THE ENGINEER’S WIFE

A Story of Erotic Madness

PART I. PRELUDE

In the summer of 1976, I met and fell madly in love with – I emphasize the word madly -- a married woman in Laramie, Wyoming. The woman in question had been married two weeks when I first met her.

This romance lasted about one year, and then stretched on, at a distance, stretched on in my mind and my heart at least, for about another year. (It actually stretched on longer than that – in fact this love is still alive inside me, still stretching on in some turbulent, haunting way, as I begin writing this most recent account in the autumn of 2010.)

In the summer of 1977, I left Laramie, moved to Eugene, Oregon, with the expectation that this young married woman, the engineer’s wife, would leave her husband and follow me. Our love had been so passionate, so pure, and so beatific, that I failed to understand how she (how any woman for that matter) could turn her back on such rare beauty, such rare and deep truth – clearly, in my mind, this love was divine beauty -- out of any sense of duty, or obedience to convention, or even love for or comfort with her husband, the engineer, discovered or re-discovered somehow in or through my absence.

During our love affair she, Leslie Harmon, was receiving very little comfort – and a great deal of discomfort, in fact – from her husband, the engineer.

Clearly I did not wish to admit to myself that my own love for Leslie Harmon was stronger, more vital, and more dangerously consuming than was her own love for myself. I did not wish to admit to myself that she could live without my love, as I was finding it very difficult – seemingly impossible -- to live without her love.

It was devastating to me, at the time, to have to realize that love was a secondary virtue, a secondary virtue to Duty, or Honor, or the Promise taken as Oath, that Love would not conquer all, and that the pure heart, fueled by romantic will and a passionate will to self-sacrifice, was not always allowed to fulfill its ambitions.

This novel is the story of that failed love.

LOVE AND DESTINY; SETTING THE CONTEXT

I. WHAT IS LOVE? WHO AM I; WHERE AM I?

What is Love, if not a divine madness?

When I speak of Love this way I do not confuse it with the more conventional marital love, which is a kind of pale courtly contract in contrast, usually dredged up from some bout of fear of or a real condition of loneliness, or as the residue of a more energetic love that has led to nothing, generating fatigue or a sense of Love’s illusion, the conventional marital love being an escape from such madness, a dry island in an animated sea, a solid place to stand upon around which nothing else seems so steady or so secure, so un-blindingly real or un-erotically clean. Marital love is a kind of covenant (this word has powerful literal and metaphorical implications) between brothers and sisters, between friends, a trust conceived for the pro-generation of offspring in a sane, quiet, efficient calling, conducive to rest, to steady growth, and to development of the family plant reaching for some magnificent fruiting in a sunny environment with little shade and much positive promise of Future contentment and maximum eradication of its opposite, that terrible passion which generates pain and confusion only. That is the blueprint of marital love, at least. That is how it appears on its surface in all the magazines talking about the girl’s best dream to have her own secure place stretching into eternal blessings, congestions being few, counseling her against too much imagination and the virtue of expecting little from life, expecting little more than her mother was given, in fact.

Marital love is a business arrangement, sometimes conceived in passion, often conceived in utter soberness and practical ingenuity. Marital love is the opposite of passion, in fact. That is the source of its attractive powers. Marital love promises peace, prestige, prosperity, and quiet deterioration into a rather hopeless condition of inevitable decay in Time’s suddenly surly garden.

Erotic love is not like this. Erotic love is a passionate psalmody, a flight at the sun, a descent into hell, into the bloody conclaves of demonic possession and a ritualistic ecstasy of self-annihilation through the immanence of another. Erotic love invokes a fusing of opposite souls in a violent act of depth penetration, of votive incandescence, and results quite often in personality disintegration, which the Soul can, but always does not, survive.

Marital love is the ultimate rational contract. Erotic love is the ultimate irrational challenge to one’s own destiny, the drinking of the cup of pleasure-poison, to the dregs, with no underlying scheme attached but the full enjoyment of the pleasure and pain inherent in the experience itself. Erotic love leads no where, but is something, is the path, even if not always the treasury, the gem, expected to be found at the end of the path.

Marital love ends in a courtroom, most likely, or standing at the side of a coffin. Erotic love ends, it seems, with a requisite inevitability with one or both parties standing, singly, or side-by-side, at the edge of some clarifying black abyss.

Dante understood this. Marsilio Ficino understood this.

Thomas Moore, in his analysis of Ficino’s ideas, through Plato, The Planets Within, writes: ‘Anyone who has loved knows that it is a madness, a mania, whose meaning is elusive, its rules confounding, its goals and outcomes a riddle, and its attractiveness overwhelming… Love may be painfully exhilarating and disastrously pleasant, but, above all, it is necessary for Soul – like religion and poetry: it has psychological significance.’

Ficino wrote: ‘Love has the enjoyment of beauty as its goal.’

The enjoyment of beauty. Yes. Necessary for Soul. Yes. That is the unstated goal, the automatic result, and the manifest essence of erotic love, if one survives it, a love that simply is, that asks for nothing, that demands nothing, that endures until it no longer can endure, always refreshing the souls involved, always providing water for the thirsty, always creating a dream for the arid and the empty, those whose imagery has become exhausted, but also engendering a series of dangerous whirlpool sensations, pleasures and animations which some souls have trouble enduring and even surviving. Memories become tantalizing ghosts capable of haunting one rigorously and righteously unto the grave.

Enjoyment of beauty first; then, often, non-enjoyment of the painful, even the grotesque, animation triggered by the sudden absence of said beauty.

In 1976, I was a man whose imagery was exhausted. I was arid. I had just finished my first novel, A Silent Dell, which is the story of a young man living in southern Wyoming whose imagery, values and sense of life’s meaning was exhausted and who was attempting to survive a case of escalating alienation from too much mundane American reality. His wife was 8 ½ months pregnant. The world was closing in.

I was attempting to publish this novel, sending it through the mail to New York City publishers. I sent the manuscript, first, to Alfred A. Knopf, legendary publishers of ‘real literature’ in America. ‘Real Literature’ is the highest, most ambitious writing. ‘Fiction’ by contrast, is fast food for the masses of reading public. My manuscript was rejected by Alfred A. Knopf. I received a rejection note that read: “We regret not being able to publish your manuscript. We did hold a conference and considered publishing this book. However, we think it does not quite fit what we are looking for at the moment. We wish you success with other attempts at publishing this manuscript…’

In the nomenclature of publishing rejections, this was a very high rejection, one that I should consider supportive and positive, which I did.

I thought: “This publishing game is going to be easy.”

I quickly sent the manuscript out a second time.

It was not easy, however.

I had begun writing A Silent Dell in 1974 during my senior year in college at the University of Wyoming. I used Robert Roripaugh’s Advanced Creative Writing Class in the Spring Semester as an excuse to begin developing the ideas for this novel – then, after graduation, I settled in to a pattern that was conducive to my writing, continuing to work part-time at the University’s Coe Library, working nights, making enough money to pay rent and buy food so I could focus on my calling.

By the winter of 1975 I had completed the novel. I began to send it to publishers.

I had other ideas on which I was working. I had become pathologically attached to the work of James Joyce in my last two years of schooling – Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Marie Rilke: the 1930’s had been the apex of literature in the Western World. I began to study American history with an eye on creating a Finnegans Wake made from the material of my own culture and my own national and personal history. I was reading Pilgrim’s Progress and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, imaging a fusion of the two in some strange concoction that was both philosophy and religion, a strange mixture of the two supposed oppositions.

I was also reading a strange, difficult doctrine on the organic nature of history, Decline of the West, written by Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher who appeared in the 1920’s with a work that was profoundly pessimistic to a European world sinking deeper into the economic chaos of that era. The West would die, the writer exclaimed, as a flower dies, as a man dies. Cultures live out an organic life-cycle and then vanish – that is, the spirit vanishes; the body of the culture remains behind.

I worked every day at my typewriter; discipline was, itself, the mother of creation. But it was hard to deny the feeling of exhilaration I experienced, having achieved my goal of completing a novel – my mind, straight-jacketed for nearly two years in a frenzied, furious task, was now a bit slack with freedom. My mind was suddenly like a rubber-band that had lost some of its shape and elasticity. What next? This question did not seem so important to me at the moment. It was enough just to be alive, just to be alive and again curious about the beautiful world in which I found myself again, a world that I had forgotten for so long as I buried myself in the coffin on my own verbal constructions, oblivious to everything else, oblivious to the beautiful world around me, waking up, Spring 1976..

I hesitate in saying too much about myself here. It can be a dangerous landscape for a writer in presenting a context since, and this is especially true for myself, the context has a lure, a gravity, of its own, and can generate an impulse to expand beyond the control of the writer, to become the story itself instead of merely the setting of the story.

Focusing on the implicit is not always easy for me. Focusing on a single strand of the web and eliminating from view strands which can wisely amplify the strand upon which one is standing: this seems to violate the laws of symphonic understanding wherein themes weave and unweave, animate, mute, elaborate, move together as a single gigantic whole toward an understanding that is both prescient and satisfying on microcosmic and macrocosmic levels, the contextual feeding the central image, and the center-piece, in turn, feeding back into the amplifying and amplified background context.

I was born to a small family in southern Wyoming, in the refinery town of Sinclair – the town being a ‘company town’, owned by and maintained by the Sinclair Oil Company. All the residents of the town worked at the Sinclair Oil Refinery. All the houses in town, originally built by workers at the oil refinery – all original workers lived in a tent-city while they worked daily in the oil refinery and built the town’s houses, one-by-one, eventually building and occupying their own home -- were owned by the Company and leased to the workers. There was even a company store, managed by Ray Rasmussen, a thickly-muscled unimaginative man, who barked at children who entered his store and sought to sweet-talk women with children in strollers who appeared unaccompanied by their husbands. The grocery story was subsidized by the company to compete with the larger grocery stores in Rawlins, six miles to the west, for the workers’ convenience.

There was a hotel, a movie theatre, a coffee shop, a bar, a bowling alley, even a credit union – all managed and operated through the company to provide services and entertainment for the residents of Sinclair.

Sinclair – originally named Grenville, after General Grenville Dodge, legendary Indian-Fighter, and then Parco, Producers and Refiners Oil Company -- had been conceived, as a self-contained, self-sufficient modern American town, on the drafting boards of Denver architects, Fisher and Fisher, at the direction of Frank Kistler, owner/CEO OF PARCO Oil Company. Sinclair/Parco had been called by the local newspaper “Frank Kistler’s Dream” and was called in the official History of Wyoming written by T.E. Lawson “the wonder town of Wyoming”.

My sister, Laura, was born October 26, 1948. My brother, William, was born October 26, 1949. I was supposed to be born – this was ‘guaranteed’ by Doctor Baker, a small intense man who would become professionally cranky when I finally got to know him, like a priest from the old school, made inherently brittle by his allegiance to his old world concept of a doctor’s proper integrity – on October 26, 1950. But I waited. In fact, I was an eleven-month baby, a ‘fact’ that I would later work its way into my own mystical biography, my own encapsulation of divine identity and beativity. I was born December 17, 1950, almost two months late.

I was the end of my parents’ family-making. There were ‘complications’ from my birth – seemingly eleventh months of gestation damaged my mother’s womb terminally – my mother had an emergency hysterectomy after she dropped me into the cold winter light of Wyoming smack-dab in the middle of mid-century, during mid-Winter.

I remember almost nothing about my early life.

My family was Catholic. My mother, Mary Ellen Clause -- (Clause - Lola) -- came from a long line of Irish, Czech and German Catholics on her father’s side and first-generation Czechs on her mother’s side. My father, John Henry Clark -- (Clark-Peterson) -- came from a more solitary line of iconoclasts: Welsh, English, French, Scottish; my father’s father, James Abraham Clark, was an itinerant tin-smith with a love of spirits; my father’s mother, Lily Peterson, was a temperance unionist, campaigning against drink, apparently against my grandfather. She died in her mid-twenties. My grandfather never re-married.

My father had no religion until he married my mother. He was forced to convert in order to marry my mother, a Catholic. He followed the tradition – and, in the end, became a Catholic himself, although less strident in his declarations of ecclesiastical loyalty than was my mother.

All three children attended St. Joseph’s Catholic School in nearby Rawlins.

Sinclair had some Catholic families. But we were ‘in the minority’, to be sure. We rode the St. Joseph school bus each day (holding no more than 28 students) 6 miles to Rawlins to pursue our education. We were better educated, especially where ‘the word’ was concerned (spelling champions always came from St. Joseph’s), not always so in science and math; and clearly more personally disciplined than were the public school students in Rawlins and Sinclair.

As much as we loved Sinclair – Sinclair was an idyllic hamlet, the Heaven Pole to Rawlins’ Hell Pole -- we were always ‘outsiders’ in terms of religion. I remember my friend, Jack Argyle, telling me in 1960 that his dad and mom were ‘voting for Nixon’ – and he was too -- because they would never vote for a Catholic like Kennedy. This declaration was like a jolt of lightning. Jack and I were friends; we played baseball and basketball together; yet he and his family didn’t trust Catholics. My father was the coach of our baseball team; and Jack loved my father. But his family would never trust Catholics. Ever.

Catholics were different. One can never underestimate the profound impact of a traditional Catholic education on the development of the religious nature (which is more than a moral framework, embedding, as it did, in the character a sense of awe, and a fear of God that never really abandons the individual if he is inclined to take the hook into the deep layers of his being), since it introduces techniques, ideologies and processes which, by their very nature, stimulate awareness of the Soul, and, of course, graphic powerful fears of Eternal Damnation. To the Protestants (under this title I clump many sects and movements which got their identity, at some point in time, from opposition to Roman Catholicism, protesters against the Pope, essentially) – the very essence of what I call Mundane Realism – the Soul was not a proven reality, but a kind of contagion from an earlier ignorant era that needed to be suppressed, even defeated, as the Daylight attempts to defeat the Night, for the sake of clear living and clean procession through an uncertain landscape leading ultimately to physical dismemberment.

The dark mystery of the Soul (a very Catholic expression) was the very thing from which the Protestants wanted to be freed. The dark mystery of the Soul, its symbolisms and rituals – the shadow world often mistook for Evil itself – was dubious to the Protestants – whereby it was essential to the Catholic. The Darkness – the passing into the Valley of the Shadow of Death – was crucial to Soul awareness, because the Soul was born in Darkness as a response to the reduction of life to its barest most naked essentials, life, death, morality, and potential for rebirth or resurrection.

Protestants seemed more comfortable with Sunlight, wealth, order, a kind of arid Noon-day whiteness, which the Catholic (and, even more so, the Jew) threatened, with their dark symbolism. The Protestants were the Day Angels, having exiled the Catholics into the lower order of the cosmos, closer to Earth, and to the Earth’s shadow, Nighttime.

Catholics were taught to believe in miracles, in angels and demons, in spiritual warfare, in martyrdom and in saints, in hell and heaven, in exorcism. Our church was imbued with mystery, shadows, stone sculptures larger than life and brimming with exotic, inconceivable powers. Entering the Catholic Church, the dark cave, the mother’s womb, produced in me a sense of ecstatic gravity. Protestant churches seemed more like schoolhouses, with windows thrown open, shades pulled back, an utter equality expressed through the white-wood bench-like pews. Pews in St. Joseph’s were black, or at least a dark-wood stained deeply, perhaps mahogany. Light entered in magical quanta through stained-glass heroisms depicting the timeless struggle of the Saints and Angels (manifestations of the Soul) in a world that was corrupt by nature, dangerous to virtue, contaminated by the desire for too much comfort, too much wealth and too much power – the very things the Protestant powers, in America at least, seemed to patronize and pursue as embodiments of some celestial virtue. Elaborate garments were worn by Catholic priests in magical rituals of Holy Mass wherein wine represented blood and Jesus was portrayed as a meal in the form of a moon-like host for the congregation through which Jesus could save worthy and repentant sinners from eternal annihilation. Nuns dressed in the Night color of black. Candle lights flickered and illuminated paintings on the walls, carvings of Christ’s stations of the cross, and an altar that was off-limits to ordinary members of the congregation, a place where God lived, in a dark sacristy in the back part of the altar. On the arched vault above the altar, a grand painting of Christ dying on the cross dominated the sky of our dark church, blood dripping from wounds on feet, hands, right side, and under his crown of thorns.

Of course, in 1960, I did not see the world this way. I saw the fierce antipathy with which my friend, Jack Argyle -- his family, too, apparently – there were other friends my age who declared similar loyalties – regarded John Kennedy, and apparently Catholics in general. When John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, St. Joseph’s School fell into a deep tragic trance of mourning, my family as well; but there were those in Sinclair my age who gloated, smiled, and suggested America had been saved from the dark Catholic influence: at least, that’s what their parents had told them.

Another way of viewing this political dilemma, of course, was that the families of my friends who abhorred the thought of a Catholic sitting in power in the White House did not abhor the idea of Richard M. Nixon, a small-time used car-salesman-type elevated through personal ambition and ‘tricks’, through crude manipulation of national bigotries and through political intrigues – a low man, a Protestant non-idealist, pragmatist, on the side of the nation’s white, rich and ‘traditional’ -- from sitting in power in the White House.

The Kennedy family was not perfect – and John Kennedy was not perfect. But in order for one to choose Richard Nixon over John Kennedy as president, one must be blinded by hatred, confused or consumed by unfathomable ideologies of race, of class, of religion, of an unaesthetic breeding, or be simply cursed with incredibly weak powers of discernment. Never underestimate the power of bad taste. One man was a prince; the other was a troll, a body-bound devilish masculate ogre from some grim fairy tale, whose candidacy seemed a joke perpetrated for some past national sins by wood demons irritated with American hubris.

For these families of my friends to befriend the troll and to gloat at the murder of the prince told me something about the inherent future tragedies that were waiting for America in history’s blind road – and also suggested something about the very structure of reality, through duality, polarization, body and spirit, man and woman, love, too, in a most oblique and pointed cadenza scaled to describe the day and the night as periods of vision followed by periods of essential and the most common blindness.

As I have suggested, Sinclair was a kind of oasis – except for the latent religious bigotry. There was no crime. There was no violence. Residents knew every other person in town – there were no strangers. There was no unemployment. What drunkenness there was was almost always kept behind closed doors, at Whitey’s Tavern or, perhaps, at the occasional town picnic when this one or that one took on too much good cheer and made a fool of himself in a good-natured exhibition of human weakness, usually around the merry-go-round, often when a pretty girl made an appearance and triggered the catastrophe of unremunerated fool-hardy admiration.

Of course I viewed the life of the town of Sinclair through the eyes of a shy boy, not especially sophisticated, not especially perceptive, who desired anonymity most of all, hoping to remain formless dark energy, simple background static, for as long a time would allow.

We had no racial minorities in Sinclair. We did have class distinctions. The houses in Sinclair described quintessentially the social and economic structure of the town. Common laborers lived in stucco houses, smaller and more modest, usually pink or green, sometimes blue. Lower management lived in wooden houses, always painted white. High management lived in brick houses, more elaborate and larger structures. The brick houses were situated away from the refinery, on the west end of the town.

My father was a middle management worker at the refinery. When I was born we were lower management, living in a wooden house not far from the town Post Office. We soon moved to North Ninth Street, at the very western edge of town, facing the Sinclair Grade School and beyond it Rattlesnake Butte, a hill structure surrounding and projected above the town, standing sentry between Sinclair and Rawlins, the larger town six miles away.

When I was about six years old we moved into a brick house on Eighth Street, 311 North 8^th Street, as my father received a promotion that made him the Chief Clerk of the Payroll Office. We were overjoyed to move in to the larger, more prestigious brick house two houses away. Dean Eaton had retired. We were given the house the Eaton family had vacated.

Two houses from us lived one of my father’s assistants, Bob Woodhouse, who lived, I guess inappropriately, considering his name, in one of Sinclair’s brick houses also. The Manager of the Sinclair Refinery lived in the largest brick house in town, on Seventh Street, a block and a half from our own house: his name, and this is true, was E. H. “Brick” Hausner.

We talked in a whisper when we passed by Brick Hausner’s brick house. He was a kind of pope apparently: The Pope of Sinclair. He could fire one’s father and ruin one’s family if he wished to – he had the power to do this, although probably not the inclination, as he was well-regarded generally. He could smile as well, and gift one’s family houses, wealth, company cars (we had a black Ford at the time; later would come an olive green Corvair, in which the whole family took great delight). Passing Brick Hausner’s brick house, we would lower our voices, make a kind of nodding non-verbal genuflection, thanking him for our family’s good fortune, trying not to wake him or to disturb him in any way, lest our carelessness afflict our family in some hostile manner, invoking the wrath of the apparently querulous Refinery God.

A child becomes aware of context, of scale, slowly, as this understanding emerges bit by bit, like a flower unfolding.

I was alone, at first, utterly alone, in a very dark wet place. I could hear ocean waves lapping about me. And I was aware of a light outside of me, something very much like a Moon, which turned out to be my first world, my mother. Then I was born into a family and we lived in a house – and this was my expanded context. This house, this family, was everything.

But then the door of the house opened, cold air and light rushing in. A door. A door. My mother’s womb was a door also. I stepped out into a larger world.

My block became my context. I could not cross the street. “Don’t cross the street!” my mother warned me. I walked around the block. Around and around the block.

But then I crossed the street. The neighborhood became my next context. Then the town itself.

Sinclair was a kind of atom in which activities occurred, a myriad of activities, through the mechanisms and good graces of many people of all ages, a carnival nature, perplexing in its scale and complexity. But not for ever perplexing.

Sinclair was an atomic world, a closed context – but it was not alone. There was a door leading out of Sinclair also, a road, a road being a kind of umbilicus leading to something else, an even larger understanding of the world, another atom, free-existing but somehow connected to the past. Rawlins was out there somewhere, a darker town, a more visceral place apparently somewhere to the west.

Our conception of the world apparently just got larger and larger, as our experiences generated a shifting and expanding sense of direction and scale, the gradual opening of the lily as the Sunlight and Warmth just increased and grew more powerful and pleasant apparently. Did this expansion of vision ever end? If it expanded, must not it also, at some time and place, also contract?

If I had been able to read a map at that early age, I would have understood one aspect of the context of my life, perhaps, in a better way – if the map even bothered to include Sinclair in its registered glossary.

“Mom, where is Sinclair on this map?”

“They didn’t bother to put Sinclair on the map, dear,” she would say. “But, see Rawlins. We’re just a little to the right of Rawlins, between Rawlins and Laramie. See in Carbon County.”

Ok. I see. That’s enough for me, I guess.

I would later learn that Carbon County was a mystical description: that carbon was black, as it was manifest in coal, charcoal and graphite, but white on the inside, as its hidden gem, the diamond, was as clear as pure mountain water. The Soul was the diamond hidden inside the body. The Lily was the white flower hidden inside the Night. The Black Earth ws the story of Germination and the White Seed was the Life of the Light hidden inside of the Black Earth at Night, waiting for the time to come when it could expose itself to the Light of the Sun.

As I sat on the front porch of our wooden house on Ninth Street, and looked out toward Rattlesnake Butte, I had no real sense of the profound isolation I should be feeling, a human weed growing up in a very arid landscape at high elevations, a town surrounded by dry, dusty space, and not much of anything else. That was my first context, the archetypal and primordial world I appeared in and became part of.

Our town was circumscribed by hostile space. I remember hearing from an early age: “Don’t leave the town; don’t go out walking in the prairie. There are rattlesnakes out there, wherever you go. And quicksand. If you leave the town walking by yourself there is a very good chance you will never come home.”

Apparently, our town, our atom, our civilization was safe; but Nature was not safe. Nature was a vast expanse of hostile expressions, lurking adversaries, and primitive beasts eager to turn one’s light out.

If I had been able to view Sinclair from the air, to see how lonely our little island really was, our island of civilization set in a sea of dust, of rattlesnake dens, coyote enclaves, quicksand sloughs, tarantulas, Indian ghosts, blinding windstorms, sneaky Winter blizzards, no end of anti-human manifestations, No water. Almost no vegetation. I probably would have felt very lonely in the world viewing Sinclair as the gods must have viewed it. Good thing I could not see Sinclair from the sky. Good thing I did not have wings yet, or still. Good thing I was not an angel; I was not an angel yet, anyway. But we will talk about that more as we proceed.

II. IN THE FATHER’S HOUSE THERE ARE MANY ROOMS (MANY PLACES TO HIDE)

My first impression of my father was through his absence. I had been swimming inside my mother for eleven months; and then, when the magic door opened, and mutable light came flooding into the room I was suddenly abandoning, I do not remember seeing my father. My imagination tells me there was a room; there was white light; the room was cold. Strange upright figures dressed in white with no faces were talking to my mother and there was a sense of urgency, even panic – a dam was breaking and I was being hauled on shore like a magic fish, a magic flounder, being hauled to shore amid celebration and thanks to God.

My imagination tells me this. My memory has a huge blank centered on this early part of life.

I cannot say I smelled my mother when I was swimming in the Black Sea that turned out to be her stomach. Did I smell anything then? I was a speck of metallic sperm fastened ferociously to a beautiful egg which would become its home. The yoke of the egg was a sun, around which specks of matter circled like a small solar system. I was there too, fastened but floating, anchoring myself in a substance that now reminds my imagination of an earth substance, soil, loam, uncolored because the light was so dim then. Germination requires the black night, otherwise the seed spoils. I was the seed, a baby comet floating in space, captured by a sticky substance that, in fact, was my mother.

Do I remember my father and mother’s love-making that night, January 1950?

Buddhists claim that all reincarnating souls choose their own parents, essentially jumping into the mother’s womb as the frenzy of the hunt reaches its culmination. This is the merry magic of a Soul’s reincarnation. Of course, spiritual writing is metaphorical by design and by necessity – and a literal reading of such writing often leads to fanatical violence, sin and madness, perhaps in that order, perhaps in some other order.

I have no memory of my parent’s love-making on the night in question. I do remember seeing my mother’s vagina the first time when I was a teenager on an unfriendly, dark night that I will consider later in this novel as a kind of archetypal blemishing of youth.

Nothing, for a man, is so mysterious and so magical as the girl’s or the woman’s vagina, which is both something and nothing at the same time, both full and empty, both hidden and manifest, angelic and demonic. The image of this enigmatic organ drives evolution, drives time, drives the human quest for godhood. It is the treasure, is it not, the promise and the curse? It is the biblical Promised Land. The covenant with God and the Chosen People is, in fact, the promise of a wife, a vagina, an ark in which the fruit of life, the Future, can be stored – the fruit of Life being, of course, children.

The covenant was a promise of marriage, the promise of a wife, and the promise of real estate, on which a man might build his life from seed.

I believe I was not aware of such electrical necessities of sex and love until much later in life – but I believe love (and erotic love, and sex urgencies) are present all throughout one’s life. Babies and children fall in love; and so do grandparents. This is a hopeful thing to me, since the worst part of life is the part that includes no love, that includes exile from love. Love seems to be a periodical manifestation: present for a time; then gone; then returning, a kind of rainbow that appears at the end of a storm or a personal catastrophe, a phase of horror. Love is the hope we all carry in our Souls.

When Love is present, we tend to lose track of it.

When Love is gone, we perform great tricks of heroism trying to get it back.

My father lived somewhere else, journey somewhere else, during the daylight; that is, my father was gone most of the time.

My father lived in the sky, traveled into the sky to work, when the rest of the family went about circular rituals in the house or in school or on the front lawn or in the back yard. We mentioned his name, and wondered about his nature when he was gone; we wondered if he missed us. Mom would say: “Your father is at work.” Your father is absent. Your father is making money so we can live our life in relative comfort.

I do remember scents. I remember my mother’s scent, which was sweet and warm, like the milk from her breast. I think my mother had trouble nursing her children. That is my memory of it. I remember milk in a plastic bottle, a cold rubber nipple attached to nothing. Again, that is perhaps just my imagination. I see the plastic milk bottle in a pan of water boiling on the stove. Memories are not always accurate however. We tend to build our memories in the direction we need them built, to give ourselves illusions about ourselves and our lives, to calm us, or to excite us – or, if we tend to be melancholic beings, to provide us with continuing sorrow, self-doubt, and unnecessary draughts of longing.

Unnecessary draughts? Perhaps they are necessary after all. When we are arid, we need nectar to refresh us; shade to protect us from fiery indictments of patriarchal law. When we are drowning in emotional excess, we need dry land to rise up out of the ocean – and we need to become, each of us, amphibians, escaping the shadowing fluid matriarchal emotional vortex.

We move between two poles, between mother and father, between water and fire, between Love and Will, between Night and Day, each opposite element refreshing us just when we are nearly saturated by the extremism of grainy polarized light.

My mother smelled like love, a bit of earth-smell, lotion, floral-smelling, perfume and shampoo. Cream. A sweet smell of sweat and powder. And sometimes cinnamon, when she had been baking. When I held her, I remember sinking in to her being. She was soft. I crumbled into her in pieces, coalescing pieces.

My father was not as soft as my mother; and he was a bit colder, rougher, more angular, a bit more distant.

When he came home from work every afternoon, we all ran outside, or to the door if it was cold or snowing, and cheered his return. He drove a black car; sometimes, in summer, when we were playing outside, we could see the car approaching from several blocks away, appearing under a cortege of shimmering cottonwood trees that lined the street in seeming honor of my father’s approach.

My father worked at the Sinclair Refinery. We could all smell the Sinclair Refinery; we knew where it was; we could ride bicycles around the outside of the refinery, along the metal security fence, see inside the fence the storage tanks and the roads leading in to the heart of the refinery.

Our friends in Rawlins (I use the word ‘friends’ loosely at this point) used to call our town ‘Stink Clair’ – when a strong wind reversed, gases and obnoxious permutations of air could be smelled miles away. Sometimes we would grab our noses, and exclaim our disgust with the smell. My mom would say: “It smells like money to me – it smells like your father’s salary”, defending our father’s profession against the cloying cynicism of outsiders.

My dad was a gentle man. Strange men and women (women and men I did not know, some strange, some not) often came up to me and exclaimed “your dad is such a gentleman”. My dad was admired in our town for his gentle nature. My father was left-handed.

My father was born in Manistee, Michigan on March 10, 1912 or 1913. There was always some disagreement as to the exact year – some records had been lost. He was born John Oliver Clark – I think. He did not like the name Oliver – he had the name legally changed to John Henry Clark, but everyone knew him as Jake.

I never met my father’s mother or father. My maternal grandmother, Lily Palmer, died when my father was seven years old. My father made it sound like tuberculosis when he told the story, although he rarely talked about it. My father did not need to talk to be content.

My father had two older brothers, Don and Bill. Uncle Don would become, eventually, a park ranger, living in Denver, Colorado. Uncle Bill was a hard-drinking journalist, living in Butte, Montana. Uncle Bill told us the story of how he, Uncle Bill, created the nickname ‘Evil’ Knevil, the famous motorcycle daredevil. To hear Uncle Bill tell the story, Knevil was a tough teenager in Butte, running around with a friend named Knaufel. Both were always in trouble with the police. Uncle Bill nicknamed the pair: ‘Evil’ Knevil and ‘Awful’ Knaufel. He told us this story one morning at about seven am, having had several ‘Seagram’s sandwiches’ in order to start the day on his right foot.

The Clark family apparently liked to drink. Don was a quiet drinker; Bill was a boisterous drinker; my dad drank also, coming home from work and having a highball and a can of Coors beer nearly every night (this was when I was a teenager) in order to unwind him from the stress of work. I never saw my dad drunk. He did not drink to be noticed. He drank to unwind quietly. There were apparently things happening at work (perhaps also in life) that were unpleasant and stressful. Alcohol apparently made these stresses more bearable.

My father’s own father, James Abraham Clark, also liked to drink. His wife, Lily Palmer, did not want her husband to drink. They didn’t agree on this; and the disagreement eventually became a war. Lily Palmer became a Temperance Unionist, marching in political demonstrations designed to make the purchase of alcohol in America a criminal act.

Lily Palmer eventually won the battle, although she did not live to see her victory. She died in the year 1920 in Manistee. Her husband never re-married.

My father was sixteen when the Great Depression hit. His father made money working as a steelworker and a metalsmith mostly in Chicago. He and his son, Jake, would take a ferry across Lake Michigan early in the morning; James Abraham would go to work; Jake would wander around Chicago, take in an afternoon baseball game at Wrigley Field; then Jake would meet his father at the dock and ride the evening ferry back to Manistee. This all ended when in 1929. Work vanished. Savings vanished. Uncle Don was working in Denver, just having started his career with the Parks Department. He sent the family money for a train ride to Denver. The family moved in with Uncle Don, who was married to Aunt Geri, a talented, intellectual woman, who loved books, painted landscapes and still-lifes with passion. We would later get to know Aunt Geri more closely as my family and Uncle Don’s family came to share vacations each summer for a time, each renting cabins from Joe and Ethyl Neith across from Ryan Park in the foothills of the Snowy Range Mountains.

Uncle Bill was working as a journalist in Laramie, Wyoming in 1930. He invited his dad and Jake to live with them in Laramie. They agreed, moving the 400 miles from Denver and establishing themselves in a small rental house, Uncle Bill helping with the rent.

My grandfather found occasional work at the local cement plant, or working for the Union Pacific Railroad. Work was not steady. James Abraham and Jake, with Uncle Bill’s help, also set up a still in the basement. Once a week the local bootlegger, Jack McTeague, would back up his car, after midnight, to the Clark house basement storm door – a rental home -- and they would load up his car with jugs of illegal moonshine. The cash from these weekly visits kept them above water during the long years of the Depression.

My father was an athlete. He attended Laramie High School and played basketball and football for the high school team. He played baseball in the local summer leagues. He was a good athlete, becoming All-State in both football and basketball. He received an athletic scholarship to attend the University of Wyoming and play basketball. Two years before my father enrolled in the University of Wyoming, the Cowboy basketball team won the US National Championship, beating Georgetown to take the crown.

After completing his education at the University of Wyoming in 1936, my father was hired by the Sinclair Oil Company to work as a laborer in their refinery down the road in Sinclair. He was hired because he was an athlete. In fact, all the men being hired by the refinery were being hired because of their athletic prowess. There were national softball leagues in those days; and corporations fielded teams as a way of advertising their various products. Sinclair Oil wanted to field a team that could compete nationally. They hired my father and Gene Hittner, who would become my Uncle Gene, who was one of the best fast-pitch softball pitchers in the country at that time. Gene would later marry my mother’s youngest sister, Patty. He would also later become my high school football and basketball coach.

My father was drafted in 1941 to serve in the American Army during World War II. He fought in George Patton’s army; although my father was quick to point out that he worked in the clerical corps of the medical department. He was not in the infantry corps. He operated behind the lines. He was no hero. He simply did his job. He was lucky to survive.

He told me that, one night in Italy, enemy planes flew low over their camp, scattering machine gun fire and dropping bombs. My father was in his tent; that afternoon he had dug a pit inside the tent beside his bed. As the planes came in, and the bombs shattered the night silence, he rolled out of his bed into his personal bunker; a bomb hit beside his tent and blew everything above ground away.

He was unharmed.

He told another story. He was in Germany. Germany planes were strafing his camp. My father was hiding behind a hill, lying near the crown of the mound. Americans were firing back. My father looked up at the German plane flying toward him. He saw the face of a young, teenaged German boy, frozen in fear, harmless, tragic. This image was frozen in my father’s mind.

The German pilot crashed behind my father about 300 feet. My father found the boy dead in the wreckage.

My father participated in the allied landings in North Africa, Southern France, Sicily, Anzio and Palermo. Anzio was the hardest. At the Monastery of Monte Cristo, allied soldiers were pinned down for weeks by German and Italian fire directed straight down at them. These were the most painful, lonely and dark moments of my father’s life.

My father brought war trophies home from Europe: a captured German military helmet (much heavier than I expected, and more crude, having seen them on television, in the Combat series); and snapshots he had taken during the liberation of Bergen-Belsun, the concentration camp, with naked corpses filling up railroad box-cars, and starved and starving men lining the fences of the camp, hollow speaking shells of men, asking for chocolate perhaps, thankful for their deliverance. Who were the Jews? Why were the Jews hated so much by the Germans?

Holding the captured German helmet was like holding a religious relic from the Black Mass. One could feel Evil in the scarred metal conquistador’s protection.

America was the force of God’s Will, God’s Virtue. America had saved the world from the satanic for of German Naziism. Hitler was a form of the Devil. There was no other way to understand this. America was God’s country. America was the Land of Angels apparently.

The Sinclair Oil Company had a policy of country time-served in the military as time served for Sinclair Oil – the six years of my father’s military service were counted toward his continuing seniority. When my dad returned to Sinclair he was given his old job back, with a promotion and a raise.

On the way home from Europe, my father had stopped in New York City for a week. He had made inquiries at Yankee Stadium. They were holding tryouts. My father joined the tryouts to become a New York Yankee. Apparently they liked his defensive skills, but wondered if his hitting would be productive enough for the major leagues. They declined to offer him a job.

He settled in to life in Sinclair again. His friend, Bud Daily, who would later become a Senator from Casper in the Wyoming State Legislature, introduced him to my mother, who also worked at the refinery, in the clerical pool. Bud told my father, his best friend: “She’s pretty good looking. But she’ll talk your leg off. She never seems to close her mouth.”

Yes, that was my mother, in a nutshell.

My mother had left her home in Rawlins after graduating from high school. She moved, alone, to Salt Lake City and found work as a secretary. She later transferred to Seattle, and then to Anchorage, Alaska. She worked for a company that was building air force runways in Alaska.

When the war ended, she returned to her home in Rawlins. She went to work at the Sinclair Refinery. She loved to travel. Her plan was to work for six months or a year, to save money, and then to move to Australia. She was fascinated by stories of Australia, fascinated by aboriginal art and myth.

She met my father in 1947. They were married that same year. In October 1948, they had their first child, a daughter, Laura Marie, my sister.

III. WHERE DOES A MOTHER COME FROM?

I realize that this is a love story – I have not forgotten this – and that I am traveling on the very periphery of this story. But it is not possible to understand the fruit – the culmination of the deed -- unless one understands the root, the seed-bed from which the stem, the tree, and the branch are born.

Who is my mother – who was my mother? My mother is dead now. My mother was the seed-bed. My mother was the fountain of Life in fact.

My mother was born in 1923, November 10. She was the oldest child of William Clause and Marie Lola. The Clause family was German and Scotch-Irish; but the family was more profoundly Irish, with McGlones and O’Melias fastened near the root, spreading in all directions. My grandfather and grandmother lived in Irish Town in Rawlins, Wyoming, east of the Post Office, at the extreme end of Cedar Street, across from the railroad tracks, next door to the Ryans, three houses down from the Jordans.

The saying was: the Mexicans lived on the south side of town, the Catholics lived on the west side.

There are myths that surround every family. Here is one of the myths in my mother’s family. When my grandmother first traveled to Rawlins, to teach grade school in nearby Hanna, after having completed college (education major) in her home town of Montgomery, Minnesota, she traveled by Union Pacific railroad, arriving on Front Street the very same day that an angry Rawlins crowd pulled an outlaw named George Parrot (famously known as Big Nose George) out of his jail cell and hanging him from a telegraph pole adjacent to the train station. My grandmother’s first introduction to Rawlins was the dead-weight corpse of George Parrot hanging in the evening sun.

George Parrot’s body was taken down from exhibit that same day, March 22, 1881, by the town doctors Thomas Maghee and John Osborne, who began an immediate autopsy which included the study of the outlaw’s brain in an attempt to find the ‘location’ of his anti-social behavior. The examination didn’t stop there. Doctor Osborne molded a death mask of the dead man – a death mask with no ears, as George’s struggled at the end of the rope while being hanged had torn off both ears. Then Doctor Osborne – probably skilled at skinning deer, elk and antelope – cut off the skin from the dead man’s thighs and chest – including both nipples. Osborne sent this skin to a tannery in Denver, Colorado, with instructions to make of George’s skin a pair of shoes (size eight) and a medicine bag.

The shoes and the death-mask are still on display in the Carbon County Historical Museum. The medical bag was misplaced at some point.

The odd behavior of Doctor Osborne did not diminish his stature in Rawlins. He soon thereafter became prominent in local politics. In 1892, Doctor Osborne was elected as the first Democratic Governor of the state of Wyoming – it is said he wore his Big Nose George shoes to the inaugural ball in 1983. Later, Osborne became President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State.

How much of this story is true? I remember hearing, as a boy, that Parrot’s nose was fashioned into a tobacco pouch. Apparently this part was not true. As for my grandmother arriving in Rawlins the day Big Nose George was hanged, in March 1881, I later used math to cast doubt on this recollection. If my grandmother had completed a four-year degree at the teacher’s college in Montgomery, Minnesota, she must have been in her twenties when she arrived in Rawlins. Being kind, I suggested she was a wonderful student and arrived on the train when she was 20. This means she was born in 1861. Considering she married my grandfather in 1921, this would have made my grandmother 62 years old when she gave birth to her first daughter, my mother, Mary Ellen, in 1923. She did marry late in life. But ‘late in life’ means in her late twenties or early thirties. She would have been 89 years-old when I was born in 1950. She was not 89 years old when I was born.

A second myth surrounding my mother’s family: sometime shortly after my mother’s birth, my grandmother was wheeling her baby daughter around the streets of Rawlins on a pleasant afternoon. Two men rode by on horses. The two men got off their horses. One of the men walked over to my Grandmother Clause and looked at the baby in her stroller: picked her up and kissed my mother on the cheek. “What a beautiful baby!” the man said – then he set her carefully back into the baby-carriage. The man was Butch Cassidy, Robert LeRoy Parker, famous outlaw and partner of the Sundance Kid.

Sadly, at least in terms of the family story, Butch Cassidy is said to have died in 1908, in a gun battle in Bolivia; and my mother was born in 1923.

Apparently Butch Cassidy, a ‘jack Mormon’ born in Beaver, Utah, and the Sundance Kid were seen quite often in Rawlins. And there have been claims that both men survived the shootout in Bolivia, and returned to America to live quietly. Lula Parker Betenson, Cassidy’s sister, wrote a biography stating she and her brother met at an impromptu family reunion in 1925, attended herself, her father, her brother Mark, and her brother ‘Butch’. Red Fenwick, a well-known columnist for the Denver Post newspaper told writer Ivan Goldman in 1975 that he had been acquainted with Parker’s (Cassidy’s) doctor for years, a woman, who told Fenwick she had continued to treat Butch Cassidy for many years after his supposed death in Bolivia.

There is anecdotal evidence that the Sundance Kid also returned from Bolivia, lived quietly out the rest of his life in the Rocky Mountain area, and died in 1936.

My grandmother did not like Rawlins. She fell in love with and married my grandfather in 1921. My grandfather had trouble getting and keeping a job. She would shop in downtown Rawlins and see signs in the windows: “Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply.”

My grandfather was Irish enough to keep him from getting these jobs.

My grandmother did not like living in Irish Town. She was a devout Catholic – Czech Catholic – she would remind her children: “We are Czech, not Slovak!” She would not allow the Czech language to be spoken in her house, even when Czech friends visited – “We live in America now. We speak English!” My grandmother understood the ‘No Irish-Catholic Need Apply’ was a backhanded English Protestant reference to the social and political system in America that placed Catholics beneath Protestants.

My grandfather, for his part, would rather spend the day in a local saloon singing, drinking and telling stories than working in a stiff button-down shop downtown with the other local Protestants busy transforming America into the richest country in the world. My grandfather was playful. He was charming, and had a charming smile. But my grandmother wanted more from life, wanted more social advantage, a nicer house, a better situation.

My grandfather apparently could not provide it. This caused tension between them all of their married life.

My mother was a tom-boy, tall, gangly, extroverted. She was her father’s daughter. My mom and her father would go hunting together from the time Mary Ellen was a little girl, just Ellen and her dad. Her dad would drive out south of Rawlins, out toward Jack Creek, looking for antelope. They would track the antelope for hours, sometimes in hot sun, sometimes never even taking a shot. It was good to be out of town; good to be away from civilization. (Life in Rawlins was not easy for my grandfather. He was not successful. His wife reminded him of this; and his richer relatives also reminded him of this. With his daughter, hunting antelope south of town, with a bottle in his pocket, his rifle, binoculars, and his un-judgmental and loving daughter, grandpa felt like a whole man again, not a shattered fragment of himself, torn apart by civilization’s demands and idolization of successful businessmen.)

They could walk for hours; or sit quietly in the sagebrush together all morning. Then, ever-patient, her father would site in the king buck who had hidden all day; grandpa, with his telescoped 30-06 rifle, would calmly take aim and adjust his seating, calming himself with steady, deep breathing, and drop the buck in his tracks. Father and daughter would cart the bloody, dead antelope back to the parked card, mount the corpse over the front hood of the car, antler’s forward or antler’s driver’s side, and drive back to Rawlins filled with pride. They would drive several times up and down the main drag of Rawlins so everyone could see them, loaded with treasure. Let them say what they wanted to say about William Clause: this man could hunt!

Yes, Grandpa Clause loved driving through Rawlins with a big, bloody buck strapped to the hood of his car. This was proof he was providing for his family. There was always talk in the town, in the extended family, about ‘poor Marie’, how her husband was not much of a man, couldn’t make or keep money, couldn’t find or keep a job. He liked his freedom. He liked his liberty. Yes, these two things were not exactly the same. But when he drove through town with a dead buck lashed to his car, he felt like Jim Bridger himself, a warrior bringing his treasure wrestled from wild nature back to tame civilization.

Both my mother and her father were happiest outside of town. My grandfather taught my mother to shoot the gun; and soon she was taking down antelope and deer too. And he taught her and his wife how to fish. Grandmother Clause ‘would not’ hunt, a pastime she felt ‘barbaric’; but she did fish, loved fishing, and became quite good at it. They fished on Jack Creek, the Platte River, and then made forays into the Lincoln Park and the Bush Creek areas of the Snowy Range mountains above Saratoga.

Sometimes they stayed out late – and it was very late when they returned home, after midnight. Her father had been nipping on Irish whiskey all day. My mother’s job was to keep talking to her father, keep him awake, so he would not run off the road. My mother always said this is how and when she became so talkative, a trait that would shadow her to her grave.

The marriage of William and Marie Clause was not especially happy. Marie wanted more. And she let her husband know that other women in town had a better life than she did.

To her credit, she would not stand any criticism of her husband. But she was not happy. She could criticize him; no one else could.

More children came: Rita, the prettiest, followed by Patty, the friendliest, and the most popular; then, later, a boy, Jimmy. Jimmy had a childhood disease that robbed him of his normal bowel activity. He was forced to wear a colostomy bag. This was tragic for a young, handsome, active boy in 1930’s Wyoming. Jimmy shrank; he turned inward; he did not want to leave the house.

My mother – the whole family – became violently protective of Jimmy, the baby. Children were mean. “O God, Jimmy Clause stinks!” girls would call to their teachers. “Somebody must have shit their pants! I guess we know who that would be!” the boys would call on the playgrounds. Jimmy turned away from people. People were cruel. People could not be trusted.

In fact, the people of Rawlins were very cruel. Her father could not find work because he was Irish Catholic. Her brother was ridiculed by bullies and shrill cats because his body had delivered him a bad set of cards. They were a family of outcasts.

My mother shadowed her father during the day. They would sit outside the A&P Grocery Store and listen to the baseball game on the radio together. My grandfather taught about the intricacies of baseball. It was the most sophisticated of sports, the most soulful of games. It was a thinking man’s game. The pitcher had to think, about the hitter’s strengths and weaknesses; about his own weaknesses, and how they aligned with the hitter’s; about how his defense was set. What kind of pitch would the hitter be looking for, and where on the place would he be looking? An aggressive hitter tried to outguess the pitcher. That’s why the pitcher had to bust a fastball in close to the hitter every now and then, to teach him some fear, or at least respect.

Then came execution. A pitcher might be a great thinker, understand the intricacies of the game, the tendencies of the hitter: but could he put his pitch where he needed to put it? The hitter was looking for a fastball on the inside of the plate. The pitcher might be able to get away with throwing a fastball if he painted the outside edge of the plate – but did he have the skill to do this?

David Halberstam called baseball a game of ‘9 desperate, isolated atoms’: baseball was not a team sport like basketball or football, a game in which the rhythm and flow of the game swallowed up everyone on the court or field in a group dynamic of motion, where individuals were often unnoticed, lost in the animation of the magnetic field under inspection. Baseball players were alone, each under their own microscope, isolated by a kind of floodlight. An error on defense was obvious to all. A weakness on offense was clear to every observer. It was you against him, you against the ball: and there was no place to hide on a baseball diamond. Fear was a big part of baseball, fear of failure, fear of making the big mistake. This made baseball much different psychologically than the other sports, where thinking was less exacting, acting was more a response of instinct.

My mother was a New York Yankees fan, a trait she passed on to my brother Bill. She and her dad were Yankee fans. They would listen, together, to the exploits of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, later Joe DiMaggio, living and dying with the fortunes of this national treasure and dynasty.

Grandmother did not want to hear about this. She was struggling to find food for the family during the Great Depression – and her husband was off listening to baseball games. Had he bothered to look for work all day long. She heard they were hiring at Long’s Foundry. Did he bother to go by Long’s Foundry?

Grandfather Clause finally found work at the penitentiary, as a guard watching over the prisoners. The family did not realize what a mean job this was. It wore my grandfather down quickly. He was expected to be brutal to the prisoners; many bullies worked in the penitentiary, and liked the physical nature of the job, the need to discipline the criminals.

My grandfather tried to conform to the job. His stride changed. He became more gruff, a bit mean. My mother noticed the change and did not like it.

Now, when her dad drank, he became cruel, frustrated – before he drank to laugh – now, when he drank, he seemed to court a fight.

My grandfather was a short-man. He had a short-man complex. He used to prop himself up on his toes, as a way of trying to be as tall as the other men.

In the mid 1930’s, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses were meeting in Rawlins, passing through town on their way to Utah. A group of Rawlins citizens confronted them, demanding that they salute the American flag. They refused; their religion did not allow such temporal worship. The group demanded that they proclaim their love of America, and their willingness to serve in the American armed forces. They refused. The men in the group were beaten by the angry citizens. The police had to step in and ‘arrest’ the Jehovah’s Witnesses and take them to jail for their own protection.

When my grandfather heard about this, he hurried home and dressed in his World War I army uniform (he had been drafted by did not serve in Europe). He had been drinking; he wanted to show his love of his country.

That evening many men and some women surrounded the jail, demanding the prisoners salute the flag.

The word was passed to them that the Witnesses were no longer in jail, but were seen on the edge of town, leaving Rawlins. The mob jumped in cars and pursued the fleeing ‘pacifists’. They caught up with them on the edge of town. A group of about forty citizens of Rawlins, my grandfather included, both men and women, set upon the eight Jehovah’s Witnesses (five men, three women) and beat them, tore their hats and clothes, and tarred and feathered them, leaving them bruised and battered on the side of the road; one man was left unconscious in a wheelbarrow.

My grandfather returned home late that night. The word of what had happened spread throughout Rawlins. My grandfather appeared at around 11:00 PM, drunk, his army uniform stained with tar and blood. He was ashamed. He crawled into bed, saying nothing about his role in the incident. No one was allowed to mention the incident in the presence of my grandfather after that.

My mother was lanky and a bit awkward physically as a girl; she got puberty late, and got her breasts much later than the other girls. She had a pretty face; but she was a Catholic girl, uncomfortable with dating and sexuality. My grandmother took in sewing to make extra money during the Depression, and my mother helped her do this. My mother also got a job waiting on tables after school, when he was in high school. My mother took typing classes, bookkeeping classes. She was good at office tasks and was preparing herself to become a secretary upon graduating.

My mother’s family was poor, but not destitute. The ‘other’ side of the family helped – there was a wealthy side of the Clause family, a brother who owned buildings in Rawlins. He had died a left his money to his own family. I would know this side of the family as the Twins, Esther and Robert.

The Twins, Vincentia and Veronica, were like two medieval nuns, always dressed in black, always listening to Guy Lombardo or Liberace records, small women, who never missed a 6:00 mass, walking together the eight blocks from their house to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.

Veronica had been married shortly, had a son, Vincent. Her husband died suddenly. Veronica moved back home to live with Vincentia. From that point on they never separated. They raised Vincent together, with help from Uncle Robert, a sly old, introverted bachelor who never married.

Veronica and Vincentia where small, withered woman who now always dressed in black. Conservative, devout, soft-spoken, they seemed ready for death, waiting for death, many years before death came.

Their sister, Esther, was the opposite: a beautiful blonde, shapely, alive, who ran off to live in Denver with a bootlegger named David Graves. They were married in a private ceremony. The Twins tried to get their brother to track Esther down in Denver, to try to get the marriage annulled. It was a sinful union. Graves was a sinner and a criminal who had seduced the beautiful, innocent Esther and taken her way under a devil’s intoxication.

Robert eventually drove to Denver, did track down his sister, did bring her back home to Rawlins. Esther apparently had come to see that her wild life in Denver was not in her own best interest. She agreed to a divorce from David Graves, which cast her out of the Catholic Church. Esther rented an apartment in Irish Town, not far from my mother’s house; each year she bought herself a brand new Cadillac; and one could see her on the highways around Rawlins and Sinclair, driving all day, in one of her brand new pink Cadillacs. She never re-married.

Uncle Robert had girlfriends, at least one he wanted to marry. But the twins would not consent to the marriage. Robert was to live with them and take care of them. The life of the flesh would destroy the decent soul. Look what it had done to Esther.

Robert dated, but did not marry.

The family had made a fortune investing in Western Nuclear Company, which owned three uranium mines at Crooks Gap and operated a mill near Jeffrey City, Wyoming. Western Nuclear would later buy mines near Spokane, Washington, near Grants, New Mexico (mining rubies as well as ‘orebodies’) and the Beverley Uranium Project in South Australia.

The family was not flashy with their wealth; modesty was their code. They all lived in the same small house off Cedar Street the family had built years before; Esther rented an apartment about seven blocks away. Robert did buy a classic Airstream mobile home in the mid-1960’s, the top of the line. He did not want the Twins to know that he had spent the money, so he rented a warehouse garage across town. He would tell the Twins he needed to run an errand; he would drive across town to his garage, inside of which was stored the brand-new Airstream trailer, and he would sit inside his new Airstream mobile home, inside his garage, quietly, getting away from everything, getting away from his cloying sisters, and from their tedious ministrations. He hid his little getaway from his sisters for all of their life, never once turning on the record player in his Airstream to hear either Guy Lombardo or Liberace.

The family also owned the Jade Lodge, across the street from the City Hall and town jail, a small, nice motel which Robert ran for the family.

Marie got money from the Twins, Esther and Robert -- otherwise the family could never have survived the Great Depression.

My mother did not like Rawlins. She did not like to see what it had done to her father, and what it was doing to her mother; she did not like what it had done to her brother Jimmy either. She could hardly wait to leave.

Her love life in Rawlins was disappointing. She wanted a special man. And the boys in high school were small, insignificant: so boyish. They had no nobility in their hearts.

In 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The country began to gear up for war.

In 1941, my mother was graduated from high school. She wanted more adventure. She had skills: shorthand, stenography, typing. She intended to be a secretary.

Against her family’s wishes, Mary Ellen left Rawlins and took the Union Pacific train to Salt Lake City, where she found work in the office of a Randall Construction Company. The family had friends in Salt Lake, so she wasn’t living alone. She sent home money every month to her mother.

The next year she transferred to Seattle, staying with the same company. She liked Seattle more than Salt Lake. Salt Lake was beautiful; but she was a Catholic, in a city of Mormons. She was never very fond of Mormons. Seattle was wet; but the rain made it more romantic. The men she met in Seattle were more interesting than the men she had known before. But all the men were leaving the country.

In 1943, Mary Ellen transferred again, to Anchorage, Alaska. The company had been hired by the Army to build runways in the Aleutian Islands. She was far away from the war front; but she was never far away from the war effort. She dated pilots. The world was life and death suddenly; but everyone she met was on the same side, fighting for the survival of America.

Then the war ended. Randall Construction Company ran out of work.

Mary Ellen returned home. She had a plan. She would work at the Sinclair Refinery in the secretary pool – she could also run a switchboard – and save enough money to travel to Australia. Her adventure was just beginning.

The first time my mother saw my father – in summer 1946 – she was taken by him. He walked with grace; he was left-handed; he had many friends; she never heard of anyone who did not like him. But he did not seem to notice her. She tried to catch his eye.

Bud Daily, one of my mother’s high school classmates, was a friend of Jake Clark. Mary Ellen told Bud that she wanted to meet Jake. Bud wasn’t sure it would be a good match. Jake was very quiet, reserved. Ellen was not. Ellen could be the life of the party; and she could talk a blue streak. She talked too much for Bud. May Ellen asked Bud to intercede for her. He agreed.

Their first dates were somewhat stiff, as they tried to get comfortable together. Mary Ellen liked Jake, that much was clear. Sometimes she seemed to try to hard.

My dad was thirty-six years old. He had played, he had traveled, he had survived the Great War. Now he needed to settle down and raise a family. Was Mary Ellen Clause the right woman for this? He did not know. She brought him warmly into her family. Her mother loved Jake, and welcomed him immediately. The whole family seemed to love him. He was gracious, thoughtful, sensitive. He was the ‘special’ man my mother had been hoping to meet. The thought that he might not like her made her desperate, frantic at times.

When my dad asked Mary Ellen to marry him, she was shocked, and she had never been so happy. Jake was the best man in the town, the best man she had ever known. She said yes immediately.

They were wed that autumn. Ted Neuman was Jake’s best man – more about the Neuman Family later – and Patty, Mary Ellen’s sister, was Ellen’s Lady-in-Waiting.

In October of 1948, they had their first child, Laura, my sister. In October of 1949, they had my brother Bill. And in December of 1950, my mother gave birth to me. That was when everything got a bit strange.

VI. FIRST LOVE -- EVERYTHING GETS A BIT STRANGE

I have written of my first understanding, my first love, with my mother. It began in the womb – at least, that’s how I picture it in the imagination -- when I was but a mineral atom, a kind of small earth rotating and evolving at the end of my umbilicus, like a space traveler attached to his space-craft.

My mother was my space-craft.

If my mother lost her balance, or fell: I fell too. If my mother drank too much alcohol: I felt it. If my mother smoked cigarettes – and my mother did smoke cigarettes -- I felt that too. I sensed the smoke, and tasted the acid tar and burning paper – what a lovely word, ‘nicotine’. If my mother made love with my father – if my father climbed the mountain of my mother and stuck his fleshy spear into the dark lagoon, the delta of his wife – he was a fisherman then, afterall, an unseen hunter seeking a treasure hidden in the sea: I felt that too. I was a fish, remember: I evolved into a fish, from a stony mineral spasm to a mandrake, to a tadpole, to a rainbow trout. The spear was not my friend. It was an invader’s tool. Perhaps it sought to hurt or even to destroy me. I was a toad suddenly, hiding behind Mosaic reeds in a moonlit pond.

I do not remember being jealous of my father when he took possession of my mother’s flesh with a gentle and a steady insistency – how much did I even understand of human passions at that primordial stage of my evolution? I was aware of my mother in a very vague sense, as I am aware of Nature when I walk on the beach and see the brooding sky with dark clouds approaching, when I feel the wind blowing in my face, tanning my face with a surly and sturdy abrasion: my mother was like that: ever-present, creating conditions of my atomic atmosphere (‘atomsphere’ Joyce would call it, with all the sound implications that go with such a word).

I was not aware of my father at all at that point. Although I probably did sense an invader was near.

When did love begin? When does Love begin? As I have suggested, I believe that love is the essence of the universe, and the basis of all existence – so to suggest there is a time when the love switch was turned off implies that there is a secondary or perhaps even a primary or an adversarial force that sometimes rules a nature, when the love-switch is turned off.

What would this secondary (or is it primary) nature be? Nietzsche might call it the Will-to-Power. Perhaps Will Power and Love share the world, one being the Day-Force and the other being the Night-Force, the first being the expansive Construction Principle, the other being the contractive Deconstruction Principle.

I do know that my love for Leslie Harmon was ‘turned on’ suddenly, after many years of being turned off. Why did this power of love ‘turn on’ in 1976? Where and why had it been hidden from me for so long?

In fact, I will attempt to answer those questions as I go deeper into the mystery of love, of power, of Time itself.

Birth is the first great separation. We dwell in an egg, in an egg in the water – we suspect this animated sequence will endure for ever. We have no sense of time. We are in a dream; images move through us: we become the images; the images become us. Then, suddenly, an alarm goes off: the atom decays; and Time suddenly appears? From where did Time come so suddenly? Is Time connected to sunlight in some magic way? Is Time periodical? Is Space eternal; and is Time merely the shadow side of Space?

As surely as the American Indians (the tribal Night-Cycle Principle) became aware of the Time Principle when European crusaders landed in North America, I became aware of Time when my mother opened her garden gates and dropped me in the world, an egg-boy extruded from the Golden Egg which was my mother.

I did not ask these questions when I was born, of course. I almost remember seeing light rushing in to the room; I almost remember the door opening; I almost remember strange, alien creatures dressed in white with covered faces welcoming me into the new room, through the open door, pulling me by the hand, by the arm, by the shoulder: coming out head-first like a diver jumping in to a new kind of ocean, an ocean of air instead. Was I a bird suddenly, transformed from a fish by the primary element in which I was dwelling?

I almost remember my lungs filling up with air. Doctor Baker had a small but thick hand; I do remember that – and a wedding ring– not the cracking sound on my butt that I heard helped deliver air into my inverted lungs (which I had been led to believe were gills, in fact) – but later in life, as he set a broken finger for me, which I had injured playing basketball, I do remember noticing again his thick, spotted hands, and the same wedding band. Doctor Baker, a grim little man, short, with thick shoulder, balding hair, and yellowing finger nails, assured me that everything would be alright, as he fitted a metal split on my injured finger.

Doctor Baker did not explain about the hidden expiration date we all carry inside of us, however: all of life, all of matter also perhaps: all forms of matter. We are all like a library card (or a credit card, if I need to be more modern) that will expire at some point in the future, denying us, after that point of expiration, any more adventures, escapades, any more doors that we might open, seeking to expand our knowledge, fuel our fantasies, sustain our desires, or to further and/or diminish our illusions. At some point – and I believe this is an electro-chemical process, programmed in our genes but enacted in our atomic structures – the electricity that is Life, governed by temporal atomic instruction, is simply unplugged; and we collapse like a bubble suddenly deprived of its wind.

In this there is essential justice. In the end, everyone is the same again, returning to the solar soup, this latest odyssey on Earth completed.

It is not a mere coincidence (or even simply a mirror coincidence I believe) that each member of the human species begins his life in a dark cave, the womb, and that humanity, as a species, began in a dark cave also. We take up residence in the cave and we hide from the forces of Nature until we are strong enough (and oriented to our new strange habitat), before venturing out of the great cave’s yawning mouth or door (yes, Jesus threw aside the stone also and stepped forth out of the cave as a new man), ready to move beyond the Stone Age, into the Plant Age, the Animal Age, into the Human Age, then in to the Spiritual Age.

I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

I loved my mother first, of course. She was the woman (or girl) I first knew, touched, kissed and was kissed by. I touched her breasts; I kissed her breasts; I got sustenance from her breasts. I received affection and attention from her breasts, so soft and warm, so pleasant to touch.

One can argue against Freud’s conception of the Primal Family and the emotional and psychological and sexual-social mechanics of the atomic microcosm that is the family in the private house, a model, in miniature of the larger, macrocosmic paradigm: the human race in the house of Planet Earth: everything happening in the larger world also happens in the smaller world as a thought or as an intention if not always as a finalized action. One can argue against the Freudian logic, even condemn it as a perverse interpretation of something nobel and majestic, God’s ecstatic nativity of love and respect in the Human Family.

But when one looks below the moral surface of outrage and false puritanical self-devotion that declaims Freudian logic (and Jungian as well, usually marbles being spit out of another type’s mouth), one understands that love is present from the beginning – love being an affection, a desire, a jealous possessiveness, and a form of madness reaching to the end of existence, a shadow of death itself – and that struggles between the father and son(s) for the love of the only woman in the world, one man’s mother being the other man’s wife – we think, of course, of the Tristan and Isolde myth wherein King Mark gets to play the role of the aging father -- do begin at an early age, and do form a protoplasmic template through which the son experiences the world as he grows as leaves the cave to find his own life.

From the very beginning, there is both the high and low, the majestic and the tertiary, the noble and the platonic and the ignoble, the mean, and selfish expectations often interwoven with lust.

Every man is two men at once: an Outside Man, with a face, and a set of behaviors that are intended to be rewarded by the social managers, the powerful archons of social convention. The Inside Man is the opposite of this Outside Man, a mirror image in fact: the Inside Man sees, even as the Outside Man is seen. And these two men inside the one man are often at war, often despise one another, often engage in warfare to try to unseat the other. The Inside Man moves in one direction; the Outside Man moves in the opposite direction.

This mythical activity is often represented in the family by the behavior of the sons, the brothers, who are fighting for recognition in the family, first, and then in the larger world, the macrocosm. Each brother plays these roles with the other – the Body Life, the Outside Man, and the Solar Life, the life of the imagination, the Inside Man. Often the same brothers exchange these roles many times in a single day, flipping back and forth, as a way to gain attention, or as a way to avoid responsibility, as a way to expropriate love from another sibling or a parent.

Children are trickier, more duplicitous, and even more sinister than many adults want to believe, or want to admit.

My brother and I performed many rituals of duality in our time of childhood, and even in to young adulthood, being best friends and worst enemies at the same time, building fortifications in quicksand to protect our grim and thorny egos against devastation by the cruel or disinterested objective reality.

My house, my second cave, was not only the warmest place on the earth, filled with kindness and love and gentle understanding, and a wealth of food-stuffs that kept me satisfied, it was also a complicated place, filled with envy, misunderstanding, arguments, power struggles, open conflict, and frustrated love.

I imagine being aware of tension almost immediately: I can visualize now periods (I use that word with advisement) of intense misunderstanding, hurt feelings, anger, resentment; bristling; human diminishment, revolving in to a form of madness.

During the day, Madness, Chaos, Sorrow, seemed far away. Of course, usually, my mother and father were separated during the day. The Sun seemed to make everything more cordial, warm and expansive. Then Dusk would begin a kind of secret invasion, which brought a level of fear into the house, a sense of frustration, limitation, which could lead to some kind of explosion centered around the dinner table.

This picture of strife was not the common ground of my early life, and I remember it most clearly from my life as a teenager. But there was something, a kind of seedling phenomenon perhaps, in my earliest life, which suggested angst in the family, an opening of the flower of discord. The sexes, the genders, were apparently at war – I heard this expression later of course. They needed one another to be complete apparently; but such completion did not always come easily. The man seemed to see the world differently than the woman did. The man seemed to see the world through the eyes of the Sun. The woman seemed to see the world through the eyes of the Moon. Men and Women were traveling in opposite directions also, it seemed; much as the Dual Man was also traveling in opposite directions, the Material Man wanting to embrace the world and wrench from it all the treasures and pleasures it was offering to him; the Immaterial Man, the one with the weak body, saw the world (Objective Reality) as something toxic, sinful, corrupt, offering poison where pleasure was portrayed, offering sin and punishment where wealth and success were seemingly proffered.

There was a quite clear demarcation of times and conditions on Earth. The Sun ruled over the Day; the Moon ruled over the Night. All the implications of this were not clear to me yet, of course. But the Sun seemed to be warm and expansive and to allow the eyes to see great distances in physical plane reality. The Moon seemed to be cold and contractive and to allow the eyes to see much less and much shorter distances; but the Night (I came to view the Night as an entity) – and I learned some of this by listening to my transistor radio at night – gave out secrets, forms of knowledge, to the ears rather than to the eyes. The Ears were sacred to the Night; the Eyes were sacred to the Day. The ears were profoundly limited during the day. My radio could pick up only one of two stations during the Day, local stations, one in Rawlins, another in Casper, capturing radio signals from only several hundred miles. At night, I could hear ‘messages’ from as far away as Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oklahoma City. Night transmissions were usually clear, avoiding the static that dominated the Daytime transmissions. Apparently the Sun was hostile to Sound, to the Ears; the Moon was more generous to the ears.

In some clear way it seemed to me that the eyes belonged to the Day and the ears belonged to the Night. Even the dream belonged to the ears. When one went to sleep, one turned off one’s eyes – but the ears remained open, feeding data to the brain that fed images to the sleeping mind.

I was beginning to understand what was meant by the phrase: the ‘Laws of Nature’. I should clarify this: my Inside Man was beginning to understand the inside perspective of the Laws of Nature. The Outside Man studied physics and chemistry and mathematics to understand the outside perspective fo the Laws of Nature.

That my sister, I and my brother – but even more my brother and I – fought for the attention of my mother is a given, at least in my understanding of how the world works.. Our mother kept us alive, feeding us, clothing us, bathing us; encouraging our ambitions; rewarding our successes. She was a kind of goddess in the Garden of Childhood. She was also a figure of authority. When she loved us, the world was gentle and good. But when she became dissatisfied with us, or needed to discipline us, clouds suddenly formed in the house, voices were raised – on occasion, even one of us was struck (generally my brother Bill, he being the primary Outside Man in our small operatic dance of geometry) in order to teach us the common understanding that there were limits to our self-centered behaviors.

Who did mother love the most? There was always a struggle for attention. My brother was older and larger than I. He often used his physical vigor to position me out of the way – physically and in other ways -- in order to win my mother’s favor. He let me know at a very early age that he was willing to inflict pain on me in order to maintain his position as number one son. He could do this with looks when looks were effective, looks filled with meaning and with the promise of physical punishment if I persisted. When looks were not enough, he would attack me; and we would usually roll on the ground, on the grassy or dusty earth, or on the floor of our house, each seeking to pin the other on his back, a sign that chronological hierarchy and physical dominion would be served.

Punches in the face were rare. Punches to the body were not so rare.

My brother learned rather early, also, that tears were useful. Were he to challenge me, to attempt to inflict upon me fear and pain, and were I to gain an upper hand, loud tears would usually flow, enough noise and confusion to force an intercession by my father or mother (usually my mother), in order to defuse his pending defeat, and postpone the revolution represented by my impending physical advantage. Tears would almost always force an end to our conflict, usually to his advantage, as tears almost always flowed prior to his defeat and effectively stalemated our experiment in social realignment.

I eventually nicknamed him ‘crybaby’ as a way to announce that I was gaining in my understanding of how he intended to keep me a background player, his shadow in fact, during our life in the burgeoning world of Sinclair.

My brother was the oldest son in the family. He was more outgoing, more extroverted. He was a bit of a ham, a performer; I remember my grandmother being entertained by my brother’s loud movements, aggressions, more vocal disquisitions, which my grandmother considered a social grace, one attached to success, a life with many friends, popularity being a sign to here that a boy was normal and, therefore, properly raised. I was the darker half of the whole, the reticent brother, the shy one: Mister Inside.

I was Tonto. My brother was the Lone Ranger.

I was the dark-skinned brother; my brother was the very white leader. I was expected to follow, to be quiet, to be submissive – the younger brother who did as he was told.

I learned quite early that there was a place inside where my brother could not find me. I could go inside, in to my imagination, in to my spiritual haven, and find peace, rejuvenation and contentment, escaping my brother’s minor tyranny – minor, since I knew that, should I really wish to oppose his physical supremacy, I could find a way. I did not need to challenge my brother’s status in order to find a place for myself in the world. I was born with a place in the world. Inside of myself there was a very large world, much space for myself, a place where my brother Bill could not find me.

My sister, Laura, was like a second mother. My own mother lets us all know that Laura was in power when she, my mother, was gone; Laura was second-in-command. We were to follow my sister’s word as though it were my mother’s own word. My sister and I did not have the kind of closeness one might expect. She was always a bit of a loner. She had her own room. She spent time with in her own company, sitting before her mirror, listening to music on her record machine.

We must remember that my sister and my brother were born on the same day – October 26 – one year apart. She and my brother were closer, even though their struggle for power was occasionally dramatic, and even explosive. One summer afternoon the power-conflict between my sister and brother became very vocal – and even more. My father was running bath water in the bathtub. My sister began lecturing my brother on something – I don’t remember now – then tried to force her hand; my brother fought back; shoving ensued; then a right cross (my brother claimed it was a ‘slap’) to my sister’s face. The blow caused my sister’s nose to begin bleeding. She ran into the bathroom and bled, hunched over the bathtub, half-filled with water. She was screaming and crying hysterically. Before long the house was aflame with chaos; my sister was certain she was dying, she had bled an entire bathtub of blood. My father was furious with my brother for having punched his sister, for having hit a girl, which, to a gentleman like my father, was unacceptable behavior.

My brother won the battle of love for my mother. I really don’t think my mother loved him more than myself. But my brother seemed to need my mother more than I did. And she seemed to understand this. Both my mother and my grandmother said my brother Bill reminded them of William Clause, my mother’s father, my grandmother’s husband. My mother loved her father; my grandmother loved some memory she had of her husband perhaps, some idea of him. She loved his better side. I drifted toward my father.

My father began to draw more closely into view. He was silent, remote, yet graceful. He did not need attention, did not need to be noticed; he seemed to appreciate solitude. I don’t know if I became more like my father because I admired him so or if I admired him so because he and I were so much alike. We became partners. It was something unsaid, of course: we became welded together. The strong, silent man, and his silent son – silence often being read by the world as a sign of strength.

My brother liked being part of the crowd, liked having an audience; my mother loved a house full of people: entertainment, excitement.. They were very much alike in this way.

My father and I needed nothing, needed no one. The silence was warm and welcoming. A house filled with people provided more distractions and more chaos than entertainment to my father and I. My mother loved spending a day at her mother’s house, with the whole family (brother and sisters and their families) gathering together. My father had one brother who lived now in Novato, California; another brother who lived in Butte, Montana. We almost never saw them.

In 1956, my sister attended kindergarten in the Sinclair Grade School, a larger brick building across the street from our house. Kindergarten was taught by Mrs. McQuarter, a kindly but bland professional schoolmarm whose most memorable gracing of the world was the afternoon nap required for all of her students, on the schoolroom floor lying on colorful, woven Indian blankets.

The following year, my brother made the leap in to the public school system. This was a good year for myself and my mother to get re-acquainted in fact. The two forces of disturbance in our house had been detached. My brother had taken his first step into the larger Objective Reality. Our house was quiet. I remember my mother seeing them off and then returning into the house and drinking a cup of coffee, often smoking a cigarette, at our kitchen table – a quiet hour or two spent doing little but being together.

I don’t really remember what we did for that hour, how much we talked; sometimes a neighbor-woman came by to spend some time with my mother. But most of the time I was simply quiet with my mother. She appreciated the peace – at least that’s how I remember it.

We grew closer.

In a way we both dreaded the end of the silence when my brother and sister returned from school with their noise, their noisy adjustments to one another. My sister was quiet by nature. She never picked a fight. But she was bossy; and she used her seniority as a club at times, which almost always set my brother off. He didn’t want her telling him what to do. On and on it went.

My sister was usually more gentle with me. When my brother was not in the house, my sister and I formed a amiable partnership. But when my brother was there, I quite often signed up with him to torment my sister. I too resented her authoritarian demeanor and iron-fisted morality.

I learned rather early in my life that my partnerships with my mother and sister were always disturbed, at some point, by emotional upheavals. It seemed to be another law of life that chaos, emotional turmoil, was embedded into life’s cycles. Unexpectedly, my mother could turn into a monstrous shadow of herself, a disturbed personality, ranting and raving, exploding, a terror caused by the smallest thing. Perhaps not caused by that thing at all, perhaps caused by something innate, some hidden manifestation of God’s plan, rather than the fact that my brother or I casually mentioned that Vera Vasey made great cookies, for instance, which my mother could and almost always did take as a personal criticism of herself, the theme being that Vera Vasey was a better mother than Mary Ellen Clark was. Taking things personally – that seemed to cause much of the pain and violence of the world. The need to defend oneself, against the suggestion that one was not perfect, that one had flaws, that one was not living up to the image of perfection that was embedded in oneself with very deep roots.

My sister too was subject to emotional meltdowns over nothing. We knew that girls were different. We – my brother and I – had bathed with our sister when we were young. ‘Mom, where is Laura’s thing?’ we asked our mother. ‘Mom, Laura’s faucet is gone!’ ‘Honey, Laura has a different thing than you boys have. Laura has a binness. Boy’s have faucets.”

Later I conceived of Laura’s binness being a faucet that had imploded inward. Maybe girls had penises that had been inverted inward. Maybe this had something to do with their periodical breakdowns into emotional deluges.

Maybe Mister Outside was the Man, and Mister Inside was the Woman. Maybe the Man lived more in the sunlight, and the Woman lived more in the moonlight. Going ‘lunar’ meant going into the shadow-land of Night, a place where women were more dominant, on the inside of things. Men seemed more sane. My father was more sane than my mother was. My father never went insane. My mother went insane quite often – my sister too.

I loved my mother, but I did not love her world; I did not love our world together, that often involved shouting, fighting and tears. My world with my father almost never involved shouting, fight or tears, unless we were dragged into my mother’s world. Then all hell could break loose.

In 1956, I joined my brother and sister at school.

My first year in public school does not stick out in my mind. I do remember the alien feeling of the first few days at school: new faces; names I’d never heard before. Some kids were bigger than I; and there was always the mythologically omnipresent bully standing at the edge of the school grounds, always threatening to make one’s life miserable. The threat of invasion from an outside force is apparently always alive, even if some times hidden, in the psyche of the individual unit and also in the reptilian mind of the tribe or the civilized town. I remember feeling this fear quite acutely at school, trying to judge strange faces and ogre-rich shapes to see which represented a threat to my own safety, or a threat to the continued safe existence of my Ego bubble in which I floated through life, trying to protect the fragile state of my own physical and psychological expansion.

I remember my mother talked about this year being very difficult for her. All three children were gone. The house was like a tomb. She could hardly wait for the kids to return. She used to spend each morning on the front steps of the house (during the warm months at least), watching the school, hoping to catch a glimpse of her children, and often crying out of loneliness.

In 1958 I entered the first grade, and met what I’m calling ‘my first love’. My first love was clearly my own mother – but, excluding my mother out of a sense of Christian dignity, or perhaps psychological shame, the first love to which I openly admit, was ‘Miss Petty’, a dazzling blonde who taught First Grade at the Sinclair Public School. Miss Petty was tall and leggy. I remember clearly a yellow dress that showed off her legs wonderfully – a yellow dress with some kind of what lace pattern on top.

‘Miss Petty’ was gentle and gracious. She seemed to take a fancy to me. The kinder she was to me, the more I loved her, and desired to possess her. Of course I was not really aware of sexual possession at that age. Sexual possession is not primary; it is a shadow of love-possession, holding a lover’s soul inside of one’s own, where no one else could have it, share it, or diminish it. I was only six and a half years old, but my desire for my teacher was clear and untamed. During recess I would try to talk with Miss Petty, try to get her to smile at me. And she would smile at me, talk to me.

I was usually shy around women and girls – Miss Petty was somewhere between being a woman and a girl, probably 23 years old, having just finished studying education at a local college. But Miss Petty and I had some kind of magnetism. I knew this even at an early age.

I don’t remember how our romance turned more physical – but it did. I used to tackle Miss Petty on the school grounds during recess. I had learned to tackle people while playing football with the older Vasey boys, our next door neighbors. One could take down a much larger person by hooking the calves and then rotating one’s body in a countering position. Bill Vasey, the oldest, who was usually my teammate, was 7’1” tall. Dick and John were both tall and much bigger than I and my brother. But we both learned how to tackle them in the front yard of the Vasey’s home.

So I would take down Miss Petty on the school grounds during recess. She was always dressed nicely, in a skirt or dress always. I would grab her by the calves, pivot my body in the opposite direction of her stationary momentum, and she would tumble down to the ground in my arms.

I would end up holding her bare legs; and she would end up in a surprised and embarrassed pile on the ground, other students and even teachers watching the public sexual assault. Miss Petty would blush, explain to me that she could not play football with her students. Her face was so red – she was not angry at me. I understood from the signs (some obvious, and some either imagined or transmitted deep below the surface) that she liked me and even enjoyed my aggressions. She tried to get me to stop. But she never got mad at me. I looked up in to her beautiful face with an expression of pure love and she was touched by such an honesty. She eventually visited my family and explained the situation to my mother and father. I was talking her on the school grounds in front of the other students. She could not get me to stop. Could they say something to me that would explain why this was not appropriate behavior?

She stressed that she was not angry; and that she considered me a wonderful students. She did not want my parents to punish me – she even suggested that I was her favorite student – but I didn’t listen when she told me I had to stop tackling her on the school-grounds.

When she left our house, my mother and father explained to me that Miss Petty was trying to do her job; and that my behavior at recess was embarrassing her in front of the other students and teachers.

“Did I like Miss Petty?” my mother asked me.

“I love Miss Petty,” I replied – and I could see that my mother was stung by the response.

“Well, if you like Miss Petty, and you want her to like you, you will do what she asks you to do,” my mother replied. “She’ll stop liking you if you don’t start behaving her at recess. You’re embarrassing her.”

I did not want Miss Petty to stop loving me. I stopped tackling her.

I flirted with her all year in my own quiet way, smiling, catching her eye. She smiled back. Sometimes she touched me. Sometimes she would comb my hair with her right hand, brushing it back from my forehead – an act that I considered a kind of surreptitious kiss. At the end of the school year, she told my parents what a joy I was to have had in her class.

She was leaving Sinclair. She was getting married.

I cried when I heard that she was leaving town. I cried very hard. My mother tried to comfort me; I felt it was the end of the world, and that I was losing my lover for ever.

My mother blanched when she heard me whisper this declaration, through my tears. My mother was not first in my heart. I had allowed a stranger to come between us. This made my mother love me even more, I think, to understand that my love for her had limits.

The following year, I began taking the bus to St. Joseph’s Catholic School in nearby Rawlins. I never fell in love again with one of my teachers.

VII. THE ART OF SEEING -- AND THE ART OF DREAMING, OF VISIONING WHEN NOT SEEING

I am not certain if I was born blind – badly near-sighted that is. I do remember having to squint to see the black-board during classes at St. Joseph’s School. I do remember seeing a foggy world, like a background picture seen through a veil of snow, through a layer of white static, similar to poor reception received by a television set.

I did not realize that this was not the way the world was: distant, disfigured, veiled by dots of whitish geometric points. Perhaps everyone saw the world this way. How could I know otherwise. I knew what I knew. I adjusted.

Once a blind boy, always a blind boy. Tell that to Tiresias. Tell it to Homer, or Ray Charles.

Having a difficult time seeing forced me to develop my other senses – at least, that’s what I believe now, looking back. As a child I simply lived, without much analysis. Analysis comes only as one is able to (or is forced to) distance oneself from the ‘real’ phenomenal world in order to try to ‘understand what just happened’ – and, even more, WHY it happened. And even more, if it was a negative experience, how to keep it from happening again.

The mind develops for many reasons, a primary reason being to enable us survive.

If we are punched in the face by a childhood ogre, then we must either strike back and blot out our threat, or perhaps go into hiding, back into our house, into the cave, or under our mother’s metaphorical skirts – God bless Gunter Grass and his The Tin Drum – in order to discover why this happened – and, at least as importantly, how to keep it from happening again.

Light brings us all our information about the world – in this, I use ‘Light’ in its largest sense. Light is not just visible light, but also waves that contain sounds and scents and even tastes. Light, visible light, rides in electromagnetic waves that carry all kinds of information to us. Magnetic fields. Magnetism is a primary characteristic of love. Radio waves are pieces of light that bring information to the ear at night especially when one learns how to harness and use such fragments of light and magnetism.

The word ‘matter’ should include all parts of matter, not just the dense, solid aspect of matter – which science tells us is mostly empty, mostly space. Not just liquids, gases, and plasmas. There is matter we cannot see, cannot detect – dark matter – and this invisible matter constitutes nearly 99% of our known universe. The visible world is a very small part of the totality, in fact. As with visible light – light that stimulates our eyes – visible matter is a minority participant in our universe, but a tyrant surely, with a strength of will to rule, to control, to convince us that it is everything….

The eyes have it. The eyes have power; the eyes have wealth and popularity. (I will get into this more later.)

Dark matter gravitates but does not emit much light – like most of the people we know in life – in scientific jargon, it has a high ratio of mass-to-luminosity. Background noise we might call it. Or the Dead Zone, if we were Stephen King.

Each of our senses provide evidence of segregated aspects of our reality. Our ears bring us information; our eyes bring us different information; touch reveals something else; taste something else. The mind synthesizes these packets of information and forms a picture, an image, of the world that we tend to believe is the world – or, at least, accurately represents the world. But what would happen to this picture if we were to add another sense? We would be given an added stream of information; and, most likely, the picture we had believe was reality would be proven to be not-reality any longer.

That process appears to be what evolution is all about. At least it appears so to me, in moments of utmost clarity. But you know what they say about clarity? Clarity is the first stage of a new blindness, the last stage of an old luminescence.

Clarity is a dangerous crystallization of an idea that has already passed – like light traveling through space from a star that is already dead.

Because I was born blind, my eyes became less important to me, became a secondary source of information. The information my eyes brought to me was limited. So I began to listen more intently. Clearly the eyes and ears worked together, as did all the senses in fact: when someone spoke to me, I could more easily hear that person than when the speaker stood far away from me. I believe I read lips from an early age – and school magnified my eyesight problems because I was unable to hear the speaker as well when I could not read her lips.

In my first or second year of Catholic schooling, my parents bought me eyeglasses. The nuns had warned my parents that I was having trouble seeing the blackboards. My parents also had noticed that I never watched television from one of our living room chairs, but always got up and relocated myself on the carpeted floor, only a foot or so from the tv screen. They thought for a time that I loved the television (which I did, of course) – they eventually understood that I needed to sit close to the screen so I could see it.

Being marked publicly as being ‘handicapped’ was disturbing, at such a tender age of six or seven, – ‘four-eyes’ was an unsubtle imputation of my masculinity – but it was nice to see the un-blurred world more clearly for the first time. I say more clearly because I firmly believe that there is much that exists in reality that our eyes cannot see. As science cannot see Dark Matter, our eyes cannot see the vast part of reality that is either too large to see, too small to see, or that has turned itself inward, absorbing instead of reflecting light, that has mass but does not emit light.

Mass that is, or so I believe at least, generating massive amounts of light into the inner realm, but not into the outer realm. Remember my description of Mister Outside and Mister Inside. Mister Inside projects massive amounts of light into the inner dimension, while those observing him from the surface, on the outside plane, see nothing of this luminescence. He is often a loser, a loner, a geek, one who ‘lacks social skills’, weird, a book-worm, inverted, ‘artistic’.

One of the men I worked with as an adult took offense when my wife called his son ‘an introvert’ – it was as if she had called him a criminal, a deviate. An introvert was something most Americans did not want their children to become, for it suggested unhappiness, loneliness, psychological deformation – a lack of future success, of fitting in with the convention of the happy family living in suburbia, pleasing the neighbors and pleasing all the family members by following all the rules of life.

“Extroverts”, Outside Men, conquered the world, were fearless, aggressive, got what they wanted, cast light and warmth on the world – they made more money than introverts, had more (and prettier) girlfriends that introverts, drove nicer cars than introverts: they were more successful in managing the material world than were introverts.

But introverts were better at managing the world of anti-matter than were extroverts – anti-matter being the inner world of Dark Matter, the Spiritual Kingdom -- a place where most extroverts would never venture, understanding that were such a transformation even possible they would probably end up like Actaeon, the Greek extrovert hunter, who ventured into Love and into Diana’s (the Moon goddesses’) sacred Nature grove, who retaliated against the strange hunter after he saw her naked while bathing by turn Actaeon into a stag and turning his own hunting dogs against him. He was torn to shreds before the dogs had realized that had murdered their own master.

The spiritual world – the very essence of life to most of the world – does not exist to science – science being the pathologically extroverted conditioning of reality by the Masculine Mind -- for this very reason. The spiritual world directs very little light onto the surface, directing most of its light into the inner dimensions. This spiritual world is dark matter to scientists, making those who consider this realm ‘real’ seem dense and ethically and eschatologically blind, living in darkness. But those who live in darkness on the surface often live in light on the inside, like Mister Inside, for example.

Mister Inside and Mister Outside speak a different language, see a different world, in fact – the internal world flips the external world, as the image reflected in a pond is reversed (turned into a mirror image), so that right on the surface, in the external world, is left under the water of the spiritual world. Up is down; good is bad; light is dark. This built-in duality guarantees conflict in our world, and is the cause of wars, intellectual disagreements, and structural misunderstandings. Even using the same language, Mister Outside describes a world that Mister Inside reads in the opposite way intended by Mister Outside.

I bring this up as a way of introducing the reader to a vocabulary I am developing (and, because of this vocabulary, a philosophy) which purports to a structural geometry existing in Reality which divides historical and personal phenomenon into Day Cycles (dominated by Men and Male thinking and the Male Body – force – and, of course, by the Sun) and Night Cycles (dominated, which is an odd world to use in this discussion, by Women, by Female thinking – metaphor dominating causality: that is, more accurately rendering a description of reality at the time), and the Female Body (which is Water, as the Man’s Body is made of Fire, from the Sun). Male thinking – science – says everything is separate, everything is individual, and can be studied and known by separating it and viewing it in a laboratory setting. Female thinking – mytho-poetry – says everything is connected, because in the metaphorical mind everything is connected: this is like that, that is like the other thing. And, of course, the Night-Cycle is dominated by the Moon.

Male thinking says: if I study the atom, I know the atom, but nothing else. I become a specialist, a master (with a Ph.D) in the atom. When I speak about the atom I am all-knowing. When I speak about other things you can often disregard what I am saying, because I am not an expert in anything but the atom. Female thinking says that if you study the atom deeply you will know not only the atom, but you will know everything else as well: for the atom is a metaphor for how everything works, everything created in this universe following a paradigmatic season-based logic, based on the principles of duality: the cooperative sharing of the governance of the world, sequentially, by light and then by light’s shadow, darkness.

Each of these periods of governance – each Day-Cycle and each Night-Cycle – lasts on Earth for 18 years. We have just passed through a distinguished Day-Cycle, which peaked in 2001, and which is ending in 2010, as I write this. The current Night-Cycle will run from 2010 to 2019 (this is the Autumn season, the period from Dusk to Midnight) and then again from 2019 to 2028 (this being the Winter season, the period from Might to Dawn).

These ideas of a dualistic governance of the Earth were the very basis of my Catholic education – however the appealed only to my emotional nature at the time of my first education. There was good and evil; God was good, and the Devil was evil; God was Light, and the Devil was Darkness. There was Heaven and Hell – Heaven was peopled by angels, and pure spirits; Hell was the abode of those with too much taste for Earthly pleasures: sex, money, power, technology – these were earthly things, and the province of the Devil.

Somehow that message got twisted as Mister Inside incarnated into Mister Outside and passed the central vortex of such transmission where the opposites exchange information and become their own opposites.

God’s geometry – or at least the geometry of the Demiurgos, the Divine Source of angel/gods, that generated matter and the Laws of Nature – divides the Heaven from the Earth, separating them by this central vortex, which is a kind of womb, a kind of door, a secret passage, through which Mister Inside passes to become Mister Outside and through which Mister Outside passes to become Mister Inside.

It is ‘birth’ when seen traveling from one direction, and ‘death’ when seen as traveling from the opposite direction. But the two processes are the same in truth – the fish passes through the keyhole to become the bird – the bird passes through the keyhole to become the fish (again). Of course the womb is the keyhole, and the erect-penis is the key, symbolically and literally, as my continuing analysis will (I hope at least) aptly show.

Of course, when I write about sexuality, I am writing about the mystical marriage that occurs in true love. I am not writing about lust and promiscuousness, which represents a misunderstanding of the force of love as a transformative experience.

Love is the primary of sex. Love transforms. Sex helps the unfolding to occur. Sex without love is a kind of masturbation in three-dimensions. It is love that transforms. Love can transform without sex; but love is complete with sex, because love with sex completes the re-creation of the world through the procreation of children. It is love and mystical sexuality which opens a door to a different world, which opens the door from the Female Principle of Water back again into the Male Principle of Fire, back into a Heavenly stature which is God’s covenant with man, the man in Heaven having dominion over the Earth.

To put it differently, Love and Sex transform the Inside Man into the Outside Man, who is the carrier of a New Law, and the driver of the evolution of society through Civilization. The Outside Man delivers the New Law; the Inside Man creates the New Law, or is given it through the Mother Element, during the Night-Cycle as the external light vanishes and the internal light grows stronger and stronger.

This is all thematically connected to my failed love for Leslie Harmon of course, although it may appear now to be extraneous and a bombastic introduction to the idea of passion (it is not extraneous; but I cannot deny a bombastic flush of language sometimes appears when I grow lyrically over-stimulated).

I have come to view my own life through the lens of the Day- and Night-Cycles I will be portraying in this book.

For those not certain about the 18-year cycles, I have come to understand this reality as a reflection of the circle’s division in to 180° cycles above and 180 cycles below – that is the construction of the division of Heaven and Earth. The cycle itself is, of course, a 36-year cycle, running from one source to the next source, from one root system to the next root system, from festival of fruit to the next festival of fruit (the fruiting of the Tree of Life), the fruiting being represented by the City, by Civilization, by the build of the City of Light on the Mountain of God, all based on the 360° of the circle in one complete turn.

America has experienced the regular day/night cycles throughout its history. And my own personal history, as I view it today, fits nicely in this macrocosmic scale.

Looking at recent American history, the first Day-Cycle of the Twentieth Century ran from 1911 to 1929. This is not exactly correct – and I must clarify my terms here more carefully. 1911 to 1929 was a growth cycle, from root to fruit and seed, the apex of the Civilization Cycle being from 1911 to 1929. The Growth Cycle began in the bottom of the Time Well, in the bottom of Winter, 1911, and ended in the culmination of light (light is matter, afterall) in 1929. The apex of the Growth Season is almost always accompanied by a tragic act of destruction, signaling the destruction of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The 1929 Stock Market Crash was one such event as this. In 1965, another apocalyptic culmination – epic/epoch collapse – was typified by what? By the assassination of John F. Kennedy (which came at the end of 1963, a bit early); or perhaps it was the Watts Riots. In every case, at the apex of the growth cycle, an act of violence occurs against the the Lords of Materialism who dominate the Earth, against the White Race, an act which heralds the era of a new attempt at balancing the division (economic, material and cultural) between the High and Low, between the Heaven and the Earth.

The year 1929 was the beginning of a new balancing act between the haves and have nots, between the Whites (the Masters of Time), and the non-Whites, the Lunar Tribes, the Masters of Space); 1965 was the same, as blacks in America (and American Indians, and of course women, who are the Dark Race in a more generic sense – the Dark Races are the Female Mind in fact – oppressed by Time everywhere) rose up against their White oppressors and slave-masters; in 2001, the next apex of Western Civilization, the black God, through the force of Islamic fundamentalism, struck out against the White God, in an act of symbolic castration, destroying the Twin Towers, damaging the Pentagon, and attempting to annihilate the White House. Each of these times was a culmination of the Growing Season in the building of Western Civilization, a crowning achievement, at which time destruction, deconstruction, appeared and decay of the dream began to accelerate.

Summer Construction Cycle: 1911-1929, culminates in the fruiting of the dream;

Winter Deconstruction Cycle: 1929-1947, culminates in the seeding of the next dream;

Summer Construction Cycle: 1947- 1965, culminates in the fruiting of the dream;

Winter Deconstruction Cycle: 1965-1983, culminates in the seeding of the next dream;

Summer Deconstruction Cycle: 1983-2001, culminates in the fruiting of the dream;

Winter Deconstruction Cycle: 2001-2019, culminates in the seeding of the next dream.

Abstraction – what the mystics call ‘initiation’, a sudden deepening of spiritual understanding, or God-awareness, as a series of forces or ‘laws’ typified by cyclical Nature – happens during the Night- or Winter-Cycles, when hope is lost, and when the society, the globe itself, undergoes a dark cycle of economic depression, social chaos, the breakdown of the social hierarchy, and often war and genocide.

Winter-Cycle: 1929-1947;

Winter-Cycle: 1965-1983;

Winter-Cycle: 2001-2019.

No one can question the extent of deconstruction that occurred in the first two Winter-Cycles of the Twentieth Century, in terms of madness, warfare, economic dislocation, and genocide: Hitler in the first; American genocide, through high-technology warfare, in Southeast Asia and Pol Pot in the second.

As I write today, I read about the massive floods that are hitting many countries, destroying property, killing citizens, and devastating crops: Pakistan, Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Poland, France, South Africa….

I read also of food riots sweeping the globe, Algeria, Tunisia, India, China, Bangladesh. Rising prices are everywhere being fueled by a profligate Western expansion of credit, which created the Economic Collapse in 2008 (Day Cycles, Growth Cycles, are fueled by cash expansion, first, debt expansion, second, debt overexpansion third – when asset bubbles form, the Growth Stage is over, and the panic-filled attempt to continue creating bubbles, illusions of expansion, are akin to cancerous cells refusing to stop reproducing, resfusing to obey the Laws of Nature and rest). Night Cycles are built in to Nature’s System in order to provide rest for Nature, to allow systems to eliminate debt, and prepare systems for the next Growth Cycle. Taking on more debt during the Night-Cycle is a madness that ignores these stages and laws, proclaiming that continuous growth is possible.

The Growth Cycle is a kind of Faustian agreement, a contract with the Devil – we will discuss later what really is the nature of this Devil. All debt is Karmic Debt and must be paid off in the ensuring Night-Cycle, the ensuing period of darkness, contraction, deconstruction, Chaos. Moon Period. Female Gleaning Time. Call it what you will.

I have written that I have come to see my own life situated in terms of this larger Macro-Cycle.

I was born on December 17, 1950, at the end of a Winter-Cycle that ran from 1929-1947. Dawn or Spring came in 1956. In 1956, I entered Kindergarten at the Sinclair Grade School. A year later I met my first love, Miss Petty.

The Spring Season is almost everywhere considered the Golden Age, or the Garden of Eden. The Spring Season in America’s cyclical history this century ran from 1920-1929, curing the first Growth Season (the Roaring Twenties); 1956-1965, during the second (the 1950’s being the Patriarchal Ideal of Order, Progress and Wealth Accumulation of America’s post-war baby boomers); and 1992-2001, during the third (being perhaps the most hopeful time in the history of the Earth, except in places Rwanda, Africa – with political freedom coming to much of Eastern Europe, affluence coming to much of the world, globalism, a form of corporate empire rising to power with its promise of ‘better days ahead’ for all the countries of the world.

But something happened in 2001. Something ended; and something else began.

The Night-Cycle is about Dark Matter taking over – and Visible Matter beginning to deconstruct.

Vision comes during the Night-Cycles (the deconstruction or Winter Cycles); Action comes during the Day-Cycles (the re-construction or Summer Growth Cycles). These two seasons work together, and only seem to be adversarial. When the Force of Light is active in one hemisphere, the force of Rest, of Dreaming, is active in the opposite hemisphere. One hemisphere acts out its dream while the opposite hemisphere dreams out its (next) act.

This chapter is supposed to be about the power of vision, both the vision produced by the eye-sight in the material world, and also the vision produced by the mind’s eye when the physical light is put out; and, indeed, so it is.

I was born in 1950. I went to school in 1956, Spring of the Time Cycle. In 1965 -- Summer of the Time Cycle -- John Kennedy had already been assassinated, Watts was burning in the Race Riots of Los Angeles, and the Black Power Movement was born. The White Power movement of Individualism, Capitalism, and Materialism was going out of power slowly, going in for a rest; and the Black Power movement of collectivism, Communism, and Anti-Materialism was beginning to grow.

The Deconstructions clearly were in power in 1929-1947; again in 1965-1983; and they will again be taking power 2001-2019.

In 1974 -- which is equivalent on the Time Wheel to 2010, Autumn and Dusk -- I finished college and began writing my first novel. In 1976 I met Leslie Harmon and fell madly in love with her. Madness being the key word here. Madness, and utter joy, surely. And desperation; and animated bliss. After this, after my love affair with Leslie Harmon deconstructed in 1977 and 1978, my world got much darker and more emotionally unhinged, warped by the reality of my own emotional and philosophical emptiness.

During the Day-Cycle the Soul ‘fills up’ with dreams, ambitions, plans; unlimited expansion is the rule. The Future is clear; and the Future is bright. During the Night-Cycle the Soul ‘empties out’ and becomes naked again, without hope, without plans, without light to see the Future. As the external light dims, the internal light begins to grow, the spiritual light begins to re-make the man into the new model he will become in the next expansion, the next Growth Season. As this happens, as the Future blinks out of view, and hope with it, the mind turns back to the past. In the past, in ancient poetry, history, philosophy, myth, religion, are buried the metaphorical and allegorical truths that light the darkened path that leads ‘around the horn’ to a new existence and a new light, a new Future.

This re-making process – which is alchemical at its root, transformational, reductive to essence -- requires that the Old Man, the Ego Bubble which was the Old Man, be ‘killed’, be completely emptied out, down-sized, reduced to humility and to the original purity of nature, so the new, recycled pure vision can be planted in a new pure body or environment, which is the New Man himself, standing in a purified Soul, which is the first body that manifests.

The corruption, the greed, the selfishness, the material ambition based in separation and creating alienation and crime – karmic debt -- has to be given up. The Body, as a principle, has to be given up. Debt has to be given up – and with it, the inflated value of assets pumped up by the massive invocations to the God of Debt, Faust’s Holocaustic God of Justice. The Lord gives (the Growth Cycle, the Day-Cycle) and the Lord takes away (the Deconstruction or the Night-Cycle). If one expands he will contract. If one takes on Life he takes on Death. If one chooses bodily pleasure and power he also chooses spiritual self-judgment and a terrifying, isolating spiritual dis-empowerment.

Death has to be accepted, a death of the Old Self. Hopelessness and poverty of spirit are the nature of this ‘emptying out’ process.

The first half of the Moon Cycle, from New to Full Moon, is, likewise, a filling up process. The downward path of the Moon, from Full Moon to Empty Moon, is the Suffering Season, the Winter Season, the inactive, infertile season, the time when Mister Inside turns his back on Civilization (Man’s Triumph) and embraces instead Nature (God’s Triumph) – passing from the influence of the Father (Time) back to the influence of the almost-forgotten Mother (Space, Pure Virgin Space if you are to believe the ancient mythologists who used words in a highly esoteric sense). The Soul must become one with nothingness again. One with the Void;. One with emptiness.

Only when the Soul is empty is it ready to be filled again. A vessel that is full, when filled, overflows, creating a flood of excess capacity – which is a metaphorical description of what happens in the economic realm when the Day-Cycle over-expands material capacity and debt, creating a flood situation, such as we are experiencing today.

Filling-up, as a process, cannot begin until the vessel is empty.

Our current Night-Cycle will find Western Civilization empty again in 2019, as the bottom of the wishing well.

As the reader must understand by now, I am fond of tangents. I am also fond of metaphors.

I am definitely on the side of my mother again. Afterall, it is another Night-Cycle – it is now January 2011. The influence of my mother (and her insistence of political and social justice and moral integrity) should be growing, if what I’m writing is true; and the power of my father’s practical nature, of his willingness to view life as a series of compromises between compounds of virtue and vice should be losing much of its authority, defense of tradition, defense of the status quo. Polarization should be growing. The Soul should be beginning to align itself with the powerless in society, against the powerful, with the poor and against the rich, with the underprivileged classes with darker skin tones and against the over-privileged classes with lighter and lighter skin tones and heavier and heavier bank accounts.

This does seem to be happening also.

As I was writing earlier, I have never had good eye-sight. My eyes were always my weakest feature. Even when technology corrected this problem, I was still reliant on the technology more than the eyes. I was a natural Mister Inside because of this flaw in my physical make-up, and because of my placement of birth in my own family hierarchy. The baby of the family is scheduled to become Mister Inside.

The eyes are the main instrument of Mister Outside. He sees and he mesmerizes through the power of the eyes. He shines light through his eyes. He controls women through the power of his eyes. At least, he engages women with the power in his eyes. He sees what he desires; and he sees what he has to do to possess what he desires, to fulfill his dreams, and to fulfill the heroic role that he has embraced.

Women also depend upon the eyes of men, for it is through the eyes (mainly) that women capture the hearts of men who generate the Growing Season dating game (men hooked through the eyes by women, driven by desire to possess beauty, promised pleasure and promised a destiny of heroism), which drives civilization into greater and greater forms of organization.

The Day belongs to the ‘normal’ man and the ‘normal’ woman, those wishing to fulfill material dreams of comfort, pleasure, acquisition and power in the world, which all helps to guarantee their survival. It is all a story of survival after all. The desire for survival (the fear of death) drives expansion into the physical world, drives up towers of civilization – a phallic reconstruction of the initial act of generation, fueled and pampered and rewarded by the eyes of course – creates empires, crimes of hubris, crimes of genocide, and crimes of racial brutality.

When the eyes go, and the ears take over, all orthodox forms of judgment about life’s normal path begin to break down. The constructionists lose their power to control Nature. Dreams begin to invade ‘reality’. Traditions break down. Personal will begins to empty out, and become receptive to the Female values of love and real desire and subject, quite suddenly, to the power of the Moon, the power of water. Goal orientation breaks down; and ‘stream of consciousness’ in alliance with the Unconscious comes back in to view, comes back in to the Soul’s picture of Reality.

Real Religious Nature requires Night-Cycles. Day-Cycles reduce religion to a moral code and a hierarchy (God-sanctioned, of course) of power-structures, putting the rich on top (mostly white) and the poor on the bottom (mostly black). This is religion when it becomes rigid with death, rigid with formality.

The Religious Mind is metaphorical by nature. Religion is poetry. Religion is the poetic movements of Nature, waves of wind playing on waves of water, wound together into a logic that connects cycles of time with reflect rituals of human custom.

Mysticism is the Soul of Religion. Orthodox, organized religion is the Body of Religion, the corrupt shell on the inner truth. Orthodox religion is a business organization – a kind of chamber of commerce for the soul -- designed to keep the white on top, the black on the bottom; and keeping the women always subject to the law and order of the men.

Man needs Night-Cycles in order to find his true self (this is an alchemical process, as I have suggested, of using the internal heat of atomic radiation caused by stress and despair to burn away the corrupt parts of the Soul in the emptying out process described above). In finding his naked self, man finds his God again.

In the Day-Cycle, Man becomes the God and serves himself as a God would serve himself. In the Night-Cycle, Man falls from power, falls in shame, travels through all the lower realms of Nature, on his knees, finding modesty, disabused of the idea of his own greatness and grandeur, and becomes empty, like a stone. This is both the ending point of his decline, and the starting point of his re-ascension into heaven.

The Greeks considered hubris the greatest of sins, because it reflected a loss of balance, a loss of perspective, an unsustainable illusion that one was, himself, a god, and could and should act as a god, making cruelty, violence and shameful greeds and lusts and abuses of other humans and animals normal behavior (think of the late Roman emperors in this context), justified by one’s self-conceived state of divinity. Hubris was punished, in Greek mythology, through a ravaging of the guilty party by Hecate – interestingly, Hecate is a protector of entrances, gates, doors, keyholes – in Greek, Hecate meaning ‘she who removes’ – as in ‘empties out’ – or overthrows, and she who ‘operates from a great distance’ – the internal ‘laws of Nature’ obviously operate from a great distance. Hecate was a sorcerer, a witch, and was called by Ptolomaic Egyptian scholars ‘the she-dog’ and ‘the bitch’ – her approach was signaled by the barking of dogs in the night – and whom I would argue is the Greek personification of a Night-Cycle.

Hindus described the ‘Mind’s Eye’ – the ‘Eye in the Forehead’, the Ajna Center – as the ‘Eye of Shiva’ or the ‘Eye of Dangma’: the Third Eye. Dangma and/or Shiva were the ancient Hindu gods of Destruction – of Deconstruction of attachment to the Material World. When the two physical eyes of the Day-Cycle are active, the Third Eye is inactive. When the two physical eyes shut down, as the Day-Cycle is transformed into the Night-Cycle, the Third Eye, which destroys all attachments to and illusions through the material world, opens up and gives the Soul of picture of the world’s mechanisms from an abstract height – that is, ‘out of time’. The Third Eye assists the ‘emptying out’ process, by providing a logic for it, a circular image or mandala that ‘explains’ why the world (personal and larger objective world) is shrinking, down-sizing.

The Third Eye helps to release the Soul from the pain of death – make no mistake, Night-Cycles are death experiences -- from the fear and the terror that are often associated with the Night-Cycle deconstruction phase. Identities are deconstructed too, which can be traumatic if one believes these ‘mortal’ identities are really one’s essence, really at the root of one’s nature. But if one’s identities are merely clothing one wears while performing in the endless play of the Day-Cycle, then stripping oneself of such colorful baggage is rendered more harmless by the greater understanding of the process being undertaken by nature, and this mutes the sting of death, and the fear of permanent dissolution.

The two eyes (the physical eyes) link man inevitably to the duality of the material world during Day-Cycles. The Third Eye synthesizes this duality into a image of wholeness that mystically marries the two forces of that duality into a functioning unit, out of time. The two forces of Darkness and Light, of Night and Day, of Woman and Man, only seem to be adversarial. In fact, these two forces are working together in the double evolution of humanity as a political-material being and also as a psychological-spiritual being.

VIII. LOVE, FIRST – PHILOSOPHY (AND RELIGON) AFTER

A note of explanation is probably required here. This is a love story. My roundabout attempts to paint a picture of my childhood years, to set a context for the love story, have now been punctuated by what many readers might find difficult or unnecessary digressions or diversions.

I apologize for the sudden permutation (emphasis on the word ‘sudden’).

When I first met Leslie Harmon I had already begun what would become a lifetime romance with philosophy – literature is merely philosophy dressed in interesting stories and fashionable clothes. My first philosophy class at the University of Wyoming in the Spring of 1974, my final semester in school – “Introduction to Philosophy” – triggered in me a life-long passion for ideas – the very essence of literature. Bertrand Russell asked me questions about determinism in that first meeting, questions which began in me a boiling condition of enthusiastic curiosity. Were we really free to choose any path in life – were we really able to choose to do what we could not choose or do?

I was the athanor – my soul was the athanor – and ideas were the fuel that lit the fire and fired the coal that created light, burning slowly, burning for a lifetime, burning bright.

My first novel was embedded with the issues that were raised in that class. I think I was the only student in the class who could not wait to arrive and begin discussing the abstract questions of philosophical inquiry -- Professor Crocker was my instructor: I believe that was his name . Or perhaps it was Crockett.

` I completed writing my first novel, A Silent Dell, in the Autumn of 1975. In the Summer of 1976, I met Leslie Harmon.

In the Summer of 1977, I lost Leslie Harmon, and re-began my love-affair with philosophy.

In the late-Summer of 1977, I began my second novel, Conversations On a Dying Age.

Being a poetic type, I was always more drawn to the philosophy embedded in literature, especially in poetry – Dante, Rilke, Goethe, Shakespeare, and then, tragically perhaps, James Joyce – and in ‘nature’ philosophers, such as Vico, Ficino and Oswald Spengler – than in the dry, arid, ‘masculine’ philosophy of traditional Western intellectual giants of philosophy – Aristotle, Hegel, Sartre, Descartes -- expounders of what I call the ‘philosophies of reason’, whom I would call the Day-Cycle philosophers. Reason is overvalued by many unless they also value unreason, poetic wisdom, giving this shadow voice equal time in their world-view. This is my premise. The philosophy of un-reason attracted me more, I must admit, the philosophy embedded in mythology, in poetry, and in scriptural writing.

Some writers tell stories through visual descriptions of the world: they tell you what they are seeing. I have admitted to my readers that I am essentially blind, and have been so almost since birth. This is a warning, also, in terms of the manner in which I tell stories. I do not see physical reality so well, visual phenomenon – so I have lost interest somewhat in visual phenomena. I tell my stories through the medium of ideas. Ideas are living things to me, entities. Ideas, as I see it, are closer to the essence of reality that is visual imagery. To comprehend and appreciate my writing, one must see the story I am telling as a progression of ideas, or themes, surface themes rather than buried or hidden themes. I am aware of most of these themes, and I try to make the reader aware of them also.

What many writers describe in detail visually, I tend to describe in detail psychologically.

I did not really begin to fully realize my ideas on the Day-Cycle/Night-Cycle processes of Time – with diagrams and graphic details -- until 2010, when my wife and I were living in Hanoi, Vietnam, some thirty-three years after my love for Leslie Harmon ‘expired’. I will define what ‘fully realize’ means later. I was introduced to these ideas, in a very deep way, in my descent into the Night-Cycle that Leslie Harmon represented. Remember, the first Night-Cycle of my current existence began in 1965 and ran (from Noon to Midnight) to 1983. In the center of that Night-Cycle appeared Leslie Harmon, who was very much my Venus acting as the Evening Star.

I will say again that ‘Night Cycle’ is a misleading terminology. The Night-Cycle runs from Dusk to Dawn; the Day-Cycle runs from Dawn to Dusk. In this sense, the Leslie Harmon Night-Cycle began in 1974 and ended in 1992.

I will note, at this point, and illustrate this point with another diagram, that every true Dusk-to-Dawn Night-Cycle begins and ends with the appearance of a very significant woman. The Dusk-to-Dawn Night-Cycle in 1974 began with the appearance of Leslie Harmon and ended with the appearance of my wife, Hoa-Lan Tran, whom I met in 1989, and with whom I began living in 1992. 1992 is the Dawn of the 1992-2010 Day-Cycle.

Leslie Harmon was to me my Venus, my Evening Star; and Hoa-Lan Tran was to me my other Venus, my Morning Star.

Leslie Harmon led me in to death, into despair, into emptiness, futility, emaciation, hopelessness, absolute solitude – these being the ultimate Night-Cycle conditions – which is a stage in alchemical process of emptying of the soul into nothingness, from which condition I could them be reborn and begin again the Day-Cycle process of filling up.

Leslie Harmon was my Beatrice, my Moon Goddess, my virginal evening light, who lit my way into the mythical Underworld, lighting the path I followed, where I found God again, hope again, renewal, spiritual power, and the elements of resurrection.

Hoa-Lan Tran was Venus waiting for me to turn the full round and prepare again a life on Earth. Two women: one stationed at the gates of Hell (Death in Autumn), the other stationed at the gates of Heaven (Life in Spring).

I loved and lost Leslie Harmon in 1977. I loved and married Hoa-Lan Tran in 1995. Eighteen years apart. As I have probably mentioned, Day-Cycles last 18 years; Night-Cycles last 18 years.