John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

But body-and-soul or simply two-bodies — the fundamental things apply, in either case. Myself, trying here to expain, trying to get once and for all a grasp that won’t betray me, trying as if I had an extra set of hands to hold back the breaking up of what I did…myself, I can’t split hairs. When my character was cracked open nothing so incredible came out. I don’t want to get all subtle and elasticized and strange. Rather, when I look for an analogy I recall the first time I held a lead fishing weight. I was just a kid then. It had Chinese markings but the brand name was French, Quinze . Something so small yet so heavy. Myself, I believe Astral Projection can be that simple, that firm. Or maybe I believe merely that I once believed.

CONNECTIONS

As for example Plato believed. He constructed kingdoms of migrating souls, hierarchies that proved which spirits you could trust. From Pythagoras Plato took the original geometry, then he fit those theorems to coordinates of his own. He sketched a supernatural universe, which he claimed provided the outline for this one. The World Soul, Plato called that universe, and he said it assumed the perfect shape and motion: a sphere, rotating around itself.

In reciprocal cycles of birth and death, like the swooning tranverse vibrations of radio waves in space, we left and returned to the World Soul. Through love of philosophy we could visit it also during our “lifetime.” Moreover the World Soul, or something similar to it, was responsible for the special tug one person can feel, from time to time, towards another. In the Symposium Plato had Aristophanes explain for him, you must remember this, that our bodies were once androgynous: “a circle, with four hands…, one head and two faces, two sets of genitalia….’’ But we were all then split in two.

In fact beliefs of this kind, beliefs in a cosmic Body of which all other bodies are dismembered parts, turn up everywhere. Back, well back before Plato. To start talking about a body that’s split and yet still living is to plunge beyond any measurement we have for historic time. Osiris for instance, in the remnants left of Egyptian mythology. Osiris may or may not have been torn into fifteen pieces by his rival in love; but according to every version of the tale, the separated bits of the god thereafter came back to life.

And go deeper still, try for something firmer still. Nature itself is dismembered, bodies split and sent flying. Caterpillars and mushrooms turn to butterflies and psilocybin. The land itself can rescue a person in one form while betraying him in another. There’s a river the name of which I can’t recall at the moment but which lies in Western China. Not that I’ve ever been to China; not that I’ve ever traveled so far. But many famous fossil hunters did try to find their way to their digs by following this river. Only the river kept disappearing. I remember reading, especially, the exciting accounts of Roy Chapman Andrews. A mere few hours earlier, the scientists had carefully marked and numbered fragments they’d assembled thus far of vast, vague skeletons. But then en route back to the boneyard, the river would suddenly disappear, “in the shifting sands of the Gobi.” Name begins with a T?

But to root Astral Projection in mud and sand provides a foundation of a mere few million years. If someone should care enough — if you and I would just care enough — we could link the magic up with the very system of the earth in the sky. Because when I hear these stories about dismembered existence, in two places simultaneously, I am hearing about the moon. The moon is dismembered night by night. Part of it exists forever in darkness and part in light. When a boy and girl join hands while looking up at the moon, without realizing it they chase down the first thrill that passes between them with harder stuff: the sky’s luminous proof of decay.

WHAT I DID

AN EXAMPLE YOU COULD GIVE

“Listen honey: nothing is going to convince me you can do Astral Projection.”

…

“ Listen , you can do all the reading you want. Oh yeah, you’re very good at that. But honey babe, no way. It’s like asking me to care about somebody when I’m not even sure what happened to him.”

CONNECTIONS

And Astral Projection is often compared to sex. I’m thinking again of Plato, and of those other classical thinkers who claimed that during a kiss the soul went out at the mouth. And Dante also comes to mind, naturally. John Donne, Walt Whitman, some passages from the chapter “Night Watch” in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood . Possibly also the contemporary writer…or is Djuna Barnes still contemporary? Alive or dead? Whatever, I believe these authors all speculate along the same lines. Leaving your own body, entering another body….

Now there is a man, a contemporary, who claims to have had sex while in the “Astral body.” His name is Robert Monroe. He’s not a writer, but rather a successful business executive. Yet since his first out-of-the-body experience back in the ‘60’s he has conscientiously investigated Astral Projection, journey after journey, and he claims that his work has involved a great deal of sex. He has a theory. We in this world of physical details are overstuffed sexually, he explains (“the one satisfaction most often denied us”). Therefore upon reaching the other world, our first need always is to unload. What precedes sexual fulfillment in the Astral sphere Monroe doesn’t hesitate to label Hell; Heaven lies beyond any lover’s desires that might be left over from the physical plane.

Yet Monroe too, for all his experience, in the end leaves us confused. He says that during Astral intercourse he feels no tug on the heavy overlapping muscles of the penis, no tightening of the scrotal sack, in fact no rush of blood or any other sensation whatsoever in the area of the male genitals. Then is this describing sex at all ? He says that a person experiences Astral encounters more or less in the upper trunk, and that they are “like an electrical discharge.”

Connections? But how can I pin it down?

Sex is compared to so much, so much: playing cards, a Chevy Corvair, the sort of close reading generally associated with poetry, playing chess, a Ford Edsel…. Except that we actually do it from time to time, we might lose track of what sex was altogether, in an oblivion of comparisons. And along with it, Astral Projection. I remember that once, several years ago now, a Newsweek critic wrote: “Sex hovers over the movie Five Easy Pieces .” But, suggestive as the phrase is, he wasn’t thinking of Astral Projection.

PHYSICAL DETAIL

There are, in the last analysis, no physical details in Astral Projection.

AN EMOTION

fear

WHAT IT IS

Yes fear. “This soul of yours,” Dr. Joy says, “ whee ! Have no fear—” stop stop , I want to say, or scream. I want to punch out the radio’s clockface. Because on all the talk shows, all the phone-in shows, all, they take our ghosts and turn them to clowns. Yes fear, because their yammer even now fills the dial. Repeats endlessly, as we run the needle round the cycle. We run faster and faster and get nowhere. Don’t pretend you don’t hate them the same. Gum chewers, bonehead goobers whose idea of passion is going one-on-one for a Michelob Light. As for what can be discovered in the gray weekly newspapers, in the hollow behind the checkout counter, it’s too painful even to think about. Only keep searching through the dismal closed circle of stations and we will find them. Oh, on that you can rely. And then, finding them, I find what I fear: the insinuation of their voices. Powerful voices, an undertow of tongues, something logy and liquid and flattering that hauls you in deeper. I hate them, but I pay attention to them. Though they cut against the grain with every vapid word. I think they must deliberately pitch themselves off-key, in order to project in a way that’s so habit-forming, in order to engage your curiosity and get you drowsy at the same time, in order to send such unlikeable yet spellbinding voices over the incalculable miles of airwaves, in order to continue sounding alien even as their whispers penetrate deeper and deeper into our ear as we doze off with the sleep-switch set. Weird saturation. Painful to keep listening and yet we keep listening; weird weakness. The outsider gets let in as the rest of us tumbles away and down into the distant parts of sleep, until that voice seems to have threaded the very wrinkles of the brains, though we know it’s talking trash, idiocy, babytalk, like singing babybabybaby…and the talk runs wild like a strip of golden infection out even to the barely sensory palms of our hands, as if we could hold the sound, feel its weight, and it runs farther because we’ve nothing left to resist…and therefore fear , yes, fear is just the word.