Guardians of the Secret
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved
1.
Nimé my father called me. Karl Richter was on the birth certificate, but he hoped the name he learned from Indians in the Amazon would make me a child of the New World and a stranger to the tragedies of Europe. Like everyone, I was too brief a child, too long a stranger. A family crisis led to my being sent back to East Germany. I became a therapist, in part, to find a meaningful union of child and stranger, the Old World and the New.
Michael first heard of me at the end of a two week episode. He would have just put it a down as a bender. I think that's shortchanging the deeper meaning of a spree. It's more of a misguided, misunderstood pilgrimage. A sort of a vision quest for those not ready to see. Sara had picked him up outside of Taos and was driving them to a plane in Albuquerque. As they neared the city, Michael surfaced from a hangover reverie. "I was thinking."
"In your state it might be dangerous," Sara playfully cautioned.
"You think God creating the universe was the first spree?"
"You looking for some Biblical justification for your behavior?"
"Precedence, that's all."
"Forget it, it wasn't a spree, he rested on the seventh day, remember."
"He was already finished. It was already done. Stars, fish, people, it was done."
"It wasn't finished. His rest was part of it."
Sara caught herself getting heated. " I can't believe this."
"What?"
" I come all this way trying to save you from yourself and wind up arguing theology with a man in your condition."
"Is it the theology that's bothering you, or my condition?"
"What do you think? A few hours ago you were so drunk you thought it appropriate to be screwing on D.H. Lawrence's doorstep."
"Memorial."
"Okay memorial."
"As in memory of," Michael said with slurred emphasis. "Besides, my present condition is the only one where I'm able to think about such things. My attempt to be an aspiring priest seems to have drummed it out of me otherwise. It's funny because it was this very question that ended my brief career."
"The meaning of the seventh day?"
"I just couldn't get it. I tried, really concentrated. It just set off some horrible commotion in my head I couldn't stop. I had to quit. It's what led to my thinking that hell was God's first failed creation."
"They must have loved that bit of heresy."
"No, at the time I was equally inept at heresy and orthodoxy. This came to me years later. It was the line, 'And God saw that it was good.' It finally dawned on me that he didn't know how it was going to turn out. He could have created anything he wanted. Why would he choose to make it so unpredictable?"
Sara had an answer, but was curious what Michael would say.
"He must have known better. By experience maybe. Maybe there was a first creation where God knew everything that was going to happen ahead of time. Perfect and ordered and a huge mistake. It was like a giant machine, a real no exit kind of place. Hell was God's first failed creation. And so he created a second."
"And got it right."
"Yeah he saw that right away. So we live in two creations side by side. You can find yourself in one or the other, and despite everything I do, and I do get out there, really out there as you know, most of the time I'm stuck in the first."
"Looking for the exit."
"Yeah, or the entrance to the real creation, the door that opens into life. And there are moments when it seems that a woman, a situation might do it, and I pursue it."
"Right up to Lawrence's doorstep."
"She was a book editor and loved Lawrence. I tried to be the next best thing. It didn't hurt that I'd read 'Sea and Sardinia."
"I read 'Sea and Sardinia', you just heard me talk about it."
"Okay so I'm second to next best thing. In a more perfect world you would make love to her. Anyway we both thought that Lawrence would appreciate the spirit of our undertaking."
"I'm sure he would. On the other hand, you must have noticed that the neighbors were not Dionysos and Bacchus."
Michael wasn't listening. He was already lost in a memory of parochial school. He was still back there struggling with it, when she asked him if he would listen to one of my tapes, thinking it might do him some good. She described my background and how we met doing work for indigenous peoples and had become friends.
"I'm not indigenous," Michael interrupted. "Maybe you're branching out into other categories like helping the indignant or the indulgent."
Sara knew he would razz her about the political correctness and her saying she trusted me. She was desperate enough about his condition to think that the altered state of consciousness engendered by a miserable hangover and deep depression might constitute a receptive frame of mind. Over his protest she started the tape.
Michael apparently got as far as the first lines. "The revolutionary idea we're putting forth here is that sexual fantasy is not just something you make up that brings you pleasure, it has a meaning. Interpreting and understanding that meaning can change your life. I'd go further and say that sexual fantasy is a call to change your life." Sara was sure his promise to listen to the rest of the tape was just an effort to get back to sleep and was surprised when it eventually turned out otherwise.
I wish I could say the idea had come to me when I first saw the cave paintings at Lascaux. Or at the very least germinated from that experience and the various clues from other fields. There were stepping stones that could have defined a path, anthropological studies of Paleolithic art and shamanism, psychology and Eastern religion. Reflecting later I could retrace these steps and see what I had missed.
I was in France for a conference. A rare opportunity to visit the West. Lascaux was merely one of the many sights to be seen. It had been closed to the public for some time in an effort to save it from further deterioration. I was fortunate to get the opportunity to visit it through the efforts of a professional colleague. That it had something unique to reveal was furthest from my mind. I was impressed, even moved, but not spoken to. It was all part of the mute grandeur of the world. So the opportunity passed and the direct path of insight replaced by a long and circuitous one.
The idea haltingly evolved many years later through a series of encounters, most importantly one involving a man who had delusions he was a famous philosopher and one involving a fallen evangelist. So much more pleasing to have made the leap from the insight contained in a 25,000 year old painting connecting sexual ecstasy and a way to knowledge. But such boldness is left only to children, who can see that Africa and South America fit together and have to wait years as their elders ponderously catch up to them.
It was shortly after a return visit to France that Michael appeared briefly at the back of one of my workshops. He never came back. It happens rather often, it's difficult work. I had no opportunity to learn any more about him than I had heard from Sara.
It wasn't until my life was threatened and the FBI showed up along with a set of my tapes, that I knew Michael was involved in the events in Washington. The tapes were among the things found in his car which the Georgia police fished out of a river, including the body of someone they accused him of killing.
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved