MJCwriting.htm

LAST LOVE OF A CHOIRBOY

FIRST PART: CHILDHOOD

I.

I read the news in the Laramie, Wyoming Sunday newspaper: Leslie Harmon was dead, following a short illness. She was twenty-nine years old.

This was the last act of a romantic epoch in my life; and the first act of a mystery which, because never truly solved, continues to haunt me in much the same way that earlier romantic epoch inspired me with awe.

First, I should explain, that this romantic epoch of which I speak was not directly experience by myself – that is, the love affair was between Leslie Harmon and my best friend, Michael Clause. I experienced the love vicariously, through the tales and emotional extravagances of my friend – being his chief confidant throughout the duration of the affair – yet, somehow, seeming to experience it with a great intensity, an even greater intensity than I have ever experienced my own rather intermittent romantic episodes.

It was a great love – the last great love I am fond of calling it, perhaps through some need on my own part to establish a link with greatness, with immortality, with a realm of experience larger than the trite deeds of mere men, the latter group of which I sincerely admit to being a member. This love was an act of power, an act which shook the Earth, shook everything in the orbit of this pair, shook the very foundation of my reality, shook my friend loose from my watchful protection into a far-away land of mists and dreamy illusions.

This great love, and what appeared at the time to be its culmination, was the end of my childhood in many ways. And, with the rupturing of my childhood, a whole new sense of the world, a world more poverty-stricken, in my view, succeeded the land of my own dreamy illusions.

This all probably makes little sense. I am not a writer by trade. I suppose I am a writer through necessity instead. By trade I suppose I am an ‘office manager’ – whatever that means. I am married, with a young son named Jake whom I named after the father of my friend, who, the father I mean, Jake Clause, being in many ways my father, certainly being much more my father that my real father ever was.

I intend to say very little about myself. This is not my story. I introduce myself and my situation only as a way of sketching my relation to the principals of this drama.

Michael Clause was born in Rawlins, Wyoming, December 17, 1950. Later, he would attach some mystical important to his being born at the mid-point of the century. This all came much later, however – and it probably should not even be mentioned at this time. We grew up together in Sinclair, Wyoming, a small oil refinery town situated some six miles west of both of our birthplaces, the Memorial Hospital in Rawlins.

At this point I should also introduce William Clause, Michael’s older brother, born one year earlier, October 26, 1949. If I should allow myself another digression this early in the tale, I would point out that Laura Clause, the older sister of Michael and William, was born October 26, 1948. Michael Clause was expected (even promised by Doctor Baker) to be born October 26, 1950. However, Michael resisted this precise pattern, holding out two additional months in the dark warmth of his mother’s womb. Michael would later attach mystical significance to his 11-month residence in the womb, connecting it to the 11-year cycles of the Sun’s ‘breathing patterns’, otherwise known as sun-spots. But that is a different story to tell, one that should come later I admit.

The formal names ‘William’ and ‘Michael’ came along somewhat later in life, when a kind of formal distance was desired by each, formalizing relationships, in the sense of driving a wedge between intimacy and friendship, reflecting the later need each felt for isolation – solitude, if you will – which became almost pathological in the end, when hermeticism of a sort succeeded the political activism each expressed related to civil rights and the Viet Nam War – when, as Michael was later fond of explaining, Time was dethroned by Space, and the Dream-Reality was giving birth by the Day.

These abstract conceptions, the later poetic language, hence, the later universe of the two brothers, should not discolor the early image of these two. The Clause Brothers were, truly, all-American boys: athletes, scholars, Catholic School boys, as adept at the repetition of Latin phrases and spelling gymnastics as they were at the secretive art of masturbation, as skilled in idealist fanaticism as they were buoyed by the love of nature. I am perhaps saying too much in too short a space. I don’t intend to reconstruct their entire youth – I should say ‘our’ entire youth, for my own early life, if disconnected from these two, and from their family, really resembles only the chaotic precision of jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered on the old brown cardboard table at which we all sat in the Clause Family yellow-brick house as the breath-heavy snows of Wyoming winters pinched life from the collared air and sent us in to the sweet hibernation to escape the icy winds and the inevitable suffocating darkness – that is to say, my life, apart from the Clause Family, must remain an incompleted image, rife with voids and devoid of colors, lacking sensation and also lacking form.

(Please excuse the awkward simile. An ‘office manager’ attempting to become a ‘writer’ surely, in excitement, might tend toward artificial phrasing at times. I apologize for this.)

It is important that I mention the winter early in this narrative. Winter is more than a season in southern Wyoming. Winter is a stage manager, a form of diction, an all-powerful deity to which all other beings paid humble obsequiousness.

Michael Clause, later in life, would say that the Winter was his true mother; that Winter, being the dominant mood, the dominant season of this landscape, created from its bosom its own children – or sub-elements – spilling these life-weary atomic factors out in to the other ‘seasons’ as ‘harvesters of the golden apple’ – a phrase totally alien to me, a concept unacceptable to my view of necessity, yet, in hearing Michael say it, with his magnetic certainty, an idea I could never quite shake, and which walks with me to this day, in some ways like a heavy burden I carry, a burden, mainly, as an unsolved clue, a riddle I might need to solve to really get closer to the source of Michael Clause’s passionate madness. Madness and language are always mixed, always materially connected.

I am a detective more than a writer. This is a mystery story – or so I am coming to believe.

There is a great mystery interwoven in all this mystical transformation. I watched my best friend change from comrade in ideals to passionate lover to battler of dragons, conqueror of fogs, to an Icarus absolved; from a willful lover of humanity, in his ideals at lease, to a woods-enchanted poet, speaking a language of beauty and horrible distance. To a man (two men really) at odds with the culture of materialism, indifferent to art and culture.

I lost Michael Clause somewhere in this process; and, in losing him, I lost the key to some greatness. And it is the utter loss of this world I feel most acutely. When a butterfly dies, all creation heaves a heavy sigh. It is the world’s loss. The butterfly must die, of course; yet – and we all understand this – the world the butterfly leaves behind, upon its death, is attendant to gravity and to the gradual disappearance of the light. The world can no longer fly.

When I read of Leslie Harmon’s death, something inside me also died. It was Michael Clause in me which died. I felt it very deeply. The death was instantaneous. The room shook; the lights quavered.

In many ways, Leslie Harmon was my last link to my friend. As long as she lived, in the same town as myself, Laramie, Wyoming, there was always a chance that Michael Clause might return. That was a great hope of my life. I felt inertia (fear would not do it) might pull my friend back to Earth somehow. I felt that sorrow for lost youth might supercede his journey, might force him to turn back, to the only woman who could absorb his pride, and make him real, make him less that the god he so desired to become.

Yes, Michael Clause was a proud young man. Proud out of fear, I am sure – for all pride, in its inverse, is fear. Fear of being discovered, perhaps. Fear of being forced to admit that godhood was an illusion, something the mind hatched as a trick on the body, constructed by little manias that built formal psychic strictures in childhood, when spirit and demonic practice played so freely with the vulnerable being.

My hope was that Michael Clause would appear at my door one day – I often imagined it – telling me that he needed to rest, that he needed to live near Leslie Harmon, in the same town, breathe the same air as his love did, even if their destinies were malformed. In my dream, I would be there to comfort my friend. I would be the one to offer him shelter.

I should tell you that Leslie Harmon was married when she met my friend. She had been married two weeks when they met. Her husband, Donald, was in graduate school, studying engineering at the University of Oregon.

Leslie went to work at the University Library that late summer, at which Michael Clause had been working for several years since his graduation. Michael worked the night shift. He wrote during the day. Yes, he was a writer – have I not mentioned that yet? Later in this story I will present to you some examples of his writing. He was even larger, as a person, than his writing – yet his writing does hold clues to the savage altitudes to which he could and did climb, brining musical notions back to Earth for those of us unable to fly, unable to see broader landscapes of speculation (I hate to use the word ‘truth’ in this context, everything being subject to relativism this day and age).

It was love at first sight – which might seem obsolete or out-of-date as a description in this modern age (they met in 1976) – but that is an essential clue to understanding this mystery. Each – Leslie Harmon and Michael Clause – each was out-of-date. Neither really existed in America in the 1970’s. It was as thought their love were written on a cloud. Not that it was without its physical side – how could it be! Yet there was something grand and heroic about their love, something sweeping in its scope, a battle for the Queen of Heaven, a battle which Michael Clause eventually lost – which swept him in to the underworld for ever.

The structure of this narrative may be disjointed – I wish to warn you early of this. I am no clever story-teller, but a novice seeking to share my memories with strangers. Please allow me my indiscretions, my asides, my occasional exaggerations – for they are the stuff of my remembrances. To cleanse this history by taking meat from the bone would cleanse it at the cost of its flavor. Afterall, sterility is no guide to creation. And color, certainly, is not the shape of deception.

I loved Michael and William Clause more than any people I ever met. They were my brothers. I lived with them as brothers from birth to our mid-twenties. When Life’s rude rotations suddenly tore me away from them, it seemed to me that, at that point, the world became flat. I moved in a lost agony of movement. I wan not clean any longer. I was not whole. I was not certain about my views, not as filled with the vigor of decision as I once had been.

I married not long after this happened, not really out of love, certainly not out of passionate love – rather, out of a desperate desire to be finished, a desire to be preserved in an easily-recognizable pattern, a pattern leading to the grave with that marvelous monotonal alacrity that one might see when watching a slaving beaver build its dam. Shut down the vision to the most local ambitions – to be like everyone else – and tune out the music that challenges unthinking ambition.

I wanted to hide from life when they left, for I had lost my twin towers, my twin protectors. And I had also lost young Michael, for whom I had acted as a protector for many years. Who would protect him now? Who would keep him from a tragic flowering?

I say I wished to hide from life when these brothers left town. I wished to bury my head in the bosom of a woman – one need not be a follower of Freud to understand that this woman replaced my own mother – never again to hear the cries of night which tried to freeze me, which tried to trap me in a dark aloneness. And frozen I became, of course. Frozen in place. We become what we most fear – and we fear what we most desire.

I came to move in a cautious arid circle about the sun. Never daring to be the Sun, itself, wishing only to be ruled by the mathematics of a mundane existence, surely measured.

Sometimes I am very hard on myself – judging myself quite harshly for my lack of imagination, or my lack of courage to step out of line. I tend to measure myself against the two brothers. They somehow seemed like gladiators – their later ‘doctrine’ of asceticism, of living close to Death at all times, certainly is an example of this, worthy of their favorite Roman, Marcus Aurelius.

Their angry damning of America, their self-imposed exile, was another example of their exacting code, fueled and framed by their Catholicism, no doubt, a fanaticism which sought to war wit the gods, damning a world which seemed to sanctify mediocre values. This was their greatest pain – for, in these Christs, were also Satans. Michael once told me that he had met Hitler, face-to-face (in a subtle sense, of course – in the world of the dead, the world of the shadows) – and he had been instructed by Hitler’s ghost to annihilate the world.

‘Even the Destroyer must be defeated,’ Michael concluded.

I did not understand this then – still, I’m not certain that I do. I do not doubt what he said however. I cannot doubt his experience. He lived in a land from which I am forbidden, where the laws are different, and the realities less fixed.

Michael once said: ‘Be thankful that you are forbidden from entering here. Keep your own mind. In this land there are only mountains with no limits…’

The second sentence, ‘Keep your own mind,’ as Michael pointed out to me, was lifted from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, a work from which he often quoted, the last time I saw him. Michael had come to view himself as Prometheus. Zeus commands Prometheus to annihilate mankind, in order that a new crop might be planted by the gods. Prometheus refuses to be the Destroyer; so, he is cast out of heaven, chained to the Mount of Caucasus (the ‘White Man’s Burden’ he called it), an exile from the joyful, for he had rebelled against the will of the Titans.

More will be said about this story as my own narrative develops. Michael Clause told me that in the structure of this myth, the secret of evolution of the Earth could be seen.

Michael Clause planted a great mystery in my mind.

He spoke of himself being the ‘father’ of children – ‘mind-born children’ he called them – saying: “It is the calling of other human beings to procreate the species. I have been called, instead, to give life to their minds…’

I am already telling your more about his later life than about his childhood. That is not my intention here. I wish to structure this sequence, at least superficially, in relation to Time. I find this rather difficult to do, however, since all Time, that is, all his life, seems interwove, like an exotic Persian rug, scenes lace to other scenes, attitudes merging out of previous statements or themes. The pure structure of Reason, with a Time-form of Future-Present-Pas, the straight line within the circle -- Michael Clause would say: ‘The diameter is the rule of Time. It is an erection; something man-made. When Time stops, the erection is gone.’ – does not really seem to describe the world in which Michael Clause lived, and into which his spirit, even now, seems to be pulling me.

Michael said: ‘There are Two Times. One, the everyday Time, Waking Reality, which we call Time. The other, eternal Time, Time without differentiation – the Fourth-Dimensional Time – which we call space, with its analogue, the World of Dreams, which is akin to NonBeing…’

I must come back to Earth. This is the later Michael speaking. Speaking through me, it seems – which frightens me no little bit. Sometimes, when sitting at this table, pecking at the keys of my Royal typewriter,, seeking to conjure up memories of my friend (actually, my friends, both Michael and William), I actually feel his presence in my room. I don’t know what it is. I mention it to no one; yet something is here with me, some force which seems to help organize me memories.

I will digress as I attempt to tell this story, as I must make mention, occasionally, of world events which fill my other side of experience. It is the Winter, actually the Autumn of 1982. October 30, a Saturday. The Cold War between Ronald Reagan and the frightened bears in Moscow heats up in a display of words. America has sunk into a deep sleep, a state of sleepwalking, in which any atrocity might occur. It is akin to Germany, before the rise of Hitler both brothers have assured me. I do not wish to believe that. There is a gnawing in me, however, which makes me fear their such dire predictions.

Bottles of Tylenol (aspirin) have been poisoned by a madman; and the insanity has received full play on our Midnight Journal news media stations. America now has a new fad. Mass poisoning of consumer items. I read where a football crowd, on being warned that the Pepsi they were drinking was poisoned, began to fall like fractured leaves. In all, fifty-nine fans were stricken. Later, we are told, that Pepsi has been acquitted – and these fans were found guilty, instead, of being subjects of ‘mass paranoia’.

I mention this since it is in line with the predictions of the Clause Brothers of their description of the ‘Night Reality’ we had entered. More prophecies will appear as I proceed. The later Clause Brothers and their prophecies were the same thing; they had become their ideas, leaving a great cavern, a chasm I should say, between those living at a different time and a different status than themselves…

But I must get back to Leslie Harmon, for it is only in her that gentle reality, or Hope, seems to abide. Leslie Harmon was born May 9, 1954, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her family moved several times; she grew up, mainly, in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, a bedroom suburb of New York, elite, excruciatingly civilized – millions of miles in social status and density of self-perception, from the tiny refinery town in which we all grew up, even if only distanced several thousand miles on the map. This is an important piece of evidence to digest, in fact. The distance between Leslie Harmon and Michael Clause was immense. Leslie Harmon, maiden name Rhoades, a descendant of the Queen of England, or so her family tree purported, a connected which she tried to diminish even while making sure to mention it. Leslie had been born in the clouds. She was petite, with long brown hair, hair falling below her waist, a delicate figure, an angel she seemed to Michael Clause, who had fallen into his world from some great height to stand before him. This great distance, of class, of breeding, of background, fueled their romance.

It is the foreign, the unknown, our opposites, we desire most.

Michael Clause, to Leslie Harmon, was as dark and mysterious as, to Michael, Leslie was bright. Leslie was Venus, the morning star.

Michael was a ‘night person’. His way of life ran counter to the norm. He was a writer, but a writer of dark, psychological studies. He was a mystic. He believed in mystery, needed mystery, labored in the dream light.

Each was a great mystery to the other, as deep as the ocean, and as dangerous, filled with storms.

II.

Michael Clause, although he liked to speak of himself as another Lord Byron, actually was closer to Keats in my judgment. Michael Clause was virginal when he met Leslie Harmon. Not a virgin, but virginal. (I’ll explain this later.) He was a Catholic Boy, an Ex-Catholic Boy, who had rejected the Church because of its falseness. He did not reject Catholicism, in its letter, so much as a Church which had soiled and betrayed the word of Jesus. He demanded perfection from his world. He could only love the personification of Perfection. Grace. Grace was perfection – so he had once claimed. Leslie Harmon was Grace personified to him. Her walk was light; she was erect, yet her step was light, fairy-like, filled with Joy.

Yes, she was a goddess of Joy, a goddess who raised him out of his underground life to show him the prospect of Love and its Virtue.

I have never known anyone as happy, as joyous, as Michael Clause, as this love began to blossom; nor anyone so desperate with pain when the love eventually fractured.

Michael Clause was the youngest child of Jacob Clause and Mary Ellen Clause, who had met, after World War II, while both were working at the Sinclair Oil Refinery. Mary Ellen was working to save enough money to travel to Australia, a journey she would never make, but which her son, William, would make, in 1974, as an English teacher, assigned to Perth, where he experience the ‘Down-Under’ with little sense of amazement.

Jake Clause had worked at the refinery prior to the war, being originally hired on the basis of his athletic skills; each town in the 1930’s fielded a softball team vied, eventually, for national honors – hence, good athletes were given priority for jobs; a good team for Sinclair (the town) was good advertising for Sinclair (the oil company). After spending three years in Europe during World War II, fighting in George Patton’s army, which experience Jake rarely mentioned, until later, when the boys showed real interest in his exploits, Jake Clause returned to his job, having gained seniority in the company on the basis of his work and military service.

As an aside, I might mention that Jake Clause had, as trophies of his European experience, a German military helmet, and photographs of death camps he helped to liberate in 1945, including boxcars filled with naked corpses and nearly-starved Jewish men and women. The Clause Brothers clung to these mementos as indicators that Evil, as a force of nature, did exist in the world – and a very real pride that their father, Jake Clause, had fought on God’s side against the Devil’s side and had defeated the Devil and saved life on earth, preventing a slide into slavery, murder and darkness.

For several years after the war, Jake worked, played softball (the Sinclair team twice making the National Tournament in Chicago, once winning the championship), drank with his friends, live (or so it is described, although I have my doubts about it) a care-free life, without much thought for the future or of plans to become a husband and a father.

There is an age a man reaches when the voices begin to suggest: It is time for you to be married. Is it the voice of the gods, seeking to direct a man away from…what? A meaningless life? Competition with the gods themselves? What is it truly? Voices from the grave? Voices of my ancestors…?

I heard those voices also, not only from my family and friends – voices within, insistent voices, angry voices, voices demanding I submit to my fate. I gave in rather easily to the voices. Why resist such threatened terror?

Jake Clause also heard those voices. Every man hears them – as does every woman. Jake heard the voices – yet he resisted them. For a man to marry – yes, I know it as a fact – he must be willing to castrate himself. Yes, castration, in the name of Law and Order. He must give his power to the woman; he must accept his own demise. He does not lose his power totally, however. He rules his children; he even rules his wife at times. Yet he does not oppose the Powers That Be, by expressing his continued ‘freedom’ from social strictures. The unmarried man is a threat to order. He is, in effect, saying: I will challenge your authority! I will not submit to your rules and your conventions…!

The act of self-castration was not an easy thing for Jacob Clause to do – nor was it easy for his two sons, or even for their elder sister, who still has not married, though she is living with her partner (divorced), and her daughter and son. Jacob Clause (he never called himself ‘Jacob’ – it was always ‘Jake’, for ever seeking the proximity of the informal appellation, although he, too, lived at a distance from all) – Jacob Clause was a mystery to his friends: a gentle, sensitive man, yet a man whom other men did not cross. He was powerful in his being – powerful enough to be sensitive. He existed between both worlds: neither a brute, nor a weakling; neither of ‘management’ (although a ‘white collar’ worker, an administrator in the Payroll Department at the refinery), nor of ‘labor’, having friends in both divisions, yet belonging heart-and-soul to neither.

His sons followed this directive, although, often, it was not easy. Both young men were passionate. The Viet Nam War (and the social upheaval of the 1960’s) turned them against their father’s house, their father’s government, the so-called ‘establishment’: they marched in the streets, condemning the American government and it’s policies; ultimately, the rejected ‘success’ in a blemished social system, which they considered fascist and totalitarian, seeing the world polarized as black and white. Either a system is perfect or it is evil. Of course, time would show us that life was rarely this simple or categorical.

It is dangerous for a nation to preach idealism, for, when Memory is born, and crimes of the past uncovered (no nation is without historical crimes0, a nation of Idealists condemn themselves to Hades. So it was wit the two brothers. The condemned America to hell, for the sins of the Fathers had been visited upon them.

That was later, of course.

Michael and William were ambiguous by nature – that is, not fixed, mysterious. Their early lives show this pattern. Although they lived in Sinclair, they went to school in Rawlins (St. Joseph’s Catholic School) – hence, they did not totally belong to Sinclair (and their friends in Sinclair), nor cold they totally belong to the world of their schooling.

They rode a bus every day (we rode a bus every day), in which they were carried back and forth between the two worlds: Sinclair being the heaven pole, peaceful, settled, beautiful; Rawlins, the hell pole: dry, noisy, violent, filled with racial tension (Mexicans and Anglos). This movement between two worlds became a defining pattern of their lives.

Mercury became the symbol of this (especially with Michael, especially when he discovered that Michael the Archangel was connected in Catholic theology with the planet Mercury, the ‘Messenger’): he who carried messages from Gods to Men, yet belonged to neither world, for each was incomplete, demanding some form of allegiance to their incompleteness. The world, to be complete, needed to have both sides melded. This, indeed, became the logic of the metaphor of marriage, which Michael came to understand during his time spent with Leslie Harmon.

Man was the Day World. Woman was the Night World. For wholeness to occur, marriage of the two worlds was required. The opposite of Wholeness was alienation, which was a form of mental illness.

Man was Life, with all its requisite competition, struggle and domination. Woman was Death, rest, peace, comfort. Life and Death were two parts of the same whole. Struggling against Death was allowed as a part of the Life force – but anything would also have to submit, at some point, to the force of Night, to peace, to comfort, sleep, in order to become whole.

This, of course, was a later understanding. A man has to forgive his father, in order to be able to forgive himself. Forgiving imperfection. Forgiving friends, and family, and even adversaries. Without this, there was no entry into God’s kingdom.

Neither Michael nor William were good followers. William once used the line of Groucho Marx in describing this propensity: ‘I could never respect any club that would stoop so low as to have me as a member.’

William grew more humorous in his later years. He laughed at reality: he saw fate as mere folly.

Each of the Clause Brothers saw himself as a leader, yet wished not to have a following. Each craved solitude – hence, cultivated anonymity – although Michael more so than William. William had a more social nature, was more popular, had had girl friends throughout school, had always had a group of friends. Michael had always been much more isolate.

Yet a dark, magnetic power is grown in solitude; and power tend to attract new alliances. The art of having friends and not being possessed by those friends is a delicate creation and proposition. To rule the Earth or to rule the Heavens? To be a Man or to be a God? That, really, was the question….

The philosophical issue of Power haunted Michael during his last days on the earth (I use this phrase with purpose) – for, as Michael told me: ‘To seek power, to achieve power, is to be cursed with power.’

I should add here that by ‘power’ Michael was clearly referring to the ‘power’ espoused by Carlos Casteneda in his books in the 1970’s, indicating power in the unseen world, the non-physical worlds. William Clause fell under the spell of Casteneda for a time. But to Michael Clause, Casteneda reeked of death, darkness, the nagual – Michael, instead, fell under the spell of Alice Bailey and, later, Helena Blavatsky, and the theosophical movement generally, which stressed that Theology, Philosophy, and Science were, originally, part of the same system, unified – and only later became differentiated, opposed, disciplines, when Western Science split the atom apart.

Michael argued with me that the task of Western thinkers would now be to reassemble the broken pieces back in to a whole picture again. He felt that this was his duty as a writer, to re-present the entire picture.

My narrative becomes heavy with philosophical disputations, which are not demons to the majority of us, and certainly not to myself. I am a man; I have no pretensions to being a god; nor could I have; it has never been an issue to me.

There is no way for me to tell this story without delving in to the nature of these philosophies. Michael Clause, in the end, had ceased to be Michael Clause. He had become a shadow being; he had become ‘non-personal’. In the end, he believed himself to be a dangerous man. He spoke of his own darkness, his own forsaken nature – although speaking, at the same time, with light emanating from his being, and an ever-buoyant spirit. He had become both worlds, light and darkness, hope and despair, peace and war, fused in to one.

As I was saying, Michael was virginal when he met Leslie. His inclination had been to wait for Perfection to arrive. He had been pursued by other women, whom he rejected out of hand, though not with scorn, more out of embarrassment, even fear of hurting them. He was the Hunter; he would not have it otherwise. There must have been an innate sense in him of which ‘game’, which prey, was inaccessible. Only those women who were absolutely inaccessible did he pursue. There were many reasons for this. Fear of success was surely one; and fear of being possessed by the object of his triumph. ‘Each dream or goal must be inaccessible!’ he once told me. ‘Immortality is the pursuit of the inaccessible!’

Immortal love, then, by definition, must be the pursuit of the woman who could not be caught, only glimpsed, only fathomed.

Leslie Harmon was truly inaccessible to Michael Clause. Class separated them. Class philosophies separated them. Marriage separated them. The custom against adultery…yes, this it was that possibly brought them together. It was the breaking of law which surely must have appealed to both of them. Leslie screamed to shatter the bonds of matrimonial convention, of a marriage without true love; Michael struck with his sword against the corrupt, fossilized, artificial institutions in order to save his princess…

Michael must have known, deep within himself – he was very good at seeing phenomena right to the root – that this love was doomed to tragedy. Another reason Michael did not accept the advances of other women was a kind of noble understand that, in unrequited love, one loves and the other is loved. The one who loves is doomed to break; the other may pass from passionate flattery and compassion to sorrow, yet ultimately demands freedom. Guilt may follow this; but never the death of Love as an Idea, of Love as an Absolute, of Love as a god. Michael must have understood this at some level: in his love with Leslie, he, Michael, would need to be the one most deeply wounded; to wound was not so noble a role.

Some people curry tragedy, finding in the rending of the Soul a more noble life, a more grand and glorious fate. So it was with Michael Clause. He demanded tragedy. To be a man was not enough; to be a fallen god was virtue.

III.

I have intentions of breaking this narrative into four segments: Childhood; The Notebook (a journal and assorted papers kept by Michael during and about his love affair with Leslie Harmon); Letters (letters written by Michael to myself, after he chose exile, left Laramie, Wyoming and went to live with his brother in Eugene, Oregon); finally, The Last Act (clues and reminiscences from those who knew the Brothers Clause in Laramie and then in their last days in Eugene).

This is a fine outline or structure for me to work with. It won’t be pure in its construction I am sure. I am too prone to reverie, too undisciplined in my thinking, to rigidly build a system, and then to live in it alone. I warn you about this structure as a way of defining it to myself. Now that I have warned the reader I can move forward to something else.

William and Michael Clause were the closest of brothers, the closest I ever knew. Not that there was no conflict between them. There was conflict, competition, desire to be accepted, and seen as triumphant. William was the older, the protector – even his name, William, from ‘Will-Helmet’, ‘defender of the Will’, seemed to define his role on Earth in relation to his brother.

Michael had an iron will, was absolutely self-disciplined; in less complimentary terms, he was a bit of a fanatic, who struggled with precision, with virtue and with rage to raise an image or an edifice of perfection. I have mentioned this before, yet it bears magnifying. And it was only much later than Michael came to realize that to strive for perfection was to create its shadow or opposite, which he called Evil. The struggle for power, or the will to self-perfection, had a mirror-effect: the creation of a kind of fascism. He saw this eerie fate strung like beads before his eyes. To be Jesus at one point in time was also to create Hitler at another point in time. The Jew who was not a Jew; neither Jew nor Gentile; existing in and beyond both worlds…

Michael came to fear anti-semitism in himself and in his nation. He became haunted by his visions. He saw too much. The Future had consumed him.

I am telling you now too much about Michael’s demise, and not enough about his youth.

Sinclair, Wyoming was an oddity in itself. It was an old fashioned “Company Town’ – meaning all the residents worked for the same ends, work for the same company. Cynics would point out to him that the same ends everyone worked for was Harry Sinclair and the Board of Directors in New York City. There is some truth in that. But it isn’t the whole picture. When the town was founded, the refinery was built by an army of men living in tents in the city limits. Once the refinery was operational, all the men who had built the refinery had work. They then built, one-by-one, the houses in the town. As a house was built, a tent or a wagon was taken down in the park and a family moved in to the house. This went on for several years, until all the men working at the refinery had a house for themselves and their family.

Michael was never aware (nor were William or I, until years later) of the class distinctions and political complications hidden beneath the surface of our fine little Eden. We were children, living in a peaceful, ordered, self-sufficient universe. If there were troubles wit the plumbing, our mothers would call the refinery and plumbers would be sent from the plant to fix pipes. Painters from the refinery kept all the houses in town refurnished. Windows were replaced by refinery artisans; electricians resurrected dead lighting and broken fuses; carpenters appeared when the stairs were rotting.

It all sounds rather idyllic, this scene from the Middle Ages, with these guilds and hierarchies of order. And this idyllic town was our childhood microcosm, our picture of how the world worked and how the world should work. Little wonder that the Clause Brothers would lean, in later years, when molding a socio-political vision, toward the age of faith in which each city was a country, each country was a culture; and nature, the world beyond, was inhabited by gods and powers whose primary intent was to profit children.

Some might say that the problem of the Clause Brothers was that they refused to grow up; that they never faced reality. In clinging to this ideal of life, the City-State, a miraculous island of light, governed by a beneficent deity, the brothers walked a thin line between a communist and a Christian utopia, with elements borrowed from both sides of the political spectrum. The Clause Brothers became ascetics in an attempt not to descend into adulthood, into the crass pursuit of goods, consumerism being a modern religion without the reference point of God or decent living, just one individual atom armed against the next, competing eternally for the right to purchase the next technological device wrested from the earth.

A whole generation became anti-modern. The theology (the psychological imperative) of apocalypse came in like storm clouds sweeping over a nation. And the nation, one strong, thriving, youthful and exuberant, was brought to its knees as the darkness fell.

Yes, the two brothers rebelled against Time, rebelled against their own aging process, and sought to transform Reality into a Never-Ending Childhood. There is no denying this. And I did the same. And our whole nation does it now.

The economic depression we are experiencing -- which threatens to decay into an international anarchy, followed by the inevitable sinking into nationalistic antagonism – this depression is a reflection of that psychic need to rest and to escape Time.

As I have written, Michael spoke at length to me about our nation entering the Night Cycle in our cultural manifestation; about how, when religion, symbolism, and interest in the dream language, replaces the language of mathematics and science, the language of the straight line (he said that the diameter was an emblem of the man, and the straight line was a symbol of the man’s erect penis, which was a magic wand of sorts for a time, but then, after having completed its act of creation, it became dead again, and was, in his words, ‘absorbed by the circle’, Space, or the Woman’s Womb) the culture, and its elements, escapes back into a dreamscape body -- the hierarchical order of a society breaks and all elements return to a soup or undifferentiated whole, represented by the circle. Chaos if you will. The culture sleeps (sleep-walks, perhaps is more accurate), turning away from the tyranny of Time and Causality, escaping in to the phantasmagoria of nonbeing and Space. Each element became a body is space; Life, in its structure, became atomic; only in re-awakening did a culture, again, become molecular….

Michael Clause never really felt like he fit in Sinclair. All his early life he felt as though he was biding time before leaving. As thought the point he occupied was nothing more than a stopping point toward infinity. One of the last songs written by John Lennon (before the principle of Peace was murdered by the principle of Chaos) had the line: ‘I’m just sitting here watching the wheel go round and round. I really love to watch it roll…. I’m just sitting here doing time…’

Both Michael and William came to feel the same, that they were sitting doing time. ‘Waiting for Godot!’ they would laugh. Waiting; the power of patience. ‘All of life is waiting,’ William would say with a laugh. ‘Waiting for what?’ I would ask. ‘Waiting for Death,’ he would respond, although with a laugh, a kind laugh, not morbid – almost defiant. Defying life, it seemed to me. Yet what could I tell of this other world they had seen?

They rejected marriage and fatherhood and career as having no matter (a pun of a sort, unintended). They waited like John Lennon waited. Waiting for God to relieve them from Life’s sorrow and emptiness.

When Michael’s love for Leslie Harmon disintegrated, a great issue stood naked before him. Love as an Absolute – had this been abolished by his experience? If Love was an Absolute, and his Love had broken, then was Love not proven an illusion afterall. Another false promise? Another form on empty self-delusion?

Two figures, two symbols, stood before Michael: Don Juan and Tristan. For the one, love was very occasional and non-sacred; for the other, much as it was for Dante, Love happened once in a lifetime. Love was a holy sacrament.

Love had been awakened in Michael, an all-consuming love, which ate the world in fiery bites and tore the sap from aching leaves and cold moons. Desire rose within him, having slept for so long in his darkened sanctuary. Desire was hard and insistent and incapable of retreat.

If his love for Leslie Harmon had been true, then she would have left her husband to be with him; and, if not true, as true as it seemed and felt – nothing had seemed or felt truer to Michael Clause in his life – then was Love, itself, the Ideal, a mere illusion, one which Michael Clause could never again worship because of its failure. In other words, was Love a false god?

I speak mainly of Michael’s feelings, since we talked quite often about them, and since I have the notebook in which he expressed his feelings quite succinctly and explicitly, keeping word for word records of their conversations and his troubled longings.

I will also speak of Leslie’s feelings, mainly through the voice of Anita Springs, Leslie Harmon’s confidante during and after the romantic cataclysm. Anita Springs was with Leslie Harmon that Saturday when she died. The mysterious circumstances accompanying the death will also be reported.

I have never felt America so depressed as I felt here today. I went out last night to visit a friend, rectnly separated from his wife. He was playing cards with other ‘bachelor’ friends, drinking beer and eating fried won-ton. I stayed only a few minutes. The depression was so thick; the hopelessness seemed like a lion in the tombs, scaling the scene with desperation to flee. People have gone very deep in to themselves, to try to escape the death which now stalks the streets and fields.

Yes, dragons live deep in the self. If you go in you must be prepared to fight; and you must fight with the strength of thousands; and, if you win, you merely hold your own, praying for, waiting for, Day, which will scatter Anxiety, and will prepare you for conflict. War. Even nuclear war? Yes, perhaps. Perhaps even the unthinkable. Suicide it is – a form of suicide. For it is annihilation we desire, annihilation of our own sorrow, our own loneliness, our own atomic existence which gives us so little back.

At least I have this story I am writing. It lifts me away from my fears, from the Earth’s darkness, into the evanescence of my imagination. All things are glorious in the wealth of the air. I walk amid legions here; and I see two lovers in the stars. Vega and Altair perhaps. The Weaver Fairy and the Buffalo Boy, kept apart by the gods, allowed to meet on the earth for a short time only each year…

Snow is beginning to fall again. I sit in my attic study, removed from my wife and son, who, apparently, are below in the den. I hear the television. I assume they surround it.

Winter has such a grand beauty here. Snow seems to cleanse everything, covering the aching Earth with its coat.

I don’t mean to be prosaic.

I had a dream last night, after my experience with the bachelors, coming home dejected, my house feeling empty and cold: and I feeling quite alone. A giant, a man about eight feet tall, with huge muscles, dressed in a dark t-shirt, appeared in my office (I work as the manager of the University Student Union). He was immense, powerful, wrathful, unjudging in his fury. I feared his presence, tried to usher him out before the others in the office saw him. He left; I watched him from my window; he stood outside the building, placing something near the door.

‘My God!’ I cried. ‘He has a bomb! We need to get out of here…!’

He appeared again in the office; he shattered everything. The entire office was demolished. I tried to get away. I fled down a staircase to the left, on the opposite side of the room from where this monster stood. Half-way down the stairs, I met him coming up. He took me in his arms: I could not get away from him: his power was absolute.

I eventually escaped somehow – I don’t remember how – and ran to find my home. It was not my home here in Laramie, however, nor even my childhood home in Sinclair. It was my real home, somewhere far away, yet safe. I ran toward the top of the hill – yet, in looking back, I saw the monster watching me.

I woke up terrified by this vision. My wife tried to comfort me; I was haunted by the image. The monster was myself. The monster wished to annihilate my circumstances. Yet I also feared that the monster had a concrete, literal reality. The man with the bomb. I thought of Ronald Reagan.

Each president we elect is a manifest symbol of our cultural life-stage. This was an idea which both William and Michael told me years ago; I did not understand what they meant by this. It was too abstract for me – too absolute – in its obscurity. I saw it last night, as I awoke from my tormented image.

I am the monster with the bomb.

I am Ronald Reagan.

I am an actor in a B-grade movie who desperately desires to carry the world back to childhood.

What has happened to us now? Where are we going? Where have we been?

I should not burden you with this vision. I am usually optimistic. I am a hard worker. I like to work. I need to work. Yet, when this titanic energy for creation has no outlet, and turn in on itself – the Monster seeks to destroy his creator…

And I had promised not to speak much of myself.

IV.

One of the earliest memories I have of Michael Clause (a second-hand memory), a story often told by Mary Ellen Clause, Michael’s mother, especially when a glass of evening wine or beer had loosened her tongue and primed her emotions, releasing a flood of memories associated with her own Golden Age, centered around Michael’s will-nature making itself known in the first years of his life: when dinner was late, or when he was not paid enough attention by his mother or father, Michael would hold his breath until he passed out – not that this is all that unique, being an experience of many parents; yet the duration of this behavior, lasting off-and-on for several years, was somewhat peculiar. Even more alarming to his parents was Michael’s supplemental self-assertion: sticking his fingers into electric outlets, experiencing a shock that would shake his tiny frame in uncontrollable fits of pure blue intensity until mother or father would knock him from the source of his excitement.

Indeed, Michael’s coming in to the world, as I have suggested, was attended with the same willful attitude, that same stubborn resistance to physical law which would be the mark of much of his later strife. His insistence on a birth date near to the Winter Solstice, instead of being clustered with his Scorpio family (mother Mary Ellen, sister Laura, and brother William were all Scorpios) in October and November, showed very clearly the power of his will as adamantine proof of his powers of orchestration. He was fond of claiming this at least, feeling that his own will had turned him in to an 11-month baby.

As I have written, Michael was delicate, thin, shy as a boy, protected by his big brother, even more so by his older sister. He was dreamy, spending hours at a time by himself in a basement room. His mother would check on him, hour after hour, worrying aout him, finding that he had not moved, that he was totally absorbed in some project which had, presumably, no real value in itself, being the means, instead, by which young Michael slipped into an area without bounds.

Michael, even when very young, was fiercely independent. Early in life he learned to escape tyrannical situations by withdrawing into the atmosphere of dreams wherein he ruled the world simply through silent concentration. William loved his brother ferociously, wished to protect him, to possess him, to possess him through ruling him. Nothing infuriated William so much, and rendered him so powerless, as Michael’s ability to abstract himself from such oppression. Michael could, at a moment’s notice (in words he would later use) ‘manifest inwardly’, thereby rendering the physical reality obsolete, or, at the very least, non-obstructive, unobtrusive, and rendering Michael’s older brother largely reduced as a form of tyranny.

Michael was never very competitive. Winning was not obligatory to him. Winning a game or a race was quite irrelevant. Winning passed away. The excitement of the competition was superior to the winning – but even this excitement of competition passed. Again, win or lose, he was left alone, as he desired it, free from the flurry of movement, and the pressing in of the other voices.

He was truly a Winter Child, reflective, silent, dark (physically – and, later, he’d be told, spiritually as well). No one ever knew him. It could be said, accurately I believe, that none of us are every truly known. With Michael, however, no one, at least until Leslie Harmon, ever really penetrated his armor. His armor, put simply, was his distance from the Earth. At a glance, a word, he could travel aeons, abstract himself in to a form which was (I call it) ‘non-human”: an ‘angelic’ location it seemed to me, becoming entirely self-sufficient, melancholy, cold perhaps, yet not unkind, and not untouched.

With Leslie, this changed. He ‘fell’ from his great distance, falling in love, like Lucifer from his minioned heights. Like Icarus from his smoky ascendancy. His crash was devastating, to all who knew him. His grief was not without its grace; his madness from grief was not lacking in magnitude; indeed, the entire episode was pregnant with magnitude; he was like some fallen god, tearing the curtained Earth to shreds with his anguished, lonely fury, his silent hopeless dance of pain.

I wanted to reach out to him, to help him bear his fractured image, the vacuum of a broken idol: yet, even in his suffering, he was distant. His brother reached him; only his brother could reach him; I tried, yet failed, never being able to fathom such loss, such intensity of disrepair. I never really found him again. In some ways, I believe he died when his love died, when his love was torn from its fragile soil, when he fled from the site of his pain. He never stopped fleeing. He sought to climb the skin of the heavens. He tried to find a hole in the sky. And, having apparently found the hole in the sky, he never really returned…

To comprehend the transformation of this young angel, his journey thorugh hell and back again, from All-American Idealist to Foresaker of the World, it is necessary to comprehend the influence of Catholicism on his world-view. There is no Catholic so adamantine, so immovabl, in his pursuit of truth ( a seeming absurdity), as the Ex-Catholic. The Ex-Catholics are the true Catholics, a dispersed army of Jesuits, living in the world but not at home in the world, without community of sorrow or faith in custom, seekers of some Truth (some anti-Truth), some form a absolute experience. They are the dangerous ones, crusaders for the non-existent, tyrants of self-damnation – and, therefore, damnation of the world as an obsolete relfection of a purer image: seekers after Death, who holds the key to a Second Childhood…

And this last phrase leads me again to a fresh understanding of why this structure of narrative I am seeking to develop cannot be so rigid, so linear as some would like. My tendency to slip from anecdotes about or descriptions of the Clause Brothers’ (first) ‘childhood’ into similar particles of evidence from their most recent experiences, their ‘second’ childhood, if you will, is reflective of the nature of their travels through the circuit of life.

This section, CHILDHOOD, includes images and adventure from the Clause Brother’s entire life (Michael’s life; William, apparently, still lives, somewhere, having disappeared without a word after the death of his brother) simply because they never left their childhood. CHILDHOOD might be the title of the book itself, had not the image, the remembrance, of Michael, actually, of the three of us, as choirboys, been too devastating (in its innocence) for me to eschew.

The three of us sang together, with many other St. Joseph’s School neophytes, led by Sister Mary Olive, a rotund, cherubic figure, rotund also in good humor and humanity, who led us in our notes as a water-buffalo leads her young through chest-deep streams toward higher ground. We stood above the congregation, in the loft, peering down at the hatted and unhatted (men and women sat on different sides of the church in those early days, the women with hats, the men bare-headed), lifting our spirits in chords of worship, raising our lilting spirits into the rafter for wondrous worship.

Singing made us clean, it seemed. Many of us could not sing; some refused to sing, merely mouthing lyrics in a silent calisthenic, fearful of being discovered in tuneless mediocrity or considering singing unworthy, unsophisticated and unnecessary. Michael loved to sing, however. He would lose himself in song, merging himself with the other tremors scaling up toward heaven, reaching beyond with the velvet of his voice, building in some violet network a picture of reality experienced only by the sense of joy that was hidden somewhere in his song.

Catholic School children have a different quality about them, compared with Public School children. We all became painfully aware of this, after some eight years of ‘private’ schooling, when we attended the only high school in Rawlins, a ‘public’ school, Rawlins High School. Public School children were wilder, more experienced (more sinful, more cynical, more jaded) – and even more violent. Rougher; less disciplined. Every year a new group of lambs were thrown in to the ring with the more raffish elements of the town, more experienced socially, sexually; more educated scientifically; more aggressive athletically -- less sequestered, generally – with whom these new usually well-mannered, well-groomed, reserved, semi-paragons of virtue were forced to compete and dwell and communicate and be molded. Angels cast into the world of the beasts. Choirboys turned from their cloister and song, turned out like swallows, into a sky ruled by hawks.

It was as exciting as it was dangerous. The world was enlarged, complicated, enriched, even as it was soiled (a better word is annihilated) by its magnification. This transition was a challenge to the Clause Brothers (as it was to all of us). William made the transition quite easily, although he, too, had his moments of emotions and moral crucifixion.

I might say that the transition was even more difficult for Michael, although I’m not sure that was true. William had already preceded him, laying the groundwork for his advent. His sister Laura had preceded him even earlier; indeed, she broke the ice in nearly all the initiatory rituals of the odyssey into man- and woman-hood required of unsuspecting babies forced into the role of awkward androids. She suffered for her ‘leadership’, having to become the second mother of the two brothers at such an early age, a responsibility which forced upon her such a seriousness of purpose (early transformation into adulthood), that her own childhood appeared to be stunted, distorted, causing her to leap from child to adult in such a short length of time that her sense of humor never really survived the demand.

Laura’s world became narrowed by responsibility so early in her life that it never really expanded beyond the confines of her town, the smallest perimeter of interest an adult might be capable of experiencing. The practical concerns – of protecting and guiding and disciplining her brothers – suffocated the ‘child’ in Laura Clause to the point that she quickly became excluded form the world of phantoms and planets and political polarizations which only the lyricism of drams can mold and which was and ever remained the stuff which filled the shape of the world of her two brothers.

William left childhood for a time. I have mentioned his journey to Australia to teach high school English after he completed college. I have not mentioned his love in high school (Michelle was her name, not insignificantly), who initiated him in to the ritual of flesh, she being, at the age of fourteen, practiced in the art of love, as eager to teach as she was dedicated a student; I have also not mentioned his other love, both of flesh and of spirit, the two usually not having the same object, name or complicated resolution. I have not mentioned that William contracted syphilis from a pretty blonde in college whose greatest ambition in life was to be able to sleep with Rod Stewart, the English rock star. William was more worldly, and more physical that Michael, at least up to a point.

Michael’s transition to the chaotic world of High School was also rendered less trying by his aforementioned skill of abstracting himself mentally or spiritually from difficulty. Essentially, Michael’s transition to the larger world was excruciating, as any shattering of identity is bound to be, of being swallowed by a mass of motion, by a density of a world pre-existent and resolutely unconcerned with his presence. Yet it was not the lack of recognition that troubled him; rather, it was the lack of anonymity. It was the danger of being pulled form out of a coiling mass, differentiated by name, by insistance on identity, which really troubled the displaced choirboy.

He was skilled in the art of disappearance. The art of re-entry, of being forced to stand amid Earthlings was more difficult, because transparent. He was being asked to wear a mask. And he would wear one, longing almost immediately to take it off. If he could have stayed for ever in his room certainly he would have chosen that. Yet Life called him out. Life demanded he perform.

It is no wonder that, later, as a writer (another mask, he knew), Marcel Proust came to charm him, not only because of his magical literary universe, his labyrinthine prose, and serene, metrical, symphonic human metaphysic – but also with his reclusive lifestyle, his ultimate self-exile, his retreat into the cork-lined bedroom of his childhood, into the heart of the metre of childhood itself, which Michael believed was the goal of our surging and brutal conquest of landscapes: Ages, monuments of centuries, the length of adulthood spent twisting, stealing, killing, lying, cheating, in order to return to the land of our Youth. And in this Youth to find annihilation, sweet in its essence, if, indeed, bitter in its husk.

Michael once said to me, commenting on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey: ‘The only really compelling scenes in the movie were the first and the last – this, certainly, intended by its maker. Birth and Death, with a strange, laborious rather flat intermezzo filled with striving. That middle string of necessity being the long conquest of Mundane Time – that ragged Summer of discontent. A task, a cross: all precedent to disengagement…’

It is the fate of the tragic to be obsessed with Death. Great art seems to spring from this obsession. The greatest of men, perhaps, are those who live the closest to Death, thereby recognizing Her significance in every step they take – and, through this, also, the true significance of Life…

The question of the gender of Death: yes, Michael believed that Death was a woman, at least his own Death was a woman. Perhaps Death appeared as a Man to the woman. I don’t know. We never discussed that.

He believed that Death (as a process) was a form of love, a form of orgasmic extinction, in which (for himself), the ‘unattainable woman’, the Muse, Immortality herself (perhaps Shekinah in Jewish myth), absorbed the isolated soul drawing him out from his isolated existence. Real Love was finally attained: the Absolute: the Ideal.

Michael became obsessed with Death, after his love for Leslie Harmon disintegrated. He began to study symbols, the occult, old scriptural writings. He had no need of religion, as an institution; yet the kernel of vision, hidden in symbolic writing, led him deeper and deeper into the ancient nature of the world. He came back toward his Catholicism, not as a form of state so much, rather as a history of solar strife. Early Christianity, Gnostic in its nature: this interested him much more. Christ became a symbol of his own life, his own struggles: a symbol of the Soul in all life, animate and inanimate, organic and, yes, even, inorganic matter. The Sun-Hero was the soul who existed in every culture, who turned, in Time, through all the seasons, all the houses of the Solar Clock, the mansions of Light and the phantom-mansions of the Shades.

Michael’s own life became mythological. The mundane became mythological – which, he said, was what happened in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Out of mundane time was born the Life-Death transition, which was mythological by nature.

He came to see the history of the Earth, the history of Life, Universal History…he saw this story of Eternity reflected in himself. He was not only who he was in his Time-Body as Michael Clause he was also all that had come before and all that would come after….

I don’t really understand exactly what he saw. I have his letters, which he sent to me from Eugene, which certainly represent bits of his holographic form and logic. I have also portions of his great work Conversations On A Dying Age, to which he devoted himself up to the end. The original manuscript was not found after his death; people who knew him speculated that William may have left with the manuscript; some even conjectured that William retired to the woods to live some hermetic life, perhaps to study his brother’s writing. Another remembered Michael saying he would leave, in his work, a map by which William would be able to see the future, to lead his American society our of its youthful turmoil. All remains speculation, however. William left his belongings after Michael’s death, simply disappearing, contacting no one, just vanishing.

I will present these ideas of Michael later in this story. At present I am more concerned with understanding the early life of the man, and his brother.

MJCwriting.htm