautiful damsel. While he is still gawping at her, she explains that she is a magical kind of chick and she can be beautiful half of the time. Either she can be beautiful in the daytime, in which case everyone will admire him for the glamour of his consort, or she can be beautiful at night, in which case his sex-life will be greatly enhanced. But Gawain after pondering a bit, said that no, she should be the one making the choice. Then she said, ‘Knight, since of your perfect gentleness, you have given me the choice, the curse is lifted from me and I am able to remain beautiful both by day and by night’.
All this was fine as a story. However, in real life, I was pretty sure that Alice was going to stay as she was – lo and behold, hideous day and night! There is no way I will be able to get it up. I said as much to Granville.
‘Oh yes, you will,’ he said. ‘And I envy you.’
‘Oh fine! Well, you are welcome to take my place. You must be having me on.’
‘I don’t mean screwing Alice.’ He shuddered briefly. ‘Of course not. Alice is just the start for you of something much more serious. No, I mean that you have a destiny, whereas I have none.’ Then he recited a couple of lines by Yeats,
‘Those who have chosen second best,
Seek to forget it all on a young girl’s chest.’
I think that I had envisaged Sunday’s ritual as some kind of love-feast and I certainly had not anticipated that I would be anything more than one of the chorus who stood around chanting and watching. Now I was sitting in Wheelers, speechless and trying to think of some way of getting out of all this. A dentist’s appointment, for example … but dentists weren’t open on Sundays … a session with the exorcist, booked weeks ago, too late to cancel now … I could wait till Sunday morning and then feign death …
Then the pudding came and Granville and I talked of indifferent things, like his plan to take me over to Le Mans for the 24-Hour Race later in the month. He patronisingly takes it for granted that I want to accompany him on this annual ritual trip – literally patronising, for I think he does actually see himself as my patron.
‘I should not have talked so much. It will all go down in that bloody diary of yours, plus, of course, I’ll have to put it all in mine. It’s all such a bloody bore.’
We have a series of missions, all of them in the St James area. There are the crates of wine to be ordered for delivery in time for Sunday’s ritual. Some shirts that the Master has had made have to be collected. It is boring, but it did not take as long as Granville had been expecting.
‘We have time in hand,’ he said. ‘I propose to devote it to your further education. We are on the edge of Soho. I can take you to a prostitute or to a casino. Which shall it be?’
‘A casino then. I have never been inside a casino.’ (Not that I have ever been with a prostitute either. Perhaps I was saving myself for Alice?)
We left the brilliant sunshine for a place of shadows. The Four-Leaf Clover Club occupied a not particularly large Soho basement. Drinks were on the house and I was drinking madly to forget Alice. Will demons make themselves manifest at Sunday’s ritual? What need for demons when we are behaving so badly anyway? When the chips are down, they are so pretty – big pink squares, yellow ovals, ivory oblongs and small circular green counters – all spread out on the green baize in pools of low light. Granville elected to play chemin-de-fer. As he took over the bank, he shot his cuffs. (I wonder if I dare ask him if he would teach me how to shoot my cuffs?)
Saturday, June 10
Slept badly, thinking of Sunday’s ordeal. I would drop off briefly, then come to, shuddering at the thought of being in the arms of Alice and her toad-like face rubbing against mine. Now, things have been made worse by not having a record-player any more. Felton told me at breakfast that people had been complaining about the noise of my record-player in the evenings. (Agatha, I’ll bet.)
‘Your handing over of the machine will of course be appreciated as a gesture of good faith.’
Another of their little tests. But every sacrifice I make makes me stronger. What does not kill me makes me stronger. After surrendering the record-player, I spent most of the morning in the Lodge’s library drawing up index-cards. A bit before midday Granville entered and seated himself on the table, dislodging a pile of file cards as he did so.
‘It’s the weekend and I’m bored. I knew I would be. What are you going to do to entertain me?’
I thought for a bit. Part of the thinking was why was he spending so much of the time with me? Partly I was thinking about how to entertain him. Should I make him a reciprocal offer to treat him to a prostitute? Finally, I came up with,
‘I’m going to take you to the Arts Lab.’
He looked suspicious, but shrugged his shoulders.
Over the door of the Arts Lab, was a freshly-painted notice in bright, blobby colours: MAGIC THEATRE. ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY. FOR MADMEN ONLY! Granville was sneering as he stalked inside. In the Arts Lab’s restaurant, I introduced him to macrobiotic food – macrobiotic brown rice sprinkled with sesame seeds, Tibetan barley bread, soya-bean salad and peach tea. After a couple of mouthfuls, Granville leant back in his chair and balefully contemplated his plate,
‘This is a bloody bad start, this stuff. Probably why you are so thin. What next? Where shall we go?’
The people at the other tables had been looking at Granville in awe. In their dopily paranoid minds anyone in a suit is normally reckoned to be a police spy – but not a suit like the one Granville was wearing.
I told him that we were not going anywhere, because there was an afternoon- showing of Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome here at the Arts Lab. Granville had never heard of Anger – which was no surprise. The Lodge members up in Swiss Cottage are a bit out of touch with developments in the American underground cultural scene. When I told Granville that Anger was an experimental film-maker, his lip curled.
‘In my book “experimental” is just a polite word for cheaply made, boring and pretentious,’ he commented.
The programming at the Arts Lab is full of surprises. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures was not on the advertised afternoon programme. How could it be when it is a banned film without a Board of Censorship certificate? Nevertheless, it is shown before the Anger film. Granville was quite shocked by the transvestite cavortings and the climactic cunnilingual rape. To be honest, I was too, the first time I saw it, but this was the third time that I have seen Flaming Creatures. It is the fifth time that I have seen The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Apart from Granville and myself, the audience consists of amateur cinéastes who think that they are watching a film. But the truth is that Anger has mounted a ritual which has been designed to damn their souls. The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is an occultists’ happening. After the smoky credits, the invocation of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, begins. The Great Beast, Shiva, and his consort, Kali, welcome their guests to the ritual. Lillith, Isis, Pan and Astarte are among them. The role of Hecate has been taken by Kenneth Anger himself. Cesare, the somnambulist from Dr Caligari’s Cabinet, has been resurrected and called into service as butler and the ghost of Crowley, manifest in a bluish back-projection, haunts the proceedings. The eye is raped by so much glitter and flesh. It is like a cut-down psychedelic musical, set in a junk shop, in which every object has been polished and burnished. Yet the body languag
e is not just actors’ business, for I recognised the hieratic gestures as deriving from the same source as the Lodge’s ceremonies.
As the guests on the screen began voicelessly to toast the success of their invocation with yage, (a drink simultaneously ecstatic and poisonous), Granville beside me produced a silver cigarette-case opened it and urged me to help myself. The cigarette- case was full of neatly-rolled joints. Since Granville regards the hippy habit of passing the joint from mouth to mouth as disgusting, we each smoked our own. As I drew on my joint, worked on by the glut of images, by the hash and by the Slavonic passion of the film’s soundtrack, I floated off into reverie. The hash smoke, drifting up across the screen and coiling along beneath the low ceiling, resembled ectoplasm massing for some kind of psychic manifestation. The celluloid phantasmagoria was a cheat. No, a double cheat; the magic is a lie and cinema is a lie – respectively ancient and modern ways of peddling illusions – rituals of the darkened crypt. The cameraman and the sorcerer working together on the manipulation of dark and light. We, the watchers, have been buried alive in a dark sepulchre of ancient illusion.
It is a short film. When the lights came up Granville was grudging,
‘It’s just a psychedelic blow-out. And nothing quite happens in the film. A long fuck without a climax. Still, it has given me an idea. This Anger man obviously knows a bit about High Magick, but only a bit. Basically he is an amateur filming people who haven’t a clue. Whereas tomorrow’s consecration is the real thing … I’ll have to clear it with the Master of course … ’
When we get back to the Lodge we join the others in working on the fumigation and purification of the ritual chamber. There is no dinner, as the sun has set and from now on until the consummation of tomorrow’s ritual, we all have to fast. (Probably that was why Granville was so fed up that his last meal before the fast was macrobiotic.) Alone in my room at night I set to work at memorising the words of the ritual responses.
Looking back on the last two days, I think that the reason that Granville has been with me so much is that tomorrow’s ritual Consecration of the Virgin is very important – as is my presence at that ritual – and they are afraid that I may bolt before it. The story is that the Master is younger than he looks because of his consorting with virgins. Regular ritual defloration seems to be viewed by the Lodge as a kind of keep-fit course.
What is it about virgins? Both vir (man) and gyne (woman), the virgin is the holy androgyne. The virgin’s slender form is a bent bow whose arrow is as yet undelivered. The freshness and power of the virgin’s breath sends -
When I saw that my diary-writing hand was going to launch itself into writing one of those ornately-written yet sinister pieces of fine writing, I bent down and bit it hard, drawing blood. Then I bashed it repeatedly with my left hand. I do not want to be instructed in the occult power of virgins. The right hand still twitches, but I am writing these last few lines with difficulty, with the left hand.
Sunday, June 11
I am back to writing with the right hand today, though it is painful. I trust that it is sufficiently cowed to write what I want and only what I want.
I ought to be in Cambridge comforting my father. I know that. But there can be no question of my being allowed to miss today’s ritual – nor do I want to. The details of the central ceremony are somewhat obscure as a lot of the key stuff is in Latin. I am bloody hungry, but there is no breakfast to go down to, so I stay in my room writing the infernal diary and continuing to work on memorising the ritual responses.
Soon after writing those words, I was interrupted by Cosmic banging on my door. He had arrived at the Lodge early and he wanted to use my room in order to change into his robes. That was the pretext, but I first thought that the reality was that he was curious about my new pad. (Not that there is anything to see really.) We chatted and, as we did so, I came to realise that Cosmic was in a funny mood and that he had something important that he wanted to tell me. For a bit, he rambled on in his usual way about the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, the pseudo-death experience and recent advances in psychic photography. At last he came out with it. He had been round to see Sally, and they had been talking and now he was here as her messenger. And, having been briefed by Sally, Cosmic dutifully set out all the arguments against my continuing further on the dark path.
But I was not really interested in Sally’s opinions about the Lodge. I had heard all that before. There was just one thing that I wanted to know.
‘Did she put out?’
‘Naah, she’s too hung up on you. Besides, she is still upset about all that stuff with Granville … Anyway Sally and I were just talking about how the Lodge uses mind-fucking techniques in a really stealthy way in order to – ’
‘Granville? Granville?’
‘Hey, I thought you knew, you two having such a free and open relationship. I swear, I really thought she would have told you. Oh shit! She was really screwed-up about it and needed quite a lot of comforting, but I swear I just gave her a bit of a cuddle. She should have told you. That was ages ago … It is not that she fancied him or anything. He just used that look of his and it was inevitable. Granville, Errol Flynn of the Astral. It was seriously freaky, because, once she felt his gaze melting the inside of her belly, she heard herself begging for it – all against her will, of course.’
I had not believed that Granville really did have this sort of power. I listened in a daze to Cosmic. He was now talking in his usual disorganised way about an ancient treatise he had been reading called How a Woman Who Is So Big Penetrates the Eyes Which Are So Small and he was lecturing me about mesmeric eyebeams and rarefied pranic fluids, as well as how messed-up Sally was. According to him, Sally knew that afterwards she would despise herself for what she was about to do with Granville, but she found that that was exactly what she wanted – to despise herself and be abased.
Why should it matter to me what Sally did? That is all in the past. She is nothing to me now. I could calmly contemplate Sally giving herself to Granville. It was not a razor-studded contemplation. Certain things which have happened make more sense now that I know. That is why she stopped coming to the Lodge and why she did not take the Master’s hand. She did not want to be gazed on in that way ever again. It also explains the look of utter revulsion she gave Granville when he hustled her out of the Master’s lecture. Of course, it does not matter now, but I was blind to quite how hung-up she was, before we finally broke up. According to Cosmic, Sally now senses herself to be defiled, tainted, even evil. She thinks that, because of this lapse with Granville, that when she dies, she will be reincarnated as a dog or a lizard, to work out her bad karma.
What is it with this thing called the Mordo Dolorosa? According to Cosmic, when Granville first met the Master, he was forced by the Master’s gaze to go to bed with him. So it must work between males and I tried to get Cosmic to demonstrate it to me. Cosmic’s eyes bulged madly as he gazed and gazed at my belly, but it was no good and after a few minutes we giggled a bit and gave up. Cosmic admitted that he was not yet the master of his pranic currents.
Then he sobered up,
‘Come on man, Sally needs you. She’s your old lady. You can’t ditch her just like that.’
I was thinking that if Sally meant little to me before, she meant even less to me now. But, on the other hand, I had had a very convincing demonstration of the power of the Lodge. Granville is not very bright, nor is he so far advanced on the Path, and I had thought that he was deluding himself about those occult powers. But, if even Granville possessed such occult tricks – birds bedded at will – what must be the powers at the disposal of such a one as the Master? And, getting back to Sally, of course, she is free to sleep with whomsoever, but she should have told me. She was always accusing me of not being straight with her … I thought also of the rotted sex of Tbubi, the death-maiden, but what I said was,
‘Today’s ritual is the beginning of great things. Now that I have set my foot upon the Path, I can never leave it.’
‘Things are getting kind of heavy, man. This whole Lodge business is seriously heavy. I have been studying today’s Consecration ritual and it’s one big, bad trip …. I’m thinking of defecting and going on the run. The thing is these people may be dangerous. Sally is right. That evening when she interrupted the Master’s lecture, it got me thinking, and that’s why I went to see her, and now I’m thinking that maybe we’ve been very stupid indeed. Maybe we should leave and contact a newspaper and expose what is going on. Once we get further in, as we are going to today, there will be no turning back. For fuck’s sake, it may be too late already! But maybe I’m just being paranoid. What do you think man?’
‘That wasn’t Sally.’
‘Huh?’
‘The thing which interrupted the Master’s lecture was not Sally. It just looked like her. It must have been a manifestation of the Qlippoth. The Qlippoth has been feeding on the images of desire that I (and maybe you too) have for Sally, as well as on the neurotic fears we both have about the Lodge. We were warned that there would be things like this as temptations on the Path. That definitely wasn’t the real Sally. The real Sally will have been at work in the theatre that evening. I bet if you go and ask her, you will find that I’m right. It cannot possibly be just chance that the Qlippoth should seek to materialise itself as Sally’s Doppelganger just a few days before we are about to take a crucial step along the Path.’
Now, for a moment, it was Cosmic’s turn not to know what to say. He stood there looking impressed, but doubtful. It seemed that I had outparanoided him. Am I mad? Is he mad? Probably we both are.
But Cosmic’s silence was only for a moment. He is rarely at a loss for words,
‘That was no Doppelganger,’ he insisted. ‘It was the real Sally. I went to see her last night and she definitely did come to that lecture and try to rescue you from the Master and she was crying about it. I could touch her face and I felt the wetness of her tears.’
