RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,087
(new horizons of damned bad colors)
I used to think the world was
a meticulous puzzle, with every
piece waiting to happen. As if,
in some science-fiction tableaux,
a mad doctor had all possibilities
laid out on a table, each ready for
activation. It didn't last, of course,
and I see now the pieces have all
fallen to the floor and ben scattered.
in addition, as I grew, I realized I
hated puzzles and none of this
could be. Back in like 1971, from
California I learned of 'Actualization,'
which was one of those then-faux
philosophy schools claiming to
have a special in, a point of view
more miraculous than even reality
itself: those sorts of 'schools' were
cropping up everywhere: Esalen,
Scientology, another go-round of
Rudolph Steiner, and, in NJ, even
a place far up in the woods by
Montague or Wantage or Pompton,
called the 'Madison Health Clinic.'
Weird they all were, and some took
off and became bigger-deal movements.
If a 'puzzle piece' was an expectation
ready to come to life, born in a thought,
than - by the 1970's I realized - that
I too had somehow developed my own
'Actualization.' Those people were
saying the same things!
-
A little after that, maybe 2 years,
I found myself, in Elmira, NY,
sitting around with new-school
friends. Jane Roberts among them.
Now there was a special note! Her
theoretical basis for 'Life' - which
ran straight and true, though somewhat
illusory and dependent on an outside
'entity' - explained lots of this very
well. That was OK as far as it all
went, as is any of that stuff, but it
always involves, again, with any
of it, the acceptance of certain
premises and assumptions first.
As does life; so I figured what's
the difference?
-
It always seems to me that unless
a person sourced any of this from
themselves and themselves alone,
than it was like rote learning or some
fairly useless mouthing of a learned
ABC, like any kid gets in school.
Jane was pretty - fairly - cool. She
bore many of the precise characteristics,
surprisingly, of a witch. Termagent.
Sorceress. Crone. Necromancer?
None of which she was but Macbeth's
witches would have taken her in. She
was small, dark, short, twisted, and,
dare-say, unattractive. (In 1970's era
social reality, nothing was like today.
those attributes still counted; hairy
harridans and crotch-twisted lesbos
had not yet been granted their own
clemencies). Yet, in all other aspects,
and 'out of trance' Jane was quite
perfectly normal. At her house, weirdly,
were strewn about all the usual (then,
and all pre-computer days) supermarket
checkout tabloids and scandal sheets;
movie stars eating their children, Martians
debasing Earth women and founding a
new race of pointy-heads, secret packets
of ancient dogma found beneath the
Statue of Liberty; all that crap. She ate
it all up, took it all in, from TVGuide to
Hollywood Scandal. Her husband, on'
the other hand, an artist, sketcher, and
the transcriber of all this trance-work,
was another character entire. He seemed
serenely silent, brooding, intensive of
both moment and scene. Fact is, I found
Rob the more engrossing of the two by
the manner in which the ancients came
through him, in his own presence,
without any of the charming noise she
banked on. I learned much; every tiny
inkling of something was able to bring
me nearer to my own, authentic, truth.
-
Really, that was all that mattered. All
else around me seemed wounded and
lacking. The place at which I worked,
back then, was a small print shop on the
back-street of Elmira's business district,
and a girl there, Sue Watkins, brought me
into this. She said I'd enjoy it, and the
group sessions and the NYC visitors the
weekly sessions attracted. In point of
fact, the NY group, weekly, was the same
passel of guys in a van, driving madly,
back and forth; to spread the word, and
envelope, later, the Manhattanites so
interested in any of this, mostly through
Weiser's Book Store. Today I guess in
'book' lingo, by section, it's called New
Age...or Spiritualism. They make up
these bullshit bookshelf categories now
for every geek in the world, though it's
most often done online. Computers have
fucked with everything - the transfer of
information, and all its content, is totally
different now and one no longer even
needs that old driving inquisitiveness and
intensity to track down information or
compose self-theories. Like crap and like
porno, it's all a pathetic click away.
Jane died. Some sort of withering disease.
Rob sent me a postcard, announcing her
death - buff colored card, strong orange
ink. He lingered, probably another 15
years, and then he too died. All is now
lost to the mist of those (better) times:
When the 'world' had momentum, and
its reason was bowed. Now it's trash
and vaudeville, as they say, wrapped
together in one shitty blanket. A
new horizon, of really bad color.
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