Image: Pixabay

So, again we’ve got two short-ish chapters here, so I’m giving you both, and since I’m about to jump in the Prius with my wife to explore some as yet unexplored parts of Portugal, while gasoline still exists on planet earth, I’m not going to write a long intro this week.

But first, a little about SCUBA diving.

After I recovered (mostly) from being paralyzed, I decided to do some things I’d always wanted to do but had been too afraid to try. I rappelled down a cliff, which not only failed to cure my fear of heights, but almost caused me to shit and piss myself. I went skydiving, (ditto on almost losing bladder and bowel control). But then I started seriously studying SCUBA (yes, it is an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, so I am being a good boy and capitalizing it).

My instructors had some trepidation about teaching me. A minor worry was that I’d had a broken eardrum as a child, but it had healed long, long ago, so this was a minor quibble; as long as I equalized the pressure in my ears properly, I should be OK.

The big worry was that I had a damaged spinal cord. I was (and still am) slightly rigid and spastic, and somewhat numb from the shoulders down. What would happen at 34 feet under water (about one extra atmosphere of pressure), 68 feet, or all the way down to the recreational diving limit of 135 feet? Would I suddenly become paralyzed again as the pressure compressed all of the soft tissues in my body, including those within my spinal cord? We just didn’t know.

After several years of diving, I eventually dove down to approximately 220 feet off of Maui, way past the recreational limit, and with no ill effects, but when I first started out, I was hyper aware that I was dealing with an unknown but enhanced and abnormal risk, and so were my instructors, who watched my first dives like hawks.

I got all the way up to one exam short of Master Diver, which is pretty funny, because I probably had less dives under my belt than any Master Diver in history, and then life took over.

I still dived for a time, but eventually money ran out, I got married, we created an amazing business that was ahead of its time and failed, bought and gut renovated an abandoned building, sold it for a minor fortune, invested it in the market although I knew we were in a tech bubble (long story), subsequently lost our shirts, got divorced, and then I paid out a large lump sum alimony payment (my second such payment to an ex-wife).

But I loved diving, particularly night diving. I still miss it, and even occasionally still have vivid dreams about it.

One of my first open-water dives was a night dive off of Marathon Key during a full moon. We went down, turned off our lights, and floated as if in outer space, trailing our fingers through bioluminescent water. It was like a mushroom trip.

Then we turned our lights back on and as we finned over coral I discovered that I could breathe in slightly deeper and rise up slowly, or empty my lungs slightly deeper and descend slowly, just as a fish does with its swim bladder, and this allowed me to cruise over the coral, flying slightly up and down vertically to follow the terrain, all in slow motion, and in perfect control. It was dreamlike and utterly addictive.

Note: do not EVER hold your breath while diving - it can kill you. You can inhale or exhale more deeply or shallowly, to an extent, but never, ever hold your breath, as if you rise while doing it, the air in your lungs might expand enough to give you an overexpansion injury and kill or seriously maim you.

The night of that first night dive, when I came up out of the dark, wet womb of mother earth and back into the air and comparatively bright light of that full moon, I burst into deep, sobbing and voluminous tears.

It was, to me, like being reborn, and all of the emotions of what I’d gone through with my spinal cord injury a few short years earlier, and what I’d surmounted - this thing I was doing that my doctors would have said was utterly impossible, just overwhelmed me with an intense mixture sadness, loss, gratitude, and hope.

It really was a rebirth of sorts, and kind of religious experience.

All of the other divers looked at me like I was a mutant, but, hey, I’m used to that...

I miss diving, and I’m not sure there’s any more in my future, but I am so glad I conquered my considerable neurotic anxieties and did a fair amount of it. Some of those moments, particularly on night dives, have been peak experiences for me.

Obviously, Andy’s experience isn’t a recreational dive, and it’s not a rebirth. Quite the contrary. It’s a dive into yet more pain and personal loss, the loss of the first woman he’d let touch his soul since Nina.

Andy feels that the Joker God, as he calls him, has cruelly only salved his wounds that he might pull out his bludgeoned, bleeding heart and shred it before his eyes once more.

Well, I spoke of those two alimonies, two deaths of hope and faith and belief in the power of love. So, yes, I am also all too familiar with the Joker God’s bait and switch…

Chapter 49

All I could do for a moment was see her face, feel her breath. I felt my heart, my stomach, my guts implode, and I sagged, sobbing, to the floor. A man in line helped me to a table and I sat, frozen for I don’t know how long, until finally my brain woke up and started analyzing the situation.

Coupled with my ordeal, this was obviously not an accident. And who else was in the car? Rumi? Ahmet? Above the grief, rage, and confusion, a new surge of fear rattled through my spent body. Someone had killed them and tried to kill me. Why they’d failed with me was anybody’s guess. Obviously outright murder was out of the question. It had to look like an accident. But what about the flood? It wasn’t mentioned in the paper at all. Surely the Zürich University Physics Department knew about it? Then I remembered. It was a holiday weekend. Probably no one would discover the flood for another two days. By then, whatever conclusions were drawn would be moot, we’d all be dead.

My mind reeled again to Silvia, to Panner, to Rumi with his shy grin. I started to choke up again and had to get rough with myself. Pull yourself together Andrew. Someone wants you dead. But a dead body floating in an underground lab run by a man who’d just died in a car crash? Surely it would provoke suspicions. It didn’t make sense. Just shoot us and be done with it, or make us all die together accidentally in that car, or just disappear. But this? It seemed messy, irrational. And who was behind it? If it was Veaux, why had he relied on physical means? Were we hard to track? Was it hard to penetrate us? Had Panner really had some kind of shield in place that had necessitated such brute measures?

I decided that a beer was more appropriate. No, make that two. I got up, bought them, brought them back to the table, chugged one and then sat back to nurse the other. The sinking feeling was getting worse. It appeared that I was a marked man. No, wait: it appeared I was a dead man. That might be to my advantage. Whoever had sabotaged the coolant pipe assumed that I couldn’t get out. If I hadn’t been observed, I just might be able to salvage some information from the lab, some edge I could still take back to Manny.

Oh shit. That meant going back into that dark hell hole.

Well, with the proper equipment it wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, was it really more dangerous than investigating all those wrecks around New York harbor and Long Island? There, the visibility was terrible, the water just as cold, the wrecks full of sharp corners and disorienting, murky spaces. And the ocean currents were murder around New York. At least I wouldn’t have to contend with them. If I just didn’t think about how close I’d come to dying, this would be a cakewalk by comparison. Yeah, a fucking cakewalk. I drained the dregs of my second beer.

The first order of business was changing my appearance. I didn’t dare go back to the Hotel Europa. Instead, I went to the red light district and walked streets full of poor immigrants and worked-out working girls. I rented a room in a fleabag. I didn’t have my other clothes or luggage, but I had my waterlogged notes from Torcello and from my time with Panner with me in my backpack, and I had my wallet, fake passport, some cash and credit cards, and my airplane ticket.

Maybe the cards and the ticket were unsafe. I’d have to think about that later. For now I had to change my appearance. I went to a local drugstore and bought an electric razor, some scissors, and some blond hair-dye. I sheared my fro down into a shorter bundle of snakes, shaved off my scraggly beard and mustache almost entirely, leaving just a little vertical strip on my chin, and then dyed it all blond: hair, beard, eyebrows. Funny, now I looked vaguely Swiss instead of Jewlatto.

No time to waste. I had to get back into the lab before anyone discovered what had happened. Off to a local dive store, to rent a very expensive rebreather, similar to the one I’d used at the lab, some underwater lights, a few tools including an underwater cutting torch system, and a six mil rubber wetsuit. I had to use the credit cards. There was no choice in the matter, especially with the deposit required. My only hope was that since this was a holiday weekend, they wouldn’t come up on any systems until Monday or Tuesday, by which time I’d hopefully be out of here. Am I too paranoid? They aren’t even in my name; they’re in Griswold’s name. Am I too paranoid? That’s rich.

I waited until dark and then walked back to the Sihl, over the bridge, laboriously toting all the gear up the hill, back to the hatch. I opened it, air rushed out with a hiss again. No water, of course. I was too high above the Sihl for the water to have breached this part of the tunnel, but the hiss told me what some unconscious part of me had been worrying about: some of the previously dry parts I’d traversed were now flooded, displacing and compressing more of the air inside. Short of a miracle, like someone discovering the leak, they’d be submerged for days. I probably had a long swim to get back to the lab. I carried the cutting torch and other gear down to the bottom of the ladder, went back up and dogged it, inspecting the mechanism. If need be I could cut my way through those flanges on the way out. No one was going to lock me in again.

I walked and walked, using the smallest of my three lights. The tunnel started to slope down, and shortly thereafter I came to it: a big black puddle. It gave me the creeps. If not for luck, and maybe Lucia, I’d be way back in there, floating against the ceiling.

I suited up, checked my gear, and walked down into the water. Soon I was in over my head. I adjusted my weight belt, and started to slowly fin down into the dark. It’s like a bicycle, you never forget how to maintain buoyancy and trim underwater, but you do get out of shape. I had to keep it slow and steady. Out of practice as I was, and in such cold water, the risk of debilitating leg cramps was very real. Whenever my calves tired, I switched to dolphin kicks for a while. They consume much more air, but the rebreather would give me a minimum of six hours. If I wasn’t out by then, I wouldn’t be coming out, so I paid very little attention to my air consumption, only slowing down when my breathing became labored or my legs protested.

Down and down I finned. My dive computer showed that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but by the time the tunnel hit bottom and angled upward, I was at a depth of about 45 meters. Deep enough that I’d need to spend some decompression time on the way back up if I tarried. So I ascended up the other side of the tunnel as fast as I deemed safe, until I leveled out again, at about 25 meters. I continued along, the featureless tunnel giving me no clues as to how far I had left to go until I passed the ill-fated ladder I’d first ascended to the flooded hatch. Now I knew I was near. I kept going to the end and swam right up the hatchway, alongside the final ladder and through the open hatch.

Chapter 50

I turned on my big light. The lab was surreal. My beam washed through the water, illuminating a range of about three meters. Anything light and loose had floated up to the ceiling. Papers and other semi-waterlogged things moved up and down and around me, disturbed by my fins. The big equipment, oscilloscopes and coils and armatures and soldering irons, all sat mute on the tables, as if waiting for a breed of underwater physicists to fire them up. The lurid red light was still there, but faint, the batteries apparently almost fully depleted. As a result, a barely discernible ruddy, bloody glow suffused the lab wherever my light wasn’t pointed. And everything was hazy, partially obscured by dust and debris suspended in the water, scattering my light beam like a pale fog.

I went to Panner’s desk, looking for something, anything that might be useful. Nada. All the papers were waterlogged, too heavy and cumbersome to carry, too numerous to go through here—and what would I see? I wasn’t a physicist or a tech. I probably wouldn’t even notice something important if it hit me in the face. But I had to keep looking. This whole trip to Zürich couldn’t have been for nothing, could it? There had to be something here for me. I slowly finned around the lab, trying not to think, trying to let my mind wander, to use my instinct to find the lost thing, like I had when I was a kid. I stopped in the middle of the room and adjusted my buoyancy to float there and closed my eyes. No, it wasn’t in this room. I had to go where I’d been dreading, into the living room where Silvia and I’d made love and slept in each other’s arms, breathing in quiet unison, entangled like drowsy photons.

I sailed over the bulkhead lip and into the living room. Candles floated up against the ceiling, the lava-lamp was tilted over, its base still on the floor, but the side of the lamp floating diagonally. It looked like a piece of diseased coral. Again, I stopped and closed my eyes, floating. Yes. Here. It, whatever the hell it was, was in this room. Where? Don’t think Andrew. Just feel. I finned slowly, with tiny movements of my legs, almost drifting but hoping my intuition would guide me. For about 30 minutes I swam around idly, lifting this and that up off of tables, the floor.

And finally: there, tucked under a corner of the futon, an envelope with my name on it. Inside, two DXCD-ROMs. One labeled Andrew Scans in black Sharpie in Fielhaut’s grandly looping script. The other had a printed label on it, but the inkjet printing had run off and it was illegible. This was it. This was what I’d been compelled to come back for. There was nothing else. I knew it. All of the other work here was dead, as dead as Fielhaut and Silvia, and probably Rumi and Ahmet as well. I thought of Silvia’s beautiful face, now charred.

“Bastards!” I yelled through my facemask. They deserved to die. And not by NODding out either. That was too good for them. They deserved to be burned alive, or to be drowned slowly. No, they deserved to watch their loved ones lose their minds, memories, personalities. Then burn the bastards—but slowly!

Get a grip.

Breathe.

It was time to leave. It had been over three hours since I’d donned the rebreather, and I needed to head back. I turned to leave and my light reflected on a mirror. I saw myself, floating in a nimbus of dirty water, suspended like an astronaut. I looked lonely and very small to myself, like an unseen insect traversing a forest, a sailor adrift, his lifeboat the tiniest dot on the Pacific, a dust mote caught in a tornado. I am nothing. There’s nothing left to me but sorrow and a desire to kill.

Carefully I finned back into the laboratory and down the hatchway, locking it behind me.

It was a long trip back and I had to hurry. I’d spent too long at depth and now I’d have to decompress in stages on the way back. Under pressure the blood, bone and tissues of the body absorb nitrogen from the air you breathe, and if you come up too rapidly that gas suddenly bubbles out violently, the way soda will spurt out of a bottle when it’s shaken and then opened too quickly. This can cause all kinds of tissue damage, including the dreaded, incredibly painful bends and a host of other maladies that are all lumped together under the label of decompression sickness. It can also kill you outright, from some form of embolism in the heart, lungs or brain. You’ve got to come up slowly, and if you’d been down as long as I had, you also had to stop along the way to let some of that nitrogen offgas, like letting that bottle of soda open very slowly with a quiet hiss instead of a gurgling spray.

I’d left traditional small tanks and regulators along the way in case I was low on air, or needed to make extended decompression stops, and I picked them up on my return. I didn’t want any overt evidence of my trip back here to tip anyone off that I was possibly in possession of something useful. True, no body would be found in the lab. They would know that I was alive. No getting around that, but best not to advertise the fact that I’d come back.

Down I went, under the Sihl, finning slowly, suddenly aware of how cold I was, how cramped my legs were becoming, trying to pace myself when my instinct was to go as fast as I could. Finally the tunnel turned upwards again. I checked my dive computer. Forty-five meters here at the bottom, as I’d remembered. The computer said I’d have to make a decompression stop at 35, another at 20, and a final one at six meters.

Sitting there at each stop in the dark tunnel, in my little bubble of light, I tried to float peacefully, to let my thoughts drift and pass the time quickly, waiting for the computer to beep to tell me that I could resume ascending. But I was starting to get quite cold, wetsuit or not, and weak as well. I’d had two beers and a croissant early this morning, that’s all. I felt light-headed.

I finished my last stop, resumed finning up the slope and came to the shallows, where I stood up and walked awkwardly out of the water. Then I took off my fins, but left the booties and suit on. Out of the water the rubber should hold enough of my own body heat to warm me up quickly. I gathered the three small spare tanks, the torch, my fins, clothes and lights and put them all into the large dive bag I’d brought them in and walked to the ladder.

I came up slowly, dragging the heavy bag behind me, dizzy and breathing in gasps. I opened the hatch and felt the cool night air of Zürich. I clambered out, seeing the twinkling lights reflected in the fast-moving ripples of the Sihl below, sprawled breathlessly out on the concrete pad the hatch was built into, and waited for the suit to warm me up.

After a while my breath was back to normal and the chill was gone. I changed clothes and headed back towards the Bahnhoff. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I didn’t think the airplane I’d reserved a seat on was a good idea anymore. Instead, I left the dive bag in a locker, took my stuff and the discs, and bought a train ticket to Barcelona.

Into Darkness (#2 of the Imaginal Subway Series). AI generated image - before I banned all AI from my creative process because it is an environmental, technological, and sociological nightmare (AI, not my creative process! :-) © 2025 Samuel Claiborne

First: a note on Manny’s Accent

I have changed mind about Manny’s accent.

No one else’s dialogue in my book is written in an accent - only Manny. That’s probably partly because some of my best neighborhood friends growing up were New York City Puerto Ricans, and I loved their accents!

Still it seems weird that I’ve singled out Manny.

So, I’m either gonna write in accents for Lucia Vernerelli and Sylvia and Panner, and Bag-Zho, et. al., which sounds tortuous, or I’m going to strip Manny’s accent away.

I think it’ll be the latter, but I must admit, I’d love to include ALL of the accents in the audiobook version! It adds spice to life, and of course I’d pick native speakers for each of those parts.

I may not get to it immediately. Manny’s accent may still show up in future chapters, and it’s gonna take awhile to write it out of past chapters. But by the time a print version is available, I trust it’ll all be gone.

Onward

How ya doin’?

Me? Well, I kind of feel like I’m in a symbolic version of this chapter and the next few that follow, submerged into an amorphous, all pervasive dark and threatening void, full of loss and grief, wherein my deepest, most core wounds are being triggered.

My only refuge is probably to run headlong back into fiction and poetry and music, and to stop reading and writing essays, or at least sharply curtail them, as well as stop reading and posting rejoinders to notes on substack and Facebook as well.

I need to let people believe what they want to believe, because I am not convincing anyone, about anything, at any time, even when I use facts and logic. Especially when I use facts and logic - Goebbels was right: playing on and manipulating emotions exclusively is what actually changes most people’s minds…

Instead, by speaking out about issues, situations, cultural blind spots and socially-sanctioned bigotries that I believe to not only be true, but really existentially important for the trajectory of the human race (as well as occasionally whining about language quibbles), I am ironically just becoming a magnet for hatred.

I usually don’t care much what people think. Or rather, I believe that authentically speaking one’s truth is more important than censoring one’s self about things that one feels are important. (I will admit, as a neurodivergent person, one with a deep history of psychological and physical trauma, what I feel is important, even critical, may not conform to your ideas of same).

But never mind: speaking my truth is not helping. I am apparently achieving nothing more than pissing people off and attracting online abuse.

I feel that I am almost alone in caricature bizarro-world of simplistic, one-dimensional, “you’re either with us or you’re against us” thinking - the amplified, hysterical, usually incredibly hateful, utterly simplistic personification of the nuance-free epidemic of reflexive ‘thinking’ that I wrote about in my last essay.

The kind of ‘thinking’ wherein truth is the first casualty and the more base an emotion a piece of language arouses, the more successful it is in getting noticed, applauded, and echoed throughout the online environment.

Why is it echoed and applauded? Because when you tell people what they want to hear, feed and affirm their deepest fears and hatreds, you get all the narcissistic supply you could ever ask for.

But when you point out that they are in fact consuming junk food propaganda, simplistic distorted drivel designed to tickle their amygdalas with fear and rage that only enhances their trauma and identarian beliefs, giving them a hate-induced dopamine hit… well, you’re not making any friends.

I see injustice and peril and the fomenting of hatred all around me. I see it as existential, an ever-accelerating rush into bigotry and fragmentation of the human race.

Ironically, later in NODding Out I talk about the Hopi myths of the consecutive worlds, and how the Great Spirit has repeatedly wiped the slate almost clean and left only a few humans to start over, because they’ve descended into heart-disconnected internecine hatred.

The Great Spirit wipes out almost everyone, instructing those left as to why this as happened and what they must do.

But after a time, they forget and revert to ‘human nature’, lose their heart-connection with each other, and to the divine, whereupon the Great Spirit blows it all up and starts the world anew again.

I see this happening right now, all around me. Not only on the right, but surging among my putative left/liberal tribe. And that’s worrying because I see it gaining acceptance among the ‘peace and love’ ‘progressives’ who seem utterly blind to the own bigotry, objectification and denigration of ‘the other’

This is all so fucking Jungian as the shadow of the ‘nice people’ the ‘good people’, repressed by virtue signaling and all the rest for so long, is bursting out with incredible force and vigor and destructiveness, all the while being embraced by those theoretically empathetic people, who have, to my mind, lost so much of their capacity for empathy.

Oh dear. You may be one of them and I may have lost you.

How. The. Fuck. To. Learn. To. Shut. Up. And. Just. Make. Art?

Because there’s nothing apparently that I can contribute, although in fits of pique I may be stupid enough at times to try again.

For now, this boy’s gonna stop tilting at some of the biggest windmills out there, and, oh, I dunno, write a poem about my cat or something, and keep putting this novel out.

That said, some really exciting stuff is coming up over these next few chapters. New, different stuff that I hope you’ll like. But it’s not going to be a picnic.

Despite that recent erotic interlude which I hope you found evocative in a life-affirming way, the world of NODding Out is rarely a picnic.

And even when it is, even after a lovely, lush, spirit-filling meal that has left Andy and Sylvia delightfully satiated, the fire ants and wasps inevitably arrive...

Chapter 48

I awoke alone in pitch blackness, half immersed in frigid water, to the sound of an alarm bell ringing.

I’ve never been so terrified. Here I was, in an underground complex, in complete darkness, with clanging emergency sirens, the distant sound of rushing water, and freezing water already covering part of my body. I yelled out for Silvia, Panner, anyone, but there was no answer. A feral unreasoning terror took hold of me and I spent all of my energy trying to breathe and focus myself with qigong meditation. I sat up into posture and started trying to slow my breathing and heart rate.

Suddenly red emergency strobes came on and began sweeping the room. I stood up and struggled in the dim disorienting light to find the door, which was ajar. I opened it, and stepped over the watertight lip and into the hallway. The water was already over a foot deep, slowly cascading over the bulkhead and into the room where I’d slept. I ran back in and put on my clothes, which were soaked as well. Then I went back out and headed down the hall, toward the ominous sound of roiling, thundering water.

I turned a corner and there it was, lit up garishly by the red emergency lights: a waterfall flowing out of one of the one-meter cooling pipes, which had apparently ruptured during the night. Water was pouring in at an enormous rate. I ran everywhere, tried every door. They were all dogged and locked from the other side. I took steel ladders up to hatches in the ceilings, but they were all locked as well. I went back to the room and tried to dog the door, but the handle had been removed from the look of it. What kind of sick joke was this? I tried the emergency phone on the wall but it was dead. I didn’t know how much time I had, but I knew it couldn’t be more than a few hours at most.

I went through the next door, also denuded of its handle, and into the lab to see if I could find something useful: a torch perhaps, to open a ceiling hatch. All I found was a crowbar, which I tried, to no avail, on a couple of doors.

I went back into my sleeping room, the living room, and picked up my knapsack, looking through it to see if there was something, anything useful. Nothing. I sat on top of a desk and tried to think while the water swirled below me, slowly rising. It had risen appreciably since I’d entered the hall. It had breached the lip of the door from the living room to the lab now, and was spilling onto the floor there as well.

I decided to try and reach someone, anyone, telepathically. I tried Fielhaut and Silvia and Bestic. Nothing. Then, faintly, fuzzily, I thought I felt Lucia near me. All I got was one whispered communication. It was so faint that to this day, I really don’t know if it was she, or just my imagination. But it was so enigmatic, and the advice offered so counter-intuitive, that I think it must have come from her.

She said: “Sometimes you must hit bottom in order to push up to the surface. Andrew: find the bottom, dive down to the bottom. NOW!”

I walked all around the room, pacing back and forth like a caged animal, while the water rose to my calves and continued to thunder out in the hall. What was she saying? What did it mean? I walked back into the lab and suddenly noticed something I’d missed before: underneath one of the work tables there was a hatch built into the floor, with a watertight wheel on top of it. I turned the wheel to unlock the hatch, but couldn’t open it. The pressure of the water in the room was too great. The water was now over two feet high and all of it was bearing down on the hatch. I ran back to the other room and got the crowbar. Using it as a lever, I pried at it with all my strength, until the knotted muscles in my back threatened to snap. No dice. Then I had an idea. If I could jump on the crowbar, using a massive transformer as a fulcrum, I might just be able to pop the hatch up an inch or two. Now, if I had something on some kind of spring that could slide into place underneath it during the second it lifted up, I might just break the seal, which should enable me to open it all the way.

I found some bungee cords in a closet and set about attaching them to a worktable and then stretching them over and around a piece of wood. The wood was pulled tightly against the side of the hatch, and I hoped it would slide underneath—if my jump could actually lift the hatch.

It took about ten tries. First I couldn’t budge it, but then I put my backpack on, grabbed as much heavy stuff as I could, and jumped from a table onto the crowbar, which finally opened the hatch for a split-second with a nasty sucking noise and the piece of wood slid in. It was open about two inches. It didn’t seem enough. I couldn’t tell if the water level had stabilized or not, but it certainly wasn’t falling dramatically, and who knew how much space there was below? Certainly not infinite space: it would fill up eventually. But now that the seal was broken, I laboriously peeled the hatch open and saw a steel ladder leading downward into a dark steel shaft. Water was streaming hard down into it now in a solid-looking column, but I went in anyway.

Big mistake. I’d just gotten fully into the hatchway with both my hands and feet on the rungs of the ladder, my head still above water, when I realized I couldn’t hold on. The water was solid, impenetrable. I tried to head back up, desperately pushing upwards against the weight of the torrent, when the sheer force of it dislodged me from the slick steel ladder and I went flying down, landing hard at the bottom, stunned and struggling to breathe through the mass of water burying me.

I dragged myself a few feet away, choking up water, and lay gasping. Soon I got my breath back and stood up. No broken bones, but I’d be very, very sore tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow.

I looked around. I was in a horizontal tube now, about two meters wide, with featureless walls. And it was dark, no lights whatsoever except for the dim light from above. It dead-ended just uphill of me, and in the downhill direction it seemed very long, disappearing into pitch-blackness. The water under my feet didn’t appear to be rising, just racing downwards rapidly along the tunnel floor. That was the good news—this was a big tunnel, with a lot of space and air in it, and a slight slope. The bad news was that it was totally dark. I’d have to move by touch.

The terror of feeling like a rat trapped in the hold of a sinking ship returned. I couldn’t see anything after three meters, so I walked slowly down the center of the tunnel, stretching and swaying slightly,trying and keep both sides in contact with my hands in hopes of finding another ladder. I walked that way for a long time, with no way of estimating either time or distance; it just seemed like forever. Finally my right hand clanged painfully into something. I’d unconsciously sped up as I’d walked, and smashed into it. It was a ladder! I eagerly climbed up it and undid the wheel by touch and tried to open it. No luck. Finally I crawled higher, so that my shoulders were wedged against it, and I was almost but not quite stretched, with just a little flex in my legs. I then used my thigh muscles to push my shoulders against the hatch. After a minute, it moved, and as it did, a cascade of water drenched my already soaked body. Whatever was up above was flooded as well.

The tube started sloping down more steeply. Jeez. But I continued, hands still brushing both sides, looking for another ladder, water splashing under my feet, rushing by me ever downwards. After a time, I got to a point where the water started getting deeper. I continued on, wading down into the dark, freezing water. Soon, it was almost shoulder-high and I half-walked, half-swam blindly through it, my body a numb piece of baggage trailing after my quailing mind.

I could no longer feel my feet, my arms were getting heavier, my hands strangely distant. I worried that any second I’d be swept forward and down to drown. But after a timeless interval, I noticed that the tube had bottomed out, and then started a gentle incline. The water level was dropping. Soon I was walking on completely dry steel, my frigid legs ungainly stilts, my clumsy feet slapping the floor hard.

How incredibly magical to be heading upwards.

I trudged along, still seeing nothing, in the darkest blackness I’d ever been in. Then, after what seemed like miles of walking uphill, the tunnel seemed to level off once more, and my hopes were once again dashed. Was I going to starve to death in here? Or suffocate after days, weeks? Well, at least I’d have plenty to drink.

I walked on. Minutes or hours later, my hand once again banged against a ladder. This one was very short, perhaps only three meters, and when I got to the top, there was the familiar steel wheel. I turned it and pushed against the hatch. My ears popped as it gave way with an explosive hiss and slammed open into brilliant sunlight and the sound of birds, crickets, and distant traffic.

I was completely shocked and blinded. I waited until my eyes adjusted and finally saw that the hatch had opened out onto a hillside, overlooking the Sihl and the Military Bridge, across the river from the gallery. Apparently this tunnel had gone clear under the Sihl and then up this hillside. Of course I was higher than the broken pipe in the lab, but I’d forgotten that I’d have to be higher than the Sihl itself to be dry. And it hadn’t been miles after all, maybe a mile and half in total. I clambered out and made my way through the brush down the hill to a street, and then back over the bridge into Zürich.

I was walking back towards the Shanzengraben, giddy at my escape, hoping to get back to the lab to alert someone, when I got the strangest feeling. It was an aversion, a… it’s hard to describe: a stomach-turning need to not go back there. It wasn’t subtle, either. More like a punch in the face. Someone or something, or maybe my own imagination or intuition, was telling me to get the hell out of there. The anxiety was almost unbearable, and almost as strong as it was in the tunnel. The sense of imminent danger rose until I turned around, and, not knowing where to go, headed towards the Bahnhoff, the giant train station.

Once I got there I went into a public restroom and checked myself out in the mirror. I was filthy. Hands, clothes, face. I washed up as best I could until I looked OK; A little like a disheveled hippie, but nothing too attention-getting. I realized I was famished, so I went to the nearest café right beside the upper tracks, and got a coffee and a croissant.

At the cash register I glanced down at the pile of morning papers and my stomach dropped out from under me. There on the cover of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung was a photo of Fielhaut Panner. Though my German is weak to say the least, the accompanying photos made it obvious. There was a photo of Silvia, and also a photo of Panner’s crushed and burned-out VW Beetle. I asked the cashier if she could tell me about the story. She told me that Panner and a graduate student, Silvia Niederberger, had died in a fiery crash early that morning. And there was an as yet unidentified body found in the back seat as well, burned beyond recognition.

Bi (heat lamp). Leicaflex SL2, Leitz Summilux 50mm lens, film unknown. © 1993 Samuel Claiborne

One of my favorite nudes ever. Shot with me lying on the floor looking up at Bi bathed in the light from the infrared heat lamp my mother had installed in the bathroom of her house.

In reading the chapter below, I see that some of Andy’s questions about what had just transpired between himself and Sylvia are the very same ones I’ve had ever since the first night that Bi made love.

And, to me, the question is really resonant because what happened to me physiologically and energetically was so profound as to be almost unbelievable.

And, in a way, as I’ve faced more and more physiological challenges in the years since, I think I’ve spent a fair amount of time unconsciously trying to recapitulate that experience through my own devices, and with others, all for naught so far, alas.

You see, at the time that Bi and I did make love for the first time, I was a mess. I was still only a few months out from my horrendous spinal cord and brain injuries, and I was in terrible pain, weak as a newborn puppy, and horribly uncoordinated too.

Bi was a friend of the family. Her boyfriend, Charlie was one of the stray pseudo-siblings my mother ‘adopted’ over the course of my childhood and adolescence, a cadre of lost teens who competed ruthlessly for my mom’s attention, often eclipsing and displacing my sister and I.

Before I’d ever met Bi, Charlie had shown me her picture, and it’d been like a punch to the heart. There was a feeling of vast recognition, vast remembrance, and vast yearning. It was like the feeling I’d first experienced at the Chinatown Buddhist Association, when the monks had started singing, and I’d started spontaneously crying, because they’d been singing the sound of home from a past life.

Bi’s face just… looked like home. She looked indescribably familiar, like someone I’d loved long ago and had lost. I was instantly, massively attracted, but it was more than attraction - it was that same weird seemingly past-life feeling of deep yearning for some thing, some one, some time, some world, I’d lost.

And man, it was deeply disturbing to me.

My father had been a world-class womanizer, and I’d spent my entire life refusing to follow suit. As a result, I’d been the absolute opposite of promiscuous and unfaithful - even onward into a marriage that had become both loveless and sexless.

When I first met Bi in person, several years before I was paralyzed, the very first thing I’d done was pull a picture of my wife and kids out of my wallet to show her my ‘happy family’. I’d placed a marker, a nice secure wall between us. I tried to be a good faithful man, but fate had some different ideas.

After my accident, I started walking from my apartment to my mother’s house every day, trying to regain some strength and coordination. And every day there, in mom’s back yard, I did hours of qipong and other things to try to regain the use of my body. And I meditated to try to heal the intense trauma, the fear and immense pain and loneliness and nervous system hypervigilance that had formed within me.

One day, Bi dropped by to visit my mom. She didn’t even know I was there.

I was sitting in the hallway, a gray, broken old man of thirty-three, who felt like a frail, crippled ninety year old.

During my accident, my face had been ripped wide open, my right eye exposed. They’d slowly pulled that side of my face together, and saved my eye, but, between the still-livid scars, and the swelling of the fractured skull and facial bones underneath, I was pretty damn scary looking. In fact, I was so scary looking that people on the subway would physically recoil and move away from me. Obviously, this only added to my mood of barren dejection and hopelessness. I was a crippled freak.

I still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it took place in 1993. I was sitting on a chair in my mom’s hall, a gray, sweaty, weak mess, trying to regain my breath after my amazingly arduous slow walk of probably less than a half mile from my apartment to my mom’s place, when Bi walked in.

She had seen me exactly once at Bellevue, when she and Charlie had come to visit. They’d only come once, and had never visited me at Rusk while I was in rehab, nor at my apartment, so I hadn’t seen her in months.

In that interim, the feelings of ‘victory’ I’d felt while in rehab, as every day I gotten better, and tons of people came to visit and encourage me, had been replaced with sorrow and ashes once I’d gotten home to familiar surroundings, saw no more visitors, and got no real human nurturance from my wife or even my kids, who were now a bit afraid of this scarred, scary-looking, newly bearded (you can’t shave when you’re paralyzed) stranger.

Once at home, I also saw just how handicapped I was. On my birthday, in November of 1992, I struggled for over a half hour to try to unwrap a CD someone had given me as a present. That same day, when my wife Mirta and the kids went out somewhere, I came closer than I ever have before or since to committing suicide, leaning farther and father out of a floor-to-ceiling window, daring my weak arms to… just let me go.

The only thing that stopped me was the thought of my kids coming home to find my body on the concrete below. No matter how much I wanted to die, no matter how lonely, lost, and helpless I felt, I couldn’t do that to them.

Instead, I’d stubbornly kept walking to mom’s to get my exercise and do my qipong and meditation, and on this day as I sat catching my breath, Bi arrived. She came over to me in the hall and asked me how I was doing, probably sensing my utter dejection.

Then she looked at me, kind of cocked her head, and leaned over, and very, very delicately kissed the swollen, angry scar near my eye.

It was just a single very gentle kiss. There was nothing romantic or erotic about it. It was a simple kiss of human concern, a gesture that communicated care, but it also seemed full of recognition of the psychic and physical pain I was in, the damage and destruction I’d suffered and was struggling to rise above.

In that moment, my heart broke! Neither my wife nor my mother had seen fit to do this or really seen fit to offer any kind of physical comfort and reassurance. Neither had seen my need for this kind of simple gesture of love and connection and compassion.

As I watched Bi leave, moments later, I asked God, the Universe, Source, whatever you wish to call it, why I didn’t have a partner like that in my life? why I was, instead, in a desert where no one who should have cared seemed to realize how entirely fucking broken I was?

Months later, I separated from Mirta, and moved back into my mother’s house, another symbol of defeat to me, but my stubborn qipong continued, as did my walks as I walked back to my apartment almost every day to see my kids.

On these walks, I passed right in front of the brownstone where Bi had an apartment, but I never saw her… until one fateful day.

That day, as I approached, she and Charlie were having a loud and acrimonious argument on the front stoop, and as I arrived, he stormed off. Charlie was 6’6”, a very imposing man, whose default emotion often seemed to be intense anger at the world.

He left and Bi asked me if I wanted to come up for tea. I remember as I struggled up the stairs to her apartment, some kind of alarm bell ringing in my head. I guess I could feel the pull of destiny. Something within me knew that a catalysis was happening and change was coming.

We had tea and talked and talked and talked.

And we talked the next day.

And we talked, several times a week, for hours, for several months.

I, as per my usual utter lack of confidence, could never conceive, all evidence to the contrary, that Bi was attracted to me. Even in normal times, when I looked like this:

Me, age 32, mere months before I was paralyzed. Camera, lens, film unknown. Photo © J. Henry Fair.

I still felt I was the not in the least an attractive man. But post-accident? With my face all fucked up, my skull swollen, walking like a shambling broken golem? I was fucking Quasimodo.

But I certainly was attracted to her, and I loved our conversations. For the life of me, I really don’t remember what we talked about, but we never seemed to run out of things to discuss.

One day, after many months, Bi suddenly led a very surprised me to her bed, and we made love.

But… we made love all night. Like gods, goddesses, beasts, bodiless beings of light, like all the things Andy talked about in the last chapter. And that was impossible!

Not only had I never experienced sex like that before, you have to understand: I was really fucking broken! I could barely walk. Using my body in almost any way left me breathless from the massive mental effort of will it took to try to control it.

Yet that night, I felt I had the strength of ten men. I felt confident, powerful, coordinated. I didn’t even know myself, this was so new, so unprecedented for me. I felt utterly re-born, re-instantiated into a body I’d been estranged from, an alien shell I’d lived in, since that accident. But reinstantiated with more power, more energy, more life force than I’d ever felt!

The contrast between hours before that night, and that night, where we made love into the dawn, was so extreme, so inexplicable, so foreign to not only any sexual experience I’d ever had, but to my concept of what my broken body could accomplish in terms of healing or regeneration, as to be utterly gobsmacking. It made no sense. It was impossible. And yet there it was.

I’ve spoken before of the ‘qi resonance’ phenomena I subsequently observed with Bi - where, even walking down the street, I’d suddenly feel stronger and know she was nearby and that I was going to run into her - which always subsequently happened. But all of that took place only after that night.

Something got liberated that night. Or conjoined, shared, initiated, instantiated, reconfigured. I don’t know.

I’ve always felt that Bi had a stupendous surplus of qi. Her being just radiated it, and it was part of the charisma she undoubtedly still has to this day, but that still doesn’t explain what happened to me.

Someone once suggested to me that the either singly or in combination, my accident, and my time that night with Bi, broke open, liberated, my kundalini energy. And indeed, for the first time in my life that night, I’d sensed that archetypal kundalini cobra’s hood of energy draped over my shoulders and head.

That seems the most likely ‘explanation’, even though it’s more of a description of an event, rather than an explanation of how or why.

I do not know the how or why, but I sure wish I did! Faced as I am these days, where I want to heal the physical issues I’m currently beset with, but feel frustrated at every turn, because even walking is painful, I want to understand it because I want to harness it again!

Was it all within me? Was it all given to me by Bi, for that time in our lives (years of incredible vitality did follow that event)? Was it something we co-created? Can I ever kindle a repeat of this kind of renaissance and regeneration on my own, or with someone else?

I dunno. I only know that it was one of the most mystical, magical, inexplicable, miraculous, most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had, and I am profoundly grateful for it, and for Bi.

We got married, but our relationship eventually foundered. And it was bad. I was destroyed by it. She was the woman I’d been determined to grow old with, and it was not to be. I felt betrayed and abandoned. But time can heal, and I got over it, and Bi and I, while not close, do communicate with fondness and mutual support and concern from time to time.

And to this day, whenever I speak to Bi, I reiterate to her that she saved my life and that’s an incredible thing to have done for another human being in your life!

At a time when I really wanted to die, and was without hope, she made me want to live again, returned a profound hope to a profoundly hopeless man.

And not just because I was physically reborn the night we first made love, although this was without a doubt an important part of it.

But also because she showed me that love and care existed for me at a time when I felt utterly abandoned and bereft, when she gently kissed my scarred face when nobody else would.

Chapter 47

Silvia and I woke the next morning, tangled in the sheets, our seemingly conjoined legs a Mobius bundle. I’d forgotten, really forgotten what it could be like. I’d forgotten that it had been my life, my source of power and self-realization, to make love with Nina. She’d been my church, my avocation, my everything. And this lovemaking, though different, energized me similarly.

How could it have been so powerful with Silvia? It had been like a dam breaking, and I felt more alive than I could remember since Nina’s death. Was she a soul mate? What were the odds? Or was something else going on? Was it the result of the hallucinogens I’d taken on Torcello, or a sort of bonus for all of the psychic and energetic work I’d done? Was it that I now had a level of control of my qi during lovemaking that I’d never had before, and it naturally did its thing without need of intervention? Lucia’d told me that with enough knowledge and control, Taoist sexual practices rivaled Tantric ones in terms of subtlety, pleasure and transcendence.

I wasn’t in love with Silvia like I had been with Nina, although I was attracted to her and felt a genuine tenderness, as well as a more rough lust. It was more like my body, my qi, loved hers with great tenderness, roughness, thirst; a physical love, different from the heart and soul and brain and bone love I’d had with Nina, the resonance that Panner had spoken of. You could make love, feel love, but not be in love. Hmm. I’d never known that the two are divisible from each other, but apparently they are. All I knew is that I felt like a man again. Damn, it felt good.

We got up, had some wonderful Sumatran coffee and lay back in each other’s arms for a while, my hands idly stroking her hair, her back, her wrists, both of us breathing into the other. Finally, a key in the door told us that it was time to work. Panner came in, nodded to us without even so much as a raised eyebrow, and went into the lab proper, while Silvia and I showered and dressed.

Dressing was sort of a waste of time, because within an hour I was naked, breathing through a SCUBA rebreather and floating in a tank of warm salt water, a tank surrounded by layers and layers of copper wire that had been precisely machine-wound around it after I’d entered it. If there was an emergency, I’d be up the proverbial creek, because it would take them a minimum of a half hour to unwind it all. Of course, I had redundant regulators and tanks, so short of a heart attack, a seizure, or a stroke, I’d be fine. The SCUBA gear was full-face, so I could communicate via microphone and headphones. They told me to relax while they tuned the gear. It felt like the MRIs I’d had after a bicycle accident—my third eye went nuts. It tingled and pulsed and was, while not exactly painful, quite uncomfortable.

Finally, they were satisfied, and they spun the field up. The magnetic field, super strong, would somehow create a bottle to trap whatever it was I was emitting long enough for it to be mapped. And beyond that, the intensity of the field was also a catalyst, causing a small but measurable graviton cascade, each person’s as unique as a fingerprint.

Soon their portable graviton emitter would be calibrated to me, as it was already to Veaux, and when the time came, I’d turn it on and hopefully have a fuzzy window right into his rancid little soul, and those of his buddies.

Once the mapping was over, I was let out and re-showered and dried off and dressed. I walked back into the lab and watched the monitors which were playing back the mapping. I saw positrons, electrons, gravitons and anti-gravitons, color-coded swarms of particles surrounding me in a glowing corona, lines and swirls, vortices of particles spiraling off of me in all directions.

“We have rarely previously observed such a profusion of particles, such an intensity of energies, nor such tightly-spiraled vortices before, Andrew. There is something quite unusual in your energetic configuration. I begin to understand what Alan was so excited about.”

“What? What did Bestic tell you about me?”

“Not much, only that you had potential, and that unfortunately your darkness had almost completely succeeded in cutting you off from it, from the wellspring of your being.”

I shrugged. Me? Things like finding mom’s lost stuff had always seemed like parlor tricks. I wasn’t impressed, but they were, so I guess I’d have to take it on faith. Bestic had said that whether I walked hand-in-hand, or was carried kicking and screaming, I’d end up in my destined place. And funnily enough, as I looked over at Silvia and she gave me a smile, I began to feel that what I’d shared with her, like what I’d done on the beach in Torcello, and at Wutaishan, was just that: a surrender to the tide, to let it take me where it might, and a commitment to stop trying to make the world bend to me, and instead, to bend to it. I’d resisted each and every one of them: Bag-Zho, Alan Bestic, Lucia, Panner, Silvia, and yet they’d all moved me closer to my self.

After lunch, Panner and I had a conference call with a friend of his in the biology department. I needed someone with the goods to go over an idea that I’d floated to some med. school buddies. Last I knew, they’d needed more info. I thought that Panner, with his telomere-based species and racial-typing knowledge, and this Doctor Roiker, who was his trusted friend and apparently a top molecular-biologist/virologist, could come up with what I needed. We talked for about an hour while I took copious notes, mostly consisting of terms I couldn’t even spell, much less understand.

Then I mostly hung around uselessly, looking over Panner’s shoulder and kibitzing as he worked on the cross-mapping algorithms that would allow me to penetrate the SUR group mind.

He finally lost patience with me and shooed me out of the lab. Sylvia and I took this as our cue to go out for the night. But first I hit an Internet Café and sent Manny a steganographic update. I also sent those buddies of mine a very long steganographic note.

Sylvia took me to a club called Moods at the Schiffbau building in Zürich West, where we heard incredible avant-garde singers from Tuva throat-singing live over a trance beat, the whole crowd rapt as they sang two and three note chords from one throat. Then we went out and danced all night at another club down the street, a gritty electro-tribal place full of kids on E.

But we didn’t need chemical enhancement, we had each other, and we danced up a storm, getting sweaty and liquid, before she finally took me back to the lab and we made love again, but very differently. Neither of us came, neither of us particularly wanted to, we just moved with each other, while we looked into each other’s eyes. Oddly, in a way it was more like kissing.

It was the last time I’d ever see her.

Bi. Digitally colorized B&W negative. Leicaflex SL2, Summilux 50mm lens, Film: Tri-X, Colorization done in Photoshop version 1.1 © 1993 Samuel Claiborne

I am such a contrary bastard. The minute I got my hands on Photoshop, what did I do? I used the latest tech to emulate a 19th century hand-tinting technique on a black and white nude I’d shot of my then girlfriend, later second wife, Bi. As part of the composition, I decided to only tint Bi, and left the rest in black and white. This shot was eventually featured, ironically enough, in the Australian photo magazine, Black & White.

This week, I am giving you two chapters because they’re both relatively short, and because I got no mo’ essays in me at the moment.

Be forewarned, those who do not appreciate such things: The second chapter is the only part of the novel that veers into out and out erotica.

Why write erotica into a ‘normal’ novel? Well, I guess I share the considerably less puritanical sensibilities of many Europeans: sex is a normal part of life. I love that a French movie may have some sex in it, just like it may have a dinner scene in it, just because it’s part of life, and it’s part of how the characters relate to each other, and it’s part of how they are shaped by their experiences.

I’ll leave it at that.

Chapter 45

This was all too much, too fast. I needed a drink of something stronger than tea. Let’s see, we had positrons, which were either a) the initiator and/or b) the product of tachyon cascades. And we had gravitons—and how did they connect? I wanted some simplicity, goddammit. It was all so abstruse, and it seemed to get more and more complex each day. More techie, and more touchie-feely, though I smiled as I thought about that, because I’d touched and been touched by that new-age (or, if it’s ancient Taoist, should I say age-old?) stuff. I knew that what Tom and Manny had cooked up in the lab at the Rockefeller Institute and what I’d experienced with Bestic and Lucia were both as real as anything else in this world. Was Panner the cat who could put it all together? Was he the grand synthesist?

Frankly, the idea of sharing a group mind with Veaux and the rest of those reptiles scared the bejesus out of me. Oh yeah, you can call me a coward, but you imagine being thrust into their sphere of influence. Nine of them that I knew of, including one of the most high-functioning psychic adepts around, Thomas Croft.

No matter. It had to be done. I was to be resonance-mapped tomorrow. In the meantime, it made sense, given time constraints and the possibility of being followed, to stay in the P.E.C. lab. They had a sort of living room set up in one of the offices, with rugs on the wall and floor, a hookah, a small fridge, pillows and a futon. This was to be my bed, but first, Panner said, some festivities were in order. I wondered if the hookah was to be involved. I hadn’t touched pot since my lost month after Nina’s death, and I never intended to again, as it clouded my mind in a way that alcohol didn’t, but I guess I could stand to be in the same room, for politeness sake.

Rumi disappeared and returned with two more members of the team. One was a blond Swiss hippie-chick named Silvia, in an outfit that featured a Tibetan hat, rainbow-striped Mexican blanket poncho, and lamb-skin leggings over cowboy boots.

Man, the more things change the more they stay the same. She could have fit right into the photos I’d seen of the first Woodstock concert—actually she was a sort of mixed-up mélange of several people you’d have seen at Woodstock, so the effect was kind of like a condensed-soup retrospective of the 60’s, which I found very amusing. I also noticed that under all that gear, she possessed a sinuous athletic body topped off by gorgeous blue eyes and an infectious smile, a smile that wasn’t afraid to be exuberantly silly.

The other member was Ahmet, a very intense, short, muscular guy, from Turkey, I think. Silvia’s cheer was counterbalanced by Ahmet’s dour intensity. He didn’t much look like a party animal.

They’d arrived with three small watermelons, not standard fare for May, at least where I live. You just don’t get a lot of out-of-season fruits and vegetables anymore, what with shipping still slowed to a crawl by all of the security checks, and the persistent global Nuclear Autumn. “Hydroponically grown here in the lab,” Panner said, answering my quizzical expression.

Each of the dark striped melons was an almost perfect sphere, and Panner and Rumi smiled to one another as they put them on an old wooden monk’s table.

“What’s the joke?” I asked, noting the pregnant looks.

“These melons are a specialty of the department,” Panner said. “Note the small plug in each one.” There was a cork in each, which I’d failed to notice before. “We cut a hole, scoop out a bit, and pour in 100% lab alcohol and let it sit for a few days. A couple of pieces and you’re bombed!” His eyes had that maniacal twinkle again, and he and Silvia exchanged a quick glance, which brought a flush to her pretty face.

What’s going on, I thought? Are they doing each other? Or is this an orgy, in which case, I’m definitely not interested, but I certainly wouldn’t mind that drink.

Rumi came over with a knife to slice the melon and suddenly tripped into me and nicked my arm slightly with the knife. His eyes got wide and he looked like he was about to cry. “I’m so sorry Andrew! Oh my God, are you all right? Oh God. I’ll be right back with the first aid kit.” And he strode off into the kitchen area.

Silvia followed him and came back with the knife. “Don’t worry, I washed it!” She said gaily. She looked at the minute trickle of blood on my bicep from the tiny scratch. “A slice will kill the pain of our bleeding hero, no?” Then she leaned over and licked my arm with a wicked grin. “I am a vampire, Andrew, but I cannot drink from a drunk, so, save yourself! Please eat a slice!”

She cut off a big chunk and handed it to me as Rumi came back in the room looking shocked and distracted and carrying a first-aid kit. This poor guy was looking so guilty, and all for a scratch! I felt bad for him and told him “Don’t worry man, it’s nothing.”

I waved off a proffered bandage while I bit into the succulent fruit. A strong stinging burn overlay the sweet slightly musky watermelon taste. In no time my lips and tongue were numb, as if from Novocain injections, and soon it hit my head. I lay back on one of the pillows and just kind of melted as I listened to the Swiss-German conversation swirling around me. My eyes felt heavy, my body like water. A vagrant thought that I might have been drugged passed through my mind, but I laughed it off. I’d drugged myself. They’d warned me that this stuff was potent and I’d ignored them.

Soon they were all sitting around and Ahmet, much to my surprise, was laughing with a big lopsided grin. I noted that Rumi was leaning back up against him, and Ahmet had one hand in Rumi’s hair, the other was idly circling one of his nipples. Rumi was still looking a little distracted. I hoped it was his tit and not any more foolish guilt that was doing the distracting. Maybe Ahmet’s continued ministrations would loosen him up.

I leaned back and shut my eyes, occasionally opening them to find everyone talking happily, their faces lit by a silly little lava lamp they’d set up in the center of the rug, and the candles spread around the room. The last thing I remembered was watching Rumi and Ahmet kissing deeply, while Silvia and Panner talked animatedly.

Chapter 46

Some time later I woke to feel someone kissing me lightly on my eyelids. Someone, thankfully, with smooth lips, smooth skin, and no whiskers. “Silvia?” I said.

“Ummm.” She was leaning on my chest with her lips pressed to my eyes, then my forehead. I gently pushed her away.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that…” I looked at her miserably, unable to say more.

“Yes, you’ve lost someone,” she said. “I know. I can see it. I don’t pretend I can be her, Andrew, but I am here and you are here, and I want you, and,” she looked at my crotch, “you seem to want me too.”

“Maybe so, but he’s not in charge,” I said.

“How long will you wait? Two humans, even if they are not soul-mates, can comfort each other. It can be very healing. You are still very bitter and Fielhaut and I believe that you will not prevail until you learn to love life again, until your rage becomes a rage for something, rather than merely anger at what you’ve lost.”

I looked at her appraisingly. “So, this is a mercy fuck so that I can be a better warrior? Is this a protocol that you two cooked up for me?”

She looked genuinely shocked and hurt and I regretted my words immediately. She turned her eyes directly into mine and spoke very quietly, very seriously. “Andrew, we all see your pain, and Fielhaut and I remarked on it, it’s true. And he could see that I was attracted to you as well. But there was no discussion of this. I am here without anyone’s permission, without plan. Rumi and Ahmet and Fielhaut have gone home. I stayed because as I watched you sleep, I wanted you. Like this.”

She put her arms around me. Then she pulled herself close and rubbed her cheek against mine, pressed the whole side of her face to mine and moved softly against me, like we were two cats. I caught my breath. It was such an intimate gesture, and it was so utterly unexpected from Silvia and yet so... familiar. Nina used to do that too. It made me want to cry. Maybe I’d been lonelier than I’d even let myself know. I only know it felt good, and I yearned for her suddenly, and the past fled from now.

I rubbed my cheek against hers in turn, opened my mouth and turned my face inward, so that my teeth could softly glance her neck, incising her with a hint, an intaglio of desire. I heard a soft growl in my chest as I took her throat gently in my open mouth, pinned it there with my bared teeth, and held her, feeling her quickening pulse conducted through my jaw like a distant drum.

Something inexorable was taking me over, a long-dormant strength I’d forgotten I’d had. Maybe it was the spirit animal that Bag-Zho had talked about, come to possess me. I wanted to mark her skin with my teeth. I wanted to take her, own her, possess her. But slowly!

She sighed, almost cried as I held her there, while my hands softly graced her curves, slid under her shirt and teasingly danced round her areolas, the sides of my fingers just barely grazing her nipples. I circled her brow with my palms, teased her closed eyelids with my fingertips.

“I think your hands know something that you and I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “No” I said, “they want to learn, to know you.”

Then my hands suddenly found purpose and reversed their orbit of her, went behind, to her shoulder blades, and gripped her hard, and pulled her to me, and finally we kissed, hungrily, thirstily. And need became desire became unreasoning being. Just being: no thinking, no doing, no past, no future, just blessed being.

We slowly, teasingly, softly, quickly, brutally undressed each other. Febrile hands darting and sliding and struggling and ripping; her hands down my jeans, searching; my hands sliding along her belly then reaching across to touch the insides of her thighs with the soft undersides of my wrists. Then both of us suddenly stopping dead to look into each other’s eyes, our breath caught in our throats. And then pushing her down, pulling her legs apart, and taking her into my mouth, or almost into my mouth.

I breathed on her, teasing her with each exhalation, making her wait for contact, my breath a gossamer echo like a ghost tongue. And finally my lips touched her slick labia. Slowly, slowly she opened to me, and then my tongue was deep inside her. I hummed loudly, making my nose vibrate as it pressed against her clitoris, my hands barely stroked her nipples. And she arched her back, pushing herself into me, her movements an odd mix of urgency and languor. My hands left her lioness chest to grab her under her ass and lift her off the futon and up to my face, and I lost myself in her tastes and smells.

I glanced up and saw her, eyes closed, blond hair raining down on either side of her face, lips pulled back, mouth open, teeth bared, nostrils flared. She was a leopard, a snow leopard all sinew and strength and resisting me and yielding to me, and taking her pleasure from me, pulling me to her, pulling her joy from me as she arched and crossed her legs behind me to pull me deeper. Then all at once she froze, unbreathing, every muscle locked. Her eyes flew open, looking straight into mine, and she came, waves traveling along her body like riptides. Then she relaxed, fell back to the mattress, unfolded, limp and melted.

And as she closed her eyes, I slid up and entered her in one agonizingly slow movement. I put my face close to hers, watched her eyes reopen, widen, her mouth open as well into a silent O. Slowly, making us both wait, our ragged breath burning in our chests, I pushed gently, bringing me into her deeply, until finally I pressed against the entrance of her womb, the place the Chinese call the golden palace, where all that qi is stored. We could both feel it: that energy streaming out of me and into her receptive body. I clasped her hands in mine and we slowly moved together. There was no agenda, no timetable, no goal. We just were, afloat in each other, riding the swells of her ocean, gliding the thermals of my sky.

And for a few hours, what was I? A god? A beast? And what was she? We were a menagerie. The boar, the snake, the bear, the cheetah, we were all of these things, and we were a pantheon of gods and goddesses, or at least it felt that way, as an incalculable strength seemed to flow and build inside me, and I saw it in her too, felt it in her coiled muscles and pulsing dantian.

Sometimes we were incorporeal, or at least no longer animal, human, or gods in human-made image. And sometimes it was just… still. Stillness. Forever. All time, movement, intent, thought, gone. And only the ebb and flow, the pulse of our qi-bodies resonating with each other, told us that we still existed at all, maybe as two particles, wavicles, caught, motionless, in a wavering sea of Brownian motion, the chaos of being churning all around us.

And sometimes, re-embodied, we traded places: sometimes it felt like it was she who had entered me. Sometimes, as she straddled me and I opened myself to her, it was she who took, who raged within me as I gave her license to take me, penetrate me energetically, own her yang side as I owned my yin.

And sometimes we really couldn’t tell who was inside whom. And then my body-consciousness would reawaken, and I would roll her over and mercilessly bear down upon her, enter her again, take her without mercy, without pity, and of course without rancor, but with a sort of rage for our mutual pleasure. Deus Irae, Deus Dulcis, Deus Astrum, Deus Aeternum, both of us, miraculous, burning within each other without being consumed, like the bush, the aurora, the sun and all the stars in all the stilled heavens that had stopped, waiting for us to breathe.

Now I was the leopard, biting her shoulder, almost drawing blood as I took her from behind, moving in a blur as I slammed into her, churning roughly within her, marking her pale shoulders with my teeth. And I was the Adi Buddha, worshipping with her, she resting in my lap, arms around my neck, legs around my waist as I moved tenderly and indolently inside her. Deep within her, my temple, calmly holding her aloft in her own dream of the world, holding her there, where I cannot follow. Keeping her at the knife-edge of space, where blue sky meets black air. Holding her there in divine embrace as she shuddered in her own rapture, her lambent blue eyes open yet sightless.

And at dawn I heard this tremendous sound that battered the room. It took me seconds to realize that I was making that sound as I brayed like an enraged bull, roared like a lion, shook the walls, the tendons in my shoulders and neck singing along like taut bridge cables, every muscle straining to lift the entire earth, as my seed finally streamed into her.

And then I slept, and dreamt of lying in fields of new mown hay on endless summer evenings in Amenia, when I was twelve and working on the haying crew. The smell of clover mixed with the sweat of sore muscles. Hanging out, smoking my first cigarette, drinking applejack with the crew, getting my first real kiss from, if you can believe it, a farmer’s daughter, to whom I swore my eternal love.

Buddha Cairn, Pig Cairn, Rat Cairn, Shawangunk Mountains, Leicaflex SL2, 50mm Leitz Summilux lens, date and film type unknown. © 2004 - Samuel Claiborne

So, if you’re a science geek, the ‘science’ in this chapter is probably gonna tweak you. It is kinda off the deep end, after all.

And yet: have you ever felt that ‘gravity’ with another person, as if you were inexorably drawn together whenever you met, circling ever tighter until… crash?

It all could just be brain chemistry and evolutionary biology playing with us, but I decided to take it, and the psychic experiences I’ve had, and try to construct some ideas around them when I started writing this book.

I mean, the ‘workspace’, or the morphic field, a term I learned 15 years after writing the book, certainly gives us some explanation of why people can read each other’s minds — and they can, albeit imperfectly.

I have had so many psychic experiences of reading minds, as well as experiences of clearly and specifically foreseeing the future, which is a little harder to theorize about unless, maybe, you start to think that time is not linear, but rather that ‘every when is now’ and causality is just an illusion. Otherwise, how could I predict my mother’s and father’s deaths so specifically? I simply do not know.

I come from a very skeptical and empirical place, and I don’t tend to put much stock in anecdotal evidence. But I’ve experienced too much personally to discount it all.

I mean, hell, I’ve worked on people remotely and been able to ‘feel’ into their bodies, again, with great specificity, when I do remote healing work. That sounds wack to people who don’t believe in such things, I know.

I had one friend tell me that I had a ‘God complex’ because I thought I could remotely work with people to help them heal.

My reply? You’ve got a God complex yourself, if you are certain that this is impossible. We have no idea what is and isn’t possible! There’s more going on under heaven and earth than we can possibly imagine.

Part of the journey of the sciences has been discovering previously-invisible things. Gases, like oxygen and nitrogen, were invisible. It took experiments to find them, weigh and measure them. and their properties

Galaxies were invisible until just over 100 years ago. Yes, we’ve only known about them conclusively since 1923, the year my mother was born!!! That’s… mind blowing to me.

There was a time when the idea that tiny living (and, in the case of viruses, sort of living) things were all around us, and on us, and teeming within us, was laughable. Then Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at some water from a local lake and found it to be absolutely bursting with life! The previously unbelievable became accepted fact. And, later, the idea that most disease was caused by such critters, even more unbelievable, proved to be true as well.

And, yeah, I’ll refrain from using the most overused word in the firmament of alternative healing, ‘Quantum’, except to say that the more scientists delve into the quantum world, the more inadequate our human perceptual frameworks of both space and time seem to get.

So, to me, my friend’s assumption is what is really surprising. How does he think he knows so much about how the universe works? Fuck if I do.

It’s even more breathtaking to me that I, someone who’d just had a ‘knowing’ about diseases inside people as a kid, so thoroughly abandoned my gifts that I, too, came to a point in my early 20’s when I convinced myself it was all in my head, and that all of this psychic stuff was BS.

And then there’s poor Andy. He’s another empirical doubting Thomas like me, arrogant and sure in his world view. I mean, look how hard he fought with Manny’s conclusions.

His rage, largely in remission but still ready to burst into flame anew, his monastic mono-focus on finding ‘the one’ to save the world, his science geek beliefs in how the world ‘really works’, the ways he thoroughly diminishes his own psychic abilities. well, the Joker God has been and is gonna keep challenging him until he opens up his mind, his heart, his body completely in surrender to a larger reality.

But I gotta give him credit: every time the universe tries to crowbar him out of the familiar, although at first he fights and argues, eventually he acknowledges the need to grow his vision beyond what he thought was true, and just keeps going…

Chapter 44

While he rattled on and on, I was first amused, then annoyed. Why on earth would I care about all of this drivel? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Hello guys! The world is about to end. Get down to brass tacks already. I’ve got no time for sex, and especially for love. Oh yes, I knew resonance. God had allowed me to gorge on resonance with Nina. There were times when I felt we were one complete being. We’d made love for hours, laughing and playful, serious and meditative, slow, fast, soft, hard, funky, sweet. I’d never tired of it.

And I knew that feeling of wellness and vitality that seemed to spontaneously arise around us too. But then God, the Joker God, the scumbag who had created Croft and Veaux, took her away.

All this talk only underscored what I’d lost. It merely forced me to see once more that the most wonderful union between two people I could ever imagine had been pulled from me slowly, piece by piece by, by what? Fate? A cruel God? Two crazy greedy assholes? Did it fucking matter? Relax, Andrew. Breathe.

“Look, this is all well and good, Dr. Panner, but what on earth does this have to do with me? Bestic said you might be able to help me, not give me a course in physics-cum-metaphysics.”

He smiled at my unintended pun. “Patience young man. It’s right in front of you. It should be nudging your brain by now. Don’t you have any intuition?” his eyes twinkled.

“Look, I don’t have time for 20 questions. People are dying.”

His face hardened. “Look, we’ve found that when people have resonance with each other, their, as you call it, Workspace, is more permeable to each other. There’s a kind of natural mixing of the Workspace, an almost shared unconscious between the two. It’s not complete, of course, but you know that zone, if you’ve ever had a soul mate like I had in Hilda. You know that feeling where you can almost read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences. That is the shared presence, this little sphere, enclosing you both like an energetic womb, life percolating between you. And that permeability seems somehow related to a symmetrical dance of particles and anti-particles coming from opposite directions. It’s as if the stimuli and the result are the same event.”

And then something did click in my brain. The record and play buttons are the same. Particles, anti-particles, spin, polarity, yin and yang, particle tracks, the cat stretching out and pulling back its paws. Something almost formed, some vision of a Taoist reality, a divine dance of opposites, almost revealed itself to me, and then was gone.

Panner continued: “Andrew, we can now map an individual’s resonance patterns. It’s taken years, but we have developed an unbelievably sensitive gravity detector array. It turns out that all humans subtly distort gravity in ways that are not explained by Newtonian physics—or quantum mechanics, for that matter. We all interact with gravity, our qi interacts with gravitons. Actually, all living things do. You could say it’s God’s heartbeats we’re seeing. We’ve worked and worked and managed to create a filter that can map one person’s pattern, although it is quite difficult and involves putting that individual inside a spinning magnetic field, immersed in water, with a SCUBA regulator for air, of course.”

“Umm, sounds lovely, Doctor. Do you get many repeat customers?”

“As a matter of fact we do, Andrew. Here is your punch line: Veaux learned of my work. He does insist on keeping track of old friends, at the barrel of a gun if necessary. He had his whole team mapped, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

“The only reason I think I’m still alive is that he thinks I’m useful, because of the mapping technique and because,” and here he paused and looked down at the floor, “because I am the one who helped him create the first prototype of his storage device, back at Plum Island. He has kept me alive because he thinks that he still may need me sometime. Mostly he leaves me alone, but two years ago, shortly after we published some of our findings in an obscure journal because none of the major ones would take us seriously, he called and brought his whole team in. We measured them and gave him the data. We were watched at gunpoint while we did it, but we managed to keep copies, although he thought we’d destroyed them.”

“Why were they mapped? What’s the point?” I asked.

“Because of something that was suggested implicitly in the article that his technical team was astute enough to pick up on. We intimated that a resonance could be artificially induced. We know this because, because we pioneered that as well. Because we mapped people and then made a device that utilizes that map to cross-link Workspaces. It’s a modulated graviton emitter that sort of fools the universe into thinking you share resonance—or if you prefer a more scientific answer, it allows a mutual increase in Workspace permeability, compared to un-augmented human consciousness.

“And so what have Veaux and friends done? They’ve created a pseudo-resonance with each other, with the whole group, a group-mind, so to speak. Veaux’s done it for two reasons. One to ensure loyalty by ensuring that there are no real secrets, and two because it produces a very efficient and speedy way to delegate tasks and share information and insights. They are all still individuals, but they all have this thing that feels kind of like intuition, but is highly accurate, about what each member of the group is doing, thinking.

“It’s not as if every detail of each individual’s thoughts is available, but strong emotions are, and if one is concentrating on sending a thought and others are concentrating on receiving, it can get pretty specific. Surely they can feel when one member is disloyal, or in danger, or if that person has died. And once or twice a day, they turn on their graviton emitters and communicate with each other this way, a sort of intuitive mixing of ideas that they find very fruitful in adapting to threats and coming up with new concepts.”

“Well, you have been busy haven’t you,” I scorned. “You’ve handed Veaux the keys to the kingdom. Anything else I need to know?”

“What you need to know is that we’ve got them mapped! Don’t you see what that means? We can create a resonance for you. We can cross-link your Workspace with the core group’s joined mind, and that may enable you to get inside their Workspace more easily and blow it open. In effect, we can soften the walls you’re going to have to break down.”

“Wait a minute. You said you pioneered the original storage device. You can create a device like the SUR box? Something that writes over, blanks out a Workspace? Why not just give me that?”

“Because they’ve got countermeasures for that. It was the first thing they developed. No, you have to enter their joined Workspace, then erase them. We will give you the tech for erasure too; but their co-resonance is their Achilles heel.”

“Yeah, but the minute I join their group mind, they know, kind of know what I know, and the jig’s up.”

“Not exactly Andrew. You will crash their party, amped up with some of our other gear, and your golf-ball, perhaps, in the state of consciousness that you’ve learned from Alan and Lucia, jacked up on amanita or ayahuasca. All of this should produce immense shock, disorientation and confusion within the group and buy you precious time. But there will be shock for you too, as you suddenly find yourself immersed in the thought and memory shadows of nine people, at least we only mapped nine. Veaux has the technology to add to that now.

“We can only hope that since you will be expecting it, and they won’t, and because of your training, you’ll be able to take advantage of the situation. You know when SWAT teams storm a building, with flash and stun grenades? That’s what we may be able to offer you, a way to jimmy open the back door and come blasting in to a blinded, confused bunch. They have countermeasures. They have training. They are paranoid and on guard no? But we have the element of surprise on our side, as well as the very important work you’ve done with Alan and Lucia. We need to map you so that we can fashion our crowbar/stun grenade for you.”

Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. His raconteur-like slyness and broad smile were gone. “I have caused immeasurable harm, I know. Much more than the Manhattan Project scientists, or even Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. My work has been used to steal countless minds. We have all lost people we loved because of it.” Here his lips trembled. “I lost Hilda because of it. I joined the project, moved my family to America, because it seemed a perfect way to research this nexus of physics and metaphysics. But when I saw where Veaux was heading, I left the project and refused to do any further work for him.

“He came here, several years later, and requested my help. Again I refused. I said I wouldn’t have anything more to do with him. Within days, Hilda was forgetting things. Within a week she was gone. And then I helped, God help me, because I’ve got a daughter and a grandson and because I am a coward. I bit my lip and swore I’d kill him, and instead I helped make him stronger!

“But I didn’t mean to harm anyone. When I was at Plum we knew the Soviets were working the same problem. The original black box was a research tool, used on monkeys. We needed to simulate an attack on the Workspace in order to develop countermeasures, so I created a device that could imprint and read back an exact pattern on Workspace keyed to an individual macaque, so that the pattern could be examined for alterations and data loss after each successive psychic attack.

It was a research tool that we’d never countenanced using on humans, until Veaux saw a use for it that no sane person could ever conceive of. Then it was only a matter of further research into the keying, the mammalian groups, the racial groups, and the telomere configurations, which enabled him to start mass erasure.

“I kept a low profile here in Zürich and prayed he would forget about me. Of course, he had a researcher check everything we published, no matter how obscure, and came back for the resonance mapping. My naïveté astounds me in retrospect. I’ve stopped publishing now, of course.

“It was no great loss to let myself be forced out of my chairmanship due to the controversial nature of the sex experiments and the general derision our findings were met with. I’ve had enough sway, and seem eccentric and harmless enough that they’ve let me continue research here, as long as it does not involve sex directly anymore. And now that I’m no longer chairman, our work is mostly ignored, out of sight and out of mind, as you say. But that’s not to say we haven’t been busy. We’re mostly spending our time decreasing the grain size of the detectors, and increasing the power of the graviton emitter—standard physics research actually, although we are pursuing it for reasons that are far from standard.”

This is a very good sign (Burning Man 2017). Canon EOS digital. © 2017 - Samuel Claiborne

Hi there. First things first:

In my quest to find some way for those of you who wish to support me more modestly (and maybe only once in a while as the spirit moves you instead of monthly) I think I’ve found a solution with the site Buy Me a Coffee.

You can use this link: Buy Me a Coffee to donate one of the default amounts, which start at three dollars, but you can also put in your own amount, down to a single dollar. And you can make it a one-time donation, or opt for a monthly one.

If you like what I’m doing, I hope you’ll consider subscribing or, if that’s too dear, perhaps buying me a coffee from time to time.

Cheers.

I’m gonna make this short-ish because the last few intros have been really long, but a recent chapter as well as this chapter bring some interesting and amusing memories to mind.

I don’t know if I was a genius or a fool, but I threw out thousands of negatives, many of which I’d never scanned or even printed on contact sheets (if you don’t know what those are, God(dess) bless ya, youngster!), when I moved from the USA to Portugal last year. Literally thousands, going back to my early 20s, many rolled up in those things that used to be ubiquitous, film cans (I loved the metal ones, which is really dating myself).

I know, I know, what artist does something like this? Well, it’s worse, because I also threw out thousands of hours of recorded musical rehearsals and jams too. I amputated a huge amount of my creative past.

Why? Well, there was so much stuff, and, given that I’d had it all sitting in my house, untouched, unseen and unheard, much of it for 26 years, and given that once I started listening to rehearsals and performances with my brother Jan in Things Fall Apart and with Jennifer Lowman in Loons inthe Monastery, I ended up crying profusely for days on end, I looked long and hard at myself and came to these conclusions:

1. The emotional wear and tear of images and sounds of lost loves, friends and relatives was just kicking the shit out of my heart. I really thought that I could hear my brother and I fucking around on tape over 35 years after his death, but apparently, I couldn’t.

2. I tend to look to the past, and all too often with an overlay of grief and loss, and this was not helping. Rather, it was exacerbating an existing neurotic tendency.

3. The magnitude of what I’d have to transfer into digital form would take thousands of hours to do correctly. This is especially true of scanning negatives. You need to clean them, and sometimes multi-scan then to filter out scratches, and then you need to spot the scans in Photoshop. It’s very, very labor intensive, unless you’re wealthy enough to hire a service (which will never, ever do as good a job) or an assistant (who might or might not be good enough and care enough) to do these things for you. I am not wealthy, so it’d have to be me, literally spending years.

4. The biggest reason is that I asked myself: do I want a large portion of the rest of my life to be engaged in a vast retrospective project that almost no one will care about? What am I gonna do - have gallery shows for a photographer with no reputation at all? Put out a bajillion musical releases based on music I did decades ago? The answers to this were twofold:

   1. I already have some good old material to share, as I have been with poems and photographs and music.

   2. More importantly: I want to create new stuff while I’m able! I want to write more books and record more music, and maybe get good at creating videos. In short, I’ve got a lot of creativity left, and I need to change my orientation more to the present and future.

So, with regret, I decided to throw it all away.

It was fucking hard, but it’s done now.

And the tangential result is that I have no pictures of a really cool part of Zurich that features in this chapter, the below-grade section of the Schanzengraben, pictures I am absolutely sure I took...

It was probably 2002, and I went to Zurich with a male friend. I’d just finalized my divorce to Bi, and he, a cocksman of some renown, wanted to get me laid as “therapy”. (This is “therapy” for men who don’t believe in intimacy, grief, and healing - i.e. not me, but I went anyway -I mean it was a free trip to Zurich with a guy I’d been friends with since grade school!).

While there, I managed, in my inimitable style, to miss, stymie and sabotage every attempt at flirtation that could possibly lead to sex that was offered to me, and left without any assignations, which, truth me told, was a relief.

I think my conscious self rather the liked the idea of a dalliance (please distract me from the pain and make me feel confident again!), but my heart wasn’t in it. I was broken into little pieces, at the bottom of my self-confidence, and just plain crushed by the failure of my second marriage.

Bi was the woman I was convinced I was going to grow old with, and the heartbreak was just all encompassing at that time; it felt like there was no room for frolicking with a virtual stranger. I will note however that, having never had a one night stand, my soul apparently finds the prospect of frolicking with a virtual stranger extremely unpalatable.

But the conscious part of me tried to convince me that I should at least try my friend Steve’s ‘cure’ of ‘getting back on the horse’ (ugh). So, I spent a crazy night without my friend, in a bar in Zurich, very close to the area I discussed in chapter 41, listening to good jazz, smoking Cuban cigars, and drinking prodigious amounts of supremely overpriced Irish whisky.

Whilst engaged in all of this, I also managed to adroitly, in true neuroatypical fashion, totally frustrate an Italian-Swiss woman who was clearly hot to trot.

I felt bad and embarrassed the next morning when I went over the night’s proceedings. I mean, the poor woman hit me straight up with a broad smile, followed up with “Do you believe in love at first sight?” I’d thought for a second and very seriously (but not intentionally unkindly, I swear) said “No.”

I just did what I do: utterly failed to understand the meaning of small talk and her overt facial expression in the moment (but understood all of it the next morning, which seems a gratuitously cruel thing for my brain to do). In the moment I took the question as a philosophical one because, well, because the ground of my being felt: why would any woman possibly want to flirt with me? That’s a helluva frame to put yourself in, fella - but I’ve lived much of my life there.

She tried valiantly for most of the night, clearly on a mission to get laid herself, and I utterly failed to take the bait, over and over, partially because of self doubt and self loathing, partially because I am neuroatypical in some form that’s hard to define. I’m not classically autistic, I am not classically dealing with Asperger’s either, but I am seriously ADHD, and this is, more and more, becoming recognized as part of the spectrum.

I am also the classical introvert who despises the very concept of what feels to me like basically meaningless conversation as social lubricant. I basically only want to talk about things that I think matter. (Do not ask me “how are you?”, because I will tell you).

I’m either deep… or boring… or both. You tell me.

But there was yet another reason for rebuffing this woman: I secretly had the hots for the German-Swiss bartender, a Nordic/California looking blonde who rang my bell, probably most of all because in virtually every way, from facial structure to stature to build to coloration, she looked the total opposite of Bi.

So, I intended to get drunk enough to gather enough fool’s courage to hit on her.

For the first and only time in my life, I stayed at a bar (I hate bars!) until closing, ordering one Irish Whisky after another, talking to her whilst also inadvertently fending off my undoubtedly intensely frustrated Italian-Swiss pursuer.

I remember at one point the Italian-Swiss woman said “My friends think you’re a serial killer, but I think you’re cute.” This put me off and bummed me out, because people are so often intimidated by my looks, and since I don’t wish to intimidate or scare anyone, I hate this.

I, of course, also totally missed the social cue that she was hitting on me by teasing me. As I often say: I’m the stupidest intelligent person you’ll ever meet. Or maybe just the slowest, because my brain will consistently serve this kind of knowledge up to me hours later, possibly just to spite me.

Or maybe I’ve just been so damaged, from such a young age, that I lack even a modicum of self-confidence in some (thank God(ess) not all) areas.

I’ve been so obtuse, and at times so down on myself that I think it’s a fucking miracle that I’ve gotten married 3 times, and have helped to make two children…

But finally my pursuer gave up, doubtless in disgust, or maybe even in sadness at feeling rejected, which makes me feel badly, and sometime after 2 am, only the shiksa goddess bartender and I were remained in the now silent place.

I was standing at the bar, putting on my coat to leave, thinking “Are you ever gonna get the courage to ask her out?”, when she said to me “How are you still standing?”

“Excuse me? How am I still… standing?”, I asked, completely bemused,

She turned the display on her cash register around and pointed at the screen. “You’ve had 16 Irish whiskeys in the last 5 hours. How can you still be be standing?”

I dunno why, but somehow this filled me with some frisson of warped male pride, and I stood up a little taller, squared my shoulders, and muttered something about being a big guy who could hold his liquor, and then I went for it. “What are you doing now?”, I asked.

“I’m going home.”, she replied. Smiling.

I immediately smiled back and offered up: “Well, I’d love to make you breakfast.” (You may think this was hackneyed or tacky, but I think it was probably the best spontaneous attempt at hitting on someone of my entire lifetime… sad, I know, but at least I meant it).

She smiled back, doubtless a kindness to a man who’d clearly had too much to drink, and said, “Oh, I have another job. Soon I’ll have to get up for that one, so I need to go home and go to sleep right away.”

“What’s your other job?”, I asked.

“I’m a nurse.”, she replied.

“Well, I could break my leg .”, I suggested, an angelically sweet smile on my face. (yeah, I know, but at the moment it seemed charming in a blurry kind of way).

She gently suggested that this wouldn’t be the best idea, I admitted defeat, put my coat on, thanked her for a lovely evening as if we’d been on a date, and semi-steadily departed the club.

I decided to walk all the way home to the hotel, which was quite a ways away (I’d come here by tram, and the trams were long closed, and Uber etc. didn’t exist at the time, and I saw no traffic, let alone taxis, so “decided” might not be the right word.)

And on the way, I did decide to follow the Schanzengraben, the canal that connects the Sihl river to the Zurichsee (Lake Zurich). I’d always thought the canal flowed from the Sihl to the lake, as that’s what I remember seeing, but Wikipedia insists it’s the reverse. Maybe it depends how hard the river’s flowing, because I believe the Schanzengraben was built as a flood control measure to tame the Sihl.

At any rate, I decided to follow the entire course of the canal to the lake. Some of this involved public areas, and some, I think, involved climbing fences and trespassing, though my memory of the night is, ummm, murky.

But the highlight, for sure, was the below-grade portion. Down there, I passed a whimsical seemingly out-of-place municipal water polo court, and then found myself in this mesmerizing section with the water near ceiling height, running behind a glass wall, the aquatic plants swaying like siren’s hair.

Just one long glass wall built alongside the underground promenade I was strolling along. It was like I was in a tunnel of air and water, bifurcated by a piece of glass, with the dark water streaming past on my left, with dark forms of fish streaming by as well

It was one of those moments (and I’ve had most of these moments totally sober - so it’s not alcohol, it’s just how I’m made) of quiet awe and appreciation. I remember that it was a little chilly, but I stopped and just stood there for a long while, hands touching the glass watching the mystery of the fish seemingly melt in and out of existence as they silently flew past, in and out of dimly lit mottled pools of light, barely illuminated through the glass from the walkway lights on my side.

It was the high point of my night, and a typical introverted moment; alone in the quiet dark, drinking in unexpected subtle beauty.

I‘ve tried like hell and failed to find a picture of that glass wall on the internet. I undoubtedly I took one myself - but that negative’s in a landfill in NY state somewhere now.

I’ve also tried to find a nighttime picture that captures the mystery of it, but I failed at that too, so here’s a cheerful daytime picture of a pretty part of it from the promenade that runs intermittently abreast of it:

Schanzengraben. Photographer Unknown.

Chapter 43

The phone rang. I opened one eye and checked the clock: 3:45 am. I picked it up, and a voice I didn’t recognize said “Professor Panner will meet you on the underground Schanzengraben Promenade in 45 minutes. Come alone,” and hung up.

I got up, tried to pretend to myself that I was sober, got dressed and went downstairs to ask the sleepy desk clerk where this “underground promenade” was. She looked a little confused for a second, and then said, “Oh yes, the below-grade section.” She pulled out the hotel map to show me.

The Schanzengraben is a little canal that connects the Sihl River to the Zürichsee, Zurich’s large lake. As I’d walked to the hotel I’d seen the mouth of it entering the lake. It snakes back toward Panner’s neighborhood, passing quite close to the theater/galleries/restaurant where I’d run into him.

I walked along dark, shiny, rain-slicked streets. Finally, there were stairs leading down. At the bottom I could see a below-grade promenade following the water. I went down and continued walking. The promenade was deserted. I’d much rather have been walking it at noon on a sunny day rather than here in the dark.

A voice suddenly told me to stop and stand still. It was not a nice voice. I was getting a bad feeling about this. I stopped and put my hands up.

“That won’t be necessary,” the voice behind me said drily, and I sheepishly put them down, embarrassed to realize that no-one had ordered me to raise them. “We are going to blindfold you, please don’t struggle, and don’t be afraid.”

Sure.

I let them blindfold me. We slowly marched up stairs, turned this way and that, marched down stairs, more up, down, left, right. After about ten minutes of this, a squeaky heavy-sounding door was opened, and I was hustled inside, nearly tripping over the raised ledge of a door sill, led to a chair, and pushed down into it. When my blindfold was removed, I was staring straight into the face of a young man, perhaps a college student. He had a scraggly beard and dreadlocks and was grinning like an idiot.

“Good scare we gave you there, eh?” He said. “We had to make sure you weren’t followed or bugged, now we’re safe.”

“Where am I,” I asked, looking around a room that looked like a cross between a bomb-shelter and a submarine, with poured concrete walls, dim industrial lighting, gray steel shelves and massive steel watertight bulkhead doors with large iron wheels to seal them.

Panner’s voice boomed out from behind me. “You’re inside the Positron-Electron Collider Lab, built under the Schanzengraben by the University of Zürich Physics Department. We use the water to cool our equipment. We use the location to isolate us from excess RFI and other particle noise. This facility is no more than 30 meters from where Rumi here picked you up, but it’s primarily 30 meters of solid gneiss, lead, mu metal and a few other goodies. Stray particles, short of neutrinos, rarely get in, and, needless to say, nor do ours usually get out.

“Now, don’t bother to tell me why you’re here or what you’ve done or intend to do. I’ve talked to Bestic at great risk to both of us, but then again, what’s risk versus the certainty of what we face, eh?”

I started to speak, but he waved fussily at me.

“First I need to tell you a little about myself and my students. It’s both true and not true that I am no longer involved in physics. You could say that I’m only involved in art and metaphysics now, but ummm, I’m sort of involved in the nexus of all three.

“I’m no longer officially active in the faculty or chairman of the department. I presume you’ve seen my artwork, the paintings of auras around people making love. What you don’t know is that these paintings are not some representation of artistic license. They are almost paint-by-numbers copies of photographs taken in this facility. Well, not photographs exactly in the literal sense but graphical representations of particle and field emissions, generated by humans in states of sexual ecstasy and communion, and captured with a sophisticated multi-state detection grid of very fine granularity.

“Although I’m on sabbatical, I’m still tenured faculty, and I have full use of these facilities, and a core group of five students carrying on this secret work, of which Rumi here is one.”

Oh Jesus, I thought. What on earth has Bestic gotten me into? The physics department nerd-orgy subsection? I don’t have time for this shit. Veaux and Croft are preparing to eat the rest of us and I’m in on the Secret Society for the Quest for the Particle of Passion? The Nookietrino? Maybe Bestic’s brain is a little more toasty than I thought.

Then I caught myself. No, Andrew, cut the shit. Bestic’s no fool. You’re here for a reason, so stop judging.

Panner could read the discomfort on my face. “OK, I’m starting at the end, rather than at the beginning, so let me start over. Would you like some tea? Rumi, please get the man some tea, eh? I have been a research physicist for 45 years. My other passion during that time has been Taoist practices, which is how Alan Bestic and I met, at a center in Amsterdam about fourteen years ago. Oddly, neither of us knew each other from the Project—he left before I came in, so we’d never met before. Fate is odd, eh?

“At any rate, I’ve studied many aspects of Taoism, from philosophy to martial arts and qigong, to Taoist sexual practices. My focus was immortality, as viewed through the lens of classical Taoist teaching. The more I studied Taoism the more I saw an overlap with physics, and the more I saw that immortality was real, though not quite what we think of it in the West as such.

“Taoism implicitly and explicitly believes that reincarnation is a reality, but again, not in the Hindu or, by extension, Buddhist sense. Rather, when you reincarnate you are actually a new being assembled out of free-floating energy gates liberated from other beings at death. You don’t have one soul, but rather four to seven soul-pieces, I guess you could call them.

“And why do you have particular resonance with some people? Because one or more of your energy gates, bits of your soul, and one or more of theirs, were shared by a single being in a previous incarnation. You have a unique and intimate connection with them. And that connection can be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or two women, and it need not be sexual resonance. In fact, there are several types of resonance I’ve codified that probably depend on which gates are involved. However, the sexual and qi resonance that I shared with my late wife, Hilda was the catalyst for this research, and has been the focus of my work because of its unparalleled intensity.

“When Hilda and I made love, it was far, far more intense than anything she’d ever experienced. She’d had a previous boyfriend who was, shall we say, better equipped than I, yet she swore I went deeper, touched places he never had. I have since come to observe that it was qi, reinforced and unbounded qi that was actually penetrating that extra depth, ahead of my penis.

“And for me? There’s a line from a Neruda poem: ’I want to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees’—that’s how she made me feel. I was walking on air for days after that first time, bursting with health and strength and vitality. Never had I even suspected that sex could be so ecstatic, so energizing, so deep and passionate and powerful, so full of heart. And I had that experience for 47 years.

“I didn’t know if this phenomenon was unique for me with Hilda alone, or with others as well. I only knew that it was real. And, once I lost her, I wondered, is there only one person for me like that? Or are there so few in the world that my odds of finding that kind of ecstasy again were remote at best?

“The Taoists feel that the vast majority of humans are not reincarnated, are in fact not fully human, but animals making their transition to humans. These transitional beings are not worthy of respect, but are worthy of fear, due to the enormous amount of destruction they can visit upon the world. Stalin, Mao, Hitler and many more recent figures like your Pell, Perle, and Veaux of course, are such animals in human form. They are the majority.

“By comparison, there are a few million old souls, humans who’ve been around through many recombinations. They carry imprints from many, many generations of being human, and so contain the most potential for resonance. These people tend to be humane, tolerant of differences, kind, intelligent, and spiritual in some sense. But by no means are they free from all human foibles.

“After Hilda passed away, after I grieved for a few years, I awoke one day from a dream where she’d scolded me and told me that it was time to start living again. I found a small group to work with: Rumi and four others, ages ranging from 22 to 57. We have devoted ourselves to finding a physical manifestation of this resonance, to seeing the interactions of energy gates transmuting qi-bindings into newly-loosed energies.

“When one of us found someone with which we had unusual resonance—sometimes it was a deja-vu feeling upon first meeting, sometimes seemingly shared past-life memories—we tried to measure all sorts of things as the two were brought into closer and closer proximity. But the interactions were too subtle. Later, we decided to try sex because the resonant sexual energy is so strong, so unique in experience, it might afford us a better chance of observing physical phenomena. But of course we had to wait until someone on the team found that rare soul mate, that co-resonant being to love, and to have a sexual relationship with.

“Another two years passed before it finally happened. A Basque grad student named Eneko fell in love with a Turkish girl named Afet.

“When Eneko broached the inevitable subject of their becoming research subjects, Afet was not interested, in fact she almost broke up with him. But after several months of coaxing, she agreed, though with some conditions of her own: the room had to be made up to look like a home as best as possible, with a real bed, paintings or textiles on the walls etc. There was to be no visible light observation, no windows, no two-way mirrors, no cameras. Similarly, no infra-red or night-vision imaging equipment, and no sound monitoring, except for a telephone, that could be used to contact them, or for them to contact us. They could stay in the room for as long as they wanted and commence lovemaking whenever they wanted. Monitoring would be continuous, while they lived and worked and ate there over the course of a weekend at a time. This was, of course, a huge data load, but at least it gave us large baseline measurements.

“After these careful negotiations were completed, we readied our room for observations. We really didn’t know what to expect, so we set up equipment to capture any kind of energy we could think of: ultraviolet, microwave, brain waves like alpha, beta, delta, theta, and of course various particle detectors. One grad student even installed a gravity-wave detector. The whole experiment was set up right here, in this highly-shielded facility.

“When we finally got underway, the results were not subtle at all. We didn’t notice much until they started kissing. Then stray positron pairs were detected. We already were filtering out normal positron emissions from their brains with some sophisticated software that used the grids of detectors in the walls and floor combined with open-field PET imaging to track the source of particle emissions. An infra-red detector array was the one point we managed to sway her on, as long as the images were just used for synchronizing their positions to the grid-overlays so we could accurately track the source of particle emissions. But it wasn’t a camera, just a grid. Anyhow, the rate of emission increased radically as they kissed and caressed each other, but when he finally entered her, there were intense flashes of particles that blinded our detectors totally. The tracking software crashed as well, but not before measuring out-rushing positrons from their bodies, and, more curiously, large numbers of particles rushing into their bodies, seemingly from nowhere. They had become particle magnets, for lack of a better word.

“These particles consisted of positrons primarily, with secondary cascades accounting for the others, or so we thought. But that crazy grad student with his silly laser gravity beam balance—he got subtle gravity wave distortions that overlapped quite well with the other energetic behaviors.

“Over the course of several months of observation and number crunching we came to the reluctant conclusion that the positrons were probably secondary cascades themselves of primary phenomena of graviton and anti-graviton particles. We haven’t worked out just what is going on, but the resonance is real, and it involves gravitons, and it seems to serve as a joining place between the karmic and physical worlds.”

Milk Drop Coronet splash - Harold Edgerton, 1936 - Camera, lens, film unknown

We have here a single milk drop that has hit a bowl of milk, and this startlingly gorgeous '“crown” of milk has been formed by the splash, and, really symbolically (for me, anyway), the initiating milk drop (or the resulting progeny thereof) has bounced back up to the top of the frame, ready to drop once more to create even more beauty.

That something so small and so mundane, when looked at from a different angle (or, in the case of the high-speed flash photography that Edgerton perfected, from a different time scale), can transmute in such an unexpected way, and that such previously unseen, possibly previously unimagined beauty can emerge is, to me, miraculous.

So, I have a really good friend, whom I’ll call Jane here. She’s a healer, a seriously wise sage, and also really knowledgeable about astrology.

What do I think about astrology? Well, as I’ve said before - I have two well-balanced, diametrically opposed sides to me; a deeply analytical ‘3D world’ side, and a deeply intuitive ‘5D’ (6D? 7D? I dunno…) shamanic, mystical side.

They are both valid. They’ve both been right many, many times. They both have their place. But determining what place they have, well, there’s the rub.

They rather disagree on astrology, one calling it utter balderdash, the other one finding intriguing threads in it, especially in the astrological concepts of the south and north nodes.

There was a very famous astrologer named Jan Spiller who wrote many books, and in an interview late in her life she said that she paid little attention to the Sun Sign that most astrologers use as their jumping off place. You know the sun sign, it’s the one you use when people ask you your sign.

But Jan Spiller contended that the south and north nodes have much, much more bearing on a person’s life trajectory.

Greatly simplified, your south node is what you came in with from past lives (and, Mr. 3D be damned, I do believe in past lives for very specific and, for me, very compelling reasons), and past karma (which, sorry Mr. Science, I also believe in). And your north node is what you’re evolving towards.

So, how does this relate to my last chapter’s introductory essay, which I also published as a stand alone essay, and this one, which is a bit of a meandering rejoinder to it?

Well, to paraphrase and once again simplify greatly, my south node has the attributes of warrior, maverick, iconoclast, self-protection, and a kind of self-contained “You come in alone, and you go out alone” mentality attached to it. It’s all about relying on self alone, not trusting in love, finding it difficult to ask for or receive help, or even to connect to groups and to society at large.

And a lot of my life has been lived this way. I have been a bit of an introverted loner from a very young age, the result of… bullying, neglect, physical and sexual abuse? That’d be my guess, since I was basically a confident, cheerful, outgoing kid until a concatenation of events starting around age seven or so kind of broke me. But whatever the cause, karma, the stars, or this life alone, I certainly came to distrust love, to disbelieve, on some unconscious level, in safety, security, or anyone consistently, reliably caring for or about me.

My north node is about connection, community, co-dependence (in the positive sense, hence the hyphen to delineate this), nurturing others, leading from the heart, not the limbic system, and perhaps above all, trusting and receiving.

OK, so WTF does that have to do with the last essay, which so exasperated Jane?

I think it’s fair to say that that essay came from a spirit of defense, hypervigilance to danger, etc. I.e. it came from my south node self.

I am so friggin’ odd…

I am a healer, if not first and foremost, it’s certainly very high on my list of things I do that matter to me. I am also almost universally seen as a gentle, caring, and empathetic healer, on the gentle end of an already very gentle healing modality (Ortho-Bionomy).

And these things that I have trouble trusting in, believing in, are the very same things that I yearn for - so I practice random acts of kindness, with clients, and with total strangers - if my guides essentially tell me that this person needs to learn to believe that there is love and care for them in this universe, on this planet, in this life.

So, I externalize the very lesson I need to learn, try to learn, yearn to believe in, onto others who seem to need that same type of validation from the universe.

But! I am also an argumentative, troublemaking, opinionated, sometimes verbally very aggressive agent provocateur and pain in the ass. And I have a quick, judgmental, articulate little brain that sometimes wields words like a switchblade.

But! I yearn for people to get along! I yearn for peace, gentleness, trust, love, sharing.

But! I don’t trust people… at all. I honestly tend to think that most humans are not very bright, resort easily to brutality, are impulsive, nuance-free sheep who are greedy, and generally transactional “new souls”, little better than chimpanzees.

But! I find some humans extraordinary in the depths of their nuance, complexity, caring, kindness, brilliance, and creativity.

In short, I am my dad (south node energy) and my mom (north node all the way) slapped together: a warrior man, always ready to use offense as the best defense, and a gentle heart-centered, nurturing woman, trapped together in the same body.

And, yeah, that last essay came form that south node warrior in that I looked around and saw ruin, greed, and negative, inhumane trends accelerating in front of me, and decided to ponder WTF a “warrior” would do about it - to the point that I pondered on a world wherein people murdered corporate murderers...

I mean, I’m completely a pacifist - except in self-defense against physical violence directed at me or my family or friends, so the purpose wasn’t to promulgate violence, and indeed, I didn’t.

I was merely asking what do we do in the face of violence, most especially in the face of diffused, often hidden and abstracted violence on a scale that humans can’t really process.

And I wondered aloud if and when violence might be morally acceptable, even imperative in a world driven by murderous unfettered greed for material wealth and power.

The essay still stands for me. Its questions are, to me, germane to one way of looking at our current situation.

The essay is also one long contradiction: I opine about Elon Musk believing that empathy is a bug while, what? Proposing that people like him might, if they’re killing millions, deserve to go bye bye? I mean, Jesus Christ on a crutch in Poughkeepsie, Sammy!

When Jane and I spoke, and she was so exasperated with my essay, we discussed it, and, as usual, although I don’t agree with everything she says, I came away with some wisdom from a more heart-centered, rather than fear-centered place.

I can’t articulate this position as wholeheartedly because I am not as wise as she is on these matters, and I am skeptical of certain aspects of it, including astrological aspect of it that may be valid, or may be complete hooey. But I’m gonna try…

A Countervailing Argument…

Jane said: “Judgement is what people do when they can’t metabolize their feelings.”

And that’s true. The big-hearted empathic part of me is overwhelmed by human suffering, just plain overwhelmed, much of the time.

She feels that my last essay is a cry from a wounded heart that just can’t deal with what I see all around me.

Well, yeah. I am amazed that we mine metal out of the ground, smelt it, merge it with explosives and fuses and propellants, so that we may lob it at others in the hopes of eviscerating them. Like… I really can’t believe that we’re so fucking smart and so fucking dumb as a species.

I’m a tech nut, an aviation nerd, an engineering nerd. So I look in fascination and amazement at the 1960s project to create an airplane called the XB-70, a supersonic plane that literally flew on its own shock wave! They developed a honeycombed titanium skin for it. They developed systems to move fuel through that skin to keep it from melting as the plane approached 3 times the speed of sound. They developed tens, maybe hundreds of amazing techniques, materials, mechanisms, engineering solutions to create this crazy airplane with 6 jet engines that looks like a prehistoric flying dinosaur.

It’s a miracle of human ingenuity! It’s gorgeous to look at, and breathtaking to study, if you’re into, oh, I dunno: aeronautics, metallurgy and materials science, structural engineering, fluid dynamics, jet propulsion, and a boatload of other areas of human endeavor.

And what was this thing built for at astronomical expense? It was designed to penetrate Soviet airspace and drop thermonuclear bombs that would kill millions per bomb!

What. The. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. Us????

I am continually unable to process what humans do. Perhaps I’m from another planet or something, but I am constantly amazed at how so much cleverness throughout human history has been devoted to implements of war and torture.

I am, at heart, a shameless idealist. I really want to believe that we can all learn to get along.

But history, according to the left hemisphere of my brain “proves” that humankind is indeed steadfastly cruel, rapacious, and greedy.

But what if history is wrong, Jane asks?

What if it’s wrong because a state-change is taking place within humanity, and we poor benighted souls have chosen to be here, at this time, on this planet, just as the shit is hitting the fan and the old order is holding on by its bloody fingernails and breaking everything in sight as it loses its grip?

She, and a lot of other people believe this.

I think she also believes that I am hurting myself wondering about, worrying about, things I cannot change. Or as she puts it: “The world is not enriched by you feeling terrible.”

She even feels, empath that I am, that it’s possible that the increasing pain I’ve been dealing with for almost 15 years, and especially in the last 2.5 years, may be related to how I am processing reality around me: “What if as a deeply empathetic man who is seeing the damage, the hatred, the vast numbers of dead, cruelty, etc. - what if that is what’s flattening you? What if the expression of your body in response to all of it is all of this pain?”

“Judgement is what people do when they can’t metabolize their feelings.”

Yes. I’m bathing in world-pain. And I see open wounds all around me, and it fucking hurts. And maybe it’s killing me…

Do you remember this from Chapter 34?

“You’re a receiver, you feel too much of those around you. There are only two ways to deal with that, either move away from people, spend time alone as much as possible, or swim in the oceans of suffering and try to alleviate it, turn down the flow of anguished energy you feel all the time. I suspect you do a bit of both. I suspect you’re involved in some sort of healing or therapeutic profession. And I also suspect that you periodically crave solitude like a man in a desert craves water, that you need to be alone more than most other people, though you genuinely like people.”

That’s Bestic describing Andy to Andy. But it’s also me describing me to me (how meta of me).

Now, I don’t consider “judgement” to be pejorative, even though Jane kinda seems to use the word that way. I feel it’s necessary and useful sometimes.

But is it useful when faced with what I perceive to be moral quandaries as I outlined last Sunday? You tell me. Jane thinks not. My friend Paul disagrees.

I like that I have a good analytical brain. But I am aware that it’s got some mega-limitations.

Jane’s thinking is way outside that "3D” box of prefrontal ratiocination.

Jane believes that an awakening, if you will, is taking place.

Not the first time. There have been waves of perceived evangelical “Awakenings”, in US history, in fact.

But I believe that she believes that this time is different, and maybe it is - I mean, to me, Christianity as most preach and practice it is a fear-based religion (“Believe it or burn”, I call it).

I believe that she believes that a loving, trusting heart-center is going to supplant both the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex as the dominant guiding light of humanity.

She’s not naive: She doesn’t think this change is going to be peaceful, or easy, because it never is when an old order is dying, but this is the transition she sees at hand.

Well, damn! My book is all about my desire for a kind of empathetic supra-consciousness to dawn over humanity.

I don’t understand all of the astrological nuances (understatement of the decade), but what I’m hearing and reading is that events in the heavens are happening that have never before happened in human history.

To those that believe, entirely new energies are being unleashed.

And if that’s true, well then, history is no guide to what’s coming. And what I perceive as “human nature” is no guide either.

Well, to be fair, I also see kindness and self-sacrifice in human nature too. I see it all.

My favorite example of this is the Saint Chapelle church in Paris. As usual, if I’ve shared this before, apologies.

Saint Chapelle sits very close to Notre Dame, and, for my money, it blows it away.

It’s rather stolid on the outside, and that’s because the walls have thick internal buttressing instead of Notre Dame’s super cool bridge-like flying buttresses.

Not much to look at outside, but Oh. My. God. when go inside and upstairs into the upper chapel, you’re floating in a vast atrium of jeweled light:

I got up those stairs, and… I cried. I looked at this and I thought, yes, if humanity can create this, we’re worth saving.

It’s bigger than it looks in that first picture, too:

But… this church resembles a giant jeweled reliquary box for a reason: It was expressly designed at the behest of king Louis IX to store jeweled reliquary boxes full of booty captured during the bloody crusades in the Middle East. The product of rape, murder, theft and war filled this church.

But it gets worse. This church was also built with blood money from those stolen riches. This incredibly gorgeous handmade structure was built on blood!

But it gets worse. This king was also an incredible antisemite who caused all the Jewish books in his kingdom to be burned after “The trial of the Talmud” took place under his auspices in Paris. The was the start of a reign of terror for Jews all over his kingdom.

And there you have it, folks: humanity in a nutshell; we are unimaginably wonderful and terrible, and some strange part of me is just too delicate a flower to deal with it, while another part deals with it by being a bit of a motherfucker at times.

So… what do we do if this is awakening is happening? And, why should we believe it?

Look, there’s no factual reason to believe this. This is a matter of faith, and I have bloody little of it.

But! The truth is, I really can’t stop the hate, the wars, the misogyny, the misandry, the racism, the antisemitism. I can’t stop the torturers, rapists, sociopaths, psychopaths. I can’t stop shit.

And, literally for decades, I’ve wondered: Is it OK to just be an artist “on the sidelines” making poetry and visual art and music and fiction while all this shit goes down? Is this OK?

Is it better than OK? It it actually some kind of moral imperative itself - to create art in a dark time?

And, later, I added healing work - something unexpected that came back into my life and drastically opened my heart.

You could say that the healing work has really pushed me more towards my north node than anything else in my life.

And maybe these changes in the heavens are, in effect, moving the whole show towards a similar kind of north node?

So… If Jane’s right, what is the proper course?

To help individuals through any way we can - from healing work to working in a soup kitchen, to creating art, if you’re so moved.

Now, I don’t think all art should be pretty, or happy making.

I think of Picasso’s passionate antiwar painting Guernica, which showed to the world the effect of the Nazi Stuka dive bomber’s shock and awe tactics on the people of Spain:

This painting, I like to think, changed some people.

I like to think that the song Strange Fruit, written by a White Jew about the lynching of black people and sung by Billie Holiday (who hated it, at least initially), changed some people.

Maybe my mother and father’s song Listen Mr. Bilbo, about a xenophobic racist senator, decrying his bigotry and singing the praises of what immigrants have brought into this country, might have changed some people.

Maybe even my song The Lion and the Lamb, a true story song about a gay kid who came out to his fundamentalist family, was shunned and kicked out and ended up homeless, leading him to eventually shoot himself, might have changed someone.

Or maybe we were all just preaching to the choir and whistling past the graveyard…

I dunno.

Maybe I move towards my north node by creating healing one person at a time, a minute drop, working with a minute drop, in an ocean of suffering.

And maybe I move that way as well by writing songs of outrage and writing poems about love, sensuality, and nature.

Maybe it’s all of a piece.

Maybe it’s enough - since, apparently, I can’t seem to do more.

Why do I say that?

Look, I started marching against the Vietnam war in 1968 when I was eight. I handed out antiwar leaflets every other Saturday on a little triangular traffic island at the intersection of Greenwich Avenue, Sixth Avenue and 8th Street in Manhattan’s West Village, catacorner from the Women’s House of Detention, where I listened to the pimps yell up at their “employees”, promising to get them out.

I marched in the largest single demonstrations in US history in the 1960s, the Moratoriums Against the War I & II, in 1969.

But the war went on for five long years from 1968, finally ending in 1973…

I was on staff for the 1982 Disarmament Rally in Central Park, also the largest single rally in US history up until that time.

Jane talks about feeling the change around her. Well… I felt it! I was surrounded by, quite literally, a million like minded souls! My heart sang! I believed!

But we did not end nuclear weapons (or even stop nuclear proliferation).

I felt it again at the Women’s March in DC, the day after Trump’s first inauguration.

But look at what that maniac and his macho-cosplay band of alpha chimps are doing…

So, on the one hand, I can say to Jane: hey, I’ve felt before what you say you are feeling now. I felt it long ago, and it led to nothing.

But she can say a) Maybe all of those things led to where we are - all a part of the whole. And/or b) New energies under the heavens!

It sure as shit looks like everything, from climate change to AI to wars to resurgent fascism, racism, sexism, an atomizing tribalism among all people, from White Christian Nationalists to radical Queer activists, is on fucking overdrive - so… maybe this is what has to happen.

So just stop doom scrolling, and just open your heart and trust.

Create the art that matters to you - just for yourself. Hopefully, it’ll add more light of some kind to the universe.

Create the healing you want to see in others, if you’re a healer, but in yourself and your family regardless of what you are.

Lead from the heart. From compassion.

Ironically, even though now I live in a country now that did have a vicious dictatorship in the past, what I see now in the Portuguese people, over and over and over, is kindness, and connectedness over profit, heart.

Just this morning at the village store, I picked the last head of lettuce. A little tired looking, but I wanted some lettuce, so what the hell.

The grocer stopped me, told me no, this one is no good, and they’re unpacking more, and just to wait, while he asked his wife to get me a good one.

Now, I am not some rich expat, but I still make more than the average Portuguese, and, frankly, I think they see all Americans as rich anyway - but they still put kindness and relationships over expedience and profits.

It’s a small lesson writ large, but it’s resonating.

Raised as I was in two households obsessed with news and activism, it’s proving SO HARD to stop looking at the news. And I really worry about terrorism in the USA, for all of my friends and loved ones, but most especially for my daughter, who lives in New York City.

But maybe I need to stop it all. Read books and get back out in nature. That means leaving Facebook and all the rest while I do. It even makes it hard to get on Substack without seeing political and news posts.

It’s very, very hard to cut off the pervasive fear machine that I do believe exists to foment separation and outrage for profit.

Am I sticking my head in the sand? Should I be going to the next American city that Trump terrorizes and put my broken body on the line? Shit, I am so impressed by those brave people, but I’ve done what I can, for almost 60 years. I need to heal.

And maybe my healing, and any healing I can offer to others, and some art, is the only thing teeny tiny me can offer to the world.

And, in the meantime, Andy reluctantly continues to be dragged towards doing his part…

Chapter 42

There was nothing for me to do but walk around the city and play tourist. But first I decided to check out his art. I went to the third gallery and stepped inside, only to be met by large paintings of people in silhouette having sex, and surrounded by pulsating rippling waves of color and thin blotchy yellow-green trails that looked like particle tracks in a cloud chamber. This guy was a trip. One picture had just the tip of a penis entering a vagina. The organs were outlined in recursive psychedelic patterns and there was a background of a wall or bed behind the close-up of the organs. But everything seemed rippled, even the wallpaper, the sheets, whatever was in the background, as if seen through a fun-house mirror, except that the ripples, though not symmetrical, still seemed to surround the organs in a concentric pattern, seemed to be emanating from them.

Then there was another one of a naked man and woman hugging, smiling, looking into each other’s eyes, this time with the particle tracks coming out of their eyes, circling their bodies, and entering their own and their partners’ genitals and anuses. It reminded me of Alan Bestic’s description of making love with the girl in Amsterdam, and also somewhat of the paintings of Alex Grey. All of the pictures that included full bodies also had an almost radioactively glowing yellow area in what Lucia had termed the lower dantian—the body’s qi storage battery that is about equidistant from the navel and the pubic arch. Freaky shit. This was a physics professor? I guess the social mores here in Europe are just a little bit more relaxed than in the good old puritanical US of A.

I got to my hotel, checked in and had some dinner at the restaurant downstairs. Then I did some clearing down. Bestic had given me a small quantity of ergot, amanita and the other hallucinogens to use to contact him, and for our final attack. I was tempted to use some and let him know I was OK, but I had to save this stuff (and smuggle it into the US) for really important things. Although Bestic said that some (he and Chang, for example) could see the lights, traverse the terrain and communicate directly without chemical enhancement, as he called it, I still couldn’t reliably, and didn’t know if I ever would. And even if I could, I felt that these hallucinogens fell into the same category as Chang’s golf ball and whatever, if anything, Panner could offer: insurance, odds-changers, arrows in the quiver.

I wondered how Manny and the Diné techs were doing. Most of the Navajo I knew were not pure blood, and that was a good thing, as I was very worried that soon every relatively pure-bred non-white person was going to be toast. My God, I thought, Joseph Mbia could be NODded out any day. Then again, Bestic and Bag-Zho had both said that SUR was slowing down as the world economy shuddered under the weight of hundreds of millions of people turned into vegetables. Didn’t those morons know this would happen? Did they think you can wipe out large populations without adverse economic consequences?

It reminded me of an interview I’d heard way back in 2004. The interviewer was asking some heavy in the Department of Homeland Security why the US was only inspecting a vanishingly small fraction of incoming shipping containers. He replied that inspecting them all would slow down shipping to a point where it would cripple the economy.

Jeezus! I mean these putzes had refused to beef up airport security before September 11^th, despite pretty specific warnings about terrorists planning to crash planes into buildings, because it would slow travel and cost too much. The result, besides all the dead? The airline industry was almost wiped out overnight. And here was this guy thinking inside the very same box. An inspection regime would be too much of a burden? Well, we all know what happened. The Aegean Wind proved just what a burden not inspecting things turned out to be.

All shipping stopped, and the world economy went into free-fall. There were food riots all over the planet, and agriculture and manufacturing were shut down. Farmers couldn’t harvest due to gas and fertilizer shortages, and what food there was couldn’t be shipped, often spoiling in warehouses and in the fields. Famine struck much of the US, and many other places. The developed world took it much more on the chin than the third world, which ate more locally, used more animal power for agriculture, used compost and human and animal excrement for fertilizer, and was generally more used to doing without. Things gradually settled down, inspection regimes were instituted, and the massive war to follow even stimulated the economy in some sectors. But five years after the Bomb, the world still hadn’t fully recovered, economically, socially, or emotionally.

And then Veaux and friends had launched NOD. Of course, the whole thing was starting to implode. I mean, in some ways NOD was an economic boon for the mega-powers. For example, imperial America was now pumping oil almost for free in abandoned places like Nigeria. Nonetheless, world trade could take only so many shocks in such a short span of years. Agricultural production was minimal in large parts of the world, and the medical and euthanasia costs were staggering.

My thoughts drifted back to the Chuskas and the ITI. Were Manny and the Diné having any luck? Had anyone heard from Bag-Zho or this Vernon guy? Had they figured out the golf ball? It seemed like they and I were traveling two parallel paths. They had this whole techie thing going on back in Arizona. Meanwhile, my path had somehow diverged big-time into this metaphysical, woo-woo, qigong meets Timothy Leary meets Yuri Geller thing. That is, if Yuri Geller had been the real deal…

Bestic said we’d only found the play button when we’d isolated and replayed the positron stream, but that’s not strictly speaking true. The play button was also the record button. The same signature was used to store and retrieve a memory. Something about that tickled my mind. Two sides of the same coin? Yin and yang? There was something there, but I couldn’t fix on it.

I knew that Bestic thought that most of the answer lay within me, within the human sphere, and Manny thought the opposite. In Manny’s view, a human was the aiming and tracking mechanism (well they had learned to track somewhat, but only a human with some psychic abilities could tell the decoys from the real thing in real-time). And that human was most likely me, now that we’d exhausted our other options. Somehow we were going to use me to aim and squirt a packet of info that would function, in a gross way, like Veaux’s box—it would reformat a section of Workspace and fry anyone whose memory structure resided within that space— a crude version of the Veaux technology. Crude, we knew, because when those boys wanted to, they could find one person and turn them into salsa overnight. We hoped to do that, but we had an untested system, and no subjects to test it on. In fact, I still didn’t understand what we were going to do according to Manny. How was I to be married to all the gizmos? How was that packet going to be fired at what I was “looking” at?

And Bestic’s way? He had an almost opposite view of the whole deal. He saw all the tech stuff as the gross focus, working in concert with me. He felt that although, yes, I did aim and especially track as well, most of all, I was the weapon itself, the thing that would actually wipe out their Workspace. The gizmos would only aid in focusing my gaze and filtering out noise. The trigger, the bomb, all lay within me, inserted as a series of post hypnotic conditionings.

We’d discussed how to do it. He’d tried to describe with words, with mental pictures, but there was no way to test it either. One, because who or what could we try it on ethically? And two, we might send up a hell of a smoke signal to Veaux and friends that there’d been a “disturbance in the forceˮ (sorry, couldn’t help myself), and we might wake up as plants the next day. He said it would happen automatically, that I’d just know what to do, and not to worry about it.

What if I or the machinery fucked up and somehow nuked the entire Workspace? I started feeling like those Los Alamos scientists who had bets going as to whether the first A-bomb would somehow set fire to the entire atmosphere and wipe out the planet: a cheerful kind of bet, where only the guys saying “noˮ could possibly collect. We were possibly in the same kind of grim situation. Maybe one false move, one software or hardware or human error and the entire Workspace structure would collapse.

And is the Workspace local? What if it holds all intelligence for life everywhere in the universe? Shit, we could play God in the worst way, sterilize the universe of all higher life forms. Higher probably meaning anything above protist, anything with any learned behavior, maybe merely instinctual wiring as well. Maybe the euglena would no longer know how to flail its flagellae to get around. For all I know, maybe even trees use the Workspace, I mean, I don’t fucking know. I only know I’m scared shitless of all of this power, all this responsibility.

When Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, witnessed its maiden test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, he suddenly remembered a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.” Now I feel like Oppie’s Shiva. I should’a stayed in med. school because now, being a doctor looks like a piece of cake compared to this insanity.

I sat in my room, drinking incredibly, vastly overpriced Scotch from the minibar (the Swiss put all others to shame in having no shame about overcharging), and trying to quell four thousand different strains of worry and anxiety. More clearing down. More mind quieting. More Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Finally, meditated and medicated to a fare-thee-well, I crashed at about midnight.

Ice boat, Hudson River, circa 2014, iPhone. © Samuel Claiborne

Olá from Portugal. Well, the ENDLESS storms have subsided, and we’ve had mixed weather, including a string of sunny days lately. The rivers have calmed. The reservoirs no longer feel like they’re about to burst their dams, and... we have bright brilliant SUNLIGHT! I actually don’t spend that much time in the sun. I tend to stay indoors or under shade most of the time, as sunlight makes me sleepy, and although I don’t burn super-easily, I am a somewhat pale blue-eyed specimen. But my eyes always sunlight and blue skies in greedily! The little village square in front of my house is brilliantly-lit at the moment, each cobble stone etched in sharp relief by the strong light raining down from a pellucid blue sky.

So, in today’s excerpt we’ll start of with a missive from Manny, and then flow on into chapter 41. In that chapter, Andy sees some artwork that reminds him of the artwork of Alex Grey, whom you may or may not know of. Even if you don’t know his name, there’s a very good chance that you’ve seen his work. These pieces are pretty emblematic of his style:

Alex and his wife Allyson, also an accomplished artist, have a performance, meditation, art, ritual space in the Hudson Valley called the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, or CoSM (get it, CoSM, like cosmos, microcosm, etc.). It’s a pretty cool place, though not precisely my vibe. Lots of rave-type things, hallucinogens (at least among visitors), and a lot of new-agey, syncretistic stuff that borrows liberally from everything from ancient Egypt to Hinduism.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a cool place, and actually, I’ve performed there probably 4 or 5 times with a band called the Clear Light Ensemble (please don’t hate me: I would never give a band such a pretentious name). I’ve met some cool people there, played with some great musicians there, and have admired a lot of great art there.

Not only that, but I am honored that Alex often uses my motto, “Creation is Salvation”, which I shared with him there one evening. Too bad I can’t get royalties on it, LOL.

But before CoSM moved to the Hudson Valley, it was in Chelsea, in New York City. Stephen Larsen, the head of the Center for Symbolic Studies in Tilson, NY, invited me down to my home town to participate in a fund raiser for CoSM. So, my musical partner in crime at the time, the late, great Jennifer Lowman, keyboardist and synthesist extraordinaire and I went down there to perform as the electro-acoustic improvisational duo, Loons in the Monastery (which you can find in most places - Apple Music, Spotify, etc. spelled as “Loons inthe Monastery” - don’t ask…).

It was a chaotic scene, and it took forever to get it sorted, but eventually we played our blend of madness, with Jenn on synths and myself on guitar, vocals, viola, pot lids, penny whistles, toy instruments, and something I’ve mentioned previously, the “Zefalator”, a slide whistle/Godzilla hybrid otherwise known as the Shakuhachi From Hell.

All of my sounds were then seriously digitally molested through a long signal chain of sound-altering gizmos, sometimes even sounding more like synths than the synths Jenn was playing.

Back in the day, almost nobody was doing stuff like this, but these days any guitarist can and does - the ears of the culture have changed the way they do, and what was once groundbreaking shit that blew people’s minds is now passe. Ahhh, the joys of getting old… Still, I’m glad to be here on the flower side instead of the dirt side, for as long as I’ve got.

At any rate, Alex was very appreciative of our performance and graciously offered me my the choice of any picture print from the gift shop, which he’d then sign for me.

At that time (less so now), Alex’s palette tended to be dominated (to my eye, anyway) by oranges, yellows, and reds, as in the examples above. They were all a bit too visually loud for me. I craved something quieter.

I went through the bin of prints and found only one primarily in blue, and it was striking. I really loved it and I also loved its subject matter, a man meditating. And in fact, once this was framed, it sat on the wall above my altar for many years, and, Goddess willing, it will once more, once I’ve settled into a house or loft or something bigger than my present space.

This is the painting I selected, although, to be fair, this example in fact looks a lot more saturated and ‘loud’ than my print does, or, to my eye again, than the actual painting does:

So, cool: we play the gig, I get a nice piece of art inscribed with a lovely thank you from Alex, and, almost as an afterthought, I hand him one of our CDs, entitled Stranger Than Truth, which I’ve linked to here on YouTube, since YouTube is free(ish).

So, a couple of years later, I get a fervent email from a director. He’s been creating a documentary on Alex’s work and Alex had given him my CD among others to listen to as possible material for the movie score. The letter almost sounded desperate: He’d already filmed a part of the movie about one particular piece of art, and he’d already edited it to a piece from Stranger Than Truth, my favorite track, in fact, a piece called Archangel. And that music so perfectly matched the spirit of that picture that he needed the track! He pleaded for us to give him permission to use it.

No sweat. I contacted Jennifer, and we both signed releases, requesting only credit, no payment, and sent them to him.

At least a couple more years go by and at this point I’ve forgotten all about it when one day, a DVD appears in my mail. It was the documentary on Alex Grey, called CoSM the Movie: Alex Grey & the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

I popped the movie in the DVD player and had a look.

And when the scene came on with our music, it was about the very one and same painting that I’d gotten a copy of, that now hung proudly over my altar.

I asked Alex about the selection of that music for that painting in the documentary several years later, and he hadn’t even remembered what painting he’d given me, and assured me that he had never mentioned it to the director - he’d just handed him a stack of CDs.

Alex and I are both into synchronicity, so it made sense to both of us when we discussed it.

They say you can’t make this stuff up, but of course you can, but you don’t have to because in fact it’s everywhere here in the “real” world...

(Manny)

I did it! I fuckin’ did it!!! Seems like Robert and I’ve been dickin’ ’round for months. Nothin’s worked. Every idea a fuckin’ dead end.

We were tryin’ to find some way to make the fields more stable, almost to get them to stand perfectly still, ’cuz even in our best dual-tokamak rebuild, they were still not totally under control. Field shear, resonance, and other crap would collapse the fields, and sometimes pretty damn harsh too, like, shit got trashed. We were meltin’ down a lotta expensive shit, for nothin’. We needed a breakthrough, but none was comin’.

I didn’t know it, but the real problem was that I was lettin’ Robert lead. I mean, he’s gettin’ the physics degree, not me man. I’m a fuckin’ GED boy from Brooklyn is all, so, I followed’im. An’ his ideas looked solid to me, from what I could understan’ of ’em, but they all led nowhere.

Seems like I sat for months, tryin’ not to worry ’bout Andy (where the fuck is he?), an’ playin’ catch up with Robert.

But somethin’ started happenin’. I started dreamin’ physics. Can’t put it no other way—I started dreamin’ shapes, ideas, fuckin’ circuit diagrams even! Off-hook mad crazy shit. But every time I tried to talk to Robert ’bout some of my ideas, he’d get this look that said, “Don’t bother me, dude, I’m doin’ the heavy liftin’ here, OK?”

No. Not OK. ’Cuz suddenly this shit was shinin’ outta my skin, and rattlin’ outta my head whenever I fell asleep. I swear, I started seein’ machines, experiments, but mostly shapes. And light. Light beams movin’ like molasses.

So I started readin’ up on it, just readin’, not designin’, not tryin’ to fix anythin’, create anythin’, not even really tryin’ to understan’ anythin’, just fillin’ my head with all of this shit, hopin’ my sleep time’d work it out for me. Crazy—but desperate times, right?

I remember, when I first told Andy ’bout NOD, or, really, when he first started believin’ me, he got me this book on Nikola Tesla. Guy created the fuckin’ 20^th Century’s tech almost single-handed: AC power, generators, motors, turbines, logical NAND circuits, way, way before computers. Hell, he invented radio (before Marconi, who got all the credit, but Tesla won the patent suit), and even radio-controlled boats. And maybe even somethin’ like lasers.

The thing I remembered most from the book was that Tesla saw his designs complete in his head, an’ just built ’em! I mean: he didn’t have to create prototypes and tweak ’em an’ shit, an’ fail an’ fail an’ fail like that prick Edison did. Naw man, he just saw it in his head, like blueprints, and then drew ’em out and built ’em, and they just fuckin’ worked. Every time, at least until he got older. Almost like he was hackin’ the Workspace himself, downloadin’ tech from God knows where. The future? Aliens? I don’ fuckin’ know.

But, thing is, it happened to me. Come to think of it, I used to have little shit like this happen when I was workin’ as an apprentice electrician in Bushwick. At first, none of that shit made any kinda sense. So, I just sorta did what the older guys tole me to do an’ hoped I didn’t kill nobody.

But I was also readin’, studyin’ all this electrical shit. Like, night and day, weekends, whenever Mandy and Brittany were off shoppin’ and shit. Mandy cleared the field for me a lot—she knew that union card was our ticket outta the city to Levittown. So, I studied, ate, drank, and breathed that shit. An’ somethin’ started happenin’.

First, I’d see a mistake one of the other guys was makin’, an’ not know what I was seein’—just somethin’ wrong, somethin’ I couldn’ explain. But after a coupl’a near misses, where someone’s ass almost got fried, I started real gently pointin’ shit out. Got me some dirty looks, but after a while, some respect too.

But then this really weird shit started happenin’: we’d finish somethin’, some mad complicated project with multiphase, lunchbox-sized AFCI’s spliced onto cables as thick as your arm and whatnot, an’ I’d go home happy, glad it was done, an’ done right.

An’ then I’d wake up the next day, knowin’ somethin’ was wrong, Not just somethin’, but ’zactly what was wrong, an’ ’zactly how to fix it. Like, I could see the wire runs in my head, could see an arc, or a switched neutral, or even, one time, a fuckin’ hidden cold solder joint. I’d just wake up knowing it was wrong an’ knowing how to fix it. Just like that. Like I’d been thinkin’ ’bout it all night.

Anyway, this time, I didn’t see the thing itself, instead I saw what the thing made: I saw this… shell, this bubble of laser light.

Then I saw a whole buncha lasers, a shit ton of ’em, in, like, a kinda array, a verrrry specific array. I saw it all an’ when I woke up, I drew it up. Where’d this come from? Did all the shit I been readin’, plus the shit I been drinkin’ (yeah, and smokin’) all come together whenever I was asleep, slowly buildin’?

Dunno. But I built it. Well, we all built it. First, Robert wouldn’t listen. He’s a nice guy, we’re even friends, but he sees me as a gofer, an intern. Or at least he did, ’cuz once I got him to shut the fuck up and sit still long enough to look at my drawings, he knew I was onto somethin’, somethin’ big. So, we built it, an’ it did all that, first time outta the box—no tweaks at all: it made the toroidal, helical counter-rotating fields rock solid; they never phased, never collided, never collapsed anymore.

But ya know what? It did something else too. Once we built it, we started seein’ all kindsa weird shit inside that chamber. Shit that didn’t make no sense to Robert, or me either.

So we ran a lotta tests, a lotta lot. And we think that in the center of that field, time runs at a different speed. He calls it an “inertially sequestered space,” almost but not quite separated from the physical world, and the normal time stream. He says we’ve slowed the tachyons down below C, almost to zero, in fact. An’ why’s that important? Dunno. No fuckin’ idea, ’cept no tachyons, supposedly, no thinkin’. Robert says I could get a Nobel for it. But what’s it for? I got no clue. I mean, Christ onna crutch: it came to me in my fuckin’ sleep! I’m... sorta proud of it, but it also doesn’t feel like it’s mine. More like I stole it or was given it. I wonder if Tesla felt the same way—like he was just the messenger. Maybe that’s all anybody is who makes shit up—art, tech, whatever. Maybe.

I can’t wait to show Andy. Finally, somethin’ new. An’, my gut tells me, also somethin’ scary important to the whole gizmo. It’s a funny thing to say, but this mystery thingy feels like the luck-changer, the secret weapon.

Only one tiny encrypted photo from him in two months. He says hang tight, he’s onto somethin’. That was 7 weeks ago. I’m prayin’ he’s OK, an’ if he is, I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him for makin’ me sweat like this.

Chapter 41

When I disembarked at the train station in Zürich, I picked up a map. It turned out the Sihl River and Panner’s place were nearby, so I humped it over. It was kind of a deserted area, a bit more wild and less orderly than the anal-retentive Zürich I’d seen coming into the main train station.

I wandered over to the Sihl, a strangely bucolic sight in this city on this beautiful late May day. May. My God, time was passing. There were long strands of submerged river grass waving like green hair in the center of the river, and steep grassy banks lined either side. Next to the entrance to the Gesner Bridge, which went over to the far side of the river, there was a little path through a broken fence, down to the bank itself. For some reason, I found this detour irresistible. I wandered down there and found the bank at the bottom, a level floodplain path, peaceful with grass and wildflowers. I walked along the grassy abandoned bank towards the Military Bridge in the distance. Practically under that bridge, I found a solitary table with four chairs, a white tablecloth, and the remains of a meal: tablecloth, empty wine bottles, dirty dishes, some bread and butter.

Somehow it seemed so Swiss: even a riverside picnic would come complete with a table and settings and chairs. But of course this was ridiculous—no one would schlep all that stuff down to the river from home—so what was going on here? I looked and saw another barely visible path leading upwards from the bank to a long low building that hugged the street level of the riverside. I climbed up and found myself surrounded by people smoking cigarettes, eating snacks and drinking wine. It was a gallery opening. The building was a series of galleries appended to what looked like (from the posters anyway) some sort of experimental theater. The courtyard in-between had a little beer-garden-cum-restaurant overlooking the bridge. It was mobbed with chic-looking people sipping beer and martinis and noshing on little dishes. I guessed that the table had been brought down from here, perhaps for some VIPs.

It was all a little much. I had just come off a long train ride, which had followed the most rigorous and mind-bending experiences of my life. I’d been walking along, alone with my thoughts, on a seemingly wild, semi-abandoned riverside, and suddenly here everyone was, hanging out and noisily having fun, oblivious to all that I knew was going on. I sat down, ordered a beer and a small sandwich, and tried to relax and acclimate myself. The place had an arty-expensive feel, like old Tribeca in New York, but with the bucolic overlay of the grassy green Sihl. I found it a nice combination.

It was fun to sit for a while, and watch the sun setting and all of the pretty, chic, happy people flirting, but soon that old loneliness and self-pity crept in and I petulantly asked God why Nina couldn’t be here, enjoying this with me. Then I focused, meditated for a second and let it go again. Yeah, I thought I’d removed all of the trauma, but Lucia’d warned me: it’s like an onion, and there always seems to be another layer. Still, it was much better, much clearer. The layers less dense, less painful, and a whole lot easier to peel away, mere echoes of the heavy crap I’d extirpated before.

It was time to get my ass into gear and go to Panner’s loft. But just then, who do I see coming along the side of the gallery building right towards me but Santa-Marx himself as I’d mentally dubbed him, Fielhaut Panner. He was short, round, jovial-looking with rosy cheeks and a big nose. His eyes sparkled. But there was also a restrained strength to him. He was compact but brawny too. He looked like he could probably draw and quarter me bare-handed.

I got up and walked over to intercept him. I put out my hand and smiled. “Mr. Panner, I’m a great admirer of your work. My name’s Andrew Braxton, and a mutual acquaintance of ours in Venice said I should look you up if I ever came to Zürich, and, well, here I am.”

Panner grinned, ignored my outstretched hand, and reached up and crushed my shoulder with his huge paw. Then he shook my hand, crushing it as well. I’d never felt a hand like that before, massive, powerful, and calloused beyond belief. I didn’t think a hand could be that rough; It was like sharkskin.

“Pleased to meet you! Who was this acquaintance? Cheryl Snowdon from the Guggenheim or Mauro Parisi from Ca’ Pesaro? Those are the only two people I can think of in Venice. Oh, wait a minute, Thomas Crowe and his wife Belkis own a restaurant there I think, and ummm, Betty Goddard and her husband Jim have moved to Dorso Duro—was it them? Texiera Spano’s got a print shop in that part of town too, west of the Academia…”

To my provincial American ear, he spoke with the exhaled softly-rounded R’s and Z-like S’s of the archetypal Saturday morning cartoon German mad scientist. I couldn’t help grinning to myself a little as he rattled on. But it seemed like he could go on forever, names would keep popping into his head, so I butted in, quietly: “No. Someone from the Torcello Hansen’s Colony.”

That got an immediate reaction. He straightened up, his jolly, jovial expression replaced by a hard penetrating stare. “Torcello, you say? Never been there.” He glanced at his watch self-consciously. “Nice to have met you, but I’m late for an appointment. I hope you enjoy your stay in Zürich. The third gallery down is showing an exhibit of mine, if you’d like to see what I’m up to now. Goodbye.” And he started to bustle away.

I followed in his wake as he plowed through the dense crowd of beautiful people, fleeing me in slow-motion. I guess I was never terribly tactful or subtle, and I feared I’d blown it entirely. I yelled, though softly, at his departing back “No, please Mr. Panner, I’ve got to talk to you. Please. You name the time and place. I promise you it’s very important. Bestic said I must see you, that you could help me.”

He slowed, then turned. “I don’t know who you are, and I can’t help you. I am an artist now. That’s all I do. I have left the past and do not wish to revisit it. I’m sorry.” He turned to leave again.

“I’m afraid that the past is revisiting you,” I said. “You know it is, and you know there isn’t much time, and Bestic says that maybe I can stop it, with your help.”

He stopped, paused for a second, then turned to face me. “Tell me where you are staying, and I will contact you, after I have checked out your story through some intermediaries.”

“The Europa, near the Opera House, I have a reservation there, but I haven’t checked in yet, and I don’t know my room number.”

“Your name again?”

“Andrew Braxton.”

“Fine, I’ll call you by tomorrow evening.” And he left.

Parts of the Whole, Kingston NY, Date, Camera, Lens, Film unknown. © 2026 Samuel Claiborne

The theme of diseased parts of a single human (Andy), a small group of humans (Sur), or parts of the body politic, or human culture, and what to do about them as a whole, is a repeating one in NODding Out.

In this chapter, the first instance will be covered, but I’m going to speak of the other two, putting out a rough draft of an essay I’ve been working on for some time.

The book is centered of both morality and empathy. In fact, in some ways, it’s obsessed with a fervent dream of the cultivation of more empathy.

I don’t know about you, but I am currently seeing less of it, not more. Less empathy between genders, sexual orientations, religions, political movements. hell, between bleeding soccer clubs!

Among other things, I am a tad obsessed with the morality of when or if to use violence. I’ve mentioned before that I was raised by pacifists, and also my activism against wars, and for civil, gay, and reproductive rights, and for the environment. I’ve been a liberal/lefty pacifist activist all my life, but I’ve often wondered, in the face of extreme brutality, whether taking up arms is ever justified beyond self-defense, and if so, under what circumstances.

Self-defense is where my late stepmother, Sybil Claiborne and I parted ways. She insisted that even if she were in the Warsaw ghetto, or at Auschwitz, and someone handed her a gun, she wouldn’t have used it - which seems patently foolish and morally unsound to me.

Of course, she kind of gave the game away when a man grabbed her pocketbook off her shoulder and fled down the street one day. My 100%, never use violence, no excuses allowed stepmother, incensed, chased him down the street and beat on him until he dropped the bag.

But, what if it’s not self-defense? What if it’s in defense of others?

What of the people who went and fought in the Spanish Civil War to defend democracy against fascism? What of those who fought WWII, theoretically, at least, to come to the defense of Europe (it wasn’t about the concentration camps - Roosevelt et. al. purposely did not bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz so there’d be less of a “Jewish Problem” to contend with after the war).

Here’s the essay. Enjoy (sort of)…

When Violence Is the Only Language Left: Ethics in an Age of Invisible Atrocity

We live in an age where large populations, particularly low income and non-white ones, suffer disproportionate birth defects, disease, and early death from pollution. From Elon Musk’s AI server farms with illegal generators polluting adjacent poor neighborhoods with noise and fumes, to the deliberate aggregation of refineries and chemical plants in poor areas, and especially in areas disproportionally populated by people of color, this problem is long-standing.

Usually, the toll of premature death, disease, and birth defects is cloaked, silent, and therefore largely ignored. Although intrepid independent journalists do try to shine a light on this structural injustice, it is usually only drastic events, like the horror of the Bhopal disaster in India, that get large-scale press coverage. And even then with all of that coverage, the Bhopal victims got a pittance, and waited years even for that, and the problems from that horrific event still endure among those victims to the present day and yet are largely unremarked upon in most media.

Agent Orange was dumped all over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in enormous quantities. The environmental damage was incredible, including huge numbers of birth defects among the native populations in all three countries. All these years later, those victims still suffer the consequences of the actions of the United States. And of course, United States servicemen and servicewomen, often from economically disadvantaged populations, have also suffered from Agent Orange use, and many other things, in myriad ways.

In the most charitable framing, that of ignorance and negligence, many in the US military, and in communities in close proximity to the US military, here at home, and abroad, have lost their lives or had their health utterly destroyed, due to ignorance about the health effects of Agent Orange, burn pits, depleted uranium, and “forever chemicals” from things like aviation fire retardants. Often times it is discovered, after the fact, that some things were known, but possibly not from the outset, so we can give a smidgeon of plausible deniability to the perpetrators; maybe they weren’t culpable, at least in the beginning…

But sometimes, the damage done was completely premeditated. For example, US military personnel and local communities were consciously used as guinea pigs during the era of above ground nuclear testing, and subjected to chemical weapons testing, biological weapons testing (including in the NYC subways!) and mind-control experiments.

Usually, the powers that be – here in America, and just about everywhere else – stall, stonewall, and try to destroy evidence of their responsibility, leaving those injured tilting at windmills in an often fruitless uphill battle for justice.

The feeling of helplessness that people have felt has often radicalized them into what we call terrorists — from the Weather Underground and FALN bombers in the 1970s, to the bombers of abortion clinics, to the killers of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Hindus.

I include abortion even though I’ve fought strenuously for abortion rights because some of those bombers were not, as is often portrayed, merely trying to control women. Some of them absolutely believed that murder was being committed, and they felt that it was their responsibility to stop it. I don’t agree with their analysis, but I do understand that their actions fall into this same moral quandary.

And their actions make any thoughts I have on the issue even more fraught with a maddening lack of clarity that confronts me on many issues, from free speech to armed struggle; who decides what is and isn’t murder, or self-defense, or acceptable violence or disruption? Can we only follow the law, even when it is manifestly toothless or even perniciously unjust? Doesn’t fighting back — from civil disobedience to violence, sometimes mean we are merely conforming to a “higher law”? But if so, what law, precisely, and what actions does it support as ethical?

It’s all subjective, alas. But does this mean we are to meekly offer ourselves in sacrifice without a fight merely because we cannot precisely articulate a set of simple rules when dealing with thorny, complex existential issues?

It is hard to understand how merciless and devoid of remorse the killers that have led governments and revolutions have often appeared. Amazingly, some of the most brutal dictators and terrorists were once doctors, trained in the healing arts, who became enamored with power and, eventually, cold-blooded murder as a means to keep and enhance and grow that power.

They are a chilling reminder of the damage a damaged individual can do, and the almost limitless corrupting potential of power, and they, the Stalins and Pol Pots and Maos and Hitlers of the world, loom large in our history.

Hell, Che Guevara wanted a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile crisis! He said he didn’t care how many millions were killed. Oh, and he was a homophobe who also enjoyed torturing people, so maybe that poster of him, that tee shirt, should go in the trash.

Air force general Curtis LeMay wanted one as well, and he sent bombers far closer than normal during that crisis, of his own accord, and without authorization, in hopes of goading the Russian bear into a nuclear exchange – one that American think tanks estimated would kill 30 million Americans - which LeMay was thought was fine because, in the end, more Russians would die and therefore America would “win”, just as Che hoped Cuba would “win” when the smoke resulting from the mutual immolation of the superpowers cleared.

True psychopaths are supposedly very rare, but it’s really clear to me that sociopaths, at least, apparently, grow on trees…

And there are far more abstract murderers who have sometimes caused orders of magnitude more death, pain, and suffering than some dictators, and get away with it completely.

We could look at the thousands of apparatchiks who kept the concentration camps of the Third Reich and gulags of the Soviet Union going. They requisitioned the personnel and equipment and resources like good efficient bureaucrats, and kept these death camps humming.

Or, let’s take a more high-profile example, like Elon Musk, who has famously claimed that empathy is a bug, not a feature, of Western civilization. Empathy makes us weak and indecisive, he believes.

While running Doge, Musk cut healthcare and food funding for millions of people in the developing world. He is already directly responsible, through his bureaucratic actions, for the ongoing pain, suffering, disease, and malnutrition, of millions.

Poor people, brown people, people who don’t look like him, the majority of them children, appear to be viewed by him, at best, as subhumans beneath his concern, and at worst, as trash to be destroyed. He’s already killed over 300,000. He eventually may kill – no hyperbole here, quite literally - 14 million or more.

This bureaucratic mass murder brings to mind those Nazi bureaucrats who kept the cattle cars rolling and the Zyklon-B brewing. They insisted later on that they had no blood on their hands – they were just innocents cogs in a machine. The trains didn’t kill anyone. The Zyklon-B wasn’t killing anyone until someone else used it in the showers of the death camps. And it seems that many of them really believed there rationalizations. They were, as Hannah Arendt once said, the epitome of the banality of evil.

But perhaps Musk’s is worse – because his acts seem even more abstract: He’s not ordering the construction of death camps, the shipping of prisoners, the manufacture of gasses. Oh no, he’s ordering a cessation of aid! It’s much more passive than the bureaucrat routing trains to Auschwitz, which is in turn more passive and abstract than the USA ordering the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden, the Nuclear bombings of Japan, or Stalin basically ordering up a famine in Ukraine because the populace there had not proved servile enough for his taste.

This abstracted bureaucratic evil is far less visceral than two men with rifles blasting away at Jews on a beach in Australia, but far more horrific in its effects. And yet, we can’t readily or fully experience it, metabolize it, process it emotionally, so we do not adequately mobilize against it. As Stalin said: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

We humans are built with this defect. Many of us buy meat neatly packaged on a Styrofoam tray from the supermarket, but most of us would feel appalled, disgusted, and utterly incapable of killing a cow or pig ourselves.

As a college student in the late 70s, a bunch of my classmates and I considered the mass murder that the CEOs and board members of major corporations like Exxon, DuPont, Monsanto etc. were committing, and what we could possibly do about it.

The solution I came up with was untenable for me, because I was raised a pacifist, and, I like to think, because I carried too much (apparently misplaced) empathy for my fellow humans.

The only solution I saw as potentially effective at all was a loosely aggregated, hermetically-sealed underground organization, composed of groups of cells of 3 people who would autonomously assassinate these corporate hegemons, over and over, clearly stating why each time to the press, until these corporations put common morality above shareholder value and enacted policies to preserve life, not take it in the name of expediency and profit.

On the one hand, my solution appalls me.

On the other, when I read the memos of executives from companies like Johns-Manville, where they explicitly and without any hesitation state that they know the asbestos they’re mining is killing both consumers and their workers, and that they must therefore do everything in their power to suppress this information, for profit alone, that I realize that these totally free, never arrested, never prosecuted corporate titans (including those of countless other companies, from United Healthcare to Open AI) scare me more than any of the incarcerated criminals throughout history that I’ve read about.

And that includes the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, let alone Jeffrey Epstein. These sick individuals literally pale in comparison in terms for their lack of concern for human life, and the scope of their destruction of it, to these nice white collar savages who are profiting minute-by-minute off of their stunning amorality.

In light of this my plan still seems to me to be the only feasible way to deal with the manifestly evil mass murderers I see being rewarded with fame and fortune by our deranged society, a society that seems to elevate sociopaths to hero status.

And yet, it’s still morally untenable to me.

But should it be? When is violence in self-defense, or in defense of other humans, morally justifiable? Or does violence always beget violence?

Do actions such as I proposed of this theoretical group of corporate board member assassins inevitably blur and blind its practitioners to moral reality?

My college plot kind of begs the question: would I be a sociopath to be part of putting such a plot into action in the real world, rather than as a mere thought exercise? Or, in some utilitarian sense, would I actually be doing the only sensible thing, in light of the facts.

Or, more baldly, do you inevitably become what you are fighting against, when you use the same means?

Or, maybe the question is: do you need to become what you are fighting against in order to defeat it? Should you fear this transmutation, or welcome it as a necessity?

I mean, the allies won WWII by horrific means: firebombing and nuking their enemies, not through my preferred method of fighting back, non-violent civil disobedience.

Non-violent civil disobedience worked eventually for Gandhi and for the civil rights movement, but it was never, ever going to work in the Warsaw ghetto.

And so, my thought experiment and my cold calculation that a corps of assassins was the only thing that could work. And indeed, the only reason I admitted to myself that I could not be part of such a terroristic organization was because I was too empathetic, and too obsessed with some nebulous concept of morality, too incapable of elevating the ends over the means.

And yet my ‘moral argument’ would, to my mind, instantly not have applied in the Warsaw ghetto, had someone handed me a gun — so why not here, why not now?

Obviously, I am as guilty as most of us of not feeling justified to take such drastic actions in the face of abstracted, largely invisible murder — murder that is taking place on an industrial scale.

So, what is moral in the age of invisible mass murder? When is it palpable enough to take action, and what kind of action is morally acceptable?

And of course, there’s the tactical issue too. Maybe violence is justifiable, but would taking up arms, for example, on the streets of Minneapolis have prevailed in any way?

I fervently believe that the opposite would have happened: Had there been violent civilian pushback, Trump’s authoritarian wet dream would’ve come true, as it would have been used as a pretext for martial law. This is precisely what the Nazis did when they used violent resistance to the brown shirt thugs by anarchists and communists as an excuse for crackdowns.

It would be good if we could figure all of this out pronto though, because the irony is that the age of invisible mass murder is only going to get worse, much, much worse, very soon.

Income inequality, massive climate change, government cuts to even such manifestly important tasks as pandemic response, all of these trends and more lead me to believe that the rich, in their gated communities, will soon preside over the mass destruction of the majority of this world’s population, well within this century.

As a human, a father, and a grandfather, I stand here, praying for empathy, grace, and humanity, while my government and governments all over the world, and corporations all over the world, appear to be moving in precisely the opposite direction.

These trends will have the largest impact, in the short-term, on the poorest, and the most non-white, but soon enough, climate change, and concomitant famines and pestilence will likewise take their toll on everyone. And AI and gene manipulation through techniques such as CRISPR, will in all likelihood as well, decimating the working and middle classes in the USA and the rest of the developed world – a group that’s already been economically hollowed out and disempowered, starting at least as far back in the USA as the days of Ronald Reagan.

Soon, the white collar coders, accountants, journalists, chemists, epidemiologists, physicists, teachers, paralegals, and many, many others, will be out of a job.

The helpless will feel more helpless, and they will become more numerous, and their stakes will rise as they face existential threats.

Ironically, our interconnected systems of food and energy distribution are so over-complex and fragile that these once powerless people may find the means to strike back easily.

Certainly, if things get bad enough, I can see masses of “the great unawashed” laying siege to the gated communities and survival bunkers of the uber rich.

My greatest fear is that some disaffected unemployed biologist or nihilistic grad student will eventually use technologies like CRISPR to create targeted pathogens, bringing on an age of technologically delivered pathogenic pogroms. Or perhaps some mega-mining corporation will beat them to the punch, when their AI-controlled board of directors determines that depopulating Africa will deliver the most shareholder value.

This is precisely what an amoral white racist corporation does to Africa in my new novel, NODding Out. First they start a pandemic that wipes out most black Africans. Then they sell body disposal and mineral and energy extraction services to panicked governments and corporations to keep everyone’s profits flowing.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein, our tools have always outstripped our empathies. The sexy demons have always outcompeted the better angels of our nature – see, for example, the current headlong rush into AI technologies that even the CEOs of AI companies feel stand a good chance of wiping out humanity – but they must compete, lest some other Western corporation, or the Chinese, eclipse them and render them worthless.

But the larger question, the one I grappled with in college remains: is violence ever justified? And when can it be considered as self-defense? If I am not defending myself, my family, my children then… is it OK to protect my tribe, whatever that means to me (and that definition can be pernicious e.g. white supremacists like the KKK and their color-inverted counterparts like the Black Hebrew Israelites). What if I view the entire human race as “my tribe”? What of the millions in Africa and Asia that Musk is annihilating? Is protecting them self-defense, albeit on a broader, level, one with a more holistic vision?

Most especially of all, when the killing is abstracted, randomized, bureaucratically-enacted, and diffused out, often to people and places far away, and sometimes over longer timescales, what is the proper response?

I firmly believe that violence almost always begets violence. But, were I attacked by a rabid dog, and I had the means, I’d certainly kill it without hesitation. If a human, or a group of humans, is a cancer on humanity, is it ever ethical to excise the metastases?

Of course, bigots around the world use this logic: black and brown and Asian people, the ever-popular Jews (I am one), gay or trans people, or non-believers of any zealot’s particular religion, are defined as the “cancer” that must be excised, in the minds of legions of past and future mass murderers.

And there’s the rub. Because if Elon Musk really has killed 300,000 just as an appetizer, what are we to do? Where’s the mechanism for justice in the face of faceless, invisible mass murder committed via email and pushbutton, by the manipulation of genes and algorithms? How do we define it? How do we punish it? And, more to the point: How do we make it culturally untenable, in every culture, for these people to act with this level of sociopathy?

The promulgation of pernicious disinformation has led to many a pogrom, from the shtetls of eastern Europe to the streets of Rwanda. So, how does free speech work as well, when those who want to win at any cost, including murder, are willing to lie so freely? It can plausibly be argued that those killed in Minneapolis died as the direct result of some fake news bullshit about Senegalese days care centers promoted by an odious right wing troll named Nick Shirley, who, as so often happens, has been rewarded with fame and fortune for his premeditated racist slop.

What do we tell all of those killed, maimed, orphaned the world over, those who’ve held their dying children, all due to the actions of a heartless power-mad egomaniac who crows about feeding the programs that had previously sustained and aided them “into the wood chipper”.

It’s going to get worse, because it’s going be abstracted further still: soon, it won’t even be Elon Musk or Sam Altman, or Jeff Bezos, or Sergey Brin, or one of a seemingly endless cavalcade of egomaniacal, greedy, power mad swine directly making decisions that kill millions, it’ll be their creations, acting either semi-autonomously, or with complete autonomy, that will be the agents of doom.

We must forge a new concept of cultural morality and responsibility, but, as we know – the devil is in the details, because a convincing argument can be made that anyone, any of us, who are using computers, cell phones, automobiles, electricity, plastics, etc. etc. are responsible, in the long run, for the deaths masses of other, less fortunate humans.

All of this is explored in NODding Out. The Sur corporation has industrialized the deaths of millions of people of color, invisibly and untraceably, as a venture that’s partly motivated by profits, and partly motivated by racial animus. This novel’s first draft was written shortly after 9/11. It seems so prescient now, as it also contains a world-wide pandemic, and a fascist United States. I finally released it because it’s too deeply embedded amidst the zeitgeist to ignore, and because it raises the moral and ethical questions we need to face now, as our tech overlords edge us ever closer to extinction, and as that accelerates, existing ethical tools will fail, existing institutions will fail (are already failing) and violence will metastasize and endlessly propagate itself through reactions to itself.

In a way, the entire world is being faced with manifold examples of “The Trolley Problem”, which can be stated as such:

There is a driver of a runaway tram, and he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on the track he’s driving on and one man on a siding; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. So, does he switch tracks to as to only kill one person instead of 5?

I never had a problem with this. I am, apparently, a utilitarian because (to quote Wikipedia):

A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to classical utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all). This fact makes diverting the trolley obligatory. An alternative viewpoint is that since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death when otherwise no one would be responsible.

This latter interpretation, that making a decision that would save 5 lives in lieu of one is a “participation in a moral wrong” seems laughably stupid. To me, saving more lives is not just morally permissible, it is the moral imperative.

This is one reason that my liberal friends, who wring their hands over Israel using weapons given to them by the United states to kill thousands, after being attacked, coupled with my friend’s lack of concern for an order of magnitude more death in Yemen committed with United States weapons, makes me crazy.

We can even ignore the fact that Israel buys many weapons from the United states and that a majority of the weapons Israel purchases and is given are defensive weapons like the Patriot missiles used to defend themselves against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi missiles.

I’ll ignore that nuance and just say that if one is truly concerned with saving innocent lives, then quite logically work towards ending the most death and destruction first!

And, if you want to work only with your own country’s policies, because you feel more morally responsible for them, and/or perhaps more able to make a difference in your own land, and you’re an American – well, then, for God’s sake, you, and everyone else you know who was tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israelis, shutting down college campuses, threatening Jewish students, marching yelling “from the river to the sea”… you should be putting all of your efforts into getting USAID back to saving millions of lives! Fucking sit in on the halls of congress. Close college campuses. Block traffic. Do something!

But what of the assassination of the “good man”, Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, who helped “create shareholder value” by designing systems to efficiently cut coverage, leaving many to suffer and many to die? Why did so many feel the killer was doing a societal good, as shocking as it is? I think it’s clear – there was a moral argument to be made.

And how did United Healthcare respond? Was there a soul searching about their draconian policies? Of course not; they still have to “maximize shareholder value” after all! This is the mandatory amoral structural component built into corporate law. It’s the root of a lot of evil.

No, United Healthcare (and other frightened health insurance companies) massively upped security on their executives. This was their “solution” to manifestly inhumane, murderous, in fact, corporate policies.

Ironic that healthcare companies indeed treated the symptom while refusing to look at the root cause…

The alleged killer was lauded by some. And yet, others decried him and his actions, but many of those same people will support the death penalty for a bank robber who shoots a single security guard.

Why is abstract murder of thousands, millions, not easily subject to justice? Why is one death a tragedy and a million a statistic? It’s apparently a perceptual bug built into us. We can’t see the forest, only a tree or two at a time.

I do not know what the answer is, but I think the concept of violence used in “self-defense” needs to be examined, and perhaps broadened.

And I think the concept of “shareholder value” has to be changed, in law, so that when that short-term value is in direct conflict with societal, human, and environmental value, “shareholder value” gets demoted and forced to take a back seat!

I firmly believe that it we do not find some way to enforce governmental and corporate morality, if we cannot find some way, as societies, cultures, to desire to be led by empathetic people rather than the sociopaths who run so many corporations (I’ve worked for a couple in my time), the human race is doomed within the next hundred years or less.

Unfortunately, whether here in Portugal, or in the USA, there always seems to be 30-40% of people attracted to the sociopathic strongman (who is almost universally in reality a weak man cosplaying a strongman, as with Trump), or the sociopathic corporate titan (Musk). They literally see these people who manifestly do not care about others, as people who care about others. It’s a perceptual blind spot that those of us who can see their true natures (and who can also see that Musk, for example, is not intelligent in the least, is not an engineer, is not an innovator, but merely a manipulative con man) find remarkable!

Those of us who see the greed, the mendacity, and the grift just cannot conceive how a man like Trump who has ripped off thousands of small contractors, and “Trump University” students, whose own foundation was judged to be a grift – can be seen as some moral paragon leading a moral crusade.

This draft dodging, porn-star bribing scumbag is seen as some hallowed visitation of the divine, and portrayed on flags festooned with Christian iconography, even though his policies are unchristian to an extraordinary extent.

Violence does beget violence. And we certainly do not want to murder those we merely disagree with.

But can a more enhanced concept of justice, a demand for more proportional, far ranging, elite-resistant justice beget more justice? And does that justice leave room for capital punishment for men who murder millions?

If a person, or an entity like a corporation or government, is committing mass murder, what is the proper response? Do we want to maintain a status quo where a mother shoplifting baby formula for her child faces more legal consequences than a man who makes healthcare unaffordable for millions of Americans, or one who destroys food and medical aid for millions of other less fortunate people in other countries?

I, for one, am hoping the apple cart gets massively upset. From the publication of the Panama Papers to the US government’s stonewalling on Epstein, to the fact that left-wing stalwart Noam Chomsky is in those papers, enjoying $1400.00 a night hotel stays on Epstein’s dime, it’s clear that this is not a right or left issue any longer, and maybe for most, it never has been.

Chomsky, Woody Allen, Howard Lutnick, and perhaps the most cynical of all, Steve Bannon, who railed for years that we had to get to the bottom of Epstein, all the while playing pen pal to Epstein(!), are all in those files. They all at the very least maintained friendships with a convicted sex trafficker (Chomsky even gave advice on how to ride out the storm as things got tougher for Epstein).

They need punishment, but, let’s face it: their crimes are nothing compared to what Musk did to USAID, or what Trump’s doing to healthcare, and to alternative energy vs. fossil fuels. These crimes are massive. They will end up killing millions.

Gerrymandering, and, yes, those interlinked political elites, have rendered the legislative and judicial branches of the US government irredeemably corrupt and also largely toothless.

If democracy is no longer up to the task, as currently formulated (and, let us remember, Hitler was elected democratically), can it be reformed, and if so, without a Reign of Terror interregnum before a more human-centered, empathetically-driven type of democracy can be established?

And, given how easily manipulated people (of all political stripes) are, can democracy really work? Or is its time over, rendered moot by supra-national corporations wielding incredible amounts of power with unfathomable speed, efficiency, and funding?

Perhaps “The Resistance” as it currently stands in Progressive circles is not up to the task.

If it’s not, what is?

Chapter 40

I awoke in my own room, exhausted, and with an immense, searing pain in my left leg. It felt like a branding iron had been sunk into my femur and was broiling the marrow. A cold sweat bathed me, and I breathed in shallow little gasps, as if my lungs were in a vise, or still at the bottom of that black sea. I groaned aloud.

Lucia appeared by my bedside. “Here, Andrew, take these.” She put some pills in my mouth, gave me a sip of water. “You are experiencing another kind of entanglement, a sensory one. It is a type of extra-sensory perception, but one that is not often mentioned in the literature: an odd kind of distorted cross-talk between your sensory system and Joseph’s. By tomorrow or the next day it should be gone completely. Here, drink more. It will help.”

I swooned from the pain, the world shrank to a pinpoint of light, and disappeared.

I regained consciousness in the middle of the night. Jeezus, I felt so, so tired. I tried to sit up, but I weighed a million pounds. I must be on Jupiter, I thought, and fell back asleep.

I awoke again in strong, warm sunlight. “Yes. It is supremely draining, isn’t it?” Lucia said, bending over me with her half-frozen smile. “Do not worry. You are young and strong; in a day or two, you will feel like yourself again.”

Those two days passed quickly, because I slept round the clock. Twice. Finally on the third day, Lucia and I went to see Joseph. When we got to his bed side, he smiled up at me. Then he pulled off the blanket and showed me the stump of his leg.

“He had it removed. Demanded it, almost from the moment he woke up,” said the doctor, a peppery old orthopedic surgeon named Grantham. “Funny, he’d fought it tooth and nail before, wouldn’t even discuss it. But when he woke up, he asked me what the chances were. I told him one in a million, and even then, it’d never work like before. ‘Take it off!’ he told me.”

Joseph hadn’t said anything up to this point. He still didn’t. He just looked at me and beamed. I leaned down and hugged him hard, and a sob came out of him. Alarmed, I pulled away to look at him, but there was joy on his face. “I will be OK now,” he said in heavily accented English. “Thank you.” And we hugged again.

As I went back to my little room, it occurred to me that, like Joseph, a diseased part of me had been amputated too. I’d wanted to be a doctor, and my failure had been an overwhelming source of shame ever since. I’ll never forget the look in my mother’s eyes when I told her I’d quit. No one understood, because I’d never told anyone the truth: that I’d fucked up, practically killed a man, and that I felt unworthy, dangerous, cursed, malignant.

The fact that I’d helped many people to learn to speak again never mattered—I was a failure, pure and simple—someone who’d failed to live up to his potential.

But now I see that this failure was necrotic, a rotted part of me that I had to leave behind so I could really have faith in myself. When I ran away from medical school, something started eating away at my soul, but it’s gone now. I know I’m a healer, and that’s all that matters. Diplomas on the wall, graduations, none of it matters. What matters is that I am a healer, and, at long last, I believe in myself. At long last, this poisonous self loathing and self pity have been excised and cauterized.

Like Joseph, I too have found the faith, the will, to be my true self, not in spite of, but because of all I’ve done, all I’ve gone through, for I could never, ever have healed someone this way had I become a doctor. The Tao, or God/Goddess, had other plans for me. I’ve been kicking and screaming, dragged forward towards my destiny on rotten limbs and a gangrenous soul, but now I’m healed, clean, clear, running with the Tao, enveloped in the flow.

There were no more healing sessions for me. There was too much work to do with Bestic and Lucia, and with various meditations, postures, and hallucinogenic trance-states. Twelve more days of concerted work went by all told, including fighting classes with Alan Bestic. He taught me the fluid circle-boxing of ba gua zhang, and the strident karate-like thrusts of hsing I chuan. I sweated and cursed and bitched and whined, but actually, I was having a great time. More and more, I felt I was inhabiting my spirit animal, becoming a tiger or leopard, and it was intoxicating. More and more, that animal power and my psychic/empathetic power seemed to be merging into a new version of me, capable of violence, when necessary, but also full of compassion for humanity, and, at long last, willing to have compassion for myself as well.

The times in trance also gathered breadth and depth. It was no longer a foreign or frightening landscape, but a familiar territory, with landmarks to guide me. By the time I was ready to go, I was able to “see” Veaux. Alan took me there and showed me the whole group, without benefit of Bachman’s apparatus. As Tom and Manny had seen, they were obviously using some techniques of their own, because they shimmered and appeared to sort of move around, unlike everyone else.

But I believed that when the time came, I’d be able to melt them down. Why was I confident? I mean, what had I learned for this kind of battle? The truth is, I didn’t know. It had all been placed post-hypnotically by Bestic and Bag-Zho. The destructive and invasive techniques that they’d taught me couldn’t be ethically tested on anyone else, so how did I know they’d work? I had to take it on faith, and suddenly, I had faith in them, and in myself.

After a total of nine weeks, it was finally time to leave. I had a goodbye dinner with all of the residents who were well enough to attend and kissed Bestic and Lucia goodbye. I gave sweets I’d gotten up the road to all of the kids, hugged Joseph Mbia for a long, long time, and left for the landing, hurrying to make the last boat of the night out of Torcello and back to Venice on my way home.

Once on the boat I opened my presents, little packages that Alan and Lucia had given me. Lucia’s was a ba gua pendant, supposed to reflect evil back to its source and very apropos, I thought. I put it on and swore I’d never take it off. Bestic’s was a note, with a photograph of a guy who looked like a cross between Karl Marx and Santa Claus, and a pebble from the beach where I’d stood for so many days, a little piece of quartz covered with the most beautiful pale verdigris lichen.

The note said:

Dear Andrew, We’ve given you all we can, and you may already be strong enough to succeed, especially if your friend Manny can make sense of Michael Chang’s “golf ball” and harness it to you. However, I believe in stacking the deck in one’s favor as much as possible, so I want you to take one more side trip before you go home: to Zürich.

There’s a crazy old physicist there named Fielhaut Panner, who lives in a loft overlooking the Sihl River. He was a consultant to Veaux back in the days of the Project. He may be able to give you plans or even a working device that does something helpful. Of course, Veaux has had many years to work on counter-countermeasures and it may be a dead-end. That said, with the world-wide epidemic going on, I’m sure a clever guy like Panner would have figured out the probable cause and would once again be working the problem.

Andrew: be paranoid, be stealthy. Travel unobtrusively by train and keep an eye out for tails. What we’ve been doing has been very passive, untraceable as far as I know, but that’s just it; I don’t know. These are very violent, brutal people who are drunk on their own power. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous they are. However, I do need to tell you that even without some newfangled nefarious tracking device or cadre of tracking adepts, Veaux may very well have each and every person involved in the Project under surveillance. Torcello’s pretty easy to watch, being relatively isolated. Panner may be watched as well, we don’t know. I never communicate with him and haven’t in about five years. I don’t even know if he’s still there, but I believe he is because he dearly loved Zürich, and he knows, like I do, that there is really nowhere to hide.

Last time I saw him, his address was 24 Selnaustrasse, 4th floor. Also, he frequented a lot of the clubs and galleries in the arty part of town, an ex-industrial area called Zürich-West, especially around the Schiffbau building near Pfingstweidstrasse. I’ve enclosed a photo of him from about seven years ago. He might be a little more wrinkled and a little fatter, but as you can see, his hair was already white.

I want you to know that Lucia and I have faith in you and much love for you. You are a beautiful creature of God, whatever God is (maybe the Workspace itself?) I love you and pray for you, and I know that my love and faith are well placed. You will do more than you will ever know for the beings on this planet.

Love, Alan.

I went to Zürich by train, a long ride in which to think, practice my meditations, and watch for tails. I got off often, spent a few hours in little towns where a tail would really stand out, got another train, and generally acted like a tourist for the three days it took me to meander over to Zürich. It was the hardest meandering I’ve ever done, as every particle of my being wanted to get back to Manny. I never rumbled anyone, but I wasn’t reassured.

Non-Dominant 5. iPhone © 2023 Samuel Claiborne

Exchange… A healer told me there must always be an exchange with the client. “They have to give you something, a dollar, a crystal, a feather, a stone from the driveway - but something”, she said.

And, yeah, OK, But there are many mediums of exchange.

When I started doing healing work, I found some clients tired me out while others actually energized and enlivened me, and not at expense to themselves either; sometimes, there was a mutual energetic enhancement going on.

In the most extreme case I ever experienced, it was not with a client, but with a lover who eventually became my second wife. I’d be walking down the street and be positive I was going to run into her, because I’d start to feel stronger, colors would brighten and saturate, smell would be more acute; everything was heightened. And, without fail, I’d run into Bi within a few blocks.

This was probably even more apparent to me because this was only something like 6 months after I’d gotten out of the hospital and rehab, and I was still a very weak, massively physically and psychologically jacked up human. I felt ancient, fragile, incredibly weak, incredibly uncoordinated, and always in pain and tired. So this surge of energy was unsubtle, really palpable; a state-change within me that always blew my mind, because every time I felt it, within scant moments, there’d be be Bi walking down the street towards me.

I call this phenomenon “Qi-Resonance” (or “Chi-Resonance”, if you prefer), and I believe that it happens between all of us living things to varying degrees, in positive and negative manifestations.

It could be related to the bio-electric field we can measure emanating from and surrounding the human heart, but I don’t think so - not directly anyway. I don’t think Qi is bio-electric. We cannot measure it currently, and humans have certainly gotten very good at measuring electromagnetism, so it really can’t be.

But several phenomena that humans exhibit, like that bio-electric field, and that most if not all living things exhibit, like the fact that we all emit barely-detectable amounts of photons while we’re alive - yes, we give off a faint light, all the time - may all be cascading effects of the presence and movement (flow) of Qi.

At least that’s what I think.

Funnily enough, in NODding Out, Tom’s theory that there is a “particle of thought” and that this particle is the theoretical Tachyon, a particle that moves faster than light (there’s apparently - and I say apparently because I’d be the first to admit that I don’t’ understand physics - nothing in Einstein’s theory of relativity that precludes a faster than light particle. The speed of light is a barrier - but you can be on either side of it, so the particles we know of cannot exceed the speed of light, but the tachyon, if it exists, cannot drop below the speed of light.

One theory I’ve read about Qi is that it is composed of Tachyons. I used to like this theory, but it no longer serves, because it’s still local. OK, the particle travels faster than light - but it still travels - and I no longer think that’s the case. I think distance (and maybe, time) while not illusory, are not the whole story either - and quantum non-locality certainly seems to be indicating that this may in fact be true. You and I are some definable distance apart in the 3D world, but in a higher dimension, we may in fact be touching.

That’s exactly what I think is going on when I do a remote session with a client.

So, no, I don’t think Qi corresponds to our idea of physical space. I think Qi is (god help me for using this so often abused buzzword) a quantum, non-local field. It works outside of distance entirely, to the point that I believe that I could do a remote healing session with a client on the other side of the universe, and I could feel them and work on them as effectively, and in real-time, as with any other remote client - even one in the next room.

Oh man, am I getting off on a tangent - but man it’s fascinating! What if “particles” these things we “see” even though they’re too small to see, are all just fields?

What if everything is composed of light? Matter is slowed down light (or electromagnetic fields, if you prefer)?

Of maybe matter is a closed-loop vortex, a torus composed of those fields. Maybe stuff we can touch - from a lover’s hand to a piece of sandpaper, is all enfolded, ‘trapped’ light, circling tightly enough so as to be palpable and physically impassable.

And maybe, when we touch that lover’s hand, or touch a person we’re working with in a healing capacity, we’re exchanging all kinds of energies and information we can only guess at.

I mean, so many things that were once invisible, unmeasurable, that are really powerful, from pheromones, to entirely hidden languages like the infrasonic speech of elephants, to radio waves, are now visible and now able to be studied, measured, and manipulated by us curious uber-chimps.

When I started doing healing work, it was totally for free, an act of service. Did I think it was truly altruistic? No, like Andy, I don’t believe in altruism. I believe some people feel good helping other people, and that this is a much more constructive form of selfishness than attaining joy from harming or using people.

But although I never kidded myself that I was being altruistic, I certainly never consciously thought that I’d gain anything physically from doing healing work. I mean, it’s an expenditure of time and energy and, in my case at least, incredible concentration.

I have programmed computers since I was 19, and I have often said that programming is the most concentrated work I’ve ever done. Keeping all of these variables and control structures, the 30,000 foot view of the entire app, and the minutiae of each line of code, wherein the addition or omission of a single letter, number, or punctuation mark can break something - keeping all of that in my head, seemed like the apotheosis of this thing we call concentration.

It wasn’t until this morning, just now, writing this, that I realized that, no, the highest concentration I’ve ever practiced is the incredibly nuanced “listening” I practice when my system is engaged with another system in the act of engendering healing. It’s such intent listening!

There’s nothing like it - except the intense “listening” I have experienced making love with a super-present partner, which, oddly or not, depending on your frame of reference, often traverses the same energetic/physical, synesthetic terra incognita.

Concerted, concentrated healing work can tire you out, no doubt. Except sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it energizes you like all get out.

And sometimes, it even heals you.

When I started doing Ortho-Bionomy sessions with clients, I sometimes noticed that the left over spasticity from my spinal cord damage was, for a time after the session, reduced. There’d be a marked increase in the fluidity of my movements, and I’d find myself almost skipping down stairs - an unexpected benefit I’d never considered. It was eye-opening, and it changed my perception of this concept of exchange that this healer had shared with me.

And sometimes, as Andy’s about to discover, healing another psyche can, likewise, engender healing in your own. And, after all, you’re never really “healing another”. No, you’re engaging in a dance of co-creation. Sometimes this dance is mutually conscious, and sometimes it’s not, but it’s always there…

Chapter 39

One morning, around six, Lucia came to my little room in the cupola. “No practice today,” she said. “Or at least, not that kind of practice. Get dressed and meet me in Ward 3 in ten minutes.”

I shuddered. I knew by this time that Ward 3 was where the worst buruli cases could be found. I didn’t know what Lucia had in store for me, but I wasn’t relishing it. I got dressed and made my way over.

It was clean and brightly-lit in the ward—too brightly-lit. I could see children and adults with huge parts of their bodies eaten away, bones and all. I saw one child, an earnest looking young Ghanaian boy with quiet eyes and beautiful, almost fluted ears, receiving a new dressing. Lucia and an assistant had pulled the old one off of his left leg. I looked into the cavernous ruin of his thigh. Only ulcerated, necrotic tissue remained where muscle and bone should’ve been.

She spoke to the nurse’s aide: “Nessie, please finish up here.” And she got up and pulled me outside the ward and into the sunlight.

“His name is Joseph Mbia. He is twelve years old. He is almost certainly going to lose that leg. In fact, we have not even controlled his infection. We might lose him completely. He is a good kid, Andrew. And he is very scared. Alan cannot work on him. He is too tired. His last healing session was only five weeks ago and he is not ready. I have tried. I have connected to him in trance, but I have not been able to help him or reassure him. Day by day, he is losing his will to live. I sense he needs a man to pull him through this. I need you to try.”

“I can’t.”

“Because of your fear, the reason you left medical school?”

I looked angrily at her. “What?”

“Your schooling, the reason you left.”

If you already know about it, you already know I can’t.”

“You can, and you must, Andrew, for both your sakes. Look inside and ask yourself: why have you held onto that fear? Why haven’t you released it, processed it, with the others?”

“I’m sure I have,” I answered petulantly.

“No, you have not, which is why you look so terrified at this moment.” Her eyes bored into mine.

I sighed, and more than air seemed to leave me: it seemed as if all my strength did as well. “I didn’t know I still had it, to tell you the truth. Not until this moment. I must have skipped over it somehow.”

“None of us skips over anything. Some part of you wants to keep it near to you. Tell me about it.”

“You must know. You brought it up.”

“The telling is part of the healing. You need to hear it from your own lips, if you are ever to overcome it.”

I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette to stall. Finally, I started: “OK. I was working long shifts as a cabbie. I was… overwhelmed. Work, biochemistry, girl trouble—it all started landing on me at once. I started doing coke, a lot of coke, to stay awake, keep sharp. One day I was doing rounds…”

“‘Doing rounds’? Isn’t that for people who have graduated?”

“Yeah, interns. Well, usually. I was close to graduation, and I was friends with the administrator at Maimonides Hospital. He bent the rules for me, felt it would be a good experience. Guess he blew that one.”

I didn’t want to go on. She waited me out. Suddenly I was right back there.

“I was coked to the gills. A patient came into the ER, the doctors were busy, and I was drafted to help. I totally missed that he had cardiac tamponade, which is relatively rare. There was fluid in his pericardial chamber, which was pressing against his heart, reducing its efficiency. It’s called hemodynamic compromise: the heart’s trying to push out against this fluid, which is pressing back. And as the pericaridal pressure builds, the heart gets weaker and weaker. He was having trouble breathing, so I set him up on positive pressure ventilation. That just made matters worse, decreased his venous return. His heartbeat got more and more irregular, and then… and then I lost him.”

Much to my surprise and chagrin, I started to cry. “They, they got him back. A real doctor came in and did an emergency subxiphoid percutaneous drainage, stuck a giant syringe in right next to his heart. Did it blind, really risky, but he drained it, and restarted the guy’s heart. They said it wasn’t my fault, that anyone could have made the same mistake. But I lost faith, right then and there. I quit coke at that moment, but I knew that someday I might be too tired, too wrapped up in my love life, or maybe just my goddamned ADD might space me out too much, and someone would die. It was good I found out then, rather than later. I quit med school, and became a speech therapist instead. It was safer.”

Lucia looked at me without a trace of sympathy and said in an unexpectedly hard voice: “And why are you holding on to this, Andrew? What is in it for you?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. We are all human. And we all make mistakes. And in your case, it almost cost a man his life, and it changed your life completely. But what is done is done. Why do you keep it around?”

“The memory? You expect me to forget it?”

She sighed. “Stop acting like a peevish child.” She pointed to the next room. “There is a little boy in there you might be able to help if you would just stop kissing the ass of the little boy in here!” She poked my chest. “No, not the memory for God’s sake, the trauma! I know why you hold onto it: to occlude your power, to make yourself feel unworthy, to tie one hand behind your back and keep yourself crippled. You are afraid to shine. And you must shine. Now. Joseph needs it. You need it. Perhaps we all need it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go to the barn, get in posture, dig that moment out, and process it. You cannot run around your whole life refuting the fact that you are a natural healer. You cannot hide your light under a… a… how you say? Cestino? A… a… basket forever. You are doing more than yourself a disservice.”

She spun on her heel, and said, over her shoulder: “Work on this today. All day if it takes it. Meet me here tomorrow at seven.” And she was gone.

I went to the barn and got in posture, got my breathing under control, and entered my clearing down meditation. Hours passed. I just couldn’t seem to find that particle of trauma. I was hiding it from myself, I knew.

Suddenly, just at the point of giving up, I was there, leaning over the guy, watching his face strain, his eyes widen as his heart started failing. I was inches away from him, losing him. “Doctor!” I screamed helplessly, my voice high and erratic. “I need a doctor in here now!” I just squeezed his hand and screamed for a doctor as I looked into his panicked eyes, as his life ebbed away. I was helpless, my mind a blank slate, unable to formulate any plan of action. My entire medical training evaporated, and I could suddenly only think of my bladder. I felt like I was about to piss myself. That’s all I could think of as I watched his face change color, watched his muscles become lax, and then heard the ping of the cardiac monitor as he flatlined. My mind was in a tight little loop, frozen.

I awoke with a start. No, keep it, keep it front and center. But be here now too. Somehow, let the horror, shame, humiliation go. I sobbed hard, and then let it go, in a rush. I shuddered and swayed on my feet. I felt it try to re-enter me, to implode me. And I felt a dark shadow uncoil itself from within me and try to pull it back in greedily. No. Not this time. “What’s done is done,” she’d said. Let it be done. Let… It… Go!

A weight leapt out of my chest, off of my shoulders and out of the top of my head. The darkness reached for it, reached to the breaking point, but it was gone. I still remembered it all, but the charge was gone. What was done, was finally done. I thought I heard a little scream from my shadow as this precious piece was stripped from it.

I’d wounded it. Alan and Lucia had both warned me that a wounded shadow is dangerous. You walk in front of a bus because you aren’t looking when your shadow’s enraged. Or you fumble the cell phone driving and total the car.

“Stay present,” Lucia had warned me weeks back, when we first started clearing down. “Stay very present for a day or two after a deep cleansing, because the shadow is ruthless.”

From my experience, they’re all pretty damn ruthless: the shadow, the soul, and the Great Spirit.

The next morning I met her again at Ward 3, and was formally introduced to Joseph Mbia. Yeah, he was a beautiful kid, but he was listless, unsmiling, the spark gone out of him. He looked gravely at all of us like an old man who knew his time was near.

Lucia pulled me off to the side. “Are you ready to try?”

“Yes.”

“No reservations?”

“No. And thank you, Lucia.”

She smiled warmly. “You are very, very welcome Andrew. Now: I am going to give you some ayahuasca, and give him some as well. It will help you connect. Take this.”

She handed me a cup of the foul tasting stuff. It almost made me retch to drink it, but I gulped it down. Joseph didn’t look too happy about it either, but he swallowed it quickly.

“Time to get into stance, and let yourself go. You know where. Everyone else, please leave the room. Joseph, just lie quietly, sleep if you can.”

Gradually the drug took hold, and like before, it seemed that the entire external world of sense ebbed away, and I was alone, flying over a landscape of shadowed hills and incandescent constellations. I found Joseph. He was a reddish star, shining feebly. I swam into it.

Suddenly I was overcome with joy. I saw little Joseph running to school. He loved to run. He dreamed of being a marathon racer some day. “Running is freedom.” He thought to himself as he ran. “Running is my life. Look momma! I am so fast!”

And he ran and ran and ran. He was running in his past, dreaming in denial. Manny’d told me he’d done the same thing when he was paralyzed, dreaming endlessly about running, using his hands, swimming, lifting weights, and, most of all, talking a blue streak in rapid-fire Spanish. All his dreams had been stuffed full of a kind of ecstatic physicality, an attempt to override the reality of paralysis and aphasia. Joseph was stuck in the same place, and I couldn’t blame him.

I hated to invade his dreams and ground him back to the cruel reality, but I had to. I brought him back to the present with a start by showing him his leg as I’d seen it, standing over him: the yellowed necroses, the huge void of evaporated tissue, the sandy tip of his eroding femur.

The grief hit me like a wall of pain. It was so constricting that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I was at the bottom of an oceanic trench, with miles of black water above pressing the life out of me. I almost panicked, almost ran. No. No, I was going to stay. I was going to push through this. “Joseph!” I yelled. “Can you hear me?”

“Over, over, over. Life is over, over, over,” he said. Then: “Let me die, die, die. Life is over, over, over.” And he repeated the whole thing like a song, a little anti-hymn he murmured to himself.

With all the energy I could muster, I surrounded him, embraced him with my light, my love, my heart. I was crying in that place of no-space and no-time, crying tears that burned off of my face and into a luminous vapor that surrounded both of us. And then he cried too, his tears joining mine, subliming off his face. And the vapor thickened until it was like a caul, and we were some odd twinned fetus, awaiting rebirth. His grief kept hitting me with sledgehammer blows, and I kept responding with love. Love, security, safety. And finally, hope. But not a false hope of lollipops and everything-will-be-fine. No, it had to be real, and the reality wasn’t nice, so I had to be not nice. I let him see the future. I had to give it to him straight, all of it. I had to be as unsentimental as Lucia, and as ruthless as well. So I gave him a horrific vision, and held him tight while I forced him to look into it.

It was his leg being amputated. We both stopped breathing, and watched. He was tied to the bed, screaming, not from pain, they’d blocked that, but from rage. “Don’t take my leg!” He bellowed, over and over, his voice raw and cracking. “Don’t take it!” And crying, crying, shrieking. Then there was a final surge of blood onto the bed, and he visibly shook, turned pale, and swooned into a dead faint. The vessels were clamped and cauterized, the stump wrapped in gauze. And while pale little Joseph slept, the nurse’s aide, Nessie, wept in the corner.

Joseph and I breathed together, pushing air into panic-constricted lungs, and breathing out the horror. “Let it go,” I urged him, “Let it go.”

Then I showed him another vision: being fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthesis, a sleek, shiny, running blade. And we watched him together, working hard in ambulation class. First he used the parallel bars, and swung ponderously by his arms, barely using his good leg, and utterly afraid to put weight on the prosthetic one. But gradually, he did, and then he graduated to shuffling on a walker, then onto two four-toed canes, then one four-toed cane, then one regular cane. And then none, but with a pronounced limp. We watched him doing squats, stretches, finally wind sprints. The limp was gone.

And then there was Joseph, winning a 5K race, running all-out for the finishing line with a joyous, incredulous grin on his face and tears of shock and elation streaming from his eyes. And Lucia and Bestic were there at the finish line, beaming through tears of their own.

I showed it all to him, utterly ruthless in my need for him to see the cruel loss of his leg, the hard work, the blood, sweat and tears, and then his victory over it all. I hugged him in our little womb of vapor, hugged him so close that I breathed into him and he breathed into me. And as the vapor started to rise in streamers and thin away, I fell asleep.

Thistle and Snails (Curacao). iPhone. © 2019 - Samuel Claiborne

So, last week, I mentioned the phrase “Loosen your perineum.” and said I’d say more about this, and about precognition.

After my stepbrother Jan died, I had a lot of dreams about him. I’d have ‘visits’ with him where we’d hang out, shoot the shit, stuff like that. I also had a dream (after the event I’m about to relate) wherein he told me to stop smoking pot, because, as he intriguingly put it: “it’s slowing down my transition to the next place, the next thing I’m supposed to do, and it’s gonna do that to you too.” I ignored him on that, stubborn bastard that I am, for a long time, well into my 40s.

After Jan’s death, I got a job where I used to reverse commute from NYC to Rye, NY. I had a grand old time too. I was paid well, and the trains were almost empty both ways, as I was going against the rush hour tides.

Literally for years, Jan had urged me to study Chi-Gung and Tai Chi on many occasions (yes, I know, they’re both seemingly spelled a hundred different ways, including in NODding Out - but who wants fealty to consistency? Not me).

Jan had studied, sparred, and even taken part in martial arts exhibition events at this place on second avenue upstairs in this amazing squatter’s building right near the corner of Houston street. The place was called the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association, and it had lived there for quite some time (like, way before the Wu Tang Clan ever got their name!). It was an amazing place, with a giant Bagua painted on the floor, and tons of interesting people from all walks of life from fringey East Villager Nei Gung groupies and aficionados to super-wealthy stockbrokers.

I’d gone a few times, sparred with Jan, who was tiny compared to me, and not as strong, but way, way faster and more skilled. He always won.

I’d even gone to a few parties there, gotten stoned, and watched real fighters fight. I liked the place, in a way, but never felt I fit in, which doubtless had more to do with my internal discomfort with myself than with the scene there.

But, truth be told, it also felt a bit too martial and macho for me. The founder, Frank “The Snake” Allen was covered in tattoos and, truth be told, he kinda scared me. He looked so badass and tough, and he was tough, but I learned later just what a gentle and nuanced teacher he could be (and they’re still teaching in Manhattan, although, OF COURSE, big money eventually succeeded in getting them evicted once the neighborhood became gentrified - but you can find out more about the school and its history HERE).

at any rate, intimidated by my own projections about the place, I’d drifted in and out a few times, but never really got into it, and never took a class.

After Jan died, my father died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. And something shifted within me. I’d been living with ever escalating and quite severe lower back pain since a freak trampoline accident at the age of 16, and finally after my dad died, I think I quite unconsciously finally felt able to be vulnerable, to admit to myself and my wife that I couldn’t carry the pain any longer and needed help.

So I went to my father’s doctor, and then to a specialist, and got an MRI for my terrible back problems. The MRI showed major damage, something called a “sequestered disc”, which basically meant that my disc was neither bulging, or even herniated. No, consummate over-achiever that I am, I had actually blown the bottom disc in my spinal column, the L5-S1 disc, to smithereens.

I had tried a lot of alternative therapies to ameliorate this situation. I did not want surgery. But, unlike a bulging or ruptured disc, the imaging showed that I had hundreds of free-floating fragments of disc, adhered around and compressing nerves. The diagnosis convinced me that surgery was the only game in town, and so I eventually did get an L5-S1 lumbar laminectomy, late in my 30th year, but before I did, I’d started working with a Canadian healer (kind of a chiropractor on steroids) who worked on me both before and after my surgery.

And a funny thing happened: this guy had only been in NYC for a little while, and he was from friggin’ Alberta, but he strongly recommended that I go to this strange place called the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association and study Chi-Gung with this ex-boxer, mystical interior martial arts master, Frank Allen.

Well, when the universe rhymes at me like that, I pay attention. So, although still intimidated by the prospect, I signed up for an introductory Chi-Gung class.

And one day, in my 31st year, the day upon which I was to attend my very first Chi-Gung class, I was on a train to work in Rye in the early morning hours, and I fell asleep, as I often did.

And Jan came to visit. We sat and talked. We shared a joint, and some beer, and a sandwich, hanging out just like we had a million times in the old days in my funky rehearsal/recording studio in the “Music Building” on 8th Avenue, Treebear Music. It was a nice visit. As usual, I forgot he was dead, and we just hung out, just like old times, except that just before he left, he did something funny.

He stood up to leave. He was standing with his back to me in front of the crazy beat up patchwork front door as if he was about to open it and walk out.

But then, he stopped and turned around and stared at me for a second, placidly.

And then suddenly, as if he’d noticed something while looking at me, his stare became concentrated, his expression almost quizzical.

He crossed his arms, leaned forward a tiny bit and cocked his head to one side, and sort of squinted at me, as if trying to figure out if something was awry.

“Loosen your perineum.”, he said to me, and then he turned, opened the door and walked out, left me alone in the dream theater version of my dearly-missed studio, well, really, my dearly missed brother, band, studio, life.

I woke from this dream, kind of laughed off at the bizarre random oddity of it, and got off the Metro North train at Rye. I put in my hours programming, and then got on the train to go back to NYC, and then got on the subway to the East Village for my first class with Frank The Snake Allen.

But when I got there, Frank was out sick, and a substitute, another friend of Jan’s from the neighborhood, Susie Rabinowitz, was teaching instead.

All of the other members of the class were all small, slender, middle-to-senior-aged women. She got us all into Standing Meditation posture. And, yeah, all those women stood stock-still, their tiny legs like stone pillars, while soon enough, my massively muscular (former bike messenger, still avid bike rider) legs trembled like leaves in a monsoon.

Susie went around to each student, gently adjusting our posture, and then returned to the front of the class and observed us as we stood.

And damned if she didn’t cross her arms, cock her head to the side, squint at me, and say “Loosen your perineum.”…

Chapter 38

Shortly thereafter, Lucia started teaching me the Wu style short form of tai-chi. At first we only did the Commencement, the first four motions.

“You are learning to choreograph three separate processes in your body into permutations. Each of these three has a yin phase and a yang phase, female and male, or passive and active, respectively, if you will. Tai-chi, and qigong are both about the modulation of those phases in order to cultivate and direct qi, both for health, and for martial purposes.

“Pet a cat and watch it. It will stretch out one paw while curling in the other in opposition, a perfect yin/yang machine. We say that cats are born knowing tai-chi, but of course that is putting the cart before the horse and denying the cats their due. Tai-chi was invented on Wudang Mountain by a monk who watched tigers playing and hunting. He was inspired by natural feline habits and movements, and also by two epic duels he witnessed, one between a young tiger and an eagle, and another between a crane and a snake. Nature is always the teacher.

“We will work from the least subtle to the most subtle aspects of this pulsation between the yang and yin. In the musculo-skeletal realm, upward or outward movements are said to be yang and inward or downward movements are said to be yin. Over the last few weeks, you have started to learn to open and close the spaces between your joints, massaging your joint capsules with synovial fluid. This is the second realm, the realm of the joints, the hydraulic system of the body that floats one bone over another.

“The fascia and ligaments are the controlling elements of this realm, as the muscles, along with their tendons are of the first one. Like the cat, as you stretch your hand outward like its paw, you are learning to open each joint, and as you retract, you also close the joint spaces slightly. Those are the yang and yin manifestations of the joint realm. And because you are actually extending the arm as you open your joints, this is a dual-yang movement, a choreography of the muscular and hydraulic realms, although each can also be accessed separately.

“The most subtle yet powerful realm is that of energy, naked qi itself. You can direct qi outward or pull it inward. A blow that is muscular only is not nearly as devastating as one that is delivered with a massive yang outpouring of qi, or even a yin sucking up of the other’s qi. That is why the so-called internal martial arts like tai chi, tsing-i, ba gua zhang and aikido are so much more powerful than the simple external ones like karate and judo. Similarly, a soft touch accompanied with a warm qi bath is much more healing than a non-energetic touch alone.

“Many people have studied tai chi without ever learning to cultivate and coordinate these three principles. Superficially, they do the forms well. But we call it empty dance, pretty but useless, like the student monk who memorizes katas without ever opening his mind to their meanings. All of the discipline means nothing without the assimilation of the essence.

“so, now I am going to teach you the Commencement of the Wu Style.”

She showed me four fluid movements, and by this time I could subtly feel her energies flowing inward and outward with each movement.

“The first movement of the Commencement is called Sitting Back. It is a mix of yin/yang. It involves moving your arms upward, yang, closing your joints, yin, and pulling your qi inward and down from heaven to the earth, yin as well.

“The second motion, Warding Off, is all yang. You move your arms and hands out, your joints open and your energy moves outward as well.

“As the second motion is all yang, the third, Pull Back, is all yin. You pull your arms inward and downward, your joints contract, and you bring your qi back towards your core, your lower dantian, about three inches below your navel.

“The last motion, Pull Down, is a mix like the first, but its opposite. Your hands move downward, yin, your joints are opening, yang, and your qi is moving out and up towards heaven, yang as well.

“The Commencement sequence is a beautifully symmetrical encapsulation of all of tai-chi. In fact, the more you study, the more you will come to realize that in a way, the Commencement is the microcosm of all Taoist thought.”

We worked for days on the Commencement, and then on the rest of the Wu style short form. Over the weeks, my mind had quieted to an extraordinary degree. I was no longer in a hurry because I was no longer living in the future.

Then one day, while in standing meditation, I experienced a total hallucination. By total I mean that instead of distortions of visual input, I was suddenly blind, my eyes useless and my body out of reach. I felt out of control, frightened and isolated. All of my senses were shut down and only my mind remained. It was, in a way, the opposite of these last few weeks, where I’d inhabited my body with increasingly subtle familiarity and slowed my mind almost to immobility. Now I was cast off, disembodied, my mind racing.

Then suddenly, I was in a tumult of memory, instinct, thought: of strangers, of animals, of uncountable beings, all hurtling through me, battering me with enormous velocity and ferocity. It was exhausting and terrifying, this non-stop streaming of experience, and I wanted it to end.

Alan’s voice finally broke through. “Andrew, we have given you the amanita. You’re submersed now into the totality of the collective consciousness, the entire Workspace. The chaos you see is because the normal Workspace barriers have become very permeable to you. You’re seeing a gods-eye view of all sentient and instinctual racial, spiritual, and intellectual memory, but your being can’t ingest this totality properly.

“Don’t be frightened. I am here, and so is Lucia, and I promise that you will come back. You need to get lost first, to become dexterous at traversing the barriers of species and especially of human individuality. Later you’ll map this territory and discover that you’re capable of finding individual beings without leaving tracks, without disturbing the fabric. When you master that, you’ll be ready.

“This permeability is the essence of all hallucination and all enlightenment. The schizophrenic surfs this territory all the time, as does the autistic. Their apparatus is biochemically and/or anatomically damaged. Their filtering and navigating mechanisms are impaired, and their entire life experience is haunted by too much permeability, too little sense of individuality.

“But the Taoist master, Zen master, Christian, Sufi, Hindu mystics and aboriginal shamans, they learned to traverse this territory with nuance and control, and came to see the obvious truth that Veaux misses, that we are all one and that a blow to one is a blow to the whole. We are only the sum of our parts.

“Relax. Smell with your mind. Taste with it. Find the taste of me with it. The more you relax, the more the images will slow down and patterns will emerge. You’ll feel all manner and shade of emotion but you want to follow the light, the stars. There are millions of them, but maybe only fifty thousand bright ones. I am in that group. Find me! I’ll wait. We’ve got all the time in the world.

“Time as an entity is pretty much non-existent here. This entire conversation has taken a microsecond of real time, so relax, lie down and look up. You’ll find me. At some point, you’ll even do the scariest thing of all: you’ll find yourself, your own Workspace, and see the totality of what you are in a way that very, very few people ever do. You’ll have no use for mirrors after that. They’ll never show you an adequate picture of yourself once you’ve penetrated this veil.”

How do I describe this chaos, or the order that eventually arose out of it? Starting out like a non-stop cartoon of colors and shapes, ideas and emotions, it rolled through me at incredible speed, a fountain of stuff vomiting out all around me. And I was groundless, floating in an amorphous mass of color, gradient, smell, taste, shadow, emotion, idea, with no proportion or scale or depth of field. It felt two dimensional, like a maniacal Disney film strip. Then it gathered depth and swelled into three dimensions, still moving at light speed, veering vertiginously around and through dim tunnels speckled with light that looked like the half-lit alleys that dog-legged around the Great Mosque of Xi’an.

And sometimes it would convolute and involute and turn inside out like the whole universe was a tubular Möbius pipe, a Klein bottle. And every mental memory, sense-memory, thought, grief, color, touch, rage, joy that anyone or anything has ever felt, was expanding and contracting and whirling inward and outward, unfolding and enfolding everything else—a kaleidoscopic blooming of All.

I awoke with part of me still tripping my brains out, yet some other part of me also somehow conscious and sober. I found myself still in stance, still standing on the beach and unable to determine how much time had passed. The light was pretty similar, so I thought maybe it had been an hour.

But my body was in terrible pain. I fainted almost immediately and fell into a dark quiet place of blessed stasis where the blooming, careening, painful world came to a total stop and died out. I found out later that it had been 51 hours. In standing trance I’d trespassed and traversed a billion souls’ private Workspaces and still stood. I’d shit and pissed myself and still stood. My muscles had screamed and burned and still I’d stood, unaware, letting my fascia and tendons and ligaments hold me as I’d left this world. Jesus: I’d stood for over two days, unsupported, unconscious, and unaware, a scarecrow on a ragged little beach, watched over and cared for by a cadre of almost invisible lepers.

I awoke in the barn with Lucia standing over me. “Here is some tea, nothing in it, just tea. Drink it. We will bring you food later.”

As I drank it she tenderly took hold of my feet and legs and started massaging them. They were charley-horsed beyond belief, my calves knotted into balls, my arches screaming. Slowly they let go a little as we sat in silence. I watched her impassive face, a face so at odds with her passionate nature.

She sat in the twilight and worked my feet with her two hands. The claws! She was massaging me with them! It seemed so… intimate. There was no revulsion. More a feeling of gratitude, that she knew me and trusted me enough to do this. And the energy, the qi pouring out of her hands—it was like they were two infra-red lamps bathing my feet. She used the knuckles of one hand to knead me while using the other to support my foot.

I watched. “How did you contract leprosy, Lucia?”

“Actually, I do not have leprosy. I have buruli, had buruli, which is a distant relative of leprosy. Like leprosy it kills sensation, can paralyze, but it is far more dangerous, though thankfully even less contagious. Unlike leprosy, buruli actually eats flesh.

“I was working in Africa, in Costa d’Avorio as a volunteer, sent with the Capuchin Monks from here in Italy to administer a novel buruli treatment that involved irrigating the affected areas with a water-clay slurry, and then packing them with more clays, which seem to suck out the poisonous mycobacteria. It was all volunteer, because the Brothers could not get funding. Their treatment did not involve pharmaceuticals, and so could not make anyone rich.

“Even though the World Health Organization said the treatment was very promising, they offered no money. So young idealists like me went over to help. Eventually we proved its efficacy and it is now the one approved technique, and so buruli, if caught early, is now almost as curable as leprosy.

“But back then I was young and thought myself indestructible. I never practiced proper antiseptic technique. I might scratch at an itchy spot on my face with the gloves, and sometimes I would take the gloves off on hot days and keep working. I was warned by the Brothers, but everyone was so busy and overworked that no one really forced me to stay clean, and I apparently got very infected there, with multiple invasion sites.

“About eighteen months later, back home in Florence, I noticed several nodules but they were tiny and I ignored them. There is nothing like denial to foster foolishness. Once it got started, it picked up quickly, and flesh and bone started to erode in several places. I apparently had the most distributed case of buruli infections in one body in the history of mankind,” she said, a tiny, tight smile straying across her face.

“I immediately started the clay therapy, but it did not seem to work very well in my case, perhaps because the bacteria that had remained vital on my hands while applying clay to others had become resistant to it. At any rate, it seemed to explode and when I finally faced up to the truth, the only option was radical surgery because it had progressed so far. Great pieces of my face, arms and hands were excised. Three fingers of my left hand as well as half the palm were cut off, and two from my right. Half of my jaw was replaced with a prosthetic, only to have another part start eroding.

“My last surgery was fourteen years ago. Technically I may still have buruli. I was 38, horribly disfigured and suicidal, and I despised myself for my carelessness. I had a choice to make: kill myself or find a way to contribute. I found out about this place and convinced them to also admit buruli cases and to let me administer the clay treatments. But I really came here for peace. I was searching for a place of no mirrors and no judgment and I found that here.

“Then Alan came here to heal, and he saw that I had innate abilities like yours, and he trained me. My clearing-down scans show nothing, and I know I am free of it. But I cannot be healed of the damage. Now I believe that I have enough qi and enough control over my qi to stay well. And because I have seen my immortal soul, my golden shining self, even mirrors would not disturb me.”

She said this last part so matter-of-factly that “golden shining self” didn’t sound arrogant or narcissistic, but merely a simple truth, that we all have that shining core and are all equally beautiful. Perhaps even Veaux is beautiful, under the crushing load of greed and hatred that covers his fears. Maybe all that crap covers this inviolate, beautiful, immortal essence. Would I be harming the whole by destroying him, or was Veaux like a buruli nodule, a diseased part gone dangerously astray, that eats away at the body and must be excised so that the healthy tissue can survive? I preferred to see it that way.

After I recovered, it was back to training full-time. Days and days of standing and sitting meditation and focused work with hallucinogens like the amanita and ergot, salvia, and finally ayahuasca.

Onion. iPhone. © 2025 - Samuel Claiborne

Sometimes my own book blows my own mind. Why? Because I find there’s a lot of wisdom in this thing that I wrote, and yet more often than not, I don’t live into or up to that wisdom!

A lot of Andy’s journey is a journey of letting go of the intermeshed stew of emotions we carry from our trauma. Letting go, or perhaps rather unweaving the triggers of the past from the present situation, can be a very liberating thing. But it can be (is) often so fucking scary — if you’re doing it right!

And so often I’ve utterly failed. I guess the things I wrote in the book are aspirational. Still, they have a clarity that I wonder at; where the fuck did all of that come from?

Truth is, I’ve labored hard, through therapy, multiple types of meditation, time spent at the Hoffman Institute (highly recommended), and even prayer, to become less reactive, less easily triggered and to, as Andy puts it, “stop taking everything so personally”.

And yet…

I remember a therapist of mine read this book, which was written well before I started therapy with him, and he said, essentially, “I don’t get it - I’ve been telling you all of this stuff for several years, but it’s all here!” He was, frankly, pissed off a tiny bit, but also amused. “It’s all here in your book! You clearly see the fundamental issues of what it means to be human, from the fallibility of memory to how triggers are all based in the past. And you see your issues! And yet: you are still so triggerable, and you still often take everything so personally!”

And so I do. Almost all of us do, to one extent or another. I always joke: let the Dalai Lama live for five years in the same house with an intimate partner and we’ll see just how well his equanimity survives…

Still, I am striving for the kind of clarity that Andy’s basically being forced by circumstance to apprehend.

These challenging relationships and circumstances, what we call life, peel off some of the layers, for some people, while they accrete more armor onto others. There’s a choice there, one you have to make in response to every trauma, if you want to stop accreting.

I don’t know about you, but I not only want to stop accumulating layers, I wanna peel ‘em! That’s what all that hard work’s been about, which is why I still feel that the only way to really peel the onion is to do it consciously, and, alas, to be gentler on one’s self than I often am, for failures to grow, failures to clearly perceive, learn from, and finally to let go of patterned behaviors.

Like all of you, I am a work in progress. And, like all of you, the configuration of my triggers is unique: something that might infuriate me might roll off of you like water off a duck’s back, and vice-versa.

I just mentioned the Hoffman Institute, and, if I had the money and health, I might go back and take the quite pricey over week long residential course again.

Hoffman has a model of what it is to be human that, while not revolutionary, is simple and clear, and makes sense to me.

They call it the Quadrinity. Basically, you have four “bodies”, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, and the soul. The first three bodies are distortable, damageable, and mortal - they stick around for this life only. The last is immortal and cannot be damaged, destroyed, or defiled; it is inviolate.

Moreover, those first three bodies will be damaged and distorted in this life — usually most profoundly by early experiences, but also by severe traumas later on in life.

In my case, as I spoke of on a recent video (which you can watch HERE) on my YouTube channel, beyond all of my childhood trauma, a lot of deaths in my family in short succession, coupled with my multiple spinal and brain injuries in 1992 changed me profoundly.

Because of frontal lobe damage, I became so reactive and lost so much impulse control that I was suddenly punching walls and throwing furniture, things I’d never done before in my life.

It took many, many sessions of Neurofeedback at the Stone Mountain Center in Tillson, NY to, as I call it “bring back my sweetness”.

But let’s not overstate it. When roused, when hurt, when triggered, I can still be incredibly vitriolic in my verbal dismemberment of whomever has “wronged” me. Part of that is more integral - stemming from my parents (especially my father) and from childhood. But part of it is a result of the considerable reactive residue left over from my brain injures. I’ve healed them a lot, but not entirely by any means.

It’s all me, though, and I feel that despite emotional damages from childhood and physiological damages acquired later on, I am still responsible for my failings in these areas.

I often call myself “The stupidest smart person in the world.” Because, among other things, I am absolutely amazed by how long it often takes me to even realize what’s going on inside of me. I feel that I am extraordinarily slow at times to actually consciously recognize what I’m feeling, and why, so that I can get a handle on my response to myself and to others.

Noy long before I left America, a dear friend of many years did something to me that felt like a betrayal. When I told her of my hurt, she, as per her own triggers, which call for defense, denial, and deflection, could not only not apologize, or show a shred of empathy, but she doubled-down, placing all of the blame for her own discrete decisions and actions upon me.

And… I became enraged. I attacked her with all of my venom and skill. I wasn’t lying: I do not believe I said anything untrue. But I was cruel, vindictive, totally scorched earth. It was behavior that did no one any good, and was beneath the picture of me that I like to pretend is me.

It took me two weeks to actually cry over what she’d said and done. Two weeks of self-righteous rage, safely protecting me from any feelings of vulnerability and heartache. Two weeks of emailed attacks against her from the part of my personality that I call “The Lawyer from Hell”.

By my lights, this lawyer is usually pretty correct in his analysis, but he’s inhumanly aggressive and cold in how he uses my reasoning, my intelligence, as a cudgel to beat the shit out of someone who, in the rarified air of my high dudgeon, I feel has wronged me.

But what was I really trying to do? What was really going on under the surface?

In truth, I was trying to get some empathy from that first vulnerable email, and maybe an apology. I was trying to be heard, to have my pain acknowledged. Instead, I was shut down as she deflected, and turned my feelings against me, and utterly invalidated my experience as I was blamed — as I so often had been by both of my parents in childhood — for her/their actions.

It took me so long to realize that although the original offence had felt like a betrayal, what had really made me go stratospheric in my rage was that I’d communicated how hurt I felt to her, and she’d not only failed to empathize with my pain, or even acknowledge it, it felt from my triggered place that she’d refused to even hear me as she proceeded to use her own Lawyer from Hell to construct a rather torturous rationalization that not only put all blame on me, but absolved her of any responsibility — to the point that it almost denied her any agency in the matter at all.

It was this, my reaching out initially from pain, not anger, and being met with denial and blame and zero empathy (ironically from someone who calls herself a “spiritual leader”) that magnified the hurt tenfold, maybe a hundredfold, because I’d come from a place of vulnerability.

And so, an almost instantaneous transformation into highly self-righteous rage erupted, completely protecting me for two weeks from the immense pain of abandonment I felt — a pain that, of course had more to do with my mother, and childhood than it did with her. But hell hath no fury like little Sammy scorned…

The past was conjured from the present by my clever little trigger system, conflated with it, and alchemically transmuted into rage, which is much easier for the heart to stand in the short run, and ironically so much more corrosive to it in the long run.

These triggered behaviors do serve a function: they were designed to protect the heart from things that felt unbearably scary and painful, but they persist in doing their thing even when they now do more harm than good, when they become patterned Pavlovian straitjackets.

I am still in awe that I felt none of this pain and sorrow consciously for two weeks! It was occluded, sheltered inside a ball of rage. And man did it hurt when I it finally broke through (with the help of a therapist). I cried like a baby. Harder than a baby. I cried like a man crying his guts out…

And so, here I am, a smart guy who’s often a fool, incredibly impulsive, and often unconscious about what’s simmering, or boiling, or dying, beneath my own surface. I am often a walking terra incognita to myself, after all of this fucking work!

What da Buddha said…

Buddha said that there are only two real emotions: fear and love. What a genius observation — one of those things that seemed as obvious as hell to me once I heard it, but I’m not sure I ever would have come up with it myself.

All of these triggered behaviors stem from fears: the existential fears of violence, starvation, abandonment, and the other deep fears of being unlovable, unworthy of love, or maybe, as in my case, the deep fear that love itself is an just illusion, something you can never trust or rely upon, because you’re really on your own, navigating a purely transactional sea of interpersonal relationships, simulations of the true connection I so desperately yearn for (I don’t sound paranoid at all, do I?).

To bring it one step closer to Buddha’s analysis, I could say that I am too often a soul clinging precariously atop a rampaging elephant with its own agenda, an agenda that’s doing neither myself nor anyone else any good.

That elephant is ego, powered by emotion, and buttressed by intellect — two of the three distorted, damaged bodies from this lifetime, acting in concert to wreak havoc.

Oh devious fucking intellect; such a clever little reasoning, rationalizing machine that often masquerades as the soul, but isn’t any such thing. It was masquerading as such in my friend’s case, and it was masquerading in my response as well.

Intellect, in service to ego, in its role as soul-impostor, says: “I have the answers! My analysis is truth! And so, I am right!”

And how is that working out for you?

Hasn’t done me a fucking lot of good, I can tell you. And, the smarter you are, the smarter it is, rationalizing, creating hallucinations about others and self that can be so damn convincing.

And then there’s the emotional body. It’s in cahoots. And perhaps it’s even more devious for someone who likes to think they’re on a soul-centered, heart-centered path.

Why? Well, for many reasons in many ways, but here’s an example: What often feels like “True Love” is just brain chemistry based on past patterns (the Imago model of relationship has some good insights on this). You think you’re doing the heart-centered thing, for example, in getting together with this person. But it’s often based on poverty mentality, the fear of eventual rejection, betrayal, abandonment, of never being good enough, so you take anyone who’ll have you, and you take on their damage into your life, because being alone feels worse... for a while.

You’re being led by fear, but you think it’s love. It’s… demonic! And yet, it’s how we’re built - all of us in one way or another, except, possibly, those lucky enough to have formed really secure attachments in childhood.

And even there… well, I have to say that I’ve NEVER personally known anyone totally immune to triggers, rationalizations, all of it. I am not saying these people don’t exist, but I’ve met some pretty heavy-hitters in the spiritual world, and those I’ve gotten to know well enough, well, their shit stinks too.

But, as Captain Kirk says: We must strive! And so, strive we do — or, at least, some of us do.

The banality of evil - it’s inside all of us:

There’s a gordian knot here - because even people of good will, with good hearts, people who genuinely strive to do the right thing, can actively support evil!

There are people whom I think are psychopathic or sociopathic to different degrees, like Putin, Trump, Musk, Bovino, Noem, et. al.

But then there’s my former girlfriend, now a full-on MAGA cult member, who seems to feel no empathy for what the people of Minneapolis are going through, and, honestly, I believe that she believes that all of these demonstrators are not regular folks trying to save democracy and protect their neighbors, but nefarious shadowy ANITIFA operatives bused in by George Soros. I’m serious.

I mean, she’s a good person. She feels empathy — but her own traumas, and her accumulated family traumas as upper-class refugees from Castro’s Cuba, have, in effect, dulled both her heart and her intellect. She’s in full trigger mode, to the point that she’s lost a lot of humanity.

She not only cannot feel for the people murdered in Minneapolis, but she can look at a women turning her car’s wheels away from a man (who’s just run in front of her car), a woman looking the other way from him and down the street, clearly trying to leave, and my ex sees what she’s been told; that this is a radical intentionally “weaponizing her vehicle”.

She can see a nurse pepper sprayed as he tries to help a woman who’s just been brutalized, then this nurse is beaten, disarmed, and then shot 10 times in the back - and she thinks this was a “legitimate response by law enforcement”.

She can see an entire city brutalized and terrorized, the brutality almost universally leveled against completely non-violent citizens exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech - and they’re “the enemy within”.

For exercising these core rights, these peaceable citizens are repeatedly brutalized by fists, arms, legs, and munitions. And she sees all of this as somehow justified.

In her world, the mayhem unleashed against this city is caused not by the invasive, gratuitously violent occupying army that refuses to respect the Constitution, but by the citizens themselves.

She will not believe her own eyes. She will instead regurgitate, verbatim, what’s she’s instead been told to believe.

For her, Trump is correct when he says he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth avenue, and she’d still support him, still believe whatever lies were promulgated to justify his behavior.

I’ve extended this to the grotesque at times to try and make a point: he could kill an 8 year old boy on Fifth Ave, then bugger him, and the MAGA cult would say that he’d killed a highly trained assassin and was just frisking the body for weapons.

I mean - is that really very far from the theater of the absurd (and tragic) disconnect between what we’re seeing and what we’re being told to see?

And, perhaps most ironically for my ex, while Trump’s resemblance to tyrants and strongmen from Castro to Hitler, and, most perfectly to my mind, to Benito Mussolini, has been incredibly obvious to so many of us for so long, she and her entire family still project someone akin to Jefferson or Lincoln onto a damaged, amoral, womanizing, draft-dodging two-bit grifting, sadistic bully who much more closely resembles the object of her family’s intergenerational hatred, Fidel Castro.

This is the banality of evil, and it’s really terrifying, this capacity to rationalize those dark emotions and to dehumanize anyone who dovetails into your concept of “the other” or “the enemy".

It’s terrifying that a good person, with a good heart, like my ex girlfriend, can be so blinded to the inhumanity being committed by those she’s been programmed to blindly support against those she’s been programmed to see as mortal threats, enemies.

She even told me the other day that’s Trump’s more popular in the polls than ever. I mean, it’s an alternative universe she’s inhabiting, as unreachable as the Andromeda galaxy.

But, still, it’s similar to things I’ve felt, to how I’ve reacted, only writ very, very large.

Oh, yes, it has much more dire consequences, life and death consequences, than my attacks on an erstwhile friend, and I pray I wouldn’t fall prey to these pernicious beliefs under any circumstance. But isn’t it really all of a piece? Is it all just a matter of degree? Would most of us, from the Buddha on down, come to rationalize cruelty, even murder, if sufficiently frightened? If the right button were pressed for all of us?

God knows I’ve seen it on the left — just look at China’s Cultural Revolution, or the student mobs so concerned about the “violence” of misusing pronouns and deadnaming, suddenly chasing Jewish students through the halls of Columbia and Cooper Union screaming vitriol and bl;oody murder.

No one is immune. Constant vigilance is required.

And yet, even in the most horrific places, love can conquer fear:

I just saw a YouTube documentary on the plane crash in the Andes of a soccer team and their families in the 1970s that led the survivors to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.

And, in truth, it’s a testimony to love, not Lord of the Flies. It’s amazing, and you can watch it HERE.

There they all are - several have already died. They’re freezing, and they’re starving, in a high Andes valley with no wood, no plants, no wildlife, and towering jagged steep mountains and a massive glacier hemming them in on all sides.

They were going to starve to death, and they all knew it.

So, they called a meeting to discuss what no one wanted to even consider: eating the flesh of their dead friends, team mates, and relatives in order to survive, an almost incomprehensibly horrific thing to try to wrap your mind around.

Almost everyone reflexively said NO! And that was almost that… until one of them quietly looked up at all of them and said “If I die, you have my permission to eat my flesh to survive”.

And, one by one, they found their answer inside: they’d all want their friends to survive if they died, any way they could, including using a body they would no longer need.

And so, that is how this group of people (only men, by the end), most of them deeply Catholic, broke one of human kind’s oldest, strongest taboos - not out of hatred, or greed, but out of love, for each other.

When they were eventually rescued, after a tale of unimaginable courage, grit, and ingenuity, the truth of how they survived came out. The newspapers were aflame with it. People were furious.

So, only a few days after their rescue from almost 3 months of harrowing emotional loss and physical suffering, they gave a news conference. Some of the survivors wanted to sugar coat it, but just as they had with all of their previous decisions, they met as a group and decided to tell the unvarnished truth.

And something happened. Their humanity, their looking out for each other, love for each other, is what shown through!

The news conference ended with a standing ovation. Most of the families of those who’d been consumed subsequently released statements affirming their gratitude that their loved one’s deaths had not been in vain. Even the Pope sent a telegram telling them that their actions were not sinful, given the extremity of their circumstances.

There’s kind of a corollary here for me: if you want your soul to live to its full expression in this life, you must cultivate the ability to look at and take on what you cannot stand to see, to feel what feels unbearable to feel, and to question most of all the beliefs and feelings that resonate most closely within you.

None of us gets out of here alive, after all, right? In the end, it’s all existential…

And turning towards love, even when it’s hard as hell, on a personal level, a national level, an international level, is all we’ve got.

And yet, we, all of us, or virtually all of us, suck at it!

How many intelligent people, people who feel themselves to be spiritually enlightened, have I seen rationalizing their bullshit? As Manny would say: a fuckuva lot.

We gotta do better. I think we can do better.

Perhaps we’re in the act, every day, every moment, even in this dark time in history, where authoritarian strongmen are multiplying like maggots, learning to love better.

The whisperings of the the quiet member of the Quadrinity:

While the physical body blares its pains, longings, and addictions, and the intellectual body schemes to concoct a coherent rationale to yell out in support of the emotional body’s primal chthonic forces, the true heart-center, the soul, merely whispers.

It’s the whispering we must all become more attuned to, first and foremost.

I see this all too clearly, but all too often only in theory, failing to actually hear its plea to me to risk feeling and genuinely loving. I have a big loving heart, but oh man, can it spring shut like a fucking bear trap when I’m deeply hurt or frightened, just like my ex, just like… everyone? Almost everyone?

Certainly like Andy. Here is where we find him - peeling away more layers but damn, it hurts.

Soon, a layer of incredible pain, an ego-destroying layer that he’s unwittingly nurtured within in order to denude himself of all of his power, just to avoid the pain of ever feeling responsible for the fate of anyone else ever again, will be challenged.

All of his defenses will soon be on Defcon 4, wanting to nuke anyone who wants to help him see how he’s crippled himself via the gymnastics of his team of ego-intellect, and emotion.

But. Not. Quite. Yet…

The next few chapters are an inflection point for Andy, or, maybe more precisely, a fulcrum. And if he can just open himself up to the pain, and clear it, if his soul can find its leverage, lift him up clear of the jungle of fear and defense and self recrimination, and into the soul-light, there’s nothing that he, or I, or you, can’t do!

Chapter 37

We did this for three days. I mean, that’s all we did for something like eight hours a day, with stops for tea. The balance was spent in sitting meditation, which was easier on my body but not my hamster brain.

Sometimes we would do the clearing down meditation; I was to feel all the places in my body that called attention to themselves—places that felt stiff or sore, numb or tingly, or even particularly strong. I was to soften these places, to feel them turning from ice to water to vapor, and finally to nothing, just evaporated space.

I began to feel these spots, especially in my spine and skull, but all over as well, from my eyes to my toes to my shoulder blades, and even in my cock, a place I’d never thought of as holding tension. But then again, I’d never noticed that my perineum was hard and tight and… scared.

I could feel fear there, and as I learned to let go, it came out to play, as did all of the other emotions. Memories flooded me and moods took hold of me out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe that just standing in a specific posture, and doing the clearing down meditation could produce such profound reactions in my mind.

“Remember,” she told me, “your body will want to re-encapsulate the trauma. You have to have the courage to make the conscious effort to release it. This goes against human nature, but you must do it, or you will achieve nothing at all.”

And so I practiced. And sometimes I could feel myself releasing the traumas, and sometimes I could feel them creeping back in, pulled in greedily by my shadow, despite my best efforts. Then I’d peel off another layer and try again. And I finally did relax my perineum, and learned to let it breathe.

But before I could release it, relax it, I had to see what was there and dissolve it. And what I found there was an unreasoning fight-or-flight fear that was awesome in its power and depth. Once I found it, focused on it, I could trace it right up my spine. This fear almost tore me in two. It was pernicious and it didn’t want to let go. Or I didn’t want to let it go.

As I worked on it, layers of anxiety and terror peeled away. It seemed that any fear I’d experienced in my life was there, in accretions, layers of sediment: fossilized terror. It made me ill to see it and feel it and understand what it had done to me, how it had held me back.

But even that was a trap. Thinking about the past, about what that fear might have caused me to do or not do, about missed opportunities, that just took me out of the moment, so my sneaky body and mind could try to hold on to the fear by distracting me from dissolving it. I couldn’t dissolve these terrors in my past, only here, in the moment, so I strove mightily to stay present.

Eventually, the fear seemed to go all the way back to birth, to non-verbal sensations that I could get on a body level, but for which there were no words.

Perhaps they even went all the way back to my time spent in my mom’s belly: her fears and anxieties about having me, wondering if her frail marriage could stand the strain of another child. I don’t know if these were the actual fears, I only know that I must have felt some sort of fear then, in her belly, and it must have been hers, transmitted umbilically to me in a manner as old as mothers and their young.

After three days, we moved outside, to a tiny strip of sandy clay at the water’s edge. It was a reedy, sad place, strewn with pieces of driftwood and lapped by brackish water. I was nervous about it at first, about being aboveground, under the sky. I mean, even Bestic seemed to stay underground most of the time. But Lucia told me it was absolutely necessary, that I needed to be in contact with night and day and sun and moon and stars to reach the proper state of concentration. And anyway, had I really thought that a wooden barn would protect me?

Truth is, I loved it. There was sun during the day and stars and moonlight at night. I got to see the moon and the sun rising and setting on the lagoon’s syrupy tidal flats and shoals. Over and over again, little spits of clayey land surfaced and submerged like lazy whales throughout the cycling tides. I became hypnotized, sometimes staring at the moon, staring into it until I was blind to anything else, and finally to it as well.

She began to teach me yin seeing, or inward seeing.

“In the West, we peer out, trying to push ourselves into the environment with our sharply-focused eyes, all of our ocular muscles tensed. It’s a very yang and masculine way of seeing that expends a lot of energy, and misses much. It has its place, such as the observer in the crow’s nest of a ship, or the day watchman keeping a lookout for Mongols on the Great Wall, but it is only one way of seeing.

Those in the East developed a softer way of seeing as well. They invited the world inside, in a soft, unfocused gaze rather than a sharp glance. You see more, you see less. You see energetic structures more acutely, physical structures less acutely. You see motion, especially peripheral motion, much more acutely, which is why that same watchman might have employed yin vision on the night shift. It is neither better nor worse, it merely performs a different function.”

Day after day, night after night, for about two weeks, the sun and the moon and the waves blurred. And when I looked at her with that soft gaze, I thought I saw a slight shimmering around her. We had slowly worked up to about 20 hours a day. I was eating in posture, though I was mostly living on tea. I only took bathroom breaks and I spent perhaps ten minutes of each hour lying on the beach with my sore feet resting in the cool water.

From sleep-deprivation and fatigue and the magic of yin-gazing at the moon, I finally entered a fugue-state of strange clarity. And after about three more days, I started hallucinating. The waters rose and formed into animals and waterspouts and mountains and sailing ships. I learned later that they’d given me my first dose of ergot that night.

Lucia started speaking to me without speaking. I had entire conversations with her without a word being spoken. I couldn’t believe it, yet I was sure of it. During the cool nights I’d see steam coming from her nose holes, but none from her mouth. But we were talking! Or were we? Was it all a hallucination when she pointed out a part of my skull, a fissure-site on my right temple where I still held the rage and grief of that last day with Nina? And I released it and cried all night, struggling to let it go, to stop from re-embracing that bitter memory.

Though bitter, it was a memory of love nonetheless, with its concomitant emotional charge, that charge we humans so zealously hold close to our hearts, though it kills us as surely as life-giving salt will kill a tree. Memory, the thing I was fighting to save, what was it? Wasn’t it the root of pain? The enemy? What was I doing this for? Wouldn’t it just be better to… forget?

No. The next morning I could remember that last day with Nina, even remember how peaceful she looked in her best nightgown, without falling to pieces or gritting my teeth in rage as I had so often before. It was a loving memory, uncluttered by past associations of loss, a wound debrided of the human context of infantile grief, all that Freudian striving for mama, etc. Instead, the memories of Nina stood on their own, in the context of themselves only, not conflated with childhood traumas and drives.

Was my affect flattening? Was I somehow becoming… unfeeling? No. Great feelings of tenderness and love and sadness were there, but they were true feelings, feelings derived from those distinct experiences alone rather than the smudgy mélange of memory and experience we naturally conjure up when we feel emotions. It was a new way of feeling, far removed from that messy stew of totally unrelated stimuli strung together by our busy, mischievous intellects, blown out of proportion by our emotionally over-reactive limbic brains.

There was a purity to the remembrance, a lack of weight and baggage to it. I could still feel, could still even cry, but I was finally crying for those moments alone, not for a thousand other jumbled-together events.

“You will have to practice this for the rest of your life, Andrew, to stay vigilant, for it is not the normal way of being. From time to time, you will find you have fallen into the old groove, you will feel the rage, the terror, the grief, whatever, blown out of proportion. Then you will know it is time to do some more work. Peeling off the layers is an endless process, and it takes courage and commitment. But it brings peace and strength.”

One day Lucia began a raft of other qigong exercises. She taught me Cloud Hands and Bend the Bow, Shoot the Arrow and my favorite, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. These started to teach me to have delicate control of skeletal and muscular structures and energetic processes within my body. I learned that I could breathe with my pelvis, actually flex the bones there, opening and closing them slightly. Similarly, I learned to move individual vertebrae and individual bones in my skull.

This contravened everything I was taught in med. school. The pelvic girdle and the skull are both supposed to be monolithic bone structures formed of multiple fused bones. These individual bones are not supposed to have the capacity of individual movement or adjustment, and no-one is supposed to be capable of the muscular control necessary to move a single vertebra. School’s wrong; I did these things.

Carnival, Kingston NY. Camera, lens, film, date, unknown. © 2026 Samuel Claiborne

Days and days of driving rain here in “Sunny Portugal”, and more to come and… I’m complaining? My former home in the Mid-Hudson valley is getting hit with blizzard conditions today following closely on the heels of several large snowstorms that are just barely in their rearview mirror.

It’s usually in the upper 30s Fahrenheit here in Vieira do Minho at night (it was 6 Fahrenheit in my old home of High Falls, NY just the other day), and it’s in the upper 40s into the 50s here in the daytime. There are still tons of oranges, lemons, limes, persimmons and pomegranates on the trees here too.

And yet, I miss “home”. I stumbled on some old photos of “my” land, the 6 acres lent to me for a time by fate and a mortgage (I.e. I believe we never own the land!). It was such a beautiful, peaceful place! And so full of energy! My land vibrated with it. It suffused my house, and me. And it definitely helped my healing work. The pictures tugged at my heart, almost made me cry. They were of spring, in “my” woods, with “my” trees and brook. So lovely, and yet… it was time to go, even though I nearly had to rip myself apart to leave.

I lived there for 26 years, and, where I’m currently living, though spectacularly beautiful, is not where I want to settle. I don’t really know where “home” is going to be, but more importantly, I don’t know when it’s going to be. I’ve landed here in Portugal, but it’s still not home, and it could take years before it is. But I have faith that it will eventually become home.

Last Sunday I talked about my psychic abilities, the odd way that I think I attained them, and why I locked them away “forever” due to the pain they’d caused me in general, and particularly in one instance.

Today I thought I’d talk a little bit about how and why I came to open up that watertight compartment in my soul to reaccess what I’d tried to banish.

It’s kind of funny, but sometimes I’m reminded by someone that I never quite let go of some of the memories and beliefs I had that seemed to come from another life.

My father was a science writer, incredibly logical and empirical in his world view, to the point that he was an atheist.

I’d always had multiple affinities; subjects as varied as science, music, and visual arts had all fascinated and entranced me, and still do.

But whatever nascent spirituality I’d gotten downloaded into me, or remembered from previous incarnations, or made up, all got packed away with my abilities like seeing disease and using energy to heal injuries and calm babies.

I tried to become like my dad, ironic since we had a pretty shitty relationship for most of the time we had on this earth together, though at least it became a good, if not what I’d call emotionally rich relationship before he died.

So, I became “Mr. Science”, empirical to the core. There is no God, no spirit, no nothin’. And I internally renounced all that I’d seen and perceived and done in the psychic realm. I tried to cage my true nature, imprison it with “reason”, denying actual experiences I’d had. I still sometimes fall into this trap, truth be told — this is the problem with having two brains with such opposite natures, one an intuitive, energetically hyper-sensitive mystic and the other a constantly analyzing, dissecting, measuring and judging doubting Thomas.

But apparently some of my worldview persisted, and even occasionally leaked out, because in a conversation with an old college friend recently, he told me how I’d outlined an entire theory of how synchronicity functioned. I didn’t call it that. I’d never heard the term until the band The Police used it. But that’s what I was talking about. And to hear his description, my conversations with him about it had a very mystical bent, and included much talk of reincarnation, precognition, claircognizance, clairsentience, and clairaudience (all words I didn’t know then, though I probably knew clairvoyance, which, ironically, I do not possess).

[And speaking of precognition, the phrase “relax your perineum” comes up in this chapter. I just gotta share with you where that comes from, but not today!]

I was about 16 when I shared my theories with my friend (got my GED and fled high school two years early), so apparently my Mr. Science lockdown hadn’t really run its full course by then. Maybe it never did.

Maybe some ember of belief kept burning, but I sure as shit tried to suppress it as much as I could, because from the age of 12 to about the age of 30 or 31, I never told anyone they were sick, commented on the gender of a baby when asked for a prediction by an expectant mother or father, and never delved into any healing arts in any capacity, except for once in a while answering a direct question from my mother about a symptom she had or an injury she’d sustained.

But one day at work, I got a phone call from my wife. Our daughter Hannah, who was a toddler at this time, and whom we’d nicknamed “The Flying Banana” for her penchant for clambering on things and often falling spectacularly, had fallen badly, bent her two front teeth inward, ripped her labial frenum (that little flap of skin that connects the gum between the two front teeth to the inner surface of the lip), and was bleeding all over the place.

I rushed home and we took her to a dentist. By the time we got there, her two front teeth were already a dark grey, and still bent inward, and loose. He said that there’d been too much damage and that the teeth were "dying”.

“Well, no big deal, right?”, I said to him. “I mean, they’re just her baby teeth.”. He informed me that no, it was indeed somewhat of a big deal, and that this damage would affect the development of her adult set. I asked if there was any way to save them, but he said, no, once the nerves were damaged in this way, the loss of those teeth was inevitable; there was nothing to do but wait until they fell out.

We went home and I told my wife that I was going to do this “strange stuff” that she’d heard my family talk about. And then I just did what I did. Don’t ask me what it was or where it came from - I’ve already theorized about where, but the what, and even the why, are kind of beyond me. The best I can articulate it is that in some way, shape, or form, I “pushed” qi (or chi, or prana, if you prefer), out of my body, through my hand, and into her maxilla (upper jaw), and in the process “felt” into the roots of the teeth and the bone and other tissues and cleared blockages in energy and circulation. “Opened up flow” is my lame shorthand for it. A really poor description for a guy who considers himself a writer, but in this realm, words often fail, and it’s as close as I can get.

Years later a healer told me that I was an idiot for using my own qi, and of course she was right, and I eventually learned to “bring it down” from above and use the universal qi, the germinal creative energy that suffuses everything, everywhere, all the time.

But as a kid, once I realized that “normal people” couldn’t do things that I could, I’d developed a kind of ego trip about using my own “Power” to heal, and years later, when I started doing healing in earnest, I still had this ego trip going, until this healer set me straight.

At any rate, the next morning her teeth were a much lighter shade of grey and were almost completely straight. My wife’s mind was blown, and maybe mine too - I’d convinced myself so thoroughly that what I’d done in the past was mostly fantasy and was probably merely ego tripping by a young rejected miserably outcast kid.

But Hannah was better, so I did my thing again the next morning, and later that day or the next day, we returned to the dentist, because her teeth were now totally straight and just barely a shade darker than her surrounding teeth.

He was thunderstruck. I don’t think I described what I’d done — too much trouble, or at least ridicule, could come from that. I think we just brought her back and said, basically, what do you think?

He said it was impossible, and a miracle, and, truth be told, he almost seemed dismayed by it, as if his entire world view on science and medicine had been pulled out from under him.

Poor guy may have experienced an existential crisis, but, truth be told, I wish more doctors would experience just this sort of crisis, as so many have such stubbornly closed minds about how complex and manifold the ways of healing and the ways of qi are.

We went home, Hannah’s teeth returned completely to normal, and needless to say she kept them. She did recently tell me that her two adult teeth are slightly grey, so some damage might have remained. I must remember to do a session on her and, with luck, maybe, just maybe, we can clear that up.

So, at age 30, or 31, I’d reluctantly “come out of retirement”, and treated my daughter, but I considered it a one-off, not something to pursue? Why? Utter lack of faith in myself. I mean, I hadn’t tried to treat my brother, who’d been dying of AIDs shortly before this time. I don’t think I ever even thought about it - even after his qipong master worked with him when Jan was in a coma and brought him out of it.

I’m not sure why: maybe it was too deeply locked away inside me. Or, to be a little more fair, maybe because I’d never worked with a disease, as a child. I’d seen them, diagnosed them, after a fashion, but the only things I’d actively worked with had been crying babies and things like contusions, bruises, and sprains.

Little did I know that only a year or two later, at age 32, I’d be called upon to use not only use these abilities, but use them almost 24/7, in the fight of my life. But that’s a story for another day…

So, WTF does this have to do with Andy. Well, this is another guy who’s super reluctant to use his abilities, and who has lost all faith in himself. But on sone level, he secretly knows there’s more to him, and he really wants to avoid the responsibility that his latent abilities bestow upon him, as SUR attacks more and more people of color. Andy’s scared of his own power, just as I was.

Is my power some grand thing where I can walk on water, heal anyone of any disease or physical and mental trauma? Fuck no. I’m a healer, and, I like to think, a good one. And what I do is a synthesis of some native ability and a fuckuva lot of independent studying, and over 600 hours and counting of in-class training (not to mention all I’ve learned and grown from through over two thousand sessions with clients — they are, indeed, my most important teachers). But I tell each and every client that no one healer, or modality or set of modalities, can heal every person.

I have some gifts, just as you do. I also lacked many, and had some lovely deficits like for shit executive function and impulse control from ADHD, dyslexia, and disgraphia!

I wanted to be an astronaut - but I was chubby, not very athletic, and nearly legally blind by age 8. I wanted to be a rock star - but never had the confidence, arrogance and charisma that the job requires as prerequisites. I wanted to do many things that I lacked the gifts for.

Thankfully, albeit to my view, belatedly, fate pulled my head out of my ass and made me start doing the things I was put here to do, and Andy’s about to get a similar head-out-of-own-ass removal treatment.

But as for me and grandiosity, I’ve had my share, but I think I’ve cured it. Or at very least, the amount of crow I’ve had to eat over the myriad ways I’ve been foolish and fucked up my health, finances, and relationships, has put me into some degree of remission.

So, run like hell from the types who see themselves in all caps as THE HEALER! Anyone tells you that they have all the answers, or that they can heal everyone, run away. They’re on some toxic ego trip. They may indeed have amazing abilities, but they’ve gotten drunk their own persona, their own brand of grandiose Kool-Aid.

Andy’s never progressed that far. His prescient precognitive dreams and his penchant for finding lost things seems like a parlor trick to him. He refuses to take them seriously. But he was once a medical school student, and during that period he bit off more than he could chew, which resulted in dire consequences.

And so, he locked all of his confidence in his own abilities away into a similar watertight compartment, pilloried himself, made himself smaller, caged himself in his own custom-designed prison of self deceit, self recrimination and self diminution.

How many of us have done this? Myriads, legions, billions. It seems that people who are intelligent and of conscience are much more likely to second-guess themselves, denude themselves of their own latent, sometimes blatant powers and abilities, while the fools and narcissists of this world plunge ahead, cock sure in their arrogance.

God/Goddess just loves irony.

But Andy’s watertight compartment is being breached. Unbeknownst to him, a process is starting that will open his battered heart, ablate away his grudging distrust of self and self-loathing, and eventually open him to his own true nature. Andy will see the totality of himself, and everyone else, and it will change him forever.

But for now, the siege is just starting. The hammer and the chisel are clanging away at his steel door, as Andy gets a look in the mirror as he continues to get schooled in just how much his own bullshit stinks, and on how grandiosity and self-loathing are two sides of the very same toxic coin.

Chapter 36

Bestic concluded our meeting by abruptly waving goodbye and striding out. I was led back to the farm, to a small room in the cupola of a barn. It was a tiny room, up a wrought iron ladder and through a trapdoor. There were four windows, a bed, and a minuscule desk looking out the north-facing window. Bestic had told me to sit with myself for a while and decide what to do, but I already knew what I had to do. I wasn’t in a position to second guess this guy. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

At Saint Ann’s, we were always told we were the smartest, the best. My teachers and my mother and father had always told me that I wasn’t living up to my potential, that I was supposed to do great things and change the world on account of my brains. But I’d never felt that way. I’d never felt as smart or as disciplined or organized as the other kids. I’d always been too sensitive, too thin skinned, too easily overwhelmed and distracted. And more to the point, I’d always felt that I didn’t understand the world, didn’t fit in, like there was a secret handshake to the world that I just didn’t get.

I’d tried to make it through med. school and crashed and burned. It’s a wonder I made it as a speech pathologist. In my mind, I’d always assumed I’d end up as a short-order cook or something. I guess I can thank Desert Storm and Vernard for becoming something more than that.

Now I was cornered with my terror of what Veaux and his friends could do to me, or was it my terror that I would come up short again? Why would Bestic and Bag-Zho put their faith in me? Couldn’t they see that I was a fraud? I was not a good bet. I was a fuck-up.

The next morning he appeared at the top of the ladder, holding up the trapdoor with a meaty hand, and beckoned me down.

As we walked, he explained the training. “You’re going to start your training with qigong standing meditation. This meditation is designed to release qi knots in the body.

Every time you experience trauma, be it emotional or physical, or even karmic, your body holds on to it, enfolds it and sort of cherishes it, for lack of a better word. This is a natural reaction, one of two. The other reaction is that of an animal, which will shiver uncontrollably to purge itself of the trauma. Unfortunately, when we developed intellect and time-sense, we also lost this natural animal mode of dealing with trauma and began internalizing it. The actual mode of internalization is that our bodies take a string of qi and knot it up.

“Qi is energy, life-force. It’s what makes things grow and thrive. But when some of it gets knotted, that blocks the free-flow of qi throughout the body. The knot becomes an interference field that vitiates and enervates the natural qi field. You cannot function at a high order of transmission in this state.

“But this is our nature, to take in and enfold the trauma and encapsulate it as a knot of qi. When we do the qigong standing meditation, which we call clearing down, we learn to unravel the knots. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is that as the knots open, you re-experience the trauma, whether a repeat of a past physical pain with no current organic cause,” (“NOP, Non-Organic-Pain,” I thought ruefully) “or a recapitulation of old emotional pains: rage, sorrow, anxiety, grief. Whatever the knot enfolds, you get to re-experience it as you open it. It’s not easy and it’s not nice.

“And it’s not just that you re-experience it. The worst part is that you don’t want to let it go. You want to re-encapsulate it, knot it up again.”

“But why would I or anyone else want to hold on to pain? That seems utterly counter-intuitive.”

“Let me give you the simplest explanation: If you are only the sum of your experiences, then what happens to you when those experiences are stripped away? The ego relies on those traumas to tell itself of its existence, and the lizard brain relies on keeping track of experiences that are dangerous to the organism. To some extent, the body does as well. A body left in a sensory-deprivation tank eventually loses contact with itself. It floats discorporeally in the tank, and then anxieties arise as the body fears that it’s been annihilated. If you have a pain in your body, your mind, your emotional heart, no matter where it is or how painful, it’s a kind of proof of existence. And so your entire being, body, mind, heart, holds on to it all, whether painful, pleasurable, constructive, destructive, traumatic, with equal fervor, in a vain attempt at immortality. But paradoxically, those knots actually cause strictures in the overall energy flow and shorten our lives.

“As those knots are released, that unbound qi becomes available to you. And as the channels open, you will be introduced to other qigong exercises that will enable you to further nurture this energy and direct it around your body to heal your soma and emotional body. You’ll then learn how to direct it outwards to heal the sick or defend yourself against an adversary. I’m going to hand you over to Lucia Vernerelli, one of our residents. She’ll teach you our methods for a month or two. I thought your training would take two weeks, but I see a lot of trauma within you, and I fear it’ll take two months.”

“Two months!” I exclaimed, “Can’t you speed it up? Who knows how many people will be wiped out by Veaux in that time!” I realized my voice had risen. I felt that I’d already blown way too much time dicking around in China and Italy.

Bestic waved a hand to interject: “First of all, you have no choice. Secondly, Veaux is slowing down. The economic damage is becoming widespread. Tourism, trade, finance—all are in a state of shock, and his partners are starting to become concerned, and so they’re calling for an almost complete moratorium on sales of their little box for now. You have time.”

I didn’t even ask him how he knew. He just radiated knowing. He took me into the low-ceilinged basement below the barn, dank and cool, with a hard packed-earth floor. “This is an ideal spot for the clearing down meditation. You will connect easily to the earth, ground yourself, and also gradually learn how to connect yourself upward, to the heavens. Then we will move you outside, to the shore, to begin training in earnest.”

There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” he said and the door creaked open to reveal a tall lithe woman who entered like dark water flowing across the threshold. In the dim light I couldn’t make out her face, but her body reminded me of Nina’s, though she was taller and thinner.

Actually, it wasn’t her body, it was the way she moved. She was regal and catlike, strong in a quietly wild way. It was the body of someone very sensual and alive—a body connected to a vibrant spirit. Finally she came forward and I saw her ravaged face. She was in her fifties and there was no doubt that she’d been, if not a beautiful woman, then at least a handsome one. What was left of her face had a nobility to it that was poetic, but what remained only underscored the damage.

Her nose was gone, actually gone, just two holes left on the plane of her face. Unlike the other residents who had collapsed noses, this one was totally eaten away. Her right eye didn’t track me and I think it was blind, possibly even glass. Part of her right eye socket and right cheekbone were missing, just caved in, with ugly scars traversing all the way from them to her jaw, part of which was also simply gone, eaten away. Her face was pinched by the scars, almost folded-looking.

She looked far worse than anyone I’d seen at the colony. And her face was oddly passive, unanimated. I reached over to shake her hand and she waved me off with a claw-like half of a hand and a scarred arm. Jesus, she looked like she’d been in some sort of awful industrial or agricultural accident, like she’d become entangled in a factory machine or a thresher or something.

She smiled shyly and said “Pleased to meet you,” in a hushed, almost breathless voice, her English beautifully overlain with a lyrical Italian accent. “Are you ready?”

“I suppose so,” I said, and turned at the sound of the door creaking closed. Bestic was gone.

She had me stand in a posture that she described as a relaxed sitting-while-standing, a settling in that forces the ligaments, rather than the muscles, to hold you up. “You will find this stance difficult after a while,” she said, “but try to hold it.” She walked around me, gently adjusting the angle of my chin, the small of my back, my feet, until she was satisfied. “Now relax your perineum,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Relax your perineum, the spot between your scrotum and your anus. It is a major energy pathway, your root chakra, and you must allow it to breathe.”

I tried to find my perineum to relax it. Where was it? What did it feel like?

She saw me furrow my brow as I mentally looked for it. “Do not visualize the things I tell you to do. Do not try to see the places I am talking about. Instead, learn to feel them”

All the while I’d been standing in posture and I was tiring already. My legs were beginning to tremble, and soon I was bouncing up and down in waves. She was standing in the same posture, facing me, rock solid and still, her thin dancer’s legs not showing the slightest tremor. This really annoyed me. I’d been a bike racer and messenger. I still sometimes rode my bike at breakneck speed from Maspeth to my job at Bellevue in midtown Manhattan. My legs were like tree trunks, but right now they seemed so weak: they were betraying me.

She laughed, though not unkindly, at my obvious discomfort, and also, I’m sure, at my bemused look of dismay. “Yes, you are muscular, but this is all about the ligaments. Muscles are over-developed in the West. In the East, development is more balanced. Do not worry about the bouncing, it is only the first layers of knots making themselves felt. You will stand as long as you can, and then we’ll do some qi-massage of the legs, and then stand again.”

Carnival, Kingston, NY. Camera, lens, film, date, unknown. © 2026 Samuel Claiborne

Well howdy folks. After several posts of polemics, I’ve decided to come back to something less dystopic than our current plague of dire, batshit crazy and patently unconstitutional government-orchestrated mendacity, bullying, intentional mayhem and murder in America, that being my own somewhat rambunctious, difficult, sometimes outright dystopic life.

NODding Out attempts to create a semi-believable, semi-consistent theory of how psychic abilities work. Why I’m fascinated with this should probably be evident: I’ve alluded to the fact that I’ve had psychic experiences since childhood. I think I’ve mentioned that Andy’s penchant for finding lost things, even when they’re in completely unlikely and inexplicable places, and his dream of his mother’s death and the number three are both are taken directly from my life experience. But let’s investigate what those abilities are, what they cost me as a child, and why I locked them away for what I thought would be forever. The usual disclaimer: hopefully I won’t repeat myself too much, but please forgive me if I do.

Sooooo, my mother had a very strongly developed intuition and so did I. In fact, my sister called my mother and I “The Witches” when we were growing up. I once asked her why. She said: “You two will talk about something as if it’s obvious, but the rest of us know nothing about it. It appears invisible to everyone, no one knows what you two are referring to in conversation with each other. It’s only revealed as some subtext that was almost obvious, sort of there in the ether, but not consciously evident, until suddenly it seems completely obvious in retrospect, but usually only weeks later.”

I have no concrete memories of doing this, nor any concrete examples of this subtext from my sister, whom I no longer speak with, so I guess what she’d observed will remain largely a mystery.

But I do think that ‘intuition’ can largely be seen as an ability to tease out the subtext and understand it with acuity, to divine truths, see realities, out of that which is partially occulted or occluded. And if you believe in astrology, well, I’m a Scorpio, and we supposedly sure love to look at and reveal all that is hidden in shadow — which makes us really popular if we combine that with ruthless honesty and utter tactlessness, LOL.

So, the seeds of what I had as a kid may have been inherited from Ma, as I called her, but whatever I inherited has been magnified substantially, by at least two, possibly three or even four events in my life. The first I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but I’m not finding it in the search function, but even if I have, I still want to add more detail, so, here goes.

When I was somewhere between a year and a half and two and a half, I think, I was left to my own devices, a lot. My mother was still kind of in a 'soft nervous breakdown’ — an intense depression, but not outright insane or delusional, just kind of totaled by my father’s leaving her with two young kids, and a very demanding job (she actually made more money than my father did in those days).

We had a housekeeper/nanny, Essie, whom I sure hope I’ve mentioned, but again, can’t find in the search function.

Essie was from Jamaica, and a natural with kids. She was hired while I was still in my mother’s belly, and she really became my second mom, and a kind of savior to me. The only unconditional love I think I’ve ever received in my entire life was from Essie. I spent so much time with her, watching her work, asking her about growing up in Jamaica, that I apparently developed a Jamaican accent, which I’ve since lost, although I can still understand very thick patois.

When I wasn’t in school, I was usually glued to her side. In fact, I was sitting with her, watching her ironing clothes, when the word that JFK had been shot came over the radio. I had just turned four, but her extreme distress made this rather abstract event indelible for me.

Essie helped me learn to read on the Jamaican newspaper The Daily Gleaner. She introduced me and my sister to curry goat, ox tail soup, and many other amazing dishes. She became a dear member of our family. She came to thanksgiving dinners, and later, when she married and bought a house in Bed. Stuy., we’d go there for Christmas dinners. She even helped take care of my own kids years later. She lived to age 95, and my sister and I spoke, along with many others, at her funeral. She was the closest thing to a saint I’ve ever met. I call her my “other, better mother”.

But Essie must have been overloaded with Ma’s breakdown and my older sister’s needs, because somehow, at an extremely young age, I learned to climb out of my crib and explore the house all by my lonesome. And somewhere along the line, I learned that I liked getting small shocks from putting forks into electrical sockets.

I remember doing it a lot. Little zaps that seemed to excite or titillate me in some way. Electricity has been a curious a motif during my entire life, most especially since spinal cord damage, at least mine, felt at its worst like having every single pore in your body plugged into its own wall socket, at full force, 24/7, and it still delivers random shocks to me to this day.

And how do I know what being plugged into a wall socket, full force, feels like?

Well there I was one day, merrily doing my self-zapping, when I got an enormous shock. Some aspects of this event are still so burned into my memory that I know exactly where I was in our house when it happened. I know the actual wall socket I was messing with. I also know I was using my right hand, which is really odd, since I am left handed.

This shock burned up my entire right arm, through my shoulder, up my neck, and into my head, clenching muscles in an iron grasp all the way. It’s kind of fascinating, the echoes in one’s life, as burning, clenched muscles were almost the exact sensation that would revisit me, from the shoulders down, after my accident so many years later.

But there I was, fork in the socket, searing pain, and seemingly magnetized. I couldn’t move my hand. I couldn’t let go of the fork. I couldn’t move my arm. I couldn’t move my body. Paralyzed, again just as I would be so many years later.

Then a light ‘novaed’ in my head, as Andy puts it. In fact, my entire head started to become light. I don’t know how to explain it. It wasn’t suffused with light, it was light. I felt it in a way we do not feel parts of our own bodies, but I can’t really articulate it.

The pain, which had been fierce, terrifying, all-enveloping, and somehow felt intelligent, suddenly stopped - as if a switch had been thrown, and then I was suddenly within and also part of a ball of light, looking down at myself.

And, The Music, as I came to call it as I grew up, started. But this music was in my head, not in the world. And a God, a terrifying God, a Deus Irae, was speaking straight into me. And God was The Music and The Music was God. God - if a pre-verbal or barely verbal child can conceive of such a thing, spoke straight into me, blasting me apart into a thousand discreet particles of light.

I don’t know what was said. It was the first of several events I call ‘downloads‘ that I’ve received in my life. Knowledge, a knowing, transmitted but not understood until later. Not unlike Andy’s experience at Rosebud, which is in fact based on a ‘download’ that I experienced there. But this first download, I never came to consciously know any information (except maybe something about reincarnation - as we’ll discuss shortly). But I believe it bestowed abilities upon me. I could have been born with them, there’s no way to know, but I think that this event broke something open, unlocked something.

Although I am sure I was less than three years old, I somehow knew this was “God”, but don’t ask me how. And I was terrified for a second, because of the of the pain that had stunned me with its ferocity, and the rage - except it wasn’t quite rage, that was communicated to me. A stern, Old Testament kind of God, a commanding God who brooked no resistance, had spoken to me, and it was awe-some in the original sense of the world.

The the Music continued, and there I was, floating within a nimbus, an aureole of light, of the light, really, indivisible from it. And then the angry, commanding voice seemed to fade, and then The Music faded after it, and there was no sound. But it was more than that. The was the most intense sensation of stillness that I’ve ever felt stopped everything in a pregnant, “something’s about to happen” pause. I was already not in a body, so there was no sensation or sound of breathing or heartbeat, but this was greater than that, all enveloping. In felt like time stopped — the entire world stopped. Or maybe more precisely, it felt like whatever took place, took place outside of time, as I floated, incorporeal, a ball of light.

And then I must have fainted or something, because I awoke on my side, on the floor, the now freed fork still in my hand, and my arm on fire again, although not as badly as it had been when I’d touched that socket.

I think I also pissed myself, but I’m not sure. It’s funny what we remember with clarity and what we remember dimly or perhaps have constructed while trying to reconstruct the past. All memory is reconstruction. None of it is a tape recorder. It’s a soup of stuff, tokens linked to sensory events and the thoughts and emotions they engendered at the time, that the mind dredges up and reassembles, often with little accuracy, and this is especially true for someone who is 66 years old and has suffered four closed-head brain injuries.

I don’t remember much else except that my arm hurt for days. And, I remember that I never, ever played that game again.

Shortly after this, somewhere between age two and three, was where I told my mother, in the midst of a rage, that I had been an old Chinese man in my last life, and I was forgetting everything, and I was livid about it, incredibly frustrated to feel all my knowledge slipping away.

And, in truth, I could do things then that I cannot now. Specifically, at a very young age, I could do pretty complex math in my head by, for lack of a better description, moving shapes around in my mind. And I seemed to have knowledge of other things too, and an affinity for all things Chinese as well, and as I grew up, all of this except that affinity bled away over time.

I believe this knowing that I was reincarnated, before anyone had ever exposed me to the idea of reincarnation, was a result of this near-death experience. And I believe it substantially opened my psychic and healing abilities.

Truth be told, I’d never thought of this event as a near-death experience, never thought that I’d died as a toddler, until maybe 10 years ago, when I described it to a therapist, and he was like, “You died, you moron!”, and then it clicked.

The Music was a haunting motif throughout my childhood and adolescence. It was maddeningly familiar, but I never heard it out in the real world. Nor could I hum it. It was just out of reach, the way a dream is sometimes when you wake up. It’s right there, inches away — and yet you can’t quite grasp it. That’s what The Music was like.

All through grade and high school, and into college, it would start with me feeling funny, dissociated, with an overlay of something coming, approaching, and an increasing anxiety, and I would have to lie down and close my eyes as this heavy leaded velvet curtain would descend over me, making me feel like I was about to faint. And then The Music would come.

It was always scary. The fear I must have felt right before I ascended into that ball of light is what I think I felt an echo of each time it returned, the fear that that angry God would smite me again. I hated how scary it was. I hated how the music was also scary in and of itself — not the melody or anything — just the fact that I could never grasp it, catch it, ascertain what it was, as if it was from this hyper real yet otherworldly place, and as if it, too, was trying to tell me something, or remind me of something I’d been told. It was truly maddening.

The spells became less frequent as I got older, and somehow, the music seemed to become more amorphous — even though it was already unknowable.

The last time it happened, I was at my friend Noela’s house on Sullivan Street in the West Village. We were hanging out, and I suddenly felt that half-out-of-body, scary feeling, and I basically ran out of the kitchen to her bed, telling her I had to lie down. And all the same feelings possessed me, but The Music never came. It was like I’d finally forgotten this thing that, ironically, I’d never been able to remember. After awhile, I felt better, though confused by the fact that that The Music never arrived.

And that was it. After that, The Music and the spells were gone for good. I was eighteen.

Years later, reading Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia, I was gobsmacked when he described The Music! He described patients experiencing an incredibly familiar melody that they were sure they’d heard before in the real world, except they never did, and they could never sing or even hum it. It was always slightly intangible, as if from the dream world, just out of reach.

It turns out that this is a type of seizure, sometimes described as a form of epilepsy, is called an Aural Seizure. In hindsight, it appears to me that I damaged or rewired the electrical system of my brain, giving myself a mild case of something like epilepsy that eventually resolved itself all on its own. That’s the best I can come up with from a medical standpoint.

But in the more ‘woo woo’ realms, within a few years of my self-induced electrocution, I started showing other, more psychic abilities.

First, at age 5 or 6, I was drawn to crying babies in the park. I’d come over and ask their mothers if I could hold them (do you know any five year old boys who do this with stranger’s babies?). And then, every time i did this, this feeling of… grace I guess you’d call it, would come over me. And every time, the baby would look at me in shock. Not scared but wide-eyed, maybe oddly confused or quizzical. And then they’d stop crying, and I’d hand them back to their mothers. I wish I hadn’t lost or forgotten or banished this ability - it would have come in handy when my granddaughter was an infant.

Then I started seeing cancer (and, later, other diseases and conditions, like MS) in people. And, to tell the truth, I remember thinking that everyone could see these things. So I’d matter-of-factly talk to them about it, which shocked everyone, and when they subsequently learned that what I’d said was true (and it always was: I did not see all cancers, but if I saw one, it was there), it just made trouble for me, as they often “shot the messenger”, also calling me things like a witch.

So, I stopped telling strangers on the street and neighbors, that they had cancer, or a problem with their heart of liver (I didn’t even know where the liver was - I hadn’t studied anatomy then, so I’d just touch a place and tell them that there was “something wrong” there).

But it took too much of a toll, so I stopped completely — even with family members, except when specifically asked, which did happen from time to time. My mother, especially, used my abilities in this way. And several people in my family referred to me semi-jokingly, semi-seriously as “Dr. Claiborne”.

My gradual moves towards more and more self-censorship to avoid anger and suspicion and condemnation was the start of my unconsciously suppressing and filtering out my abilities.

But what I became famous for in my neighborhood was something seen as a quirky, benign and captivating talent, one that gained me so much affirmation and good will that I never thought of censoring it.

I became famous for guessing, with great accuracy, the date, the weight, and especially the gender of the babies pregnant women were carrying.

Ironically, it was this is the ability that came to cause me so much pain that I completely banished almost all of my abilities for years, becoming decidedly unspiritual, almost an atheist in the process.

This ability of mine took place in the 60s and early 70s, and ultrasound, used with pregnant women in Scotland and the UK and elsewhere since the mid 1950s, didn’t reach the “world’s greatest healthcare system” in most of the USA until the mid 70s. So, back in those days, the gender of an expectant mother’s baby was a mystery. There were no gender reveal parties, let alone an industry producing often absurdly ostentatious and costly gender reveal events.

I had been transferred out of Public School 29 in 1968, at the age of eight, to St. Ann’s School for Gifted Children (or, St. Ann’s School for Financially Gifted Liberals, as I and Andy call it).

Taking me out of public school, where I was at the top of my class but bored out of my mind ostensibly seemed like a good idea, but a concatenation of events led to it becoming a soul-crushing disaster for me. Many crappy things happened, but the worst was the constant bullying from three boys, who chased and beat me on an almost daily basis, which no one seemed to notice, or if they did, to care about.

But one person finally did. The head of the middle school, a giant, gregarious man, became my protector. He got a lot of these bullies off my back much of the time, and also became a kind of father figure.

Since my father was largely absent, seen only every other weekend, and because he never seemed to offer any real fatherly help or advice on bullies other than “kick them in the balls!”, this man became someone I looked up to with admiration, and relied upon for protection and moral support.

In 1972, when I was twelve, his wife became pregnant. And, because I was literally famous throughout my neighborhood and among faculty members and parents at the school for always getting the gender right (I only was close, but rarely perfect on dates and weights, though), he kept asking me if it was going to be a boy or a girl. And I kept somehow wiggling out of giving him an answer. I am not precisely sure what I felt. I don’t think I consciously knew what was going to happen, but I just got a kind of restless, anxious squirrely feeling, and I’d make some excuse, or change the subject somehow.

This man and I sometimes playfully roughhoused, so, one day, he put me in a headlock and dragged me into his office, and we were both laughing as I playfully wrestled to get free. Then he sat me down. and with a big smile on his face said: “Sam, I need to know: is she having a boy or a girl?” I tried to demur, but he was having none of it. He really needed to know, he told me, almost pleadingly.

So, I sat down and felt that squirrely feeling again. So I took out a deck of tarot cards. I had no real idea how to use them, but they sometimes seemed to help me focus. Playing with them seemed to distract me from the here and now, so, it was a kind of focusing-through-distracting device that is very familiar to me now, as when I do bodywork and healing work with my clients, it happens unfailingly that when I distract my brain away from consciously trying to solve the issue and “let my fingers do the walking” (and the talking), I do my best work. I can’t count the many other healers and bodyworkers I know who've had this same experience and have come to rely on ‘being, not thinking’ while working.

And so, a few minutes later, I knew, somehow, and I quietly told him “Your wife’s not having a baby.” He looked shocked and said “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know”, I said, feeling miserable. I was twelve years old, and I had no answers, just a knowing.

Two weeks later, his wife had a miscarriage.

Although he was still kind to me, a new distance appeared. I really don’t think he blamed me, as others had for my cancer ”diagnoses” etc., but I do think he became somewhat frightened of me.

This loss of closeness with my father figure was searing. I cursed my abilities and vowed to never, ever tell another soul the things I saw.

And I buried those abilities in a watertight container somewhere deep inside of me. never used them again until the age of 31, but that’s a story for another day.

But there is a parallel here with Andy, and, to some extent, as we’ll see later, also with Manny.

In the next few chapters, Andy will meet another psychic adept like Michael Chang, one who also paid dearly for using his abilities, and excised a lot of them for similar reasons, another cautionary tale embedded into Andy’s unconscious, another brick in the wall of fear about his own abilities.

Andy consciously denies these abilities, but somewhere, he knows they’re true. But he has no belief in himself, no faith that he would be capable of wielding them responsibly and without inadvertently causing harm. He is terrified of this responsibility, especially given a past event we’ll get to soon.

So he fights to maintain his disempowering but familiar mindset that he’s an impotent fuckup who never lived up to his potential, safe in his feelings of inferiority and powerlessness, afraid of his deepest core qualities and the responsibilities they imply.

Although our qualities are somewhat different (NODding Out is a speculative fiction novel about saving the damn world, after all, and, even at my worst, I’m not that grandiose :-), I dealt with my own gifts in a similar manner for a long time.

And for both of us, it took a series of powerful, searing events and destabilizing revelations to get us to face the double-edged gifts we had, and to embrace them, as painful as that sometimes has been and may yet continue to be…

Chapter 35

.Just before dawn the next day, I was once again led to the dark crypts under the cathedral, and left to wait for Bestic.

I sat for what seemed like hours, but probably wasn’t. Just when I began to wonder if he was going to show up or whether I’d been abandoned instead to starve to death among the cold silences and dry bones, there was a rustling and he strode in, wearing a long black cassock.

“Hello Andrew, are you ready?” I nodded. “Good, but first I need you to tell me everything you know.” And so we talked for over an hour as he adroitly debriefed me of everything Manny and Tom and I had learned, asking questions, teasing out details. Finally he knew everything I knew, including our terminology (psion, Workspace, etc.) for what we’d discovered.

“Now that we’re on the same page, I have much to tell you. Sit back and listen, don’t ask questions for now. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.

“Action at a distance, reading thoughts, projecting and implanting thoughts—these are all quantum events. These events seemingly propagate at beyond the speed of light, for all intents and purposes instantaneously. Current theory holds that although quantum information of a sort can be transmitted beyond the speed of light, that information can’t be useful, or decoded. Strictly speaking this isn’t true, and in fact, the brain of an adept performs this supposed impossibility constantly. Whether you’re receiving or transmitting, core parts of one of the billions of transceivers in your brain are altering psions that have become entangled with another person’s. The brain can decipher and interpret useful information sent at beyond the speed of light. In fact it does so as a matter of course, all the time, while it’s accessing its own Workspace. The only difference in transmitting or receiving to and from another human being is the partial entanglement with the other’s psions, as opposed to linkage with only your own Workspace.

“By and large, the scientific community assumes that mind and consciousness and memory all reside in the same physical entity—the brain. The belief is that anatomy equals consciousness. But nothing could be further from this reductio ad absurdum. Consciousness is more like a photon caught in a lab and held in a magnetic bottle. The brain is the bottle, not the photon. It’s the path, not only to memory, but to consciousness itself. How you think, what you think, how you learn and adapt and respond to a given stimulus, all of this is mostly due to the accumulation of stimuli in sequential order. And the record of those stimuli is stored in your Workspace, is your Workspace. To a large extent, you are what you’ve done, what’s been done to you, what you’ve experienced through your senses. Your brain is mostly adding in new bits of stimulus and making new cross-connections between the new stuff and older data, creating ever deeper card catalogs if you will.

“We know that memory isn’t a tape-recorder—just ask any cop who’s interviewed multiple witnesses to the same crime or accident. Everything you remember is brought out of the Workspace piecemeal and re-assembled in the consciousness, replete with emotional overtones and distortions, which are the shadows of other memories.

“Now, mechanically, you and Veaux have learned how to hit the play button. But to record, to implant even a single thought into a living being, you need a psychic, an adept. The only way Veaux has learned to record or implant mechanically is by the wholesale trashing of the existing structure and superimposition of a new data set.

“At Plum, we learned how to hit the record button, albeit imprecisely. All of the work that Veaux was doing when I was in the program had to do with pushing an individual into a deeper hypnagogic state, isolating him so that he could focus more clearly, more reliably. In so doing, the images he transmitted were clearer and more focused, like a beam of light from a laser versus that from a flashlight: Over a distance the flashlight beam becomes so fuzzy as to be meaningless, while the laser remains coherent over much longer distances. If the adept is unfocussed, the projection of a specific image, let’s say the desire to kill someone, might degrade into a general mood of anxiety and anger—not militarily useful at all to the RVTI researchers at Plum. You need the laser, where one Long Island Boy could actually make a soldier in North Truro want to kill or commit suicide.”

He visibly sagged as he said this, and seemed to age in front of my eyes. “You wonder why we’ve all run away? Why we’re all underground and doing drugs or carving out pieces of our brains? Because they made us do these things. They made us hurt people, cause people to kill other people and themselves. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. It was supposed to be controlled and protected, but those early experiments were hit-and-miss. And beyond killing some, we left scores of others with generalized anxiety, depression, rage. We scrambled people, altered their interface with their own Workspace so that their reassembled memories were filtered through a distorted lens.

“The inverse of what we were doing, the therapeutic possibilities for treating mental illness, were never explored. This was a weapons system, with young boys as one of the specialized parts, interchangeable in Veaux’s mind, except that some parts seemed to work a little better or last a little longer than others.

“That’s how Veaux has come to see the world. The fact that he’s behind this doesn’t surprise me at all. The fact that he’s convinced others to work with him doesn’t surprise me too much either. Just like on Long Island, it’s all about greed and power.

“Here in the colony, I’ve healed people of depression and anxiety, through very careful projection work, over long periods of time, without benefit of Veaux’s machines. I’ve done the focusing the old-fashioned way, through thousands of hours of meditation.

“People have used meditation for millennia to get closer to God, to walk a spiritual path. Tell me: is being connected to the universal Workspace, the memories and thought processes of every living thing—is that not being closer to God? Is that not what all these people have experienced in different ways as they’ve perforated the boundaries of individuality? Voices in their heads? Hallucinations? Foretelling the future?

“What about the miracle workers alleged to have healed the deranged, the physically sick? What about the miracles performed by Christ himself? Is it so miraculous, if you see no real delineation between mind and body, or at least state of mind and state of body, if you see all physical ills as the manifestations of psychic ills? Or most of all, if you see no real distinction between yourself and the person you’re healing? You see yourself and them as two cells of the same organism: distinct yet semi-permeable, healable.”

I looked at Bestic. He suddenly seemed much older than his years. It felt absurd that this man who knew so much already, and was capable of so much would want to train a schlemiel like me.

“Look, you’ve got all this knowledge, all this power. You’ve done so much, know so much, why won’t you take this on?

He looked pissed, as if trying to reason with a recalcitrant child. “As I’ve said, the drugs have hampered my abilities. All the meditations have helped re-focus me, but the drugs did their job. I know now that that’s why I did them.

“My actual potential is now far below yours. I can focus better than you can right now, but not for sustained periods. When I heal someone, it’s like a thousand glancing blows with that laser. The laser is stronger than ever, but it can only operate for seconds at a time before it melts down for a while.

“After a healing session, I’m often bedridden and hallucinating with flashbacks for a week or more. I relive the most beautiful and the most terrible experiences from my past.”

“I’m back in a flat in Amsterdam, making love to a girl, and seeing my penis glowing as it enters her, seeing the glow suffuse her skin, travel upwards across her belly, her whole body, until it rushes out of her eyes and back into mine in a microcosmic orbit as we come together. In that moment, I see her as a little girl, playing with long-legged spiders in a hayloft. I see her blowing dandelions when she was ten. I see her father hitting her with the back of his hand when she broke a dish at five. I see her crying at his bedside at sixteen as he lay dying.

“And I see her coming—I mean I feel it. Not just through my body, the way you might—I feel it as her. I have my male orgasm full of outward-rushing energy and incredible strength, but hers as well, multiple waves of yielding, indwelling pleasure. For a moment, she is totally suffused into the fabric of the universe in a way no man could ever be. I am taking and she is yielding, and suddenly I am both of us and I am yielding and suffused and subsumed into everything as well. For one moment I’ve seen something, been something that nature usually forbids. I’ve been the union, the perfect union of the divine feminine and the divine masculine, yin and yang. And I cry and wish I could die then, happy and complete.

“Or I am at a rock concert on the Amstel, on a boat outside the arena, my senses amplified by the acid. And suddenly I’m reading everyone around me—their ecstasy, anxiety, rage, sorrow, pleasure, greed. Everyone in the entire city is broadcasting into my defenseless mind. I need to get away, far away from all these people suffocating me. My mind can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, can’t think, can no longer tell which thoughts are my own.

“My anxiety ratchets up and up until I dive off the boat, swim to shore, and walk, wet and shivering, for two days out into the lowlands, sleeping in hedges with mice, crying as every bird and vole passes by and I feel their tiny little thoughts. Like the steely thoughts the hawk thinks as he balances on the thermals, the unconscious way I flex my wings and glide, always looking for movement below. All is hard angles and lines and contrast and movement—every blade of grass, every thistle waving in the breeze could be prey. All is dead beneath me, just waiting for my talons to make it so. And I am the vole’s terror at every passing shadow, her constant nervous fear that obliterates any other thought or feeling, smothering me in anxiety: needing to eat, wanting to hide, worrying about my babies in my burrow below.

“I’m found after two more days, and taken to a mental hospital, where I spend three weeks recovering.

“When the trips are good, when I’m reliving some kind of union, like with that girl. I somehow re-enter her, join her, in a way no normal human can. Past and present, and maybe even future, I don’t know, emerge into a unitary peace. At those times, it all seems worthwhile. But whether good or bad, these flashbacks leave me utterly spent. Sometimes they are glorious; sometimes they are cruel beyond measure. But either way, I cannot control these pleasures and terrors. I can only try to hold on to some fragment of myself and tell myself that this too shall pass, and wait for the suffusion and submersion to wane, to become truly conscious as an individual once more.

“It’s a painful and exhausting process. The yearning for that lost union is almost more than I can bear. That’s why I rarely do it, and why my people are so loyal, because I’ve healed them at great cost and they know it. And more importantly, because now I can only see them as human. I no longer have the ability to register their disfigurement, because I’ve seen inside to their cores, their shining beautiful spirit essences. That’s all I see when I look at people now.

“The Taoists have a saying about destiny: they say that the only thing that you have any control over is whether you’ll be dragged kicking and screaming to your destiny, or you’ll walk hand in hand with it. Either way, you’ll end up in exactly the same place. Your destiny impels you to take part in this thing. You have no choice.”

“Why does it have to be me?ˮ I sputtered out. “Why on earth would you pick someone who can’t even keep his apartment clean or his checkbook balanced to save the world?”

He smiled broadly. “Who said I picked you? Didn’t you come to me? And who said you’ll save the world? I’ve only said that you have a gift and a responsibility. I never said you were the key, or that you’d do this alone. You’re having a conversation between your ego and your shadow ego. You’re jerking yourself off, really digging your self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. But what’s most amusing is that you’ve come looking for me, and now that you’ve found me, you don’t like what I have to say. Did you decide ahead of time what the answers would be? Did you decide that I’d be like a God for you, or your daddy? Take care of it and make everything all right?

“You are powerful beyond measure, as Marianne Williamson said of all of us. She also said that your playing small with the universe doesn’t serve God. You have a talent. It’s made you uncomfortable. You’ve suppressed it, yet your destiny is calling you to use it. Ironic, no? To me, irony is a sign of the presence of divinity . It’s proof that God’s lurking nearby, having a chuckle at our expense.

“He’s a bi-polar mathematician with a perverse sense of humor, and he’s calling on you to step up to the plate. Your self-doubt is narcissistic—a kind of fascination with negativity about yourself—but a fascination with and distortion of self nonetheless. You choose not to see what you can do, only an unflattering reflection of all you think you can’t do, all you are not. You’re a coward, terrified of your power, your beauty, your light. Welcome to the human race. We’re all terrified of our light, and our darkness. And the only ones who do anything extraordinary are the ones who step both into the light and into their darkest fears and desires.

“That doesn’t mean giving your darkness license to do anything it wants. It means inviting your monsters in for tea, it means giving the darkness a voice and self-expression and acknowledgement inside your being, so that it doesn’t have to act out in the real world to get your attention. And it means honoring all of your power, which above all means accepting the light, the beautiful, eternal spirit that animates all of us. Your spirit is strong. You have talents. All you need is some courage, which you seem to have in rather short supply.”

Hello again. Well, here we are, a new year, starting off terribly with ICE shootings in Minneapolis and Portland. I have a very dear friend who supports this administration. All attempts by both of us to see some kind of consensual reality - while looking at the same videotapes coming out of Minneapolis - have failed.

She has a good heart. I have a good heart. But somehow, we cannot even agree upon basic facts.

I mean, look at the images above. If you go to the videotape proper, you’ll see that wheels are actively in the process of turning AWAY from the ICE shooter from before the very beginning of this sequence. The wheels had been turned to left while she’d been backing up, pushing the nose of the car to the right. Then she shifted into drive and started turning the wheels to the right, to continue pushing the nose of the car to the right and away from the ICE officer, moving towards going up the street. She was moving away from the conflict and trying to leave.

Look at shot one - seen from within the videotape, you’ll see that the victim has come out of reverse into drive and that she is now actively turning the car away from him, but he shoots her regardless. And he shoots the third shot as she’s pulled away completely - I mean, she’s already turned away and quite far from his body! The entire sequence is endangering the public (potential out of control car), and the entire incident is against DHS’s own rules, and a violation of even rudimentary police procedure.

To me, it looks like shots fired in anger, out of malice, especially that last one, when he cannot even remotely be discerned to be in any potential danger at all, so I’m not surprised he said “fucking bitch!” right after he shot her. And then he calmly walked down the street. I have seen cops and wannabe cops lose their shit many times when not being obeyed, or ridiculed. It’s part of the makeup of some law enforcement - to be obeyed, to feel in control and respected.

Doesn’t matter. My right wing friend can’t see any of it. To see it would call way too much into question.

This has produced a bit of an existential crisis in me, and caused me to once more reassess my ‘religion’.

You see, my “religion” my “god” was always logic. I have tried, time and again, to change people’s minds with what I feel to be cold hard logic. Sometimes (probably not often enough), someone has changed my ideas based on logic (trans women in sports was one of those times). I am pleased when someone changes my mind this way. I may fight it initially, but if they prevail, I am relieved. It means I can think beyond my feelings, and that my intellect, such as it is, can change and grow.

I also remember when I convinced a right-wing gun nut that flag burning was legitimate under the first amendment. He’d previously objected to it vociferously. Changing someone else’s mind this way is also a great feeling.

My application of what I feel to be logic has led me to conclude that, although I’ve always called myself ‘left wing’, there are plenty of things on the liberal/left side of the spectrum I’ve never agreed with. I am a heterodox thinker, apparently, not neatly fitting into left or right - though with a profoundly left/liberal slant regarding the use of power, and upholding things like human rights and democracy.

From the time I became political (and in my activist family, that was in grade school!), I found that although I agreed with much of the philosophy of my parents, there were areas I immediately disagreed with.

I believed in personal liberty - something those on the left and the right believe… selectively. On the left, reproductive freedom, gay marriage, civil rights, on the right, guns, guns, guns!

Well, I support both - with the caveat that I only support guns suitable for hunting game, not people. This is why I owned a bolt-action 308 hunting rifle with a five round magazine. You simply cannot kill a lot of people quickly with such a weapon.

But I was and am against all automatic and semiautomatic weapons (incidentally, semiautomatic handguns kill far more people than assault rifles… just sayin’). And I wanted mandatory education and testing for firearms ownership, as well as mandatory registration and insurance - just like with a car. This was not a popular position in my liberal family.

Another ‘position’ was capital punishment. I am not philosophically against capital punishment. A serial rapist of 7 year old children should be escorted off the planet posthaste, in my opinion (and Andy ruminates a lot on the ethics of killing the “mad dogs” of the world).

Yep, I support capital punishment in principal. I have no philosophical problem with “state sponsored killing” if the thing we’re killing is a fucking monster - and this also sets me well apart for my entire family.

But it’s ironic, because I support it in principal only, because of one small problem: the incapacity to the justice system to work justly. Poor people have access to shit counsel and are more likely to be unjustly executed, conversely, rich people get away with capital offenses much more readily. Similarly, men have been executed far more than women for the same crimes. White people avoid execution far more often than people with other skin colors. In other words, the system cannot provide reliable justice, and so capital punishment cannot be practiced fairly. And when you’re talking about the result of being “unfair” ending up taking someone’s life, it’s imperative not to fuck around. So, I am against capital punishment in practice. It cannot be done safely, justly.

I remember going to anti-death penalty demonstrations in Washington D.C. with my stepmother. We’d be on the buses going down, and there’d be a lot of really sweet kind Quakers joining us. We’d share food and conversation, talk ethics and morality.

Once, we went to a pro-choice demo in DC and the Quakers were there too, on the other side, preaching pro-life. My stepmother was livid! She insisted that this was the patriarchy trying to control women’s bodies, etc. etc.

It was nothing of the kind. It was people taking a principled stand. They really believed that a human life, from conception onward, was absolutely sacred, and that taking it was murder. From within their concept of human life, they were being totally consistent. My ideologically rigid stepmother would have none of it.

I found this interesting, as I have with many other instances like this: you see, I did not agree with the Quakers about human life. Killing a tiny organism with no recognizable human brainwaves etc. seems OK with me. I do not consider that tiny fetus to be a human being, but rather an organism with the potential to become one. And I feel the woman’s right to autonomy over her own body supersedes that - to a point (more on that in a sec.). So, I did not agree with the Quakers, but I could see that they were being totally consistent and righteous in their beliefs, and I respected them for that.

My stepmother came to hate them for their position on abortion, and to insist, to the end, that it was the evil patriarchy, and not an extremely consistent cherishing of humanity, that drove them.

I used to be a radio commentator on Northeast Public Radio. I routinely pissed off both the left and the right. Not to be an asshole, but just because I saw problems on both sides. Man, people would cheer on one of my left-wing polemics, only to be furious with me the next week for killing off (or at least mauling) one of their sacred cows.

One of my most controversial commentaries skewered the Dalai Lama for his assertion in his laughably, unintentionally ironically and completely un-self-awarely entitled book, “Beyond Dogma” that all sex that does not involve male to female genital contact is wrong. That’s right: oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, obviously all gay sex, etc. was all proclaimed by him to be “devolutionary” and moved people towards “the hell realms”. All of my syncretistic friends, who liked to cherry pick all the feel-good stuff from exotic Eastern religions were furious at me for pointing out this 12th century level bullshit.

Me? I was furious at the Dalai Lama, especially since Buddha Gautama never directly said anything specific about different types of sexuality, as far as I could find. But even if he had, I’d still have railed against it as a type of arrogant and destructive ancient chauvinism.

The other big-time piss off commentary was indeed about Abortion, and women’s sovereignty over their bodies, because I did not, and do not, think it’s absolute. Hold on before you kill me.

I made the case for a scientific assessment of a legal cutoff date for abortion (always to be superseded if the mother’s life were in danger). My more rabidly feminist friends (I consider myself a different type of feminist, one obsessed with equal treatment under the law) were like “Hands off my body! No one decides when I can terminate my pregnancy!”

So I suggested a thought experiment to them (idealogues across the political spectrum tend to hate thought experiments). Is it OK for you to kill your baby after it’s born?, I asked. The answer was an unequivocal no.

How about 5 minutes before it’s born? It’s right there, at term, about to come down the birth canal. How about that. Most grudgingly said no, a few implacable lunatics insisted that, yes, that would be OK, because the baby was still inside the mother’s body.

So, I asked the non-lunatics, when is it not OK and why? Is there some mystical state change that happens? Or is it good enough to create some arbitrary number, like, oh, I dunno, 26 weeks?

An arbitrary number speaks of ignorance and half-baked ideas to me. Surely some logic could be applied here?

I suggested that a heartbeat was not a good measure. It happens very early, when there’s still no brain to speak of. How about viability outside the womb? I presumed that someday, some tech like an artificial womb would allow viability to be pushed way, way back (assuming the fetus could be safely extracted), and that still seemed invasive, and, to me, nonsensical; if that fetus is still a relatively small bundle of developing cells - why save it?

How about brain waves? Well, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere. How about brain waves that resemble human brain waves in their structure. I am no expert on this stuff, but I’m sure that although fetal brain waves are almost undoubtedly different, there’s some point during gestation where they would start to clearly resemble a newborn’s brainwaves. A state change, mystical or not, does take place, and that should be the dividing line.

When fetuses start to think, and to dream, minus a few weeks as a safety measure, seemed a good place for me, a dividing line we could probably establish scientifically, instead of just screaming “NO SLIPPERY SLOPE!” as so many of my female friends were wont to do.

I thought this was the application of an attempt at a logical compromise. It succeeded in pleasing absolutely no one, and pissing just about everyone off. I stand by the general idea, but we’d need far smarter people than I to work out just where that dividing line is.

And then there was welfare. From high school onwards, I’d thought that welfare was a terrible idea. Putting people on the dole and warehousing them in giant housing projects seemed like a recipe to crush people’s spirits, fill them with shame and resentment, and create a permanent underclass.

Then Bill Clinton came along and became president when I was about 33 years old, and sold people on “Workfare”. Bill Clinton, who single-handedly gutted the Democratic party by turning it from a worker-based, union friendly party into a sort of corporatist “Republican Lite”, introduced the grand “idea” of paying people shit wages, often forcing them to do dangerous or filthy work, and often without adequate equipment, including personal protection equipment.

He basically reinvented indentured servitude. Bravo Bill.

What had I dreamed of, since high school, regarding employment and welfare? A society that had four operating principles in this area (I dreamed all of this up in the late 1970s, actually, and wrote a paper about it in college.)

1. America should use the power of the state to pay people to do useful work, rather than paying them to be idle and useless. The goal should be to retain as close to full employment as possible. Follow Henry Ford’s idea: pay people better wages, and they’ll build the middle class and therefore build the economy, so you can sell them the shit they’re building, and lots of other shit too. Old Henry was a scumbag antisemite, but he had some good ideas nonetheless - at least good ideas within the framework of Capitalism. I’m talking an earlier, somewhat less pernicious form of Capitalism than our present late-stage Capitalism, I hasten to add. There are no good ideas at all within the framework of our current greed-driven, humans be damned system.

2. To that end, WPA style programs to improve everything from schools and hospitals to highways to forests, to the electrical grid to, yes, the creation of public art, should be funded by the federal government. This also would have included government-funded crash programs to train workers to domestically manufacture solar cells and windmills, and to train other workers, legions of them, to install them onto or adjacent to every federal building in America. After which, the federal government could supplement installations on state and local buildings. Side effects of this would have been twofold: America would have become a leader in alternative energy, and the economies of scale would have quickly caused alternative energy sources to eclipse fossil fuels as the most competitive energy sources.

   1. Where would all of the money come from? A larger middle-class tax base, higher taxes on multimillionaires and billionaires, transaction taxes on stock, bond, and hedge fund activity, the gradual closing of all non-essential American military bases abroad, and the end of wasteful military spending (one example I cited was the immediate closure of the patently evil School of the Americas, which taught generations of south and central American death squads the terrorism techniques of torture, assassination, bomb making and sexual violence).

3. If you are able-bodied, we will give you work at a decent wage, a wage you can start a family with. You will be offered one or more jobs based on aptitude testing and what jobs are currently available (i.e. someone is still going to end up being a garbage man, probably someone who’s not too bright). We will provide you with adequate equipment, supplies, and personal protection, and train you in the use of all of these things.

4. If you are not able-bodied, you will be paid a guaranteed income and provided housing. Both of these will be adequate for a dignified existence. You will not be ‘warehoused’, and you will have a safety net.

Of course, I have convinced almost no one of anything, ever, using what I consider to be logic. The sad fact is, and I see it all around me, from the hyper-woke, politically correct, don’t confuse me with science lefties shaming people like me who oppose trans women in sports, to right-wing I’ve got my guns to protect us from tyranny types who have no problem with ICE acting like the fucking gestapo on American streets, is that emotional arguments carry the day, 99% of the fucking time.

My God is a false God. I have labored over and over, believing that if I can just come up with the right evidence, the right words, I can change someone’s mind about some issue. It just ain’t so. And it ain’t so on the left as well as the right!

Our emotions enslave our intellects, turning them into finely-tuned censorship and rationalization machines.

Goebbels was right. Make ‘em afraid - as the current administration is making (some) Americans afraid of supposed cat eating savages from “shithole” (read, "brown-skinned”) countries. Fox, Newsmax, and the current administration are leading people around by their amygdalas, which is pretty ironic, because right-wingers seem to see liberals as anxious, fearful, panties-in-a-twist milksops, and yet fMRI tests show that it’s the conservatives with the hyperactive amygdalas, and the amygdala is the survival center of the brain - the place where existential fears are generated.

If they weren’t so fucking afraid, they wouldn’t need everyone to believe what they believe, and act the way they act. You see this in fundamentalists of all stripe, be they Christian, Muslim, of Hindu: the fact that I don’t believe in their God is an affront to their God (i.e. their beliefs and worldview), and therefore I am a threat, or some form of contagion or corruption that their world would be better off without.

Me? I don’t care if you only eat ice cream and pray to a Guernsey cow. I don’t care if you marry 17 other people, as long as they’re consenting adults. I don’t care if you rip up your lawn and plant tomatoes. I don’t care if you want to be called “They” or “Zhir”. Just don’t pollute my land, don’t steal my shit, and don’t demand that I refer to you by your chosen pronouns. I may try, to be polite - but that’s on me. To legislate that I call you by a name you’ve selected, or a pronoun you’ve selected, that’s where you start abridging my rights, including my right of free speech, and that’s where I draw the line.

So, my religion is dead. My friend and I can look at the same video and come to radically different conclusions about what happened. She even insisted that the officer had been run down, presumably because she’d been pre-influenced to think this by dog butcher and clearly artificial life form (Botox and surgery are surely her God) Kristi Noem, who insisted he had been. Actually, edit here: Noem and Trump and Vance all said this bald-faced lie flat out to the American people.

What’s more amazing to me is why isn’t my friend angry and less trusting of the administration’s assertions when she can now see, with her own eyes, that she’s been lied to by the lot of them? Their statements were total fabrications, so, where is her outrage? Were I in her position, I’d be fucking furious.

But, like the rest of us - yes, you too, leftists who deride the right for not believing the science of climate change while you do precisely the same about the science of gender and sports performance! - what she wants to believe bends reality to its will.

The existential crisis? Well, besides the fact that my God is dead, it’s not much, just that I feel that the human race is doomed…

Have you ever heard of that Fermi paradox?

Enrico Fermi wanted to know where all the aliens were.

He said to some colleagues one day, “the universe is so big, so where is everybody?”

And people started theorizing that there might be a series of filters that had to be passed through in order to get to Intelligent life, capable of communication

It started with the transition from no life to life, which happened very quickly on earth (the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, and life began at least 3.8 billion years ago).

Then the transition from single cell life to multicellular life, which took forever to happen (muti-cellular life seems to have started “only” 600 million years ago). But once it happened, we had the Cambrian Explosion wherein massive numbers of new life forms appeared all over the place as if nature was having a field day experimenting with crazy-ass, often downright bizarre, even rococo variations.

Then life had to leave the sea and get onto the land. It had to develop the physical apparatus to manipulate objects, apparatuses like the opposable thumb.

And it had to develop deep cognition, and probably other things like time-awareness and self-awareness - but I suspect these are naturally emergent phenomena that almost have to arise when a certain depth of cognition is attained.

But one of the theories is that this last bit - the crowning achievement of humankind, intelligence, is not really a survival characteristic.

It looks like a feature, but it actually may be a bug.

The theory of the final filter, is that maybe all the alien races have killed themselves off through warfare and environmental destruction.

Of course you may believe in aliens, I don’t know. Maybe they can all cloak themselves and so that’s why we don’t see them. Otherwise I don’t see how it’s possible that they’re here, since there are 6 billion phones with cameras on them on the planet now, and we don’t have a single convincing photograph, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

The fact that humans can’t agree on anything, even with video evidence, evidence that both my friend and I can probably agree is not falsified by artificial intelligence... I don’t know, it leads me to believe that maybe that last filter idea is correct.

Maybe we are just smart enough to become stubborn in our beliefs, filter the information we want to believe in and the information we don’t want to believe out. We are just smart enough to rationalize everything, from cruelty, to warfare, to environmental destruction, to murder. Humans can and have rationalized everything.

And not just evil human humans like Hitler or Mai or Stalin. No, regular humans.

Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general, started sending bombers much much closer to the border of the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. He was actually trying to start a nuclear war because he thought America could win it.

50 million casualties in the US and untold millions in Russia did not dissuade him. He rationalized that this was acceptable losses. I Have no doubt that he thought he was doing his duty, but Beyond the fact that he could just look at millions of people dying, and consider this no big deal in the service of a greater mission, he almost ended the world.

He didn’t know about nuclear winter. He didn’t know that all of us probably would’ve starved, the survivors I mean. I wouldn’t have been a survivor as I lived in New York City. Everybody in the major cities would’ve died. There were 1 million things he could not know because such a war had never been waged, but he was confident in his ignorance.

Perhaps this is the definition of hubris.

OK, bad example. Curtis LeMay was probably a fucking sociopath.

So, how about the Manhattan Project scientists who had a bet going on whether the Bomb would ignite the atmosphere and sterilize the planet?

They didn’t think it would do that. Their equations indicated that it probably wouldn’t. But there was some doubt, and still they went ahead. These were, by and large, humanists. But they were urged to play Russian roulette with Planet Earth because of their fears of what the Nazis could do with the Bomb.

I get it, but it’s still batshit crazy.

My friend looks at that video and tells me that a “trained domestic terrorist” was trying to kill an ICE officer, regardless of the fact that she was clearly steering away from him and trying to leave! What the fuck is there to say to this?

It’s so much more pleasant to drop into the book, isn’t it?

My God is dead, and Andy’s is on life support. His own petty prejudices are made apparent to him in this chapter.

But on a much grander scale, his ethical world is in rebellion. There is evil afoot, and what is he to do about it?

Is killing justified in the face of industrialized murder on an epic scale? Is risking the entire planet’s capacity to think and remember worth it, if the alternative is a pogrom that wipes out all non-whites? And what is he willing to do, with his own hands, his own mind, if need be? And, can he be sure he’s right? Can he be sure that his own biases aren’t forcing him to do something horribly wrong? Isn’t there hubris in even conceiving of taking such risks?

All of this is going to come into sharper focus soon, as Andy wrestles with a past that includes not only euthanizing Nina Ohanyido, but another deep shame he carries from his medical school days. He made a terrible error while in med. school; what’s to stop him from committing a much worse one now, when, like at Los Alamos, the fate of the entire planet it at stake?

Chapter 34

There were no signs for the colony at all, but I crossed the bridge as instructed, albeit gingerly, wondering if my weight would be the final straw. Though uneven, it felt solid enough. There was a little walled niche on the other side with a terra cotta Madonna and some fresh cut flowers in a vase, and a narrow leaf-strewn path edged with unkempt hedges leading towards fields and a distant farmhouse. Halfway down this pleasant lane, the dappled light filtering through the hedges and the olive trees growing alongside them, there was a warning sign: “Danger: Hanson’s Disease (Leprosy)” in English, French and Italian and, oddly I thought, the appended: “No WC.” No bathroom. So, even if you’ve really gotta go, yer shit outta luck sucker. Yup, that’ll keep the riff-raff out way more than that trivial leprosy thing.

I walked on. Not a soul in sight. Not even a bird. It was quiet, oddly deserted. The whole island is that way, as if it were missing all of the people who once bustled about it. Perfect for this colony, I thought. Suddenly, a small bell rang in front of me, apparently from a cupola atop the farmhouse, and a man approached, hooded in a full cloak on this unseasonably warm late afternoon. All he needed was a scythe and he’d have been a dead ringer for the grim reaper.

He started yelling at me in Italian. Then he tried English: “Go away!” he yelled. “Padre Bestic,” I yelled back. “I want to see Padre Bestic.” That brought an immediate reaction. About ten men, all hooded like monks poured out, seemingly from all directions. Some had pitchforks, some shovels, some carried nothing. One carried a wicked-looking ancient over-and-under shotgun.

I raised my hands in a “Can’t we all just get along?” gesture, but I was grabbed from behind, put into a full nelson, and then dragged into a little barn. A chair was brought up by one of the mob and I was roughly pushed into it. As my abductor stepped away, I caught a glimpse of his profile. He had no nose. Well, he had one but it was collapsed. His face was hollowed out there, concave where it should have been convex, his expression oddly frozen too. His hands were claw-like, locked into horrible arcs. His eyes fixed on mine and he saw my look of badly-suppressed disgust. His own look struck me like a physical blow. He didn’t look hurt: he looked disgusted as well, as if I were the deformed one.

I started talking in English, asking for Father Bestic again, telling them I meant no harm, that I was a friend. Finally a dark brown middle-aged man came in. He was hoodless, and no deformity showed on his face, but his right hand was shortened, his fingers warped, and he walked with a limp. “Who are you, and why are you here?” He asked in heavily accented, strangely slurred English.

“I am a friend of a friend of Father Bestic, and I have come to see him on an urgent matter,” I said. “It involves the fate of the whole world,” I added, and inwardly quailed at how grandiose and absurd that sounded, even though it was true.

He laughed. “We know little of the whole world here,” he said. “We have no TV, no newspapers. We don’t look at pictures of movie stars and singers. We farm and keep each other company. We have turned our backs on a world that has turned its back on us, a world that looks at us the way you look at us. We had an Alan Bestic here once, but he left two years ago and we haven’t seen him since.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You’re all acting scared, like you’ve got something to hide. I need to see Bestic. You can tie me up for all I care, if you think I’m such a threat, but I need to see him. You may not care about the world, but the world is dying, and he may be able to help stop it.”

I looked around desperately, hoping to sway them. “I’m telling you, millions of people are being destroyed and Bestic can help. Don’t you care? You act like we’re all hateful, spiteful, because we’re easily shocked, because we’re human, because it’s hard for us to look at you, but what about you? Is it so hard for you to look at us? To have… to feel that we’re human too, and suffering? Did Alan Bestic teach you this? He’s from the outside world—is he not human? Loving? Kind?” I was taking a risk here, for all I knew, Bestic could have been a world-class prick. But I didn’t think so. My gut told me that these men loved and trusted him.

“OK,” the man finally said. “I will contact those who know where the Padre is and he will make the decision, but in the meantime we must strip search you. We must be sure you carry no equipment, and you must tell us in detail why you are here. My name is Rajesh, by the way. What is yours?”

Strip-searched by lepers, now that’s one for the grandchildren. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say it wasn’t nice and all of my primordial fears of the boogey-man were in full force. I felt that ghouls were molesting me. It was all so absurd. These were fairly normal people with some obvious gross deformities and sensory impairment, but nothing nearly as grisly as some of what I’d seen at Bellevue. Looking back, it’s easy to see the incredible power of suggestion overwhelming the powers of perception. I’d heard the spin on lepers through myths and fables my entire life, and that had overcome the more staid reality.

I waited two days there, receiving a leprosy vaccine in the process, which made me feel a bit better. And funnily enough, I also got used to seeing these people, glimpses of their faces and hands. I started to relax and become inured to their deformity. And as my attitude changed, theirs did as well. The hoods started dropping, and shy smiles occasionally appeared. Soon I felt really guilty for the horrified looks I’d given them. I’d hurt them badly, needlessly, spurred by a panic that had cut through my medical training like a chain-saw. I’d seen plenty of disfigured people before, but the whole hoods and pitchforks, medieval quality of our first meeting had called up those old fairy tales I’d heard as a child; if they’d been sitting in an emergency room in tee shirts and jeans, I would’ve taken it all in stride.

Late on the third night, they unlocked the little room I’d been stowed in and woke me up. Three of them led me with small penlight flashlights over the bridge and along the glistening black canal to the cathedral. We walked up the stairs around the back and entered through a tiny wooden door, only about four and a half feet high. Then we clambered down an incredibly narrow, steep flight of stone stairs that apparently went straight down inside the hollow walls of the cathedral, past the main floor and down into a sub-sub basement, the oldest part of the building. And if things had seemed medieval before, this was getting Hollywood medieval.

We exited the cramped stairwell into a hall, with crypts lining either side. The ceilings were only a little over five feet high, and we all stooped, except Rajesh. The floor looked like very crude pre-Roman paving stones. The walls were rough-hewn stone as well, and the barrel-vaulted ceilings were massive and primitive. There were candles lit here and there in niches. Their flames looked painted on, with no flickering at all in the stagnant air. And boy was it cold.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw we were in an ossuary. Precise lines of arm and leg bones lined the walls, layered by size and type. Skulls too. A whole wall of skulls sat staring at us at the end of the hall. This place was fucking creepy. And the claustrophobic closeness of the place wasn’t helping either. A massive fight-or-flight surge of adrenalin coursed through my body and my heart was suddenly racing. I was coated in a cold sweat, my mouth dry. My nostrils flared and pulled in even more of the musty air.

We walked down the hall, stooped and stiff, toward the skulls. As we passed the crypts, I felt I was being watched, observed from within. I looked warily left and right, but couldn’t see anything in their dark recesses. Finally, we got to the skulls and I was told to sit on the floor, which I did, surrounded by my three guides, who seemed equally tense and wary.

A man came out of one of the crypts and walked to us, stooped low under the arches. He was hooded as well, and walked with a limp. I presumed he was yet another leper, coming to take me on the next leg of what was starting to look like a cross between a shaggy-dog story and a wild goose chase. He popped the hood back and I recognized Alan Bestic from Susan’s photo. He gave me a sort of grim grin of acknowledgement and sat down cross-legged in front of me.

What an intensity to this guy. The room fairly crackled with it, and I barely breathed, my attention rapt. I can’t quantify what he had, what this manifest charisma was, but whatever it was, it was real, palpable. I could see why these people were loyal to him. He had the electric quality of a cult leader, the kind of guy that people would follow right up to the Kool Aid vat: that Jim Jones, David Koresh intensity that is so attractive and so dangerous. He somehow still looked like the kid in the picture, but a thousand times more intense. Something had changed this guy, and he seemed a long way away from a lonely high-school kid, or a burned-out acidhead squatting in an Amsterdam warehouse.

“There are three meters of stone above your head,” he said in a gruff voice that had a lot of Long Island in its inflections. “Enough to kill any kind of implanted tracers or transmitters you may have. If you’re a spy of some kind, you’ve just fallen off the face of the earth. Of course, I’ve looked into you and I have little doubt that you’re on the right side of things, unless you’re unbelievably adept at shielding your true intentions. But even if my impressions are correct and you are who you say you are, you still may be the subject of undue attention, so either way, these precautions are necessary. Now, what can I do for you? Why have you come so far, with such dire requests to see me?”

“If you’ve looked into me, don’t you know the answer?”

He chuckled, “No, you take me too literally. I’ve checked out all of your information, all of the details you’ve given my people, and I have an idea why you’re here, but I’d really like to hear it from you.”

“OK. I’m working with Bachman and others from the Long Island Project, sort of. You must know what’s going on. You must have some idea of what Veaux is up to, about the NOD epidemic, or you wouldn’t be in hiding. We’re trying to mount a counterattack on Veaux and his people, and we’re looking for former Long Island Boys who are adept at… whatever it is you do. I’ve been to China to see Michael Chang. He’s no help. He had brain surgery to excise his headaches, and his abilities. Bachman thought you might be able to help us. That’s it. We’re desperate. The world’s forgetting itself, and we think, we hope, we can do something about it. But none of us are adept at your skills. None of us can do what you do.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. I can see that you are adept, that you have ability. Maybe not so flashy as mine, but there’s something. You’re deeply empathetic. It’s not recognized as a type of psychic ability, but that’s exactly what it is. You’re a receiver, you feel too much of those around you. There are only two ways to deal with that, either move away from people, spend time alone as much as possible, or swim in the oceans of suffering and try to alleviate it, turn down the flow of anguished energy you feel all the time. I suspect you do a bit of both. I suspect you’re involved in some sort of healing or therapeutic profession. And I also suspect that you periodically crave solitude like a man in a desert craves water, that you need to be alone more than most other people, though you genuinely like people.”

Well, he’d described me in a nutshell, hadn’t he? A cynical part of me thought that this was a cheap parlor trick, that he’d spent the last three days compiling a dossier on me. But most of me thought not. Most of me thought this guy was looking through me to my core, and it unnerved and impressed me.

“I can’t do your job for you,” he said. “It’s not my destiny. I have to stay with my people until this thing is solved, one way or the other. But I saw you coming. I knew you’d come, and I knew that I could help you, after a fashion. I can train the other half of you, the half you’ve never known, or perhaps implicitly known and have been terrified of, the transmitting side. I can train you to transmit as well as you receive. But this is the other side of empathy, a dangerous side that can empower or corrupt a human being.”

“How can it be dangerous to be empathetic?”

“Cruelty is the flip-side of empathy. One cannot exist without the other and, oddly, the anti-empathetic drive, the desire to experience torment in others, is always present in our unconscious, waiting for its chance. You cannot have light without darkness.

“So you’ve never let yourself project, never really owned your abilities, have you, for fear of what you might become, right? It’s a side that you’ve run from your whole life, because it’s so powerful, so dangerous. Of course, this is the side that Veaux has harnessed most of all, partnering with Thomas Croft. Croft is uniquely dangerous. He has no love for humankind, no empathy at all. He has the inverse, an incredibly well-developed capacity to enjoy suffering. He sees humans as insects, and likes to torment them. He’s clearly a psychopath in the true sense of the word, with no affect, no real emotion, save that perverse inversion of empathy. He’s much more dangerous than Veaux, and soon he’ll turn on Veaux.”

“But why train me? There’s so little time, why don’t you take this on?”

He smiled. “My friend, all the drugs I did have clouded my mind. Though I can still read people well, my transmitter is damaged. Michael Chang and I both found ways to excise our abilities somewhat, so that we could live a more normal life and live with ourselves as well. He killed, and I maimed, the thing that made us so special.

“I’m still not normal. My surgery was imprecise. I still feel and see and foresee too much. But I no longer have the power to make men think what I want them to think, to make them consider and even commit suicide, or see hallucinations.

“I’ve washed myself of those sins. It’s repugnant for me to even think of training you to become adept at such things, but the other choice is even worse—more wholesale theft of souls by Veaux and Croft. And in the end, you won’t be corrupted, you will do no harm. In the end, you too will find a way to excise this power from yourself, once you’ve done what you need to do.”

Talk about a messianic complex! Everything he said had a ringing, biblical quality, like a bloody Sermon on the Mount or something. This guy was a freaking trip. And yet—I believed him. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was true, or maybe it was his brand of charisma to make it seem true. Or maybe by tasking me with this responsibility, he was also affirming that I was special.

“What does this training entail? How long will it take?” I asked. “Every day people are dying.”

“It won’t take long. And paradoxically, it will take chemical intervention. The same types of hallucinogens that cauterized my brain and crippled my abilities can also, in very small doses, reveal your abilities to you. It’s like learning to wiggle your ears: anatomically anyone can do it, but only a few people can access that muscle, can feel it and flex it. This is similar. Under the influence of these substances, a person with innate abilities can access that muscle, can suddenly find a path to it and flex it. But we won’t be using LSD or even Peyote. We will be using older methods, ergot of rye and the amanita muscaria mushroom, which is very poisonous, but also very effective in minute doses. Some say that this mushroom has been used continuously by humankind for spiritual purposes since the end of the last ice age.”

“So, let me get this straight: You’re going to poison me with one of the most toxic mushrooms on earth?”

“Yes, if you want any chance of success against Veaux and Croft. I’m very, very cautious in the use of these things. We’ll start with incredibly small doses, picograms, and work our way up. We’ll know for sure whether you’ll be able to learn the techniques within a few days—but I already know you’ll succeed. All told, the training will take two weeks.”

Hello! I’ve got a stomach bug! It’s been a delightful 24 hours, and it’s still bloody touch and go, but here we go.

We’re entering part III, which means we’re approximately halfway through. The book is in four parts.

Last week’s rant-o-rama, continued.

So, yeah, I was raised knee deep in the negative and positive feminine, and there were gifts and destruction in abundance, and perhaps even in equal measure.

The damages I received? Well, one, as I’ve said, is that I really was imbued with incredible shame for being male, and given no pride, or even peace and equanimity, for being male. Another was that my orientation, my idea of what being a proper male was, was to spend all of my energy trying to make the women in my life happy, which, Ironically, inevitably lead to their unhappiness, as well as my own. And I think I learned to be a master of the verbal psychological stiletto (I can thank my sister for that one), and shunning and other forms of passive aggression. It was a rich panoply of negative beliefs and behaviors.

But there were gifts galore too!

The gifts I received from those women? Well, I am more empathetically sensitive than most men, more “in touch with my feelings”, more emotionally communicative (is this a gift? Most women say they like an emotionally available, even vulnerable man, but methinks they often protest too much and actually are, in the end often repelled by them – so, it may not be a gift in regards to my romantic relationships with women).

And I am a healer, and, I like to think, a sensitive and gifted one at that, and this was absolutely aided by being raised by my mother – but perhaps partially in the worst way: I was embedded into a severe codependent entanglement wherein I learned to monitor and gauge and care for her every mood swing.

I say partially because I also grew up in a house full of cats (and later, dogs as well). I was told by my mother that my first word was literally “meow” (I can see attempting to communicate with cats first, rather than humans, as possible brilliance on my part – they are demigods, after all). Some of my earliest memories are of taking care of stray cats and even newborn abandoned kittens too. I learned gentleness, tenderness, and a joy in nurturing other living things.

I love the healing work, and I’ve worked with people as a healer for 15 years now, so it’s OK that it came from a stew of various good and bad experiences.

My aesthetics are, by and large, more developed than at least most straight men I know, and I learned to appreciate and take part in painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic design and layout, and to write poetry and prose. No man in my young life taught me to make things - really almost only my mother did - but it’s a funny distinction I’ll make here: her aesthetic sense, the fineness of it, its richness and nuances, all divine feminine in my mind. Her urge to create objects of self-expression other than her kids? I’m giving that one to the divine masculine.

The writing part is interesting, because I inherited a facility with language from my father, not my mother - literally inherited as a brain organization type of thing.

But while I write all kinds of stuff, my father, although he appreciated poetry and fiction, never wrote them to my knowledge. He was a non-fiction writer and editor who participated in one way or another in the creation of 50 books. It’s funny as hell that my mother, not my father, taught me to write, but when I write non-fiction, my voice is incredibly similar to my father’s. Genes will out too…

Interestingly, along with (grudgingly) becoming a healer over 15 years ago, I also did the ‘guy thing’ of working with ‘things’, in my case computers, for over 45 years.

I am more nurturing and more emotionally present, then most men. Probably more consciously connected to my heart (although I contend that men on the whole are often unconsciously more connected, and are often the true romantics).

I’ve got a lot of the divine and negative feminine in me, but, no matter how rigorously suppressed it was, I also ended up with a lot of the negative and divine masculine, the divine including proactivity, drive, ambition, protectiveness towards women and children, and a fuckuva lotta creativity.

But when Andy discusses ancient masculinity rituals, rituals that have almost died out on planet earth, I feel a pang of loss that I never had close masculine support as a child, that I had this big strong body, and yet I was ashamed of it and secretly yearned to be some small, skinny, poetic-looking guy like John Rosenberg, my best friend in high school. I felt sensitive inside, but people looked at me and saw only a boxer, a linebacker; not a poet or a healer.

Even as a little boy, I was apparently absurdly empathetic. One story my friend Nara told me was that when she was about 3 or 4, and I about 13 or 14, she saw me in Cobble Hill park, eating one of those twin-stick popsicles from the Good Humor man’s truck. She said I took one look at her covetous, hungry expression, and immediately split it in half and gave the untouched half to her. Hardly normal adolescent boy behavior…

But I look at the culture today - addictions to numbing agents: everything from massive amounts of tattoos to extreme body modification, to drugs, adrenaline sports, shopping, phones and TV and… and I think, this is a culture of men and women desperate for ritual, and for the type of social and familial cohesion and connection that births, among other things, genuine, archetypally resonant ritual.

I look at the masses who have grown up in single-parent families, and the far larger number who’ve grown up without extended families, and I see a deep wound, a wound that has led, again, among other things, to an increasing apartheid between men and women, and to an explosion of the expression of the negative masculine and feminine in the world today.

I think both are at their zenith right now, or at least I damn well hope we’re at or near their zenith!

The negative masculine? Well, we’ve got wars all over the place. Late stage capitalism, greed incarnate, and incredibly short-sighted greed at that, is metastasizing, hastening everything from ecocide to an increasing gulf between haves and have-nots. Precious resources being spent on weapons system after weapons system, femicide is epidemic in countries like India, and right-wing and Islamic theocratic governments the world over are both going full-on Handmaid’s Tale: attempting to control women in everything from dress, to the vote, from reproductive freedom of choice, to sexual agency.

Oh yes, the negative masculine is endemic and surging, and we’re all pretty aware of it. I mean, Trump and his merry band of sycophants – from posturing hollow “alpha male” chimps like Pete Hegseth to the plasticated Barbies strewn about the administration like dollar store tinsel, all personify the actions and predilections of those with testosterone poisoning and those who wish to earn their favor.

The negative feminine? Well, first of all, no one takes responsibility any more. It’s always the other person or group’s fault. The other side of that? Well if it’s always their fault then I’m always the victim - so, everyone’s a victim - from feminists, to people of color, to incels, to white Christian nationalists.

On top of that, the entire culture has adopted misandrist humor and misandrist tropes to the point that even a series on Netflix that I love, The Diplomat, used wife-on-husband domestic violence for comic effect. Imagine if the genders were reversed!

Have you heard of “Doordash Girl”, who delivered the food to a residence (she was instructed to leave it there on the doorstep), saw that the door was ajar and decided that this might make good monetizable material for her Tiktok channel (her words). So she opened the door wider (she later denied this, but a door camera later proved it), either leaned in or stepped into the dwelling, saw a man passed out on his couch, naked, and shot a video of him and put it up on Tiktok!

Yes, she videoed an unconscious naked man to get views, affirmation in the form of ‘likes’, and money (her words). And, when called on it, what did she do? She suddenly said she’d been sexually assaulted (one would think that all would agree that this was a patently absurd claim on its face but many do not), and loudly, hysterically and vociferously screamed “I AM THE VICTIM!!!” No sense of responsibility. No awareness of the horrific abusiveness of her actions.

Yes, just imagine if the genders had been reversed! It would have caused a firestorm! Just imagine a man going inside a woman’s private domicile, taking video of a passed out naked woman, and putting her up, totally exposed, on the internet.

You don’t have to imagine it. Men have been arrested for far less. And, thankfully, Doordash Girl is now up on felony charges, because she unwisely documented on Tiktok itself that she did it basically for two reasons: to make money, and to humiliate and destroy the man in question (she even went so far as to reveal personal details about him and his house, and he subsequently lost his job).

But the scariest aspect of the negative feminine (which we could also call the toxic femininity) in this case was the support she got from other women, legions of them, who were utterly incapable of seeing the cruelty and batshit craziness of her actions, and just reflexively supported her attempted pivot to “VICTIM!”.

The current climate, wherein every group, from trans advocates to women, to, yes, those neo-Nazis and those white conservative Christians, is just waiting to be offended and cry “VICTIM”, is toxic femininity on steroids, just as surely as last night’s aerial bombardment of Kiev is toxic masculinity on steroids.

Shaming and cancelling and other forms of more passive and/or sociological manipulation is also toxic femininity, and the most egregious example still blows my mind.

Have you ever heard of Erin Pizzey? We all should have. Pizzey founded the first shelter for battered women that I know of on planet earth, in 60s, in the UK. It’s still the largest in the UK, but you won’t find her name on their website because it’s been assiduously scrubbed in truly Stalinesque fashion.

Erin Pizzey was a trailblazer, an unstoppable force for the protection and rights of women and children to begin with, and then later on for men too.

She helped so many women and children survive the most horrendous abuse. She publicized grievous domestic violence, forcing society to look at what they most wanted to deny, by showing anonymized photographs of women with bruises and cigarette burns all over their bodies, absolutely horrendous stuff that would make any normal man’s blood boil (yes, the vast majority of men are genetically programmed to protect women and children – only a small percentage are not – the phrase “Women and children first”, created by men, should make this manifestly obvious).

So, what was Erin Pizzey’s sin? Well, in the course of running this shelter, and doing Ph.D. research, she discovered, and shared some interesting findings - findings that changed her own worldview substantially. Findings that went against feminist orthodoxy, and for that, she was eventually excommunicated.

She discovered that a lot of domestic violence was mutual. She saw women initiate violence against men, and then turn victim when the violence was reciprocated. She saw women goading men into violence, and then denying any culpability in the resulting violence. I am a firm believer that words should never lead to violence, but this is my ideal, how I lead my life - it’s often not so with other people. Often, with couples with long histories of violence, and especially coupled with drugs, alcohol, and financial pressures, the result of constant belittling and denigration can and often has led to violence.

In my own life, with a particularly toxic and alcoholic partner you’ll meet below, the patented jujitsu of the negative feminine showed up as hours of haranguing and belittling on her part, vile, ferocious denigrations, only to immediately cry “abuse” when I got pissed and yelled back some choice rejoinders.

This faster-than-light pirouette from aggressor to victim never ceased to amaze me for its wanton hypocrisy and outright dishonesty. I got the same feeling I get when Trump blatantly projects victimhood, decrying the “mean” and “nasty” people, right after uttering the most vile and uncivil things: “WTF? You’re seriously going to claim victim now?” And yes, Trump’s projection, his whining victimhood after lobbing the most incendiary and denigrating insults, yep, that’s him channeling his inner negative feminine.

But what Pizzey discovered that was most profound was that most domestic violence was the product of inter-generational cycles of violence. Familial violence, passed on from parents to their children, who then grew up to become adults who, because they’d so often dissociated and/or felt helpless as children, spent much of their lives feeling emotionally deadened and/or helpless, and so were utterly addicted to the adrenaline rush of rage and the feelings of control, aliveness, and power it engendered within them.

And when two such damaged rage-a-holics coupled up, the result was, more often than not, a continuation of the cycle of violence, almost as predictable as the tides.

Pizzey’s final heresy was to explicitly state that domestic violence was not gender-based, and that many men were victims of it as well. And, of course, any decent man will not strike a (statistically almost always weaker) woman, even if she is beating on him. An example of this tragic situation, wherein a man is under attack, but feels hamstrung even defending himself, is portrayed for laughs(!) on the Netflix series The Diplomat. The producers of such an intelligent show should be ashamed of such a cheap move – but people find it funny! They’ve been trained to find this odious misandry funny.

I came from a non-violent family. Pacifists all over the place. To the point that I didn’t even fight back in school (not a wise strategy, I can attest with painful hindsight).

There was never any domestic violence in my family or in my relationships, until the aforementioned alcoholic girlfriend (who is, almost predictably, a social worker with an MSW and a certificate in addiction treatment!), attacked me physically, punching my chest hard and repeatedly.

When she went for my face, I pushed her away with a fraction of my strength. But she was inebriated, and she fell down. She immediately jumped up and charged me, now punching my face viciously. Once more, I pushed her away, and once more she stumbled back and fell down. This time, she jumped up, grabbed an empty wine bottle, and strode towards me with it over her head, ready to strike me.

I really didn’t know what to do, but I was heartbroken and demoralized, and shocked. I’d never faced a situation like this before, and some part of me just broke down, and so I foolishly dropped my arms, hands in a palms-up gesture, and said “go ahead”. But she didn’t. Somehow, she put the bottle down, still screaming at me in incoherent rage. I told her to leave my house. She refused. After trying for several minutes, I told her that if she didn’t leave, I’d call the police and have her removed. Guess what she did? She said, “Great idea!”, and called the police herself, claiming to them that I’d just brutally attacked her.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is textbook toxic femininity. All of it, from feeling free to attack a man physically because being ‘the weaker sex’ will often protect you from counterattack, and virtually guarantee your being seen as the victim if you are met with even a defensive show of force, to failing to take responsibility for physical abuse, to the swift transition into self-justifying victim, to the attempted manipulation, as the “weaker sex” of other men, and the system, to gain advantage.

Don’t get pissed - we know that toxic masculinity is horrible too, and I do not deny it for a microsecond, but we all must come to face the fact that there are toxic feminine archetypes too. They’re real, and they too cause boatloads of real harm, and, yes, women, on average employ them more often, as men, on average employ negative masculine traits like violence more often.

A comment I make to underscore this, which readers of an earlier chapter will be familiar with, is that a reductive, simplistic, maximalist statement like “Believe the woman” is dangerous, and denies that women can be crazy, vindictive, and duplicitous. It denies that they’re human, and therefore should not be idealized into saints.

If you need this underscored, look to American history: the sad fact is, “Believe the Woman” got a lot of black men tortured and killed via lynching. Men performed that lynching, zealously and brutally, and are responsible for their part, but all too often, the ‘wronged woman’, often lying or exaggerating through her teeth, was in those cases the catalyst.

Change only comes when we all take responsibility.

Somehow, I had the presence of mind to call my girlfriend’s therapist, who rushed over to my house, arriving just after the police. She explained her client’s history of rage and violence (her mother beat her as a child), and my history of pacifism. The police then examined my body, finding redness, swelling, and the beginning of bruises on my chest and face, and they examined hers, finding nothing. She was also volcanically angry and basically out of control, and I was quiet, crushed, heartbroken.

I have no doubt that, had I not had the presence of mind to call her therapist, I would have, at the very least, spent the night in jail, at the height of Covid because of the vindictive rage of an out-of-control partner.

Years later, she finally apologized. She’d spoken to many people, and had gradually come to the realization that what she’d done was unconscionable. Unfortunately, many people never do grow to this point.

The bottom line is that we need to delineate and acknowledge the negative archetypes within all of us. We need to take ownership of them and learn how to deal with them in ourselves more effectively, and within the culture the body politic. This is the only way we’ll have the freedom to grow away from such interpersonal and cultural destructiveness, and towards nurturing and manifesting the divine archetypes within ourselves, our relationships, and, one hopes, even one day, within our cultural institutions.

But the first step is that acknowledgment because, to put it plainly, everybody’s shit stinks.

And maybe we do need a return to close-knit families and division of labor. That division need not hew to gender - if a man wants to stay come and care for the kids, and his wife wants to be a corporate lawyer, I say go for it. But two wage earner families, living far from their supportive (we hope) parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins… I think it’s hurt all of us, and has left us all thirsty for meaningful coming of age rituals and heart connections that affirm our true natural beings.

Yet we live in a late stage capitalist system that almost demands two wage earners, which often leads to tired parents, takeout food thrown at the kids playing video games or ceaselessly scrolling Tiktok, and almost no quality family time.

I actually think that meals in particular are maybe the most massively underutilized reservoir of potential family connection. I think screens of all types would be well banned from all familial dining rooms, but then (oh God!) you’d actually have to talk to each other.

My memories of family meals around both my father’s and mother’s dining room tables are by no means all good. There were arguments, and the aforementioned excoriation at times, of all that was deemed male or masculine. But there are a lot of great memories of spirited discussions about everything from biology to architecture to ecology to politics to technology to modern dance to jazz to archeology and ethnography, as well as important emotional heart to heart talks.

In fact, I have moved my heavy old dining room table from my mother’s house many times since she died, and it’s currently on the move again: on a boat to Portugal right now to join me here, as it’s one keepsake whose resonance outweighs the inconvenience and expense of its transport.

We’ve become estranged from heart connection, from family, with normal family dynamics squelched by a bucket of chicken and a room full of people glued to their cell phones.

And we’ve become increasingly zero sum and transactional in our natures. Many men have forgotten what caring, nurturing female partnership feels like. Many women have forgotten what strong, steady and protective male partnership feels like. And we should all be free to embody all of divine architypes – masculine and feminine – and be met with acceptance.

I got a lot of shit for expressing my “feminine side” as a kid, and even as a man (I think I may have already mentioned that I once had a girlfriend break up with me after she saw me cry during a movie). Some people are far on one side of the masculine/feminine spectrum, and some of us, no doubt, are kind of 50/50. I’m close to that. And I’m happy about it. Although you can be 50/50 in different ways. I could be some sort of metrosexual, but I’m not. Instead I’m kind of extreme in my archetypal parts. They don’t mix. They’re kind of glued together. This is why I’ve often joked that I’m a man and a lesbian trapped in the same body.

How about you? Which traits do you consider masculine archetypes (positive and negative), and which do you consider feminine (positive and negative)? Which do you see as destructive to our culture and relationships, perhaps out of control these days? Which do we need to nurture and conjure? Maybe I should create a list and we can talk about it.

Certainly, there are negative masculine and feminine traits within me, I’m not so happy when they come out to play (i.e. wreak havoc) when I am hurt, triggered, etc., of course, but I, like you, like Andy, am a work in progress…

PART III: EUROPE

(Sur)

Thomas Croft asked: “Any news?” The entire senior directorate was on Circuit, as they called it.

Aiding the synesthetic group mind linkage was a simple video-conferencing hookup. It was almost redundant, since visual body language was a pale shadow of the volume of emotional content the Circuit conveyed to all of its intermeshed participants. Still, most people like to look each other in the eye when talking about life and death. Plus there was one participant at Veaux’s side who was unfamiliar to the board, and clearly was not on Circuit. He was a visual presence only.

“No, but since they’ve done nothin’ since, and seem to have abandoned their research—there’ve been no alterations or chimera to be seen—I ain’t that worried,” John Veaux answered, and everyone felt his stolid confidence pervading their consensual sensorium.

“Don’t sell them short.” Thomas Croft interjected. “That scientist we NODded, Tom Bouvier, was doing some top notch research, and don’t forget, it took you months to realize that the little bastards had actually scanned most of your team in New York! You’ve consistently underrated them, and in so doing, you’ve let them get away. And now, suddenly they’re no problem? Convenient.”

Veaux sighed. At this point, he was used to Croft abrading his authority, being both derisive and divisive. He breathed out slowly, letting the tension and annoyance fade, and looked out at the assembled group. “They got no money. They’re bein’ hunted. What we’ve seen on the Rockefeller security cams is two guys, and neither of ‘em appear to be scientists, based on the fact that we can see Bouvier buildin’ everythin’, and demonstratin’ and explainin’ everythin’ to ’em. You got some light-skinned mulatto-looking guy, and some Latino guy, who both appear to be gofers, nothing more. It’s only a matter‘a time before their faces pop up on the grid agin. The tech they did manage to create was at least 15 years behind us. Hysteria ain’t called for. Patience is.ˮ

“Do I appear hysterical to you?” Croft said, in a flat calm voice that matched his suddenly, unnaturally flat emotional affect on the Circuit. “No, John, I’m not hysterical, I’m pissed off that, quite literally, the only credible threat we’ve encountered has gone dark, disappeared off the face of the fucking earth, and we have no way, no way at all, John, of truly gauging if they’re still a threat or not, if they’re funded or not, if they’re doing research or not.

“You let them get away in New York. You, Mr. GI Joe, blew that operation utterly. Since then, you’ve gotten precisely two face-rec locks outside of New York City, one at the Phoenix airport, one at MacArthur and then, nothing. You’re making statements that are pure conjecture. I prefer to deal with the facts.”

Thomas Croft’s ability to blank his emotions sometimes really freaked the entire board out. It was like the guy wasn’t human. When you did pick up his emotions, they seemed to only be anger, contempt, and impatience. Oh, and a smug superiority that occasionally leaked out in the smallest flashes but was startling in its grandiosity.

But John Veaux wasn’t freaked out. He was just tired of it all. He’d worked with Croft long enough to know that he was as intolerable as he was invaluable. No one else in their employ came even close in psychic ability, which is why Croft was a co-founder, now worth, quite literally, billions, and not some contract drone. But he was so mettlesome, so arrogant. “Such a prick!ˮ Veaux thought, and immediately felt Croft’s reaction.

“So, Mr. Croft, illuminate us: whe’ yo’ vaunted psychic powers? What good’rthey, if you ain’t no better at ferreting out these two gofers than I am?”

Almost immediately, every single member of the board, Veaux included, developed a searing headache. Suddenly light was too bright, sound too loud. They were descending into matching migraines. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. Just a few seconds of pain, just long enough for them all to recoil, and then, blessed relief.

“You’d do well, John, to tread more lightly. None of you have ever seen me really lose my temper.”

Veaux was sweating into his undershirt. His tie felt too tight around his throat. And rage was pulsing through his veins. Again, he calmed himself with great difficulty, exhaled harshly, and spoke again: “Well, since nobody seems to be able, at the moment, to find the remnants of our plucky band of amateurs, we got business to take care of. First, some broad accounting. Obviously, we’ve cancelled all new production on hardware, and are just sellin’ out inventory. Consequently, profits there are tailing off quickly. However, our subsidiaries for body processing in Africa and Southern Asia have taken up much of the slack. That, along with some judicious stock market shorts, has left us in good shape, good enough to ride out the current unpleasantness.

“Another issue is Project Decrypt. We got some really excitin’ news on that, and I’ve brought in Kenton Simms from Tech. Dev. to speak on that. Kenton?”

The unfamiliar man who’d been patiently waiting on camera but not on Circuit, suddenly took the fore. “Good afternoon gentlemen. We’re still a long ways away, but there has been very significant progress this quarter! We’re actually decoding visual flashes! It’s mostly stills with some snippets of moving images, and they’re still decohered, but this is the first usable intel. we’ve ever gotten from a decommissioned full-capture fast-NOD individual. This is the start of actual information retrieval, the Grail we’ve been chasing. Obviously, sound, language, and conceptual imagery all need to follow, but this is the largest leap in our technology since the inception of the Project.”

Croft interjected suddenly: “Have you any idea when a fairly complete decryption of an individual’s storage space will be possible?” All ears pricked up at the hyper vigilant energy pulsing behind the question.

“There are a lot of variables. I’m taking an educated guess here, but I’m hoping eighteen to thirty-six months.”

A burst of manic, exultant energy, utterly shocking in its intensity, flowed from Croft’s emotion stream, swamping all of the Circuit participants, before it was quickly, almost violently squelched. Everyone felt disoriented for a second, ejected from grounded reality by the incandescent ferocity of Croft’s emotional discharge. They slowly regained equilibrium. But everyone was suddenly exhausted, enervated by the emotional shock they’d received, and eager to break Circuit.

Seeing this, Veaux quickly called an end to the meeting, but not before Thomas Croft’s exultance burst once more over the entire group, obscuring all other emotions and sensations like a malignant eclipse, a hole in the sky.

thirty-three

The Lufthansa flight to Vienna was all business, with a stoic flight crew of Aryan gods and goddesses who gave the Jew in me the heebie-jeebies (or the Hebrew Jewbies, as I call them). A serious, stolid, charmless bunch. Polite enough, but just not… warm.

Then I got on a little Aero Dolomiti turboprop plane for the flight over the Alps to Venice. Wow! I felt like I was in a Fellini movie. Damn, those Italians have style! This tiny plane had actual paintings on the wall, for Christ’s sake. The crew consisted of sleek sexy women, each dressed in a ’60s movie’s idea of a uniform; all color-coordinated and tight-fitting and very mod looking. And they served me a mimosa in a long-stemmed champagne glass, actually made out of glass. All this while we slowly cruised not-so-high over the Alps, which shone in glorious late-afternoon relief that left each snowy peak looking impossibly clear and sharp.

Sometimes we barely cleared the peaks, or even flew between them. Not something I’d fancy in low visibility, but on this pin-sharp afternoon, it was… living. My dread receded, at least for a while, and I was not living my past—Nina, Tom, Chang, Bachman and the rest. Nor my future, my terror that we were all eventually going to be ablated away by Veaux and his band of greedy freaks.

For a moment, I was like a little kid (albeit one with a mimosa in his hand), face pressed to the window, drinking in the jagged, wild, and seemingly endless Alps: checkerboards of snow on their flanks; cloud lakes above a ragged crumpled landscape; a broad river valley, strewn with villages, cutting a meandering way through this incredible ruggedness. Peak after peak after peak—just going on and on. Some incredibly rough ones punched through the cloud lakes, knife-islands breaking the serenity like castles and minarets piercing fog.

I landed a little before sunset and took an extortionist-priced water taxi to Venice. We swept around from the southwest in a broad arc and entered the Grand Canal from the east, past the outlying islands full of church domes and bell towers. Domes and spires were all aflame in the last sunlight of the day, and the water was alive with boats. We cut from this grandeur into mazes of ever-smaller canals, meandering northwest, to Cannaregio, a quiet residential district furthest from the tourists. Cannaregio was closest to the Fondamenta Nuove (the New Quay, over 400 years old) on the northern edge of Venice proper. From there I would take one of the local mass transit boats to Torcello.

But it was too dark to get there today. I’d have to wait for morning, so I took the night off, and just wandered Cannaregio in awe. This had to be the most beautiful, most magical city I’d ever seen: aged and mysterious and moody, and yet friendly as well. I walked the quiet canals crossing innumerable wrought-iron and stone bridges, their mossy landings of worn marble steps bracketed by softly shining water; along cobblestone streets, past even more tiny ornate bridges, churches, darkened gardens. The walls were all ochres and umbers, all looking vaguely frescoed. Crumbling, old, quiet alleys had laundry hanging above, and unruly grape-vines and wisteria snaking over the garden walls, growing toward churches and lofts. The fog was rolling in and Venice seemed like the most romantic, most mysterious place on earth.

Suddenly I wished Nina was here with me. Seeing all of this beauty without her felt hollow. We’d been cheated.

Boom. I’d taken myself out of the moment and into the past, into nostalgia and then “Why me?” victimhood. What foolishness, to trade this glorious present for aggrieved self-pity. But once it was done, it was done. My grief, rage, and paranoia returned and I wanted desperately to get to Torcello and find… what? Salvation? God, I was tired of hoping, fearing, waiting.

I found a brightly lit place, raucous with voluble chatter and R&B (Aretha singing “I ain’t never loved a man…”). There were steaming tables of fresh seafood, including piles of lightly fried langoustines, and lots of young university students. It was called Paradiso Perduto. I didn’t know what that meant—paradise in purgatory? That’s where I felt I was, purgatory, waiting for salvation. I later learned that it meant Paradise Lost, which fit my nostalgia about Nina even better. At that moment I only knew the wine was cheap, the women were pretty and smiling, and the shrimp tasted like shrimp—real shrimp like I’d eaten when I was a kid in Brooklyn, before everything had had the taste flash-frozen out of it. It bloomed in my mouth and stood up to the stout Montepulciano I was drinking. I ate and drank and then weaved back to the hotel for a dreamless sleep.

The next morning, I walked to the Fondamenta Nuove through the most stubborn fog I’ve ever seen, getting lost multiple times as I clattered over tiny bridges and down narrow alleys, looking for the boat to Torcello. Finally it came in out of the fog and up to the dock like an apparition, radar bar circling madly on its forecastle. It docked at our little water-bus stop, with its maps of the rapid transit system. The morning commuters trundled off, and the conductor graciously helped the old ladies out in a way that you’d never see on the IRT in New York. A couple of wayward tourists and I got on. Just as we started to pull away, a fat old woman waddling down the gangway to the floating dock called out—and the conductor signaled the pilot, who reversed and backed into the dock once more. The conductor opened the gate for her and smiled.

We pulled out, away from Venice, which quickly receded into the spectral fog. The delightful, quaint and magical vision of Venice transmuted itself into a cold, watery, lonely place of loss, with the qualities of both old and perhaps incipient death around every corner.

Then, as we continued across the lagoon, the fog burned off and my volatile mood brightened again, when I saw the wildly canted campanile (bell tower) of the island of Burano in the distance.

Like virtually all buildings of any size and age in the Venice lagoon, the campaniles are built on masses of tightly-clustered wooden piles that were driven up to 75 feet into the mud to connect to the “bedrock” below, which is really just thick, compacted clay. Because this surface is hardly as dense or strong as true bedrock, the foundations on the larger structures often gradually shift, causing cracks, leaning, and sometimes, as in the Piazza San Marcos, a catastrophic failure.

Without much warning except for a few cracks, the campanile there came down with a crash on a clear quiet day in 1902. Examination of the piles underneath found that they were largely intact, even though some were almost a thousand years old, preserved by the stagnant, oxygen-deficient soils and water. But some subsidence had occurred among the almost one million(!) piles that had supported the tower. The people of Venice vowed to rebuild it just as it was, and so they did, but without the leaning. But no one has taken on Burano’s campanile, so it continues to lean a little farther every decade.

If no remediation takes place it’ll eventually keel so far over that it’ll disintegrate, but when is anyone’s guess. For now, it bows over the waterfront looking, if not impossible, then at least highly improbable, matching the whimsy of the bright, preschool-primary-colored parade of little houses that line Burano’s canals and squares. I got off there to change boats, and felt as if I were in a storybook place. It was light and happy and did wonders for my mood, which lasted until we were waterborne once more and got close to lonely, still fog-enshrouded Torcello.

This lagoon was certainly playing with my head—from threatening to magical, from warm and friendly to cold and bereft. I was on a manic roller-coaster, and I hadn’t even gotten to Torcello yet. Paradoxically, I also looked forward to the fast-approaching island, which the books described as a quiet, empty place, a place of solitude. I still didn’t know if I was on a wild goose-chase, fiddling while Rome burned, but here at least lay hope.

And, my misgivings notwithstanding, I really love lonely, sort of derelict places, whether they’re in the midst of a bustling city, high on a mountain, or scattered throughout rippling badlands. I don’t know why. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, and these places, though often sad, seem to sing to me. Even at joyous times in my life, like when I was first courting Nina, I still needed the odd solace provided by Red Hook, or when I was a kid, the rocky outcropping under the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was reachable only by climbing over barbed wire, leaping a gap of open water, and then scrambling over boulders at the water’s edge. Of course later it became a wheelchair-accessible promenade at the center of Dumbo, with pricey restaurants and apartments to match. Now it stands alone once more, in a no-man’s land of shattered bricks, fused glass, and plutonium dust.

As we approached this island that felt like a last outpost in the hazy lagoon, I felt its windswept loneliness calling to me. We hove to the dock and I got off and started to walk the barren, beautiful wilds of Torcello. First I wandered alongside the silted canal towards the cathedral. I passed a ruined bridge that looked still passable, or possibly so. There was no level walkway or railings to it, just the curve of the old arch itself, like half a barrel turned over the water. I kept walking, past another little bridge, this one in better repair. Then I passed a couple of shuttered trattorias before finally coming to the cathedral. It was beautiful inside, and the gold-inlaid fresco showing a shining Mary was breathtaking, as were the scenes of purgatory and hell on the opposite wall. But there was a heaviness to the place. I can’t describe it any other way.

Some temples and churches elevate you. Even a non-believer like me can feel something there, even if it might only be the echo of ardent, fervent belief—a type of belief that is giving and beneficent. But this place felt more like the cellar I’d once visited, under a Roman coliseum in Trier, Germany, where the animals and soon-to-be-devoured slaves were kept: a gnarled place of sacrifice and bitterness, where a palpable sense of fear lay. It was also cold inside this cathedral, much colder than outside. I felt it in my bones almost as soon as I entered. Really, really old Roman flooring was revealed under one section of newer flooring that had been pulled up, and steps down to ancient crypts were visible behind wrought-iron railings.

I lit a candle and said a prayer for Nina and her mother. Funny how there are no atheists in foxholes. The world is ending, tilting on a shifting base just like the campaniles, and soon it will explode into a million isolated fragments, each of us like bricks shorn of their mortar, falling outward. Soon we will all be alone and lost in our own private rubble of forgetfulness.

I prayed: for them, for myself, for everyone, and for success. Days were passing, and this playing globetrotter stuff was wearing thin. Last night’s good food and pleasant company were like bile in my throat now. What right did I have to enjoy these things, experience this beauty, when all around me was ashes?

The Aero Dolomite plane, with its sleek, sexy stewardesses seemed patently absurd in a world so full of loss and suffering. I was living one long series of non-sequitors—Motown and wine and beautiful women and wards full of lost souls and crying families. Venice, rising like the most beautiful fairytale apparition before me, its towers and domes blazing like mirage fires in that famous watery yellow Venetian light. And orphans found in stinking apartments, howling next to their catatonic parents, who sat rocking in their shit; orphans destined to lose their own minds soon, but not soon enough to avoid the terror of their abandonment. SUR’s devices often didn’t take whole families at once, and so there was the extra random cruelty for the children, or for the adults, who sometimes saw their children cave in, one by one, all while waiting for the last shoe to drop.

I wandered around the island, looking for a sign to direct me to the colony. No dice. Finally I stopped at a place called Trattoria Villa 600 and had a meal. I might have felt guilty, but I hadn’t eaten all day and I was getting lightheaded.

It’s true about us men and directions, we hate to ask, and I hadn’t asked a soul all day, although my reticence was due more to paranoia than male pride; I really didn’t want to call any kind of attention to myself or to a connection between myself and the colony. But after almost nine hours of tramping around, and the day gliding to an end, I saw no option. I asked the owner, a gracious middle-aged woman straight out of Fellini herself. She was decked out in a stylish little black dress and oversized sunglasses, and flitted from table to table with ease, inquiring if all was right with the service and the food. I caught her eye and she drifted over and I asked, sotto voce, if she knew where the colony was.

She lowered her sunglasses, pierced me with a look, pulled them slowly back up, and staring blindly past me, whispered: “over the broken bridge.”

Abandoned Train, Kingston, NY. Leicaflex II camera, Summilux 50mm lens, film stock unknown. © 2016 Samuel Claiborne

Sorry folks. Yesterday was a strange-ass day, and I’m feeling like I’ve caught something that’s not as bad as the flu, but weirder than a cold, so I’m dragging a bit.

But, overcompensating here for my tardiness, here’s a kinda long rant for ya. I beg you to read all of it, even if some of it pisses you off, because I think, in the end, it’s balanced and contains some useful ideas, although I may be slightly scattershot in my presentation.

This rant is long enough that I’m splitting it into two parts. Part II will be in next Sunday’s release.

Sambolino’s Rant, Part I

Sooner or later (already?) I will start repeating myself. It’s inevitable. My mind cannot remember everything I’ve written in these pre-chapter essays. I do use Substack’s search feature, and don’t see any of this covered, so, forgive me if and when I do repeat myself, or if I have already.

The truth is, I just key off the chapter and see what arises. No plan, only messy improvisation; the story of my unkempt, chaotic life.

Re-reading the chapter again, my mind turned once again to the lack of familial/tribal connections and initiations that have left us such a hollowed out, thirsty for ritual society here in the West.

Yeah, we have Bar Mitzvahs and Communions and Baptisms, I know. But… there’s something… tougher, more arduous, missing, and I think it has a lot to do with being truly, deeply initiated into the ways of the divine masculine and divine feminine.

Yes, we also have arduous substitutes for the real thing, painful rituals like walking on coals, or painful body modifications. But, IMNSHO, they are largely empty gestures, pantomimes of deep ritual, improvised as an act of individuality, rather than an act or series of acts connected to something formulated over generations from a communal cultural matrix.

To me, they are largely an empty dance. They’re arduous enough, but there’s no abiding, longstanding, culturally-connected context. They are sort of the opposite: less a connection to a greater whole than a proclamation of “look at me, I’m an individual!”.

Others can argue that I’m full of shit, that the body-mod crowd are creating their own subculture, and their own context. This is true, to an extent, but I’d argue that it’s paper thin, because it doesn’t involve lineage. No parents, grandparents, very few elders or mentors, and none more than one generation removed, and no conceptual or cultural continuity.

Yes, this is how new cultures arise, but we’ve had tats and pierced penises and clitorises, and even more baroquely gruesome stuff like splitting tongues (aghhhh!), for quite some time now - and yet… it’s still very individualistic. There is no religious, archetypal, or other profound, developed ‘philosophy’ for lack of a better word, driving this stuff.

A lot of it, in fact, seems akin to culturally-accepted alternatives to blatant self-harm, like anorexia or cutting.

I remember I took my girlfriend Elise to get her nose pierced (got her a bitchin’ tiny alabaster lotus flower to put there too). The very nice, very young woman doing the piercing had these horrendous linear burns across her forearms. Twisted, deeply scarred flesh, warped by keloids and contractures. Oh man, it was terrible. It looked like an industrial accident had befallen her, but no, these were “ritual scars, each signifying important moments in her life”.

Mmmm, maybe write a song instead. Get some trauma therapy. Keep a journal. Write a fucking book to help you exorcise some demons (I sure as shit did!) - but don’t burn your temple down!

Was her practice as destructive as cutting or anorexia? I’d say more than the former, less than the latter. As heroin? Less, in the short term. In the long term… I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t want to find out.

For severely traumatized people, living in a culture that is bereft of true initiation rituals, a culture that mostly doesn’t have a clue how to treat trauma, and charges a fortune for essentially experimenting on traumatized people, these empty rituals may be all they have.

And for less traumatized people, these empty rituals attempt to fill the same hole that others fill through meretriciousness of one sort or another, and still others through the intensely narcissistic ‘seeking’ we see portrayed in books like Eat, Pray, Love - a book that can be neatly summarized as: I was really bummed. I traveled. Ate a lotta good food. Got into meditation and felt sooo evolved. And then, crowning achievement of my female self-actualization, I met a man who thinks I am the center of his universe, his everything, his queen, and I am sailing off into the sunset with Prince Charming because he affirms the shit outta me.

Or you’re one of the legion of ‘independent’ women who let a series of simps take you out for expensive dinners, even though you have no romantic interest in them whatsoever. Men are for free dinners, and fixing things around the house, you brag on social media (I kid you not), and you feel so powerful using your feminine wiles to get what you want - except what you want is devoid of heart connection. It is as baldly transactional as every selfish impulse that gurgles through Donald Trumps shriveled hippocampus…

Or perhaps you end up wanting to get rich by ‘putting women in their place’. Your hero is Andrew Tate, a vile, violent pimp. You want his plastic female sycophants, his sports cars, his cigars and swagger, his empty, abusive sexual exploitation for fun and profit. All empty bullshit; heartless, cruel, spiritually dead.

By teaching legions of boys and adolescent males this perverted, degraded ‘legacy’, Tate is, like Trump, toxic masculinity at its finest, ladies and gentlemen (and especially boys of all ages).

None of this transactional, selfish bullshit is connected to the divine, and yet, it feels so ascendant these days! It’s enraging, saddening, frightening, and really, really confusing.

But all of it seems to stem from a form of narcissism portrayed as individualism and/or rebellion and/or “success”.

A relationship with our inner connection to the divine masculine and/or feminine is something that few of us have been initiated into, and being a tough-ass while someone burns the shit out of your arm doesn’t do it. Manipulating men or women to do your bidding doesn’t do it either.

I remember moving upstate from NYC. I’d been raised by women with a largely absent father, and had done very few ‘manly’ things, so I decided to hang out with rednecks, go huntin’ an’ fishin’, take up archery, etc.

Well, I got better at shooting a bow and field-dressing a deer than my upstate friends, (“Lookit that Jew Boy from New York City shoot the shit outta that bow!”) but… I was still the uber sensitive, introspective, over-sharing-about-his-feelings hot mess that I still am.

I was indulging in pantomime. I was not a native kid on his first lion hunt in Africa or his counterpart on the Great Plains, I was a middle-aged man still searching for what the word ‘man’ meant to me, and hoping that the window dressing would make the man.

I was a perfect product of our unstructured, messy, chaotic, dare I say improvisational style of creating this thing we call ‘family’ and doing this thing we call ‘parenting’.

It is more often than not a close, cozy, entirely fucked up relationship with the negative masculine and negative feminine that is more likely to be inadvertently imprinted upon us by our parents, and on our kids by us. Or, at best, a confusing goulash of the negative and divine archetypes, undistinguished from one another, and modeled as ‘adulthood’ to kids by their ‘rents.

I often ponder the twinned gift/damage that I received being brought up by three strong-willed women and one strong-willed older sister, with very little male mentorship or fatherly guidance.

One result: I was brought up with an incredible guilt about being male. And I am still triggered by gratuitous female negative stereotyping of men (difficult to avoid in the present, as misandry appears to be all the rage - even in popular culture, as I’ll briefly discuss later).

In my two households, men were portrayed, without fail, as the root of all evil and the cause of all of the world’s ills. Men were predatory, sex-obsessed, violent, and the cause of all war, cruelty, abuse, and violence.

I felt so guilty by the age of 18 that I seriously considered getting a sex change operation. No, I didn’t feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body. I felt like a big, strong, tall, broad-shouldered, deep-voiced man, and I hated it - because in my family constellations, these attributes all equaled all that was bad.

My father was largely absent. I saw him every other weekend, but even then, for a very long time he ignored me in favor of his favorite, my older sister. He never had a heart to heart talk with me about anything from fighting (yes, boys really do need to know how to fight, or they get their asses grievously kicked to shit growing up - ask me how I know), to how to talk to girls, or how to have a relationship, or how to please a woman in bed (well, to be fair, when I was 17, he sent me a letter with some general, predictably banal advice on sex and relationships). He never taught me to throw, catch, or bat a ball, build something with my hands, overcome a physical challenge, or, as I’ve alluded to previously, ride a bike.

About the only areas where my father was much of a masculine presence was in teaching me to body surf, and connecting with me through nature, via long walks through the abandoned National Seashore roads in Truro, and nights spent on our deck there, looking through a telescope, an activity I found riveting, but which my sister seemingly found detestable.

I was largely raised by two women in the throes of second stage feminism, two women attending the kind of man-hating consciousness-raising groups that so shocked Simone de Beauvoir during a US visit, that she went home to Paris and wrote an essay that contrasted the women of France, who wanted equal rights but actually liked men, to the women she met in the USA, who by her lights seemed to universally loathe them.

These two women, so engaged with a very pivotal and angry period of feminism, also had in common my father, a world-class philanderer, and this had deeply hurt both of them.

The disservice they did to me (and to my sister) was that they projected their personal experiences with one or two or three men and modeled all men on them, and especially modeled all men on my father’s obsessive pursuit of women. They excoriated men, all men, all the time.

It was so extreme with my stepmother, that I could almost call her a female incel by the time she died. She lived off my father’s income, didn’t make a dime, and excoriated him and all men, seemingly all the time. And he took it.

Oh, what a time to be going through puberty and trying to figure out what a ‘man’ was:

Their marriage seemed to be a sort of strange misery equation: she got to denigrate and emasculate him, keep his balls in a jar on the mantelpiece, and he got to grab ‘em on the way out the door, and use ‘em everywhere he could...

To this day, I know so many women who say that “all men are assholes”, because they’ve only dated assholes. Their choices, their agency, apparently has no bearing: it’s all the fault of those fucking assholes.

But I know better. You see, I was one of the ‘nice guys’ in high school and college, the guy whose shoulder they’d cry on about the guy they were in love with, the guy who treated them like absolute shit, and yet they seemingly couldn’t get enough of. I have never, to this day, understood why a gentle (but protective), emotionally available, and kind man seems so much less attractive to so many women.

As for me, I’ve been with some really crazy women, including Ms. Domestic Violence (you will meet her later). But I do not blame all women! These were my choices.

But I was still culpable! It’s on me, not them, and I will not generalize their issues to all women.

When I hung on too long, opining to my friends about my sorrow, when I sacrificed my sanity and my sense of self worth desperately trying to hold on to a woman, well, I only had myself to blame. So, yeah, I don’t understand why so many men also find the female equivalent: narcissistic, manipulative women, to be so much more attractive than kind, nurturing ones.

Let’s face it: when the Joker God got bored, somewhere back in time, he/she/they/it made up some fucked up rules and tendencies: they made us bonkers… for their amusement? Feels that way, much of the time.

And meanwhile, the gender war, partially born out of a lack of initiation to/experience with/respect for the divine masculine and feminine, marches on, becoming ever more vitriolic, ever more polarized.

And ever more simplistic and one-dimensional.

I remember, even as a teenager, thinking that the descriptions of patriarchy seemed incredibly simplistic. Of course I saw ways in which it was “a man’s world”, but I also saw ways it was a woman’s. too

Women had much better odds of gaining custody of children in a divorce - even when shown to be manifestly unfit. Men died more by violence; committed suicide far more often; were homeless much more often; had no domestic violence and sexual assault shelters or programs to speak of; were convicted more often and sentenced more harshly for the same crimes as their female counterparts. And what woman has not had the experience of a cop “letting them off with a warning” when a guy would have been instantly ticketed.

Yes, women are victims of domestic violence more than men - but the difference is not as big as the women who raised me led me or themselves to believe. Same with sexual violence. 1 in 4 women vs. 1 in 6 men, yet women are met with compassion when they report these things by most of society, and men are ridiculed, or simply not believed. And it’s not always men physically or sexually abusing other men. I was groomed, controlled, and abused by an older female relative. Ghislaine Maxwell famously abused other females.

But the biggest thing roiling my mind about the rap I was receiving from my mother and stepmother (and, now, overwhelmingly, from society at large) was the omission of an incredibly salient truth: for centuries, men had created the technologies that had emancipated women from previously back-breaking work. And yet, they got no credit!

The male gender has created most of the modern world, from harnessing electricity (which led to well pumps, refrigeration, clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, etc.), to creating steam and internal combustion and jet and rocket engines, cars, fiber optics, radio, radar, GPS, lasers, airplanes, the Internet, cell phones (with the notable help of Hedy Lamarr), and… most of the rest of the technology that is the infrastructure of what we call the “modern world” - from how your house is constructed to the computer you use (the computer was refined with the notable help of several women, most notably Grace Hopper).

Men also discovered/invented antibiotics, antivirals, vaccines, autoclaving and other means of sterilization for hygiene, most surgical procedures, anesthesia, and modern sanitation and water treatment technologies - all of which have saved uncountable millions of lives.

Yes, they also invented napalm, thermonuclear weapons, probably most torture techniques and devices. I get that. But why does our current left/liberal post-modern culture focus on only the negatives, to the exclusion of the many positives? Personally, I think those positives outweigh the negatives by orders of magnitude.

Anyone who’s read the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson will recall that Johnson fought incredibly hard to get the Texas hill country electrified because he’d seen how hauling water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing, as well as myriad other arduous household tasks that were being rendered obsolete through the use of electricity, had broken his mother’s body and spirit.

Men literally freed women of the harshness of these chores, to the point that they took over as the number one consumer demographic of books (through the massive growth from the 1940’s onward of the romance sector), and television (the daytime soaps, which captured an acquisitive audience that often held the purse-strings - housewives).

Part of the Divine Masculine is a creative spark from the intellect. A proactive, ambitious desire to explore, take apart, understand, and create. And it’s created a fuckuva lot, and should be understood to be the wellspring of so much non-reproductive creativity.

Ironically, I think this febrile, driven, male-dominated creativity largely also stems from what I call “womb envy”. I think Freud was dead wrong: women don’t envy penises! Why would they? They’re silly-looking things, and quite inconvenient to carry around when not in use.

But women make humans! That is a truly awe-inspiring goddess-like ability. Men contribute their spark (there is an actual spark of light when a sperm fertilizes an egg - and that brings to mind the extraordinarily beautiful language of Genesis, from the King James, which I think of as a description of the Divine Feminine meeting the Divine Masculine and together creating the universe - but I digress once again).

Bottom line: women grow that human inside them! As a man who’s seen his two children born… It’s astounding and magical, profound, and an experience without equal in life. No man can do anything remotely as magical, IMNSHO.

So, I think the male drive to explore, expand, conquer, create by other means than reproduction, is partially the nature of the divine masculine, and partly born from a sense of inferiority, an overcompensation if you will, and I find old Sigmund’s rationalizations to the contrary to be kind of laughable.

Hell, maybe the awe of, and appreciation of the divine feminine is an integral part of the divine masculine, and vice-versa.

An important note here:

We all carry the divine and negative masculine and feminine within us.

It’s not strictly gender-based, but the ratios do tend to be weighted by gender, so there are gendered tendencies. This is why even Sweden, which has torturously tried through governmental coercion to ‘gender equalize’ certain professions in STEM, and others, like nursing, has failed utterly. At the end of the day, more men like working with things, and more women like working with people.

Funny how neither feminists nor Sweden seem remotely concerned with equalizing the dangerous and filthy jobs, like garbageman, miner, electrical utility linesman, saturation diver, foundry worker, etc., etc. - but oh, damn, I’m digressing again!

How does all of this relate to the chapter?

In this chapter, Andy comes to see Bag Zho’s disappearance as a kind of initiation into manhood - the logical next step to the teaching and ‘waking up’ Bag Zho led Andy through in the last few chapters.

And he also sees first hand the damage of the negative masculine - a sexually abusive father. And of the negative feminine - a mother who will deny her husband’s abuse, and cover for him, allowing her own children to be hurt rather than getting free from the abuser, because getting free means being alone and potentially without support.

Chapter 32

The next morning, Manny wasn’t his usual taciturn self, that whole Latino macho thing you know; he gave me a big hug and it looked like he might cry instead, like it might be the last time, and I headed off to the airport, and New York City.

But I felt good. Wary, alert, vigilant, but newly unafraid. I really felt that Bhag Zho’s disappearance now made some odd sense: Somehow he’d needed to not only teach me, but to escort me back to the Chuskas. And then he’d needed to abandon me to see if I had the guts, the fortitude to go on without him.

His disappearance now felt like a variation on some tribal manhood ritual, wherein a boy is pulled away from the wailing women who’ve raised him to that point, and dragged by grimacing scary men, men with knives and spears, their faces painted to look like demons, into the jungle, where he is ritually pummeled and then left alone to find his way back.

The boy has to be forcibly severed from women/mother’s grasp, he has to feel helpless and terrified, then abandoned, with no resources to rely on but himself. At that moment, he has a choice: find his way to connect to his male power, his divine masculinity, gather his courage to persevere through his fears, and take action, or perish. In that moment, there is a metamorphosis: He either becomes a man who meets challenges and obstacles with proactivity, confidence and creativity, or, shortly thereafter, he dies alone and afraid in the jungle, eaten by predators. Either way—the boy is gone, transmuted irrevocably in less than a day.

Maybe in more modern terms, Bhag Zho’s disappearance was a graduation of sorts, his imprimatur upon my nascent warriorhood.

But however you look at it, one thing seemed certain: as I’d struggled, as my old patterns of fear and self-doubt had come storming back, he’d come back to me in dreamtime to wake me once more, to underscore that I was more than I thought, that I could embrace the tiger, if need be. Maybe even more than that; perhaps he was telling me that I was the tiger.

As I flew back to New York, I had a couple of hours to ruminate over where we were, where I was. Something about airplane rides and their enforced free time, I don’t know, but I always seem to get to thinking, and sometimes I’m like a cat chasing his own tail.

On the one hand, yes, I felt more unafraid, physically, than ever. I felt strong, fast, resilient, tough. More than that, the work with Bhag Zho had not only given me new skills and new awareness, I could feel it catalyzing a change in how I reacted to the world: how I’ve taken everything so personally, how I’ve been so easily triggered, and, like Bhag Zho himself, how much rage I’ve carried within me. Something’s changing. Maybe I’m finally growing up emotionally. I am stronger, more confident, and my introspection in general leads more to self-discovery rather than anger or self-pity. I am more of a man, less of a boy, and, yes, I feel I have more courage.

And yet I’m not the psychic powerhouse we need.

But much more than that—there’d been a time, long ago, when I felt I’d had something like this kind of confidence, back when I was one of the youngest kids in med. school. I’d been “young, dumb and full of cum,” as they say; and partying and screwing with abandon. The world had been my oyster. And then it’d all come crashing down—and it had been my own fault. In med. school, I’d engineered a world-class implosion of my life, and there had been no one else to blame.

With Tom and Manny, I’d been the third wheel. Manny’d figured out what was going on, and found Bachman, and found Tom, and Tom had taken Bachman’s tech and vastly improved it—all while I’d basically sat with my thumb up my ass. And I’d watched Nina fall apart, killed her, set fire to a nature preserve, burned down a house, and then run away into a bottle and a bag of weed.

Warrior? Tiger? More like fuck-up. I mean, I get it—I can take care of myself now, physically, and we’ve discovered I have this little bit of psychic ability, which initially gave me a frisson of pride. But I’m no match for guys like Bestic, Chang, and Croft. Seems like everything I do, with the possible exception of speech therapy, I’m strictly bush league.

I am changed. And yet I’m not. I am more powerful, physically much more confident, sure. But at the end of the day, I’m still just an errand boy, trying to find the real deal, so Manny can save the world.

Landing this time at MacArthur Airport on Long Island, with our one-sheet dossier in my hands, I set about trying to find Alan Bestic. According to our notes, he hadn’t been quite as gifted as Michael Chang, but close, and like Chang he’d taken a powder. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. We didn’t realize he was on the run. We just thought he’d moved.

I rented a car and went right to his sister Susan’s brownstone apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. At first she asked me to leave, threatened to call the police. But eventually she settled down, because I opened up and took a calculated risk. I pled as much of my case as I thought prudent, right out in the open on her front stoop, and it seemed to open her up as well. It’s pretty easy to be thought of as a crackpot when you tell people the truth, but what I said must’ve matched what Alan had told her, because eventually she asked me in and made tea.

“First off, I don’t know where Alan is, OK? I don’t even know if he’s alive. If he is, he’s in hiding, from something, something he felt had to do with the Project. I think it’s all paranoid crap, and I told him so, but he never listened.”

“Why do you think it’s all delusion?”

“Well, after high school and the Project, Alan joined the navy, and got a degree at Annapolis in computer engineering. He ended up serving on Los Angeles—class attack subs, mostly in the Baltic, out of some secret base in a place called Rostock. We talked every now and then, but… he never came home.

“Once his tour was over, he decided to stay in Amsterdam. He’d visited a lot while he was stationed in Germany, and he liked it.”

“And?”

“He squatted in the warehouse district, sharing space with a bunch of acidheads and stoners. There was a sort of quasi-legal squatter’s community there. For a while, he just lived off his navy savings, panhandled, and got stoned all the time. He told me it helped the headaches he got from the Project, headaches he said never went away.

“One day I got a postcard from him. He’d gotten a job driving ferry boats. He seemed happy, but also really manic. He said he was dropping a lot of acid, partying hard, like almost every day, sometimes more than once a day. That’s when I really started to worry about him.”

I thought of Michael Chang, how he and Alan Bestic had both tried to blur and obscure what they’d seen and done on Plum Island, one with surgery, the other by self-medicating.

“I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that, but when he got back in touch after he was released, he told me what had happened. One day while tripping on the job, he ran the ferry right into some pilings near the landing dock. Four people were killed, including a six-year-old girl. They put him in a mental hospital on suicide watch for eighteen months, then sent him to prison for another year.

“While he was in jail, he had a conversion back to Catholicism. Funny, huh? Church of the child abusers, and Alan wants to join?” Her eyes were downcast. “I never go to church anymore,” she said quietly.

“He left Amsterdam, immigrated to Ireland and joined the seminary and eventually he became a priest, a fucking priest.” She smiled at this, a bitter, tremulous smile that threatened to break into tears, and then it spilled out of her:

“My dad… he, abused me, since I was really little, and Alan, and maybe my older sister Maureen too, I don’t know. I tried to talk to her about it when Alan came out with it to me, but she just screamed at me. I tried to talk to my mom too, even when I was little, but she changed the subject every time, ran out of the room.

“Alan went public, right after he joined the navy, and the whole family went apeshit. He was, like, public enemy number one. My mom hated him, probably because she knew, deep down it was true. She hated my dad and herself, really, but she turned it on Alan. I was the only one who talked to him, because I knew he was telling the truth about dad. But if anyone knew we were speaking, they’d have kicked me out of the family too, so I kept it secret. I never mentioned anything about him. To them, he’s dead. And I’m afraid they may be right.” She started to cry a little, sitting alone and lost among clusters of family photos in her tiny living room.

There were gilt-framed photos of her sisters and brothers with their husbands and wives on the coffee table, grandparents in smudgy dark old Polaroids on the mantelpiece, nieces and nephews in crisp new digital prints on top of the TV. Maybe one of those photos was of her father, a pedophile bastard who’d pushed her into this bachelor’s apartment, kept her alone and untrusting. Or her mother, whose silent complicity had been almost more unbearable for a scared little girl. Susan had been abandoned. Her only real lifeline had been her half-crazy brother Alan, and now he’d left her too.

I didn’t want to push her. I didn’t want to see her come apart at the seams. But I needed to know anything that might be a lead. “When did you lose contact with him?”

“A few years ago, 2009 probably, when the first stories about NOD started hitting the media. He told me it had to do with the Project, though he didn’t say how, and then he just disappeared, fell off the map. I haven’t heard from him since. Last I heard, he was a parish priest in County Clare, in Ireland. But I called them, and they said he’d left the priesthood.

“Like I said, I don’t believe all the stuff he told me, but I do believe that Alan’s a little crazy, and I worry that he might have… killed himself.” Again, tears formed.

Jesus, I thought, he probably is dead. Like Michael Chang, he’s found his way out. Damn! But I don’t know that. There’s still some chance I can dig this guy up, isn’t there?

There was nothing more, so we drank our tea, and then I stood to leave.

“Wait a minute.” She went into another room and came back with a framed photo, of a young, somewhat phlegmatic looking man, with just a trace of a smirk on his smooth face, and his eyes deep in shadow.

“It’s old,” she said. “But it’s all I’ve got.”

I spent the next few days in a motel, making calls on a supposedly secure ITI netphone, trying to track him down. I got no help from either the diocese or the archdiocese in Ireland, or even the Vatican; stonewalled by them all. I was ready to go back to Arizona, but before I left, I called Susan and asked her to wrack her brains one more time about where we might find Alan. She said she’d mull it over and call me in a few days.

I stayed put in the motel, searching almost randomly for him on the web, through a triple-blind anonymous VPN. Every time I called anyone or did a search on the laptop, I felt like I was sending up a flare saying “I’m here, come and get me!” Even with my tiger at the ready, it seemed like I was begging to be shot by a sniper or killed by some other means I equally had no control over. I was so hyper-vigilant it turned my bowels to ice water on occasion, but I drank for courage and kept going. God bless whomever invented the still.

Susan finally called when I thought I’d scream if I spent one more day on tenterhooks. She had a pitiful collection of near-random reminiscences about the last time she’d talked to Alan. Two things stood out: Alan had been studying Italian and had told her he was fairly fluent in it, and also he’d become fascinated with Hanson’s disease, leprosy. She’d asked why, and he’d said something about his feeling too much and having an odd affinity with people who felt too little, and about Jesus healing the leper.

“It’s just like him to equate himself with Jesus,” she told me. “Last time I talked to him, he was developing a messiah complex, and an Armageddon complex too. I know he did a lot of strange stuff on Plum Island, but Alan was always unstable. I don’t believe half of it, a quarter of it. I think he was taking acid even back then, back in high school. That’s where the stories came from: bad windowpane. I don’t believe all of his dire predictions, I just feel sorry for him, and I miss him. He’s a terribly damaged, fragile person. I don’t know what church in its right mind would send him to mind a parish flock.

“Maybe he has left the priesthood, his only anchor besides me. Why haven’t I heard anything from him? It’s not like him to be totally out of touch with me for so long. Please do what you can, OK?”

“I will, I promise. But that’s it? Italian and leprosy?”

“Sorry.” I could practically see her sad smile over the phone, the shrug of her shoulders, her incipient tears. “If you do find him, please tell him I love him?”

After I hung up, I felt creepier and creepier. Shit, I didn’t want to deal with lepers! Fuck it. Let him stay lost. Irrational I knew. In med. school, before I’d washed out, I’d learned that leprosy is one of the least-communicable diseases on earth, and more to the point, could now be cured in all but the most advanced cases. What’s more, there’s even a vaccine, which accounted for a worldwide drop in new cases. Because of this, the number of leper colonies has plummeted. I scrounged on the internet back at the hotel, and what do you know: there was only one in Europe, and it was in Italy. Actually, why the hell was one there? There’s no leprosy in Europe that I know of. It’s a tropical disease. So how had there come to be a colony in Italy?

Further research spelled out an odd concatenation of events. It turned out that the colony was a result of Italy’s colonial aspirations in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A few Italian soldiers contracted it and came home and remained undiagnosed for many years. Finally a doctor put two and two together and established a colony for them. Since then, various foundations had brought other sufferers quietly to Italy to escape the stigma, and give them somewhat of a fresh start. It was situated on Torcello, a lonely wind-swept island not far from Venice, which had once been the populous hub of the Venetian lagoon, before its harbor had silted up.

I immediately called the place and asked for Padre Alan and got an awkward pause, and then the line went dead. Bingo. I sent Manny a tourist photo email of Mystic Connecticut Seaport with a steganographic message explaining the situation, and caught the next plane to Venice, via Vienna. Our ITI-funded bank account was drying up. My fake credit cards, which were attached to real bank accounts with real cash in them to prevent alarms from going off, were nearing overload as well with all of this traveling. But what the fuck: the world was ending.

Me, circa 1992. Camera, Lens, Film stock unknown. © J. Henry Fair.

And yeah, I really dressed that way back in the day. I worked for Perry Ellis and they had great clothes that I could buy for a song, so I went through a dandified phase of dressing. Truth be told, I kinda miss it. Maybe I should start a clothing GoFundMe…

We’ve all had wake up calls. Some are easier than others. Some change life by a tiny angle, that, over time, causes a huge divergence from our previous path, and some are more like massive, shocking, instantaneous deflections, unmistakable in the moment, as palpable as a punch in the jaw.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher like Bag-Zho. I’ve had a few mentors, but they’ve all seemed to end up with feet of clay - corrupt or dishonest or inauthentic in some way.

I’ve actually always been highly resistant to gurus, cults, and the like, but sometimes I’ve put my faith in other humans despite my generally skeptical nature. Alas, my skepticism has almost always been rewarded.

I think that Spirit, the Divine, what have you, has been my most direct dealer of wake up calls, and the most intense of all of those was, without a doubt, my spinal cord/closed head brain injury.

But that injury happened practically dead center in the middle of a half decade of grievous loss of almost the entire family I’d grown up with - my brother, my father, my stepmother, my mother, and my stepfather. A five year wake up call, a song cycle about non-attachment, and the myths of stability, safety, and security.

And for awhile afterwards, I was fearless, as only someone deep in a trauma spiral can be (yes, you can become terrified instead, but in my case, that came later). The movie Fearless shows this dynamic beautifully. Definitely worth a watch.

The accident seems, through hindsight, to be almost a malignant eclipse, its penumbra stretched forward and backward, shadowing my life for over two years of massive grief and misfortunes prior to it, and another two years after it.

But, no doubt, my accident woke me up and radically altered my trajectory. And either it had innate meaning, a message sent from Source, or I imbued it with one, created my own message; but the meaning proved useful, so at this point the distinction seems meaningless.

Some 6 weeks after my accident, shortly after getting home from rehab, I awoke to the fact that I had not been living an authentic life - I’d given up writing, and music, trying to be the good husband and give my wife the kind of life she wanted, which, it turned out, was not the life I wanted.

I’d already known that my marriage had become barren, but boy the return home really underscored it. My wife could not love and support me. Nurture was not in her nature. She wasn’t cruel, or vicious, but she did not, could not, comfort a broken man, barely able to move at all, who was also in intense physical pain. A man who’d made the journey from age 32 to 92 in a few seconds, and was terrified that he might never come back from his spastic, rigid senescence and debility at all.

I came to finally consciously feel how insanely alone I felt, how alone I’d felt for a long time - through the couple’s therapy we’d had the year before, through her leaving individual and couple’s therapy the year before, blithely telling me, when I warned her that she might be dooming the relationship, “That’s a risk I’m willing to take”.

But it really wasn’t a risk, and she knew that, we both knew it, because without that wakeup call, I think I would have stayed, jaw clenched, incredibly alone, possibly forever. Without that wakeup call, my spirit would have gradually been buried alive, a teaspoon of soil at a time.

I had so much support - from her, and a lot of other people, while I was in hospital. But once I was released, no one came to visit, and Mirta seemed to be angry at how broken I was. She often went out with the kids, leaving me alone to seriously ponder suicide. And she never helped me physically.

She even refused to inject me, and so I had to inject my blood thinner, blindly into my stomach with my numb, burning hands, my neck still immobilized in a hard collar, twice a day.

Nor could she hug me, hold me, tell me she loved me, tell me I’d be all right, tell me she knew how much I’d suffered, that she understood, that she was there for me. All of this was beyond her means and inclinations and nature.

Somehow, all of this was alien to her. Not because of spite, but because of a combination, I think, of anger that I’d let her down, just like her father, who’d died in hospital when she was young, had in her unconscious mind, and also because this was also the way she was made. She’d come from an insular, unemotive family. There was no hugging - even less than mine. No words of love or comfort.

All she could do, in fact, was pressure me to get back to work, when, at that point, work was completely out of the question. My brain was scrambled, and my body was barely able to bring a fork to my mouth, let alone type a computer program that I would’ve been mentally unable to conceive or design anyway.

But something else was stirring quietly too: I wanted music back in my life. I wanted creativity. I wanted artistic challenges, and sensual experiences. I wanted love and romans and sacred sex, staying up all night one night writing, the next recording music, the next making love. I wanted excitement and travel. I did not want a split-level in the ‘burbs. I did not want Mirta’s American Dream.

My accident broke me out of a marriage where I always felt like I wasn’t good enough, and where I felt unloved and unnurtured. I had been determined to stay married forever, despite the grueling loneliness I felt. I wasn’t going to break up like my parents had! I was going to stay, no matter what.

I remember one of the last sessions in couple’s therapy. My therapist had this adorable playful curious kitten with us as we all sat on the floor. I pet it of course - how could you not? But Mirta never touched it. Finally, I broke down crying. “That kitten is like me, I said. It only wants to be touched, to be held, to be noticed, and you don’t see it! You don’t feel it!” Mirta looked at me like she thought I was insane. In that moment, with me deeply sobbing and inconsolable, I think she totally lost respect for me, and shortly after that, she quit couple’s therapy.

I am hardly the first person who’s gone through an experience of this magnitude who entire life has broken apart and reformed - often to the consternation of friends and family alike, who don’t understand how changed you are, how broken the entire old world seems to you. And how they tried to restore that order - pleading, guilting, threatening, everything.

But it was over, and I can say thank God/Goddess, because it was not serving my wife, or my children, or myself, to stay in that dynamic. I was modeling a horrible relationship for my kids, and living an inauthentic life, and I swore that from that day onward, I would live authentically, and follow the Tao, the path, as clearly as I could discern it - which ain’t always been clear, and I’ve gotten lost plenty along the way, but it’s been a very rich ride.

And it’s funny, because my kids don’t call me “dad” or anything like that. They call me “real” (even my daughter in law does!), and they have for probably something like 20 years. I am full of faults, but I am also WYSIWYG. I am real, warts, shortcomings, limitations, brain damage and all.

And I can say that I am fortunate enough to have two of the most grounded, ethical, thoughtful, open-hearted children in the world. I’m not sure how they turned out so well. Maybe Mirta’s craziness and my craziness cancelled each other out to some extent, but I am so thankful.

All parents have to love their children - it’s almost unavoidable, except, possibly, for sociopaths and psychopaths.

But sometimes parents just can’t like or respect their kids, because those kids are too entitled, or manipulative, or narcissistic. Or their kids are addicts, who are often manipulative, cruel, and, as we’ve seen this week - sometimes murderous.

But I am so blessed, because I not only love them, but I find it incredibly easy to like and respect both of them as well.

Here’s to you, Daniel and Hannah. I love you more than life itself.

I have a memoir I’ve been trying to write for years about how my accident took me full circle on a shaman’s path, and led me back to the healing and energetic abilities I’d had and used as a boy, abilities that, at age 12, I locked away for what I thought would be forever, because they’d caused me so much pain and loss.

But that’s a story for another day.

But here’s a bit of my poor, unfinished, much edited and re-written memoir. It’s still not done, and I don’t know if it will ever be done, but maybe it explains, a little bit, how an event like this obliterates everything, the force of it sweeping the old order away, revealing the fragility and mutability of all life, all relationships, perhaps most especially, one’s relationship with an irrevocably changed, newly unrecognizable world, inhabited by an equally unrecognizable, savagely broken self.

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Walking through Snow.

I lay with the people milling around me, and I just kept answering their questions with the refrain: ‘I can’t move! I’m paralyzed!’ – This was all that was on my mind. There was no sensation of injury yet, no pain, and no awareness of the grievous damage sustained to my face and brain – only the awareness that something must be terribly wrong with my spinal cord. I knew who I was, where I was, my address, my phone number, and I had no desire, no ability really, to answer these passerby, these rubberneckers who’d gotten out of their cars to gawk at me. Well, that’s how I felt. Not a doctor in the lot, just helpless milling people, fascinated by misfortune, voicing seemingly irrelevant questions and exhortations

I was not feeling faint. I was not disoriented. I was paralyzed, and that one reality pushed everything else out of my head. There was no bridge, no sky, just fear, and then, as I waited and waited, regret. I felt so guilty! I had two small children at home. How would I ever support them? How would I teach them, play with them, tickle them? I saw my future as an inert lump, a talking discarnate head, an object of pity wheeled to family outings. I’d let my beautiful babies down! I’d failed them in the most concrete way, and they’d grow up having to care for me, a cruel inversion of the natural order.

This led to other realizations to dwell upon. Sex. I’d never make love again. Granted, my sex life at this point was close to non-existent. My wife, once filled with heat and ardor, had cooled when Daniel had been born some five years earlier, and cooled farther still after Hannah’s birth over three years ago. Still, no sex, no opportunity for sex, ever again, was quite a different matter from the thorny issue of not enough sex. And this led… to where? To never playing guitar again, never cooking, hiking, sailing. Hell, no dressing myself!

My mind leapt with savage vigor to the task of enumerating a seemingly endless list of all I’d lost – all of the special experiences I’d had and the daily ones that I’d taken for granted that would forever be beyond my reach. Useful, facile mind, thank you for racing to the tortuous details, embroidering my dread, embellishing my worst fears with nice solid concrete examples of uncountable losses.

I lay there, mostly ignoring the clamor of these well-meaning people who I angrily saw as sightseers. And finally, after god knows how long, heard the distant wail of sirens. The police arrived first, but they had no medical gear and limited training, so in a perverse parody of helping me, they proceeded to grill me with the very same questions the bystanders had been volleying at me. What was my name? Where did I live? Was I married? Etc. etc. I answered, but my anger and panic were both continuing to escalate. No, fight or flight weren’t really possible, but my terror and rage were doing a good job of keeping shock, pain, and unconsciousness at bay.

I don’t remember if they left, or if they stayed. I only remember another seemingly endless wait, and then the big bass thrum, the Godzilla-like bray of a fire truck’s horn loud and close, and the crowd cleaved in two again to let another batch of uniformed authorities through to encircle me. I lay on my side, untouched the whole while, and answered another round of identical questions, and asked, angrily, if anyone was going to get me to a fucking hospital anytime soon. Yes, they replied, and went back to the truck to get a body board and a neck brace – both of which, it turned out, were missing. And so, with regrets, they left.

I’m aware that when you’re in shock, time can ‘telescope’, and a minute can seem like an hour, and I’ve never located all of the various reports from the different units that responded to verify just how long this absurd comedy of errors played out. I do know that by the time an ambulance finally showed up, a lot of the rapt onlookers were gone, on the way to work, thinking that thought we all think as we look at disaster. We think how lucky we are, and we get a little charge. Life is enlivened a little bit by the knowledge, brought to the fore once more, that though we are mortal and incredibly fragile, here we sit in our car, hurtling to work safe and unharmed, seemingly immortal for the moment.

There but for the grace of God go I, we think, and smile in thanks. Maybe we stop for coffee and a cruller and it seems to taste better than usual. The colors of the day are brighter and more vibrant. Perhaps, for that short time, we are immortal, immune, and truly alive and in the moment as we rational, rationalizing beings so rarely are. But gradually it fades. We forget the crises, we forget the fragility, and the meaningless distractions and annoyances of life come into focus once more, grinding away at the keen edge of the here and now, the preciousness of each unbidden breath, each taken-for-granted motion.

Most everyone had left, gone on to their jobs, spouses, families, each of them essentially unchanged but for a frisson of excitement or a pinprick of empathy.

And I lay there, utterly, irrevocably changed, in awe of the change in me, actually. I was suddenly in the abyssal depths of the ocean, limbless, unable to swim, and sinking ever deeper into a place of cold and pressure. I felt it squeezing my body, an odd constriction, as if I were wearing a tight wetsuit, and feeling a creeping, seeping cold, still climbing from my feet in waves, each more intense than the last. Black, cold water under enormous pressure was squeezing me toward the blackest, stillest part of the sea – a featureless plain where nothing moved, and there was no hope of ascent back into the light .

Chapter 31

After six weeks, the golf ball was still an enigma, no one had seen or heard from Bag-Zho or this Vernon guy, and we all knew we were getting nowhere fast. Manny came to see me in the weight room.

“You wanna go topside for a smoke? No sats around right now.”

“Sure. Lead the way.”

We took a door that led out onto a small ledge high up in the cliff face. Red rock cliffs and arches rippled around us. Far below, the white stones of the wash reflected the brutal Southwest sunlight up at us, a flat, impenetrable glare. I reached for my sunglasses.

“Damn, forgot my shades.”

“Me too. Got a light?”

“Here. What’s up?”

“Look Andy, I need somethin’, some kinda break. We’re just not gettin’ it together. Ya know I’m no engineer. Robert an’ I fuck around, but it’s takin’ way too long.”

“What do you propose?”

“We need an owner’s manual.”

“A what?”

“An owner’s manual, for the golf ball, an’ any other tech and doc we can steal.”

“And how we gonna get all that? Look, we been over this before: these guys are all ex-military, armed to the teeth. How the fuck can we deal with that?”

Manny looked at me, took a drag, and talked as the smoke trailed out of his nostrils. He looked like a dragon, cooling down after it had just incinerated a village. “Andy, you ever realize that we got our own army here? I mean, it’s not ours, but if the ITI’s willin’, they got tons of super badass dudes and dudettes runnin’ ‘roun these tunnels, an’ weapons up the wazoo.”

What did I say before about guns and grease paint and Ninja costumes? Hmmm. I could practically see the Joker God smiling, laughing his ass off.

Maybe Manny had a point. Maybe it was time to use the element of surprise and go straight at them. Veaux and all the other top dogs are in hiding, but they’ve still got their research center. I doubt they’d ever, ever expect us to launch a military-style assault on it, especially since it’s well-guarded. With luck, we might find an owner’s manual for the golf ball, or we might possibly get our hands on something far better; newer tech, with documentation on how to use it. We needed something, anything, straight from the source, to give us an edge, well, not an edge really, just something to get us closer to up to speed.

Manny looked at me, and narrowed his eyes. “You thinkin’ papi, or just spacin’?”

“Sorry, yeah, I’m thinking that if any Diné warriors are caught, or their bodies are found, we would blow up the entire ITI. I mean, if that happens, they’re gonna recognize Native Americans, and they’re gonna start snooping. Both we and the ITI would be completely blown. We’d destroy the only organization on earth that’s helping us right now, and blow our only hiding place in the process.”

“Hmm. Yeah. ’Sright. I hear you, man. But we can’t go on like this. We’re fuckin’ stuck Andy! I’m not getting’ anywhere, Robert’s getting’ pissed an’ moody an’ shit. We gotta spin the wheel and take a chance.”

“More like spinning a revolver’s cylinder and playing Russian roulette, I’d say.”

“You gotta better idea?”

“No, I don’t. Let me run it up the flagpole with the ITI brass and see what they say.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Yeah, Andy, no. We do this together. It’s my fuckin’ idea. I’m the one askin’ them to take this risk, and I’m your fuckin’ partner. It’s about time you treated me like a full partner, an’ not your pet geek.”

I was rocked. I’d never heard Manny talk this way, and in that moment, I realized he was right: He was the one who’d discovered what NOD was, and who was causing it. And he was the one who got us the technology that started us on this path. I was somehow still paternalistically viewing him as my junior partner. Not quite “the help,” but definitely not my equal. Shit. I suddenly hated myself. Can you have white privilege if you’re not white but you mostly pass? Or is this privilege really about social class? If you were raised solidly middle class, well educated, well spoken, do you naturally, unconsciously look down on people less educated and well spoken as somehow inferior? I suddenly saw a side of myself that nauseated me and filled me with self loathing.

“Shit Manny. I’m sorry. No! I really am bro, I really mean it! You’ve turned my world upside down. I’m glad, but I’m also kinda blown away.”

“You should be, dumbass. You know I love you, but sometimes…” His voice trailed off.

My mind was racketing around, like a rat caught in a cage, slamming from wall to wall. I somehow wanted to make it all better, forget it ever happened, offer an olive branch—I didn’t know what to do. I only knew that I was deeply uncomfortable.

“OK. I hear you. So, let me start to make amends. You and I will take it to the ITI brass, and you, not I, will pitch it, OK? Except don’t some of these guys hate you?”

“Yeah, true dat. They think a Rican’s the same as a Mexican, and they don’t like Mexicans any more than they like white people. Why should they? They got treated like shit by both.”

“So, what do you want me to do? You decide. I’ll follow, OK?” I caught a look in his eyes. “No, I mean it. Really man, you decide, I’ll follow.”

“OK. Lemme sleep on it, and tomorrow we do somethin’, OK?”

Yeah. Sorry man. Really, I’m really fuckin’ sorry. I love you too, but sometimes I’m a blind asshole.”

He sighed, more smoke streaming from his nose. “Yeah, Papi, sometimes you are. Lucky I love your Jewlatto ass.”

We took it to the ITI leadership, spilled the facts to even more people, because we felt they had to know the urgency of the situation, but were immediately shot down. No way they were going to risk their people, their organization, and their vast infrastructure. We vehemently insisted they would eventually lose everyone and everything if we didn’t act, but they were unswayed. On some level, we were outsiders, not to be trusted, despite the evidence.

We showed them the demographic trends among the Diné and other tribes. We laid out precisely what was happening, and why, but they shot us down. In the end, facts don’t matter, emotions do, and we hadn’t emotionally swayed them because Manny and I had naively thought that logic was the way to go.

A week later, we sat on the same ledge, drinking this time, as the sun was setting.

Manny looked at me.

”Nothin’s changed: I ain’t Einstein, an’ you ain’t exactly fortune teller of the year either, an’ we need both. You gotta go back out there again, find another Long Island boy who’s still got his psychic shit together, or find someone who knows something about their tech. Better yet, both. We need people from the project, an’ we need the project’s tech.”

I’d known this was coming. We both had. Michael Chang was now a normal dying man, the Nanish’in Tóháálí brass were starting to grow contentious because of our lack of progress. All that was left was me. And Manny and I knew that I was no match for Veaux and his buddies. They’d been doing this for years, refining their techniques, using the cream of the crop from the Project. There was no way that I, with my little talent for finding my mom’s lost pocketbook, was gonna beat these guys.

“Where should I go? Psychics-R-Us? The Long Island Boys Alumni Association?” I said peevishly. There was no way I wanted to go back out there again.

“You forgot ’bout the other guy? There’s one other guy Bachman told us ’bout, remember? Bestic. You gotta go back to New York an’ try’n find him.“

Back to New York? I’d eventually relaxed in China, but New York? Go back to the source? Talk to people who might be under direct observation?

If there’d been any way at all I could convince myself and Manny that it was his turn, I would have. But Manny, despite his frustrations, was making small amounts of progress. There was now a working PET SQuID, better than Tom’s. And a primitive tokamak, which they were trying to turn into two nested tokamaks, with counter-rotating fields. With the help of the Diné techs, he’d turned into an Edison or Maxwell, learning meatball physics and a bit of electrical engineering as he went along. I was just the local psi-talent, and minor league at that. There was no one else to go.

I’m sure my face said it all.

“Shit bro, I know. I don’t like it either. But you gotta better idea?”

“No. But I’ll need a few days to dig out my notes and stuff.”

He smiled sadly. “No, papi, you won’t.” And handed me a folder. “That’s it, the whole thing: everything Bachman told us. I already got a reservation for tomorrow, Mr. Griswold.”

“Griswold again? Couldn’t you give me a better name?”

“Hey, man, hot passports don’t come cheap, y’know? You just gonna have to live with it.”

That night I tossed and turned incessantly, visions of hit-men and NOD cases crowded my dreams.

But then something really odd happened.

Right in the middle of being chased by a hit man, the dream became comical. Bhag Zho appeared, but he was an impish, almost cartoony figure, and he tripped the hit man about to catch me and sent him sprawling. He winked, with a huge grin on his face, his pointy teeth even larger and pointier, feral, wolf like, and yet, like a wolf from a Bugs Bunny cartoon; hilarious, rather than frightening.

Another hit man was charging me with a knife. Bhag Zho embraced me, laughing loudly, and spun me around so fast, my arm arced out and clocked the guy, knocking him down and out.

“Have you forgotten already?” he jeered at me.

“Where is the tiger, fraidy-cat?” he said, smiling so broadly that he looked like the Big Bad Wolf about to eat Bugs Bunny’s Little Red Riding Hood.

“Am I supposed to babysit you some more?” he added, laughing,

More hit men appeared, each iteration more cartoon-like than the last, until they each resembled a sort of Dick Tracy G-Man turned bad guy; big-shouldered palookas in huge double-breasted suits and fedoras, moving slow and swinging wide.

Bhag Zho picked me up and swung me around as if I were weightless, knocking a bunch of the cartoon bad guys down like ninepins, and I started to smile. These guys weren’t scary, they were absurd. I started laughing and knocking them down myself, my punches whip fast and super accurate. It was effortless. My smile turned to full on laughter as I effortlessly dispatched the last of them.

As I was swinging away and laughing loudly, Bhag Zho yelled to me: “Listen: I taught you, and then I got out of the way! That is a teacher’s job! I woke you up, so WAKE UP!

And I woke up, tears of laughter streaming down my face.

Burning Man Wedding. Canon Eos Digital. © 2017 - Samuel Claiborne

Hello all. So, some changes afoot. I am slowing my publication cadence down to once a week. I need more time for myriad aspects of life, and I also am aware that many people are too busy to read two full chapters a week. So, after today’s scheduled publication, all new chapters will be published on Sundays only.

In addition, I am exploring ways of growing my audience, which I’ve singularly failed at so far. Asking someone to jump into a large novel sight virtually unseen is a big ask, and I’ve tried to do a little better than that. I’ve published excerpts on Substack and Facebook, with links to the novel, but the results have been meagre. So, I need to create a larger canvas here - probably creating a daily posting drumbeat on Facebook, Substack, Instagram, Blue Sky, and, I dunno - maybe even Tick Tock and YouTube. The end result will be a LOT of work - But I am determined to get this book the exposure I think it deserves, and someday, Gods and Goddesses willing, to even get a TV series made out of it.

The complex multilayer cake of physics, metaphysics, ethical conundrums and ruminations, all set within a container of lots of cool travelogue - replete with major and minor themes and tangents delving into martial arts; meditation; spiritual sexuality; violence; crazy, risky adventures in Zurich and on the high seas (yes, that’s coming too); cinematic landscape; food; art; architecture; and history, seems to me a perfect vehicle for a series.

But, that’s the future, if those Gods and Goddesses will it.

That’s the cart; I gotta get the horses in harness and moving first.

If you have any ideas, or if you know any agents or publishers or TV producers, movie stars, or kind billionaires who you think this work would resonate with, please email or call them. and please email me - but please email me here: tao.shamanics [at] gmail.com.

By the by, for those of you who prefer the whole enchilada in your hot little hands, a print edition of NODding Out will be published in 2026. It may even possibly end up being two editions: 1) NODding Out, all by its lonesome 2) A larger tome that includes all of the accompanying essays written here on Substack.

Whether I end up publishing one or two print versions, that version/those versions will also be available on Kindle. And, in 2026 or 2027, I also hope to publish an audiobook version or versions.

The Land Changes You (if you are broken open enough).

It’s funny how the Chuska Mountains in particular, and the Southwest in general, keep coming back to me. I first experienced the Four Corners area (specifically, Arizona and New Mexico), on a trip I made in the late 1990s with my 2nd wife, Bi Li.

For the life of me, I can’t remember what year it was. But I do know that I left New York for the Southwest as an agnostic, and I returned believing in… something. I can’t say what exactly I believe in. I’ve spoken of this before - this thing I call The Divine is not a personage, or group of personages. It’s not a symbol, although the Spiral and the Yin-Yang/Bagua symbols do resonate with me and serve as focal points, touchstones, entryways into this thing/force/place/beingness. It’s kind of a place, I guess. A cool streaming waterfall that I can sometimes step completely into, basking in its grace. Sometimes it has messages. Sometimes it’s silent. It’s always quietly loving. But whatever it is, it was the land of the Southwest that really connected me to it.

I remember that my relationship with Bi was not in great shape by then. Had I been more willing to drop my denial and my frantic attempts to stop the slow-motion trainwreck, the end would have been clearly in sight. I just didn’t want to see it.

I’d planned the trip as a getaway from the stresses we were experiencing as our organic hemp cloth based eco-couture business, Earth Speaks, was foundering. I wanted experiences, memories. I got more than I ever imagined.

Some of these experiences were quiet and simple, pedestrian but pleasant vacation fare: eating insanely delicious street food (tamales and a hibiscus drink, not unlike Red Zinger tea), in the main square in Taos. Visiting the church Georgia O’Keeffe made famous in one of her paintings, visiting the museum dedicated to her work. Buying an amazing hand-made seed-gourd made by a native artist with pigments he ground himself from local rocks and plants, and painted with brushes made from his own children’s hair - one of my prized possessions to this day.

We also had a spectacular dinner at sunset atop Sandia peak in Albuquerque, and that is one of the only times I can remember where I lied and summoned my inner asshole (AKA The Lawyer from Hell) to get what I wanted.

We’d naively driven there toward the end of the day, just somehow believing we’d get into one of the most exclusive restaurants in the area with no reservation. We arrived at a line for the cable car to the top, and there we heard that people without reservations were being turned away because the place was full.

Quite out of character for me, I strode up to the desk, confidently presented my name and the time of my non-existent reservation, and proceeded to act appalled when they told me they had no reservation for me. I pitched a fit, righteous indignation and all, and, lo and behold, we got our dinner, seated, in fact at a prime table overlooking the city, just as sunset was coming on.

Sometimes it pays to be an asshole and a liar, but I am not comfortable with it - despite this lesson, and the lessons all around me, from Trump to Musk, that prove that bald-faced lying, unapologetic and guilt free, can often lead to success after success - if success is measured in being unloved, but immeasurably wealthy and powerful, or by experiencing a dinner of great food, great wine, and great views… sitting across from someone you rather desperately love, who’s fallen out of love with you.

Despite my moral qualms, I’m still glad I did it. Even though the ship of our relationship was passing growlers left and right, and heading for the big one, somewhere ahead in the dark arctic night of the soul, It was still a lovely dinner, with the entire city’s lights splayed out and twinkling way way below us.

Yep, I lied to engineer that bittersweet memory, and memories, the ostensibly core subject of NODding Out (although the deeper subject, to my mind, is empathy), are all we have - while we have them.

The absolute peak experience I had out there was a hot air balloon ride I booked for Bi and I.

We had to get out to this remote site before dawn. We followed the directions given, onto a long, straight dirt road, surrounded by arid ground dotted with sagebrush. The land was almost completely flat, and we were practically upon the Rio Grand gorge before we saw it - a wide, deep and jagged slice, riven right through the landscape, with water glinting far below, and a team, practically at the cliff’s edge, unfurling a balloon and rigging a small wicker basket to it.

I still remember the incredulous and angry look Bi gave me when she saw that basket. I’m not sure what she’d had in mind, but probably something modern and made of aviation aluminum, and safely enclosed, rather than this tiny and fragile-looking woven container, just big enough for her, me, and the pilot:

Hot Air Balloon, Rio Grande Gorge, somewhere near Taos, New Mexico, late 1990s, camera, lens, film stock, photographer, unknown. © 2025 - Samuel Claiborne

Oh, she’s smiling here, but inside she thinks I’m going to get us both killed. Funny, since I’m the one afraid of heights.

One of the most amazing aspects of this flight was the three-dimensionality of it. Most hot air balloon flights tend to be straight line affairs. You ascend, drift in one direction for awhile, and then land. But not this one. Our pilot was clearly knowledgeable about the terrain, and, as far as I’m concerned, clearly amazingly skilled. Not only did we soar above the land, we descended into it, into the gorge and more, and changed directions several times in the course of our flight as our pilot read the air currents.

We lifted off, jumping up quickly once the ropes were released, drifted over the Rio Grande, and then more slowly descended into the gorge, all the way down until the bottom of our basket kissed the river itself, arising once more, dripping.

But then, as we ascended slightly, and flew south along the course of the river, we approached a box canyon. Our pilot raised us to just the right height, and the prevailing air current seemed to suck us right into that canyon! We coasted serenely, silently, alongside the ancient eroded walls. It felt like we were swimming through the atmosphere, up, down, left, right, forwards and backwards.

As we neared the end of the canyon, he lowered us slightly until he found a cooler current moving in the opposite direction. It slid us back in a stately glide alongside those same canyon walls, until we once again approached the juncture of our little canyon with the main gorge, whereupon we swam silently out into the gorge, and then the currents once again took us gliding southward centered over the middle of the river, as if we were on rails, with the water only a few meters beneath us. It was remarkable and I was awash in wonder and gratitude for every second.

Then, as we coursed down the river, a huge arch bridge came into view dead ahead. I was hoping he’d go below it, and asked him if we were going to, but he said that regulations prohibited it.

Instead, he fired up the twin gas burners and we ascended rapidly, rising swiftly and weightlessly in a high, high, arc over the bridge, as he then throttled the burners back, arcing us back down, and landed us gently on the other side of the bridge, on the same Eastern side of the river we’d lifted off from, back on seemingly identical scrubland, just a few miles away. There was even a dirt road terminating hard against the cliffs here too.

This was a peak experience. One I hope I’ll always remember. But what’s funny is, it wasn’t this experience that changed me, or the food, art, hiking, nor the impossibly starlit night we spent lolling in a hot tub overlooking the grassy summertime ski slopes of Taos.

No, what changed me was quiet, and happened so slowly as to be imperceptible as it happened, and was only slowly revealed to to me several months after my return.

As I said, our relationship wasn’t so great at this time. I drove us hither and yon, trying to find interesting things to please her, but the magic was gone

I mean, here we were, often out on remote, empty highways, highways so far from everything that they cut through unfenced open rangeland. In earlier days we most certainly would have made hot sweaty love all over the outdoors, probably right on the hood of our car, but those days were gone now. Most of the laughter was gone too.

Bi often radiated a sullen resentment that bemused me, and to some extent still does to this day. After many years, I’ve come to a tentative, counterintuitive conclusion: I was too focused on trying to please her, and she lost respect for me.

There’s a line from a song by U2, a song about divorce, actually: “I gave you everything you ever wanted - it wasn’t what you wanted.”

I think that’s what happened. I lost my center. Bi became my center. I grafted her hopes, desires, dreams onto my own stock, and for a time it made her very happy to have me at her beck and call, moving mountains to please her.

But eventually, she lost respect for the servile, unconsciously desperate man laboring to keep her affections. And eventually he became resentful as well. There’s a book entitled No More Mister Nice Guy about this “Nice Guy Syndrome”. Every schmuck like me, raised without a lot of male input and support - Raised by women to please women - should read it.

But I digress. In the often taut environment of our relationship at the time, we both seemed to escape into the rhythm of driving. I drove us a lot around the Southwest. And most of the time, Bi slept. She slept a lot in the car, and so I had a lot of time to myself. And… something, the light of the snow off the highest peaks, the undulating sensuality of the foothills we drove up and down and around, the red red dirt, the taste of it in the dry air - I don’t know. Something slowly, imperceptibly, filled me in a way I’d never been filled before.

I remember we drove to Canyon De Chelle, and I tried to wake Bi up, but she was cross and went back to sleep - so I drank it all in for myself. The red buttes and caves and dry washes and box canyons. The mysterious sinuous red dirt jeep trails snaking up and away, over the hills and into mystery. Even the state highway we were on, which had been washed out to bare dirt, and consequently which we had no business driving on in a rented sedan, was amazingly beautiful in that empty, lonely, compellingly mysterious quality I seem so drawn to in this life. And right in the middle of my slaloming half in/half out of control on that road’s wicked switchbacks (yes, Bi slept even through that), I came upon two barefoot Diné boys riding bareback, herding cattle.

That place, that lonely, peaceful, mysterious, perhaps slightly forsaken road, is where Nanish’in Tóháálí lives in my mind.

I’d had hints of the land filling me with light before. The first time I really felt it was 1976, the bicentennial year, and I was 16, hitchhiking from NYC to Missoula, Montana, to visit an unrequited love (who is still, kind of miraculously, a dear friend). I felt it all over that trip.

I felt it near Little Big Horn; and crossing the Missouri at sunset in the back of a pickup with a boy of 11 or so who showed me several(!) bullet scars from hunting accidents, while the river glowed as if from underneath, just like Long Island Sound is described to glow in the preface for this book; peeing into the water at Three forks - man that water pulled at me; with a trucker, as we got lost down a dry wash that looked like the exit from a truck stop, Utah’s curved sandstone maidens chanting around us in the dark; in Murdo, South Dakota, during a tornado warning, while the sky screamed a crazy-ass bilious green.

I felt it once again sitting in the back of another pickup, on another hitchhiking journey, this time through Maine - in the middle of an old growth forest, where each ancient tree seemed a sentient, kind, lovingly patient spirit, trying to communicate comfort and connection to me, and I was suddenly moved to tears, deep, deep tears.

Yep, I’ve had hints, plenty of hints. Places where the energy filled me, moved me, made me vibrate. But this trip to the Southwest, like my subsequent trip to Wutaishan, was different, partially because it happened after my accident.

You see, I’d always been sensitive to energy - at least since I was electrocuted and probably died (I certainly left my body) at the age of somewhere between 20 and 30 months - I am not sure of the date, because no one else ever found out about it, and it happened while I was alone, but perhaps that’s a story for another day.

But after I was paralyzed 30 odd years later in 1992, I was (and still am) left mostly numb from the shoulders down.

Just as a blind person may acquire more sensitive hearing or taste, so too I can feel (and direct) subtle energy much more exquisitely than I could before the accident. It taketh. It giveth.

So, my experience in the Southwest, at Wutaishan, at the Green Goat Temple in Chengdu, and at a little off-the beaten path part of Chichen Itza, all happened after I acquired this increased energetic sensitivity.

And maybe this alteration to my energetic structure (remarked upon by healers and shamans time and again, even those unfamiliar with my history), allowed The Divine to speak to me, suffuse itself into me, dissolve me into itself, in a way it could not before I was so radically changed.

I dunno. I only know that one day, a few months after I got back from the Southwest, the full import of how changed I felt landed, and I believed. And I still do. And I still have no idea precisely what I believe in. And yet, it comforts and inspires me, this feeling, this connection, this kind creative, enfolding energy that calls me home.

A poem I wrote in that bicentennial year, after hitchhiking across country to Montana, in pursuit of that unrequited love. I can see from this long ago poem that this feeling has been here all along. But certain places, like the Southwest (and, I’m willing to bet, Israel) really have it in spades…

Back to NODding Out

(Manny)

Is this thing on? OK. I hate writin’, and I’m slow as hell ’cuz my hand still don’t work too good. But maybe we need a record, in case somethin’ important comes up. So whenever I remember, I’m gonna say a few things.

I been holed up since Andy left. It’s been mostly dead ends. And these Navajo cats hate me ’cuz I’m Puerto Rican, which might as well be Mexican to them, and they hate Mexicans. They’re some sharp fuckers though. Robert Yellow Hammer is a way sharp dude, studyin’ applied physics at the University of Tucson part-time. He’s ’bout the only guy here who don’t look like he wants to spit on me. I call him MC Hammer to mess with him. Well, it would mess with him, if he were old enough to know who that was. Instead he just looks at me like I’m crazy.

The rest? Jive assholes, for the most part. Some of ’em tried to pick a fight with me. Once. I might still be a little fucked up, but I don’t play. I sent one guy to the hospital with a broken jaw. Now they leave me alone. But they don’t like me. S’ok man… I don’t like ’em either. Fuck ’em if they don’t like my ’Rican ass. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a punch.

But Robert’s cool. He’s got his own still, an’ he cooks up this rotgut shit from the local cactuses. We get wrecked an’ try to figger out what the connection between the positrons an’ the psions is. What’s the purpose of the positrons? Why’re they needed? Why can’t the brain just skip the middle man and do its thing with the psions directly? Robert thinks the brain is a quantum device. He says that it directly changes valence shells, changin’ them through what he calls intention, addin’ and subtractin’ energy to a closed system through thought alone. He thinks that thought is actually the activity of changin’ quanta directly.

In other words, the brain’s somehow linkin’ to this other space, the Workspace, by entanglin’ positrons and then spewin’ them out in some very specific ways. There are always positron pairs, always. ’Course, there’re showers, shit-loads of ’em, but always in pairs that fly apart evenly in opposite directions. He thinks they’re entangled, as they’re shot out in pairs, somethin’ ’bout them is anyway, but what? Rotation? Speed? Specific energy? Polarity, if there is such a thing? Somethin’ ’bout those pairs either makes a psion out of thin air, or jumps it out of the scaffolding, changes it so it flows, and thought and memory happen. In other words, the act of thinkin’ creates thinkin’. You can only say somethin’ like that if you’re wrecked on rotgut.

But I keep tellin’ him that we don’t have the time to work out theory. We gotta refine what we got, an’ come up with a weapon. Find a way to take thought and aim it at those fuckers, let it fuckin’ fly, and wipe ’em clean.

One night, while we’re havin’ our usual arguments, he says, “What ’bout freezin’ ’em? What ’bout stoppin’ the flow of tachyons, psions, whatever you want to call ’em. Thicken the field, suppress the positrons and that will suppress their thought.”

“Yeah, but even though the psions seem to be in all places at once, the positrons are coming right outta their brains. Shit, to do that you’d have to be next to ’em. If you could do that, why not just shoot ’em?”

“Good point,” he says, stares off into the distance, takes another sip.

What do we do when we’re not drinkin’? Well, we’re not CERN, hell, we don’t even have as much cool shit as IRCAM, and they just make music! We don’t have particle accelerators, super-cooled magnets, buckyball latticeworks, all that neat shit Tom showed me. We’re small potatoes. Tesla would feel really at home with us: big-ass iron magnets, coils, breadboards with discrete components wired up on ’em. It’s like 1890 up in here…

We’re buildin’ a stronger version of Bachman’s field spinner, though, out of parts scavenged from a couple of MRI machines, mostly. The Diné have money, but they like to cut corners. Still, they’re behind us. I think that’s why the young guys haven’t killed my brown ass yet—I think someone higher up told ’em to lay off, so I got a break one jaw for free card or somethin’.

Chapter 30

At about 3am, we left Wutaishan in a black sedan with a driver who wore shades at all times and smoked endlessly. Bag-Zho only told the Abbot of our need to leave, and for a car and driver. He told none of the other temple-keepers, none of the monks. He said they’d understand.

We took small highways, then big ones, and finally arrived in Beijing around breakfast time. We talked all the way, about art and masks and the time of world forgetting. The further we got from Wutaishan the older Bag-Zho became. He seemed to cave in on himself and become a shadow. His puckish charisma was gone and now he radiated the gray exhaustion you see with so many elderly people. Was this the guy who had fought so beautifully the day before?

I began to understand at the airport. We separated as we got our tickets and he went ahead to the plane while I lagged behind. He was hardly scrutinized by the Chinese passport control officers. He seemed to be some old grandfather going to visit his kids. They waved him on, bored and eager for the next traveler in line. This man was not a threat, nor could he possibly be a fugitive. During the long plane ride we sat in separate places and Bag-Zho maintained his protective coloration. I mostly spent the long flight walking back and forth to keep my legs awake, drinking tea in the back galley with the flight attendants, and trying my Mandarin out on them.

After landing back at LAX, we were to transfer directly to a plane to Salt Lake City. I hated traveling anywhere that involved my fake passport, and held my breath at customs. We were both traveling on fake ones, and Bag-Zho on a fake visa as well. I could only hope that his were as good as the ones the ITI boys had ginned up for me. Apparently they were. We transferred without a hitch and I slept on the plane to Salt Lake. For me, it was like I fastened my seatbelt, shut my eyes, opened them, and we were there.

From there, we transferred to a small turboprop to Farmington, New Mexico, but as soon as we arrived there, it became clear I’d been screwed.

Within 20 minutes in Farmington, Bag-Zho had disappeared. Gone like smoke. I went to rent a car, talked to the person at the counter and when I looked behind me, he was gone. Now my one possible psychic was MIA. Why on earth had I trusted this man? Jesus, I am one gullible ass.

Or worse yet, did someone kidnap him? Didn’t seem likely; why wouldn’t they have snagged me too? Unless he’d gone somewhere like the bathroom, where it was easy to nab him. Around and around it went: anger, paranoia, despair.

I was a mess, ragged, worried, pissed. I looked all over the airport. I considered having him paged on the P.A. system, but that seemed too dangerous. After two futile hours, I rented the car anyway with my fake ID and credit cards, and drove home via back roads, past Shiprock and over the Chuskas. I was looking over my shoulder the whole time. Was I being followed by that pickup truck? What about helicopters, spotter planes? I got to Nanish’in Tóháálí late in the evening, said my password to the guard, was waved on and finally parked in the outermost cave and went looking for Manny.

He and I’d been communicating once in a while steganographically, an extended, disjointed series of one-sided missives, sent via tourist photos to each other with short embedded messages encoded into the photographs. I didn’t know until I got back and talked with him how stymied he actually was, nor did he know how utterly I’d failed as well.

He was relieved to see me, and I him, but all I had for him were some wild tales of a missing warrior-woodcarving monk from Wutaishan, and a little bluish-copperish golf ball made of God knows what. Most importantly, my raison d’être for my trip—to find some high-powered psychic warrior—was a bust. I thought Bag-Zho might be the ticket, or his mysterious friend Vernon, but Bag-Zho was gone, and as the days passed, our ITI friends couldn’t dig up Vernon either, despite numerous urgent inquiries.

With nothing better to do, I hung out, training and pacing while Manny and his Diné cohorts examined Michael Chang’s golf ball. They were reluctant to disassemble it, or even X-ray it, because none of us knew how fragile its internal structure was. As for the outside, it had fourteen tiny binding posts on it, and was festooned with minute circuit traceries. But how to hook it up, and to what or to whom? Not a clue. Unfortunately it didn’t come with an instruction manual, and Bachman, the one guy who might know something about it, was back on Long Island hiding out in his radome, possibly shooting at any car that approached. Or he was dead.

Finally, after puzzling over it for days, sending young Diné to Farmington to search surreptitiously on the ’net for hints, Manny decided that the only way to attempt to reverse-engineer it was to pull it apart, even if it meant inadvertently destroying it. First they did chemical analysis of the outside. Iridium, primarily, with fine copper alloy tracings inlaid all over it. Then they x-rayed it and saw the same kind of origami of radio-opaque crystal and wiring that the SUR box had, though not quite as dense. Then they took it apart, videoing it and noting each and every part, and tried to tease secrets out of the pile of oddities that resulted. They were trying to reverse-engineer a device whose functionality was unknown. This is almost impossible, but what were we gonna do? What better things did we have to spend our time on?

Weeks passed, and I trained in our little Bachmanesque fugue-state machine, cursed Bag-Zho, and lifted weights to channel my frustration. Well, at least he’d made me strong, and pissed me off enough to stay that way. I liked my new body. I liked the cat-like assurance it gave me. Even Manny sensed it and looked at me differently. I clung to that because I didn’t have much else. I was deadwood in those caves. I don’t have Manny’s technical bent. He’s like Ernest Rutherford: he sees large landscapes of theory, but he also loves to tinker. Me, I can barely hook up a TiVo.

I trained, he tinkered with a couple of Diné guys, and in the evenings we’d get together for a beer and a smoke and vent our frustrations. To make things worse than my general state of uselessness and the implacable opacity of the golf ball, Manny was worried because he’d seen some new alterations in the decoy patterns around the SUR crew’s nodes. It appeared that they were taking extra measures, beefing up their security. We knew that once Tom got stewed, the element of surprise was gone, but beyond that, it seemed that SUR was throwing more R&D into the problem and might always stay ahead of us in our little arms race. And maybe they were after us too. We were looking over our shoulders while we waited for something bad to happen, as if NOD in general wasn’t bad enough.

Brooklyn Still Life. Leicaflex II camera, Leitz Summicron 50mm lens, film stock unknown. © 1989 Samuel Claiborne

Well, kinda busy now, so I’ll just leave it that there is more detail on martial arts, especially internal and external martial arts, and the power of things like Tai Chi that will show up later in the book, and that I’ll probably discuss in an intro to one or more chapters in the Europe section.

I’ve really enjoyed writing new stuff for the chapters, but life’s a little crazed at the moment, so, alas and alack, I will just give you the chapter once more today.

Cheers.

Chapter 29

Can I trust this guy? Well, he’s the one mentioning Arizona, not me. He’s either a friend, or he knows so much that it’s over anyway.

“OK, I’ll go back to America with you. But tell me: what are we going to do together once we get there.”

“Even if I knew, I would not tell you. You need to train for the role you will play. Vernon knows of you too. He says that although you are almost 500 years late, you are still not yet ready to assume your role, so there is no point in your knowing what it is. Apparently there is not much point in my knowing what it is either, because I do not. I can only assume that we will all find out in due time. But Vernon and I and you all need to meet together, just as you and I had to meet.”

He put his tea down. “And now you and I have to work. Are you ready to begin your training?”

“What? What training? I thought you and I were leaving for America.”

“There are certain things I need to teach you. I see them when I wear the mask of world forgetting. I have made lists in my mind as I have meditated with the mask. I need to help you find your strength, to teach you to allow yourself to react instinctively, to trust yourself, or at least start you on that path, the path to letting go of your mind. You need to stop analyzing everything and spend more time being, and the easiest way to teach you that is to teach you to fight. We have three days.”

“You’re going to teach me a martial art in three days?” I laughed. “I haven’t been in a real fistfight in years. I am not aggressive, I’m not particularly strong, I don’t work out—and you’re going to make me a martial arts master?”

He laughed uproariously. “Not at all. No, I am going to hypnotize you and teach you some of the sacred Shambhala warrior techniques, which are mostly mental in nature, though there are physical applications as well. Anyone can learn them, quickly like this if need be, although we don’t advertise that fact. You aren’t going to be any kind of master at all. You would fall before a true master in seconds. However, you will be faster, more coordinated, and most of all, your mind will be conditioned to react instinctively and without question to imminent physical threats. You will lose inhibitions and gain discipline—an odd contradiction, no?” He smiled broadly, showing his delicately pointed teeth. “You will exercise, fight, eat and sleep through the next three days in a hypnagogic state.”

Events were proceeding quickly in directions I hadn’t anticipated. I was dubious to say the least. Wasn’t this an absurd waste of time when there was so much imminent danger? “Why? Why all this preparation? Maybe all we need to do is to get you and Vernon together to save the world, no?”

“No, Andrew. You must learn to fight, and I have to implant some post-hypnotic suggestions that will improve your reaction time, allow you to act decisively under stressful, even traumatic conditions. I have to teach your system to not fall into shock, to stay fluid and reactive until each crisis is over. I need to peel away some of the veneer of analytical reasoned thought and wake up your animal instincts. Believe me. I feel this in my bones, like I felt that fever. It is a need I have to do this. It is not a desire on my part. My desire?” he said, his voice rising a little, a sardonic smile straying across his face, “is to stay here and care for this temple and make my masks. Unfortunately, that is not what is needed, so it is not what I need. I promise you that I have only the best interests at heart. I would not harm you.”

I drank my tea. He filled my cup again. I drank some more. Neither of us spoke, until finally I said “OK, let’s get started.”

“We already have. There is a potent pineal extract in this tea, along with some herbs. They will affect your sense of time and make you more sensitive to light. We will only go out at night. We will train here and in the temple during the day. Now, sit with me, legs uncrossed, hands at your sides. Look straight ahead, but soften and unfocus your gaze. Feel your eyes relax, and try to feel a spot between your eyebrows, in the center. Feel a weight there. Feel a heavy quality. This can feel unpleasant, like an ache. If so, relax that point. You can feel light flowing into that point through your relaxed eyes, through your softening. Let it open. Feel it open like a flower. You will feel warmth there, and a yielding sensation, as if you are almost floating out of your body.

“Be careful. Stay here, in your body. But stay soft and open too. Feel your crown chakra at the top of your head pulling energy down from heaven. Ground yourself. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel the bottom of your spine pressed into the chair, the chair pressed into the earth, and your legs spiraling into the earth, your feet too, energy, light, streaming through you. Become the conduit, the grounding wire between heaven and earth. You are like a tree with a canopy of light touching heaven and roots of light gripping deeply into the earth.”

As he talked on and on, his voice got quieter and quieter, until it was just audible above the sound of my own breathing. I felt a riveting surge of almost magnetic energy rippling through me. My feet were glued to the floor, my tailbone to the chair. And gradually, his voice dropped below my breathing, as did every other sound. Small sounds that you really wouldn’t think about until they’re gone: the tiny creaking and rushing as the wind hit the wooden walls of his little shack and leaked in and out; the larger sound of wind rushing down the mountains; the powdery snow grains ticking and rattling against the window panes; maybe the sound of the room itself, the way those other sounds bounced around it.

Somehow every external sound that I would normally receive through my ears grew quieter and quieter, so slowly that I was barely aware of a change from moment to moment, until they all dropped below the threshold of my hearing and I was cut off. I only heard the internal, bone-conducted sound of my breathing, and if I stopped my breathing momentarily, I heard my heart, and the sound of my muscles as I shifted in my chair, even tiny sounds of bubbles in my stomach, the odd, tiny, high-pitched whine of thought itself. Nothing else. It was as if I were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, only much more complete. I wondered if the voice from Rosebud would quake in my head again. But there was nothing but the sounds of my body: arterial plumbing, the creak of stranded muscle, my lungs and heart toiling in the mixing house of air and blood.

It seemed to me that all of my movements were very, very slow. I brought my hand to my face and it seemed to take five minutes. It felt like I was sitting for hours. Then the room started to darken slowly. I remember watching a candle, staring at the flame intently as it got dimmer and dimmer until the room went dark and I was blind.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t feel my body anymore. Suddenly, there were only the sounds of my body and nothing else, no other sensations at all. I couldn’t taste my mouth. I couldn’t even feel my breathing, there was only this odd isolated hearing left to me. I was terrified that it would disappear too, and I would be left incorporeal, a spirit drifting randomly with no body. I clung to the sound of my lungs working the air, and waited. Actually, I think I slept, though I know that’s impossible. I know that the things I dreamed really happened. I have the calluses and sore muscles to prove it. But I still feel it was all a dream.

The dream consisted of running that night, in the cold, thin mountain air. Running the narrow dirt paths between peaks, along the sharp-shouldered cols that were maybe a foot wide, with long steep slopes on either side, dropping a thousand feet down to tiny pocket valleys studded with more temples and swift whitewater streams. I am afraid of heights. There is no way I could have run those moon-silvered paths, the blue-white glow from the tree-less, snow-covered slopes lighting my feet and the drop-offs with an almost actinic clarity, the incredibly thin air cutting me, stripping my lungs to a bloody froth, until suddenly I burst through the pain and felt that I could run this way forever.

In my dream, we ran until dawn. Then we went back to the temple and Bag-Zho served me a kind of congee, a rice gruel that he called zut, with mushrooms, pork, preserved eggs, scallions and lots of ginger. And then we sat in front of the Buddha for hours while he spoke to me.

As the lecture droned on and on, he suddenly attacked me out of the blue. Without warning he punched me hard in the face. I went down, my nose bleeding, and he kicked me. This went on for some time, with me pleading that I didn’t want to fight, until I finally lost my temper and did fight back, charging in a blind rage. He adroitly side-stepped and I crashed into a wall. I tried to fight him, but he calmly avoided me over and over, for what seemed like forever.

And then I wasn’t angry anymore. But I was still fighting, now calmly, efficiently, mindlessly in a way, just the way he seemed to be. And as the dream progressed, I started moving in new ways. It was like I was a sponge. Anything I saw him do, I could almost instantly do, because in this entire dream, the running, the eating, the fighting, time was also slowing down. We moved in slow-motion, ran like we were loping through honey, and each move seemed both telegraphed and choreographed. So now as we fought, I could easily avoid his blows. Like him, I was now sidestepping, transferring weight effortlessly, spinning around him as if on air-bearings as he charged me. It got to the point that I knew what he was going to do before he did it. I was anticipating his moves, but I don’t know how. Like I said, it was mindless.

I also dreamed of lifting weights for hours, until my muscles were aflame, and then suddenly, just like with my lungs, the pain receded, and I burst into a clear space, where there was no more pain. Then more and more standing and sitting while his voice droned through me. More and more. Running, fighting, lifting, standing still, it all became effortless and timeless and it all repeated, over and over, and then I woke up.

I am tired. I am sore. All of my muscles ache. I feel my body under the covers. I am much more solid. I’ve probably gained ten pounds of muscle. And I’m awake, and time is running at a normal pace, and I am back in my body. And I know it’s all real, that it somehow happened. I even have blisters on my feet to prove it. What the hell happened?

Months later—I still remember that evening when I woke up like it was a kind of new birth, actually, more like a molting, like I’d shed a skin that had been confining me. I was more alert or alert in a way I’d never been before. I felt like a leopard, or a puma: strong, supple, quick. I felt a confidence, a physical confidence that was like a drug. It was ecstatic to inhabit my body so intimately, more intimately than I ever had.

Bag-Zho walked in, stepped over to shake my hand, and instead swung hard and fast at my temple. I immediately put up my arm and parried his blow and rose smoothly off the bed, my other arm shooting out instantly for his throat.

He danced away and smiled broadly. “Good! Your spirit animal is awake now, son. It will always be awake, day and night for the rest of your life, and that is not a bad thing. Now I am ready to leave. Shall we have some more zut before we go?”