Psychology
Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 3)
May 23, 2013
“Conway went to the balcony and gazed at the dazzling plume of Karakal; the moon was riding high in a waveless ocean. … He was only partly unhappy, but he was infinitely and rather sadly perplexed. He did not know whether he had been mad and was now sane, or had been sane for a time and was now mad again.”
- Lost Horizon, chapter 11 (the scene where Conway makes up his mind to leave Shangri-La with Mallinson)
How does Lost Horizon end?
Shangri-La, from "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004)
My old friend Professor Marc Bregman, to whom I owe the impetus to read Lost Horizon–and whose reading of the book is quite different from mine–tells me that the movie version ends without too much ambiguity. As in the book, Conway leaves Shangri-La with the Mallinson equivalent (Conway’s brother George, in the movie) and the Lo-Tsen equivalent. The wintry journey is grueling; the porters abandon them. Lo-Tsen (“Maria,” in the movie) falls down in the snow. The men turn her over to find her dead–and that she’s become an old woman.
The lamas were right after all. “Maria’s” youth, preserved for decades by the magic of Shangri-La, has been shattered by her departure. “George” goes mad and jumps to his death. Conway’s the sole survivor. At movie’s end, we find him struggling to find his way back to Shangri-La, the paradise from which he’s foolishly banished himself.
Thus far the movie. The novel’s entirely different.
Recall what I said in the first of these posts: it’s a story within a story, a third-person narrative framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The third-person narrative, the body of the book, consists of the novelist Rutherford’s recollections of the story Conway told him, on the basis of Conway’s once lost, now recovered (more or less) memory of his time in Shangri-La. Rutherford writes his recollections down, then hands the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. In the epilogue, Rutherford and the narrator together try to puzzle out what happened to Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-tsen after they left Shangri-La. This is the part of the story that remains, perhaps permanently, lost to Conway’s memory.
Conway’s story ends with the line I quoted in my last post. He and Mallinson have reached the porters’ camp, where Lo-Tsen meets them. Plainly she’s in love with Mallinson, eager for their departure. “It seemed to him [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.” What happens next? No one knows–and in that mystery lies the book’s profundity and power.
What’s known is that Conway turned up, feverish, at a French mission hospital in Chung-Kiang (Chongqing?), China, without any papers or memory of what had happened to him. The Chinese doctor who admitted him remembered that he’d been brought in by a woman, Chinese, who herself died of fever shortly afterward. Of course Rutherford, who at the end of the book has managed to track the doctor down, asks him: “About that Chinese woman. Was she young?” And is told: “Oh, no, she was most old–most old of any one I have ever seen.”
So Lo-Tsen has turned into an old woman, as Conway and the lamas said she would? (Take her beauty away from Shangri-La, Conway tells Mallinson, “and you will see it fade like an echo.”) That’s the impression the book gives, and it seems to be what the narrator believes. But this is very unclear. The old woman could be someone Conway met in the course of his wanderings, young Lo-Tsen either dead or gone off with (or without) Mallinson to someplace no one knows. When you think about it–is it really likely the old woman is Lo-Tsen? If Lo-Tsen indeed came to Shangri-La in 1884 at age 18, as Conway’s been told, she’d have been born in 1866. That would make her 65, or conceivably 66, at the time of Conway’s reappearance. “Most old of any one I have ever seen”? As one who’s 65 myself–I sure don’t think so.
So where does the truth lie? Was Conway sane at Shangri-La, insane before and after–or the other way round? We’re left to speculate, and thereby to search out on our own the mystery of Shangri-La.
Here’s one solid, or more or less solid fact: Lo-Tsen seems eager to go off with Mallinson. Surely she must know she’s really young? But not so fast. Perhaps she knows, or at least suspects, she’ll age as soon as she leaves with him–and goes anyway, believing with Robert Ingersoll that love is worth the price of mortality? Or as a self-sacrifice, a supreme act of devotion, to redeem the man she loves from a place she knows he hates, knowing also that he’s apt to reject her once she’s no longer the youthful beauty he imagines?
Howard Schwartz's novella, "The Four Who Entered Paradise," with commentary by Marc Bregman (1995). The ancient story continues to inspire.
The possibilities are endless. This open-endedness is a mark of great art, secret of its immortality. It leaves us with no fixed lesson, no cut-and-dried answer to the great human questions. With its ambiguities, its unsolved riddles, it teases us to go wandering on our own.
Which brings us back to the original Four Who Entered Paradise. (Or whatever it was that they entered.)
Reread the ancient rabbinic story, which I quoted at the beginning of my first post. Mysterious, hauntingly evocative, like Lost Horizon carried to the nth degree. As in Lost Horizon, the issue of sanity and insanity, the question of where true reality lies, comes into play. It’s represented through the “madness” of Ben Zoma. It’s emphasized in an addition to the story found in the Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 14b. Rabbi Akiba says to the other three as they set forth on their expedition: “When you draw near the stones of pure marble, do not say, ‘Water, water.’ For it is written, ‘He who speaketh lies shall not be established in My sight’ [Psalm 101:7].” The “stones of pure marble” apparently create an illusion of water; Akiba warns us not to fall for it.
3+1 patterns everywhere. Three live, the fourth dies (Ben Azzai). Three bear the wounds of their unearthly experience; the fourth emerges safe and sound (Akiba). Three, who are named, remain within the accepted bounds of Judaism. The fourth, cryptically called “the Other One,” breaks through those bounds. He “mutilates the young plants,” “suffers his mouth to bring his flesh into guilt”–and it’s left to us to imagine what these metaphors hint at.
Within the overall Four-ness of the story, there’s a polarity of the godly and the godless, the pious and the heretic. These are embodied in Akiba and in his shadow, “the Other One.” If I’m not mistaken, this is the same polarity as we find in Lost Horizon between Conway and Mallinson. Conway is devout, faithful, trusting in the revelations of that supreme master of faith, the High Lama of Shangri-La. Over against them Mallinson brings his reason, his senses, the evidence of his eyes and his flesh. Thus confronted, Conway’s faith dissolves. He leaves with Mallinson.
Who is right? We never really find out. We are Conway–he’s the hero, the point-of-view character. But this doesn’t guarantee that he sees reality as it is, nor does it rule out the possibility that illusion may have a higher value than reality. (Whose illusion?) The “Other One,” even if ultimately wrong, speaks a truth that must be heard.
In the story of the Four in Paradise, we are Akiba. He’s the good guy, the orthodox teacher, the one with the white hat. But the “Other One” also, even when his mouth brings his flesh into guilt, is a full-fledged member of the Four. What comes out of his mouth are words that the faithful need to hear.
But what were those words? What did “the Other One,” a.k.a. Elisha ben Abuyah, say? What did he do?
I’ll post on this next week.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | 
Tags: "Lost Horizon", Conway, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, merkavah mysticism, paradise, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 
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Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 2)
May 16, 2013
(Continued from last week’s post:)
The secret of Shangri-La is this: Living there, you age with preternatural slowness.
Unlike in the archetypal paradise of Eden (at least according to some interpretations), you’re not exactly immortal. Sooner or later you’re going to grow old and die. But the process can take centuries rather than decades, and you preserve your youthful vigor and appearance for much of the process. The High Lama, who reveals all this to the Englishman Conway–whom he’s picked as his successor–turns out to be the same French priest who established Shangri-La in 1734, when he was 53 years old. Do the arithmetic: he was born in 1681, died in 1931 at the age of 250.
James Hilton, "Lost Horizon"--entering the world of Shangri-La
Exactly what accounts for this miracle is never made clear. It seems to have something to do with the air of the valley, combined with the meditational and narcotic practices of the lamasery. What is clear is that if you should be so foolish as to leave Shangri-La, the effect vanishes with devastating speed. Your chronological age catches up with you, with a vengeance.
Conway’s naturally curious about Lo-Tsen, the beautiful Chinese girl who plays classical piano for the four newcomers’ mealtime delectation, and on whom both he and Mallinson are developing a crush. Turns out she stumbled into Shangri-La in the year 1884, at age 18. Which makes her currently 65.
So Shangra-La is about as close to Eden as this world can possibly get. Where’s the downside?
Lo-Tsen exemplifies it–at least for some of us. Chang, who serves as the travelers’ host and guide at the lamasery, explains to Conway:
“Lo-Tsen gives no caresses, except such as touch the stricken heart from her very presence. What does your Shakespeare say of Cleopatra? — ‘She makes hungry where she most satisfies.’ A popular type, doubtless, among the passion-driven races, but such a woman, I assure you, would be altogether out of place at Shangri-La. Lo-Tsen, if I might amend the quotation, removes hunger where she least satisfies. It is a more delicate and lasting accomplishment.”
“And one, I assume, which she has much skill in performing?”
“Oh, decidedly–we have had many examples of it. It is her way to calm the throb of desire to a murmur that is no less pleasant when left unanswered.”
Which doesn’t mean you have to be celibate at Shangri-La. The lamas’ motto is moderation in all things–virtue included. The American among the four visitors is periodically taken by Shangri-La’s porters down to the valley below, for bouts of indulgence with the local liquor and the local women. (Whereas Miss Brinklow, if she has comparable impulses, will presumably need to content herself with cold showers.) But for many of us in the “passion-driven races,” this choice between the “lovely cold vase” that is Lo-Tsen, on the one hand, and faceless prostitutes on the other, is bound to be pretty grim.
I’m reminded of the remark I read somewhere in Robert Ingersoll: that given a choice between a world subject to death but with love, versus one from which both love and death had been banished, he’d pick mortality. I don’t know what Ingersoll would say about a place like Shangri-La, where love and death are present but in pale, muted, shadowy forms, stripped of all dread and ecstasy. My guess is he’d be less than enthusiastic.
Like the young Englishman Mallinson, who unlike his three companions hates, hates, hates Shangri-La and can’t wait to be away from it. And who’s discovered a side to Lo-Tsen of which old Chang has never dreamed.
Here’s where the book started getting good for me. I have to admit that when I read Lost Horizon, which I did for the first time about a month ago, I was bored and irritated through most of it. It wasn’t until the very last chapter, when Mallinson is finally given his voice, that I realized the novel’s depth and power.
“Come on, Conway, we’ve till dawn to pack what we can and get away. Great news, man … The porters are about five miles beyond the pass–they came yesterday with loads of books and things … tomorrow they begin the journey back. …. It just shows how these fellows here intended to let us down–they never told us–we should have been stranded here for God knows how much longer. … I say, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
Conway, unbeknownst to Mallinson, is the new High Lama of Shangri-La, the old one having died hardly more than an hour ago. He knows what Mallinson doesn’t know: that the porters will never agree to conduct them to the outside world. Except that Mallinson assures him they have agreed. They’ve already been paid in advance for their service.
Conway protests:
“But–I don’t understand ….”
“I don’t suppose you do, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Who’s been making all these plans?”
Mallinson answered brusquely: “Lo-Tsen, if you’re really keen to know. She’s with the porters now. She’s waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“Yes. She’s coming with us. I assume you’ve no objection?”
And now Mallinson, who’s been made to seem so petulant and boyish, reveals himself as the thoughtful, passionate, ethical man he is. When Conway calls Lo-Tsen “very charming,” Mallinson bursts out:
“Charming? … She’s a good bit more than that. … Admiring her as if she were an exhibit in a museum may be your idea of what she deserves, but mine’s more practical, and when I see some one I like in a rotten position I try to do something. … After all, if you’re rescuing people from something quite hellish, you don’t usually stop to enquire if they’ve anywhere else to go to.”
Hellish? Shangri-La?
“There’s something dark and evil about it. The whole business has been like that, from the beginning–the way we were brought here, without reason at all, by some madman–and the way we’ve been detained since, on one excuse or another.”
Which is completely true, and someone’s finally saying it. A paradise that kidnaps its recruits and then lies to them has something wrong with it.
Masaccio, "The Expulsion from Paradise." Something to weep about?
“It’s unhealthy and unclean–and for that matter, if your impossible yarn were true, it would be more hateful still! A lot of wizened old men crouching here like spiders for any one who comes near … it’s filthy …. Oh, why won’t you come away with me, Conway? I hate imploring you for my own sake, but damn it all, I’m young and we’ve been pretty good friends together–does my whole life mean nothing to you compared with the lies of these awful creatures? And Lo-Tsen, too–she’s young–doesn’t she count at all?”
Because what I’ve called “the secret of Shangri-La” is for Mallinson “a fantastic rigamarole.” “Believing in people hundreds of years old just because they’ve told you they are”! Does Conway have one scrap of evidence for the advanced age of the people at Shangri-La, beyond the word of Chang and the High Lama? Conway has to concede the point: he doesn’t. “I suppose the truth is,” he admits, “that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.”
Which brings us back to Lo-Tsen.
She’s not young, he tells Mallinson. Reiterating the lovely-cold-vase theory of Lo-Tsen, he declares her beauty “a fragile thing that can only live where fragile things are loved. Take it away from this valley and you will see it fade like an echo.”
To which Mallinson retorts with the equivalent of an eight-letter hyphenated obscenity:
“Oh, what stupid nonsense it all is–about her not being young! And foul and horrible nonsense, too. Conway, you can’t believe it! It’s just too ridiculous. How can it really mean anything?”
“How can you really know that she’s young?”
Mallinson half turned away, his face lit with a grave shyness. “Because I do know…. Perhaps you’ll think less of me for it, but I do know. … She was cold on the surface, but that was the result of living here–it had frozen all the warmth. But the warmth was there.”
“To be unfrozen?” …
Mallinson answered softly: “God, yes–she’s just a girl. I was terribly sorry for her, and we were both attracted, I suppose. I don’t see that it’s anything to be ashamed of. In fact in a place like this I should think it’s about the decentest thing that’s ever happened …”
So Lo-Tsen is a creature of the flesh after all, a human being and no museum piece. Without another word, Conway is persuaded. He and Mallinson leave the lamasery and, at dawn, reach the porters’ camp. There, just as Mallinson had said, Lo-Tsen is waiting. “It seemed to [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.”
So Mallinson is right. Conway was wrong. The High Lama was a liar, Shangri-La no paradise but a cushioned prison, from which Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-Tsen have a chance of escaping and finding a real life.
But the story’s not quite over …
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon"
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", agelessness, Conway, immortality, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, paradise, Shangri-La | No Comments »
Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 1)
May 8, 2013
“Four entered Paradise. One looked and died; one looked and went mad; one mutilated the young plants; one entered safely and came out safely.”
No, this isn’t a plot summary for James Hilton’s wildly popular novel Lost Horizon, turned by Frank Capra into a somewhat less popular film. It’s the opening of one of the most famously cryptic passages in all rabbinic literature, preserved in slightly different versions in a number of ancient Hebrew writings. And I cheated in my quotation. The Hebrew word pardes doesn’t really mean “Paradise.” But maybe it does.
Poster for Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" (1937)
I’ll explain in a minute. But first let’s listen as the ancient rabbis themselves decode their story:
“Ben Azzai looked and died. Of him it is written, ‘Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints’ [Psalm 116:15]. Ben Zoma looked and went mad. Of him it is written, ‘Hast thou found honey? Then eat only that which is sufficient for thee, lest thou become filled therewith, and vomit it’ [Proverbs 25:16]. The ‘Other One’ mutilated the young plants. Of him it is written, ‘Suffer not thy mouth to bring thy flesh into guilt’ [Ecclesiastes 5:5]. Rabbi Akiba entered safely and came out safely. Of him it is written, ‘Draw me, we will run after thee’ [Song of Songs 1:4].”
The four men named were rabbis of the early second century CE. The best known of them is Rabbi Akiba–scholar, martyr, possibly political activist–one of the great heroes of rabbinic Judaism. “The Other One” is a hushed designation for the man who was Akiba’s polar opposite: Elisha ben Abuyah, as learned as Akiba, but somehow gone bad–a notorious heretic, libertine, and blasphemer. Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma are more obscure. There’s a story, apparently relevant to this passage, about how another rabbi finds Ben Zoma sitting in what seems like a trance. To the rabbi’s question of what’s going on, Ben Zoma gives the distinctly spacy answer: “I beheld Creation, and between the upper and the lower waters there is only the space of a handbreadth.”
The kind of talk, in other words, that you’d expect from someone who’s gone insane.
As for the word pardes, it normally means “garden” or “orchard.” But the Persian word from which it’s taken is also the source of the Greek paradeisos, from which we get our word “paradise.” In the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of himself as having been “caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows … caught up into Paradise … heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” In this passage paradeisos is apparently the same as the third heaven, or maybe located in the third heaven. (And the Greek verb harpazein, which Paul uses twice, really means “seized,” “abducted.”) Maybe the four rabbis were believed to have had a similar experience, and their pardes was “paradise” after all. Some versions of the story, actually, say that Akiba “went up safely and descended safely,” which would suggest his pardes was envisioned as somewhere up above.
Now cut to Lost Horizon. The year is 1931. Four people are abducted in a hijacked airplane into a paradise called Shangri-La, somewhere in the Himalayas. The foursome is made up of three men and one woman, three British and one American; there are probably other 3+1 patterns if we look for them. Jungians out there will know what I’m driving at: the archetype of the quaternity. I’m assuming the basic story is archetypal, and that’s what accounts for its power. That’s what makes it possible to do a comparison between two imaginative creations from such different historical contexts.
The four abductees are Mallinson, a hot-blooded young English diplomat; Conway, a somewhat older and mellower diplomat; Miss Brinklow, a not quite stereotypic missionary lady; and an American who initially introduces himself as Barnard, which turns out not to be his real name. (He’s a wanted man–a high-finance swindler of the Bernie Madoff variety.) The story is told from Conway’s point of view, he being, like Rabbi Akiba, the only one of the four who’s survived, or at least who’s come back alive.
Originally, it seems, Conway lost his memory of his stay in Shangri-La. It comes back to him, though in fragmentary fashion; and he spends a night telling his story to a novelist named Rutherford, who writes it down (in third person) and subsequently gives the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. The story in between is that manuscript, which is to say, Rutherford’s recollection of what Conway told him. These details underscore the haziness of the story. We’re never quite sure how much to trust what Conway says–or, indeed, even if it is what Conway says, as opposed to Rutherford’s distorted memory of it.
Book jacket for James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" (1933)
The four end up at Shangri-La, a lamasery high up in a fertile, pleasant valley sheltered from the Himalayan cold. There they receive a magnificent welcome. Shangri-La might as well be a resort hotel, with central heating and modern plumbing, plus a stunning view of a conical mountain on the horizon called “Blue Moon.” But it’s also a center of learning, with a library rich in European as well as Asian classics. Conway is almost immediately drawn to the place. Young Mallinson, by contrast, can’t wait to leave. Boorishly he demands of their impeccably courteous Chinese host that porters be provided for them. When told it’ll be months before any are available, he rages like a child. Miss Brinklow and the American, meanwhile, make their own accommodations to life in Shangri-La. (Which, we slowly discover, will go on longer than any of them can possibly imagine–they’re never going to get away.) Like the four rabbis of old, each responds to this paradise in his or her individual way.
The High Lama of the place takes an interest in Conway, at first unexplained. In one of a series of private conversations, he confides to the Englishman that Shangri-La will be a refuge for human culture, preserving it through the new and worse Dark Ages that are coming. (Lost Horizon was published in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany.) Soon, says the Lama, there will be such a storm “as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos. … [T]he Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these.”
After speaking this prophecy, the High Lama dies. He leaves Conway as his successor, the new High Lama of Shangri-La. Almost immediately Conway has to face the restive Mallinson, who has his plan of escape all worked out–and a beautiful young Chinese girl from the lamasery ready to go with him, as his lover.
Except that lovely Lo-Tsen may not be so young. Shangri-La has secrets that Conway is beginning to understand, and Mallinson doesn’t.
Unless it’s the other way around.
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", 2 Corinthians, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, Frank Capra, James Hilton, merkavah mysticism, paradise, pardes, Paul, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 3 Comments »
The UFO Experience – “Although I Am Only a Child, Please Believe Me”
April 26, 2013
A gentleman named Jordan Hofer, with whom I’ve had a stimulating exchange of comments in connection with my post “Drawing Dirty Pictures – Philadelphia UFO, January 1974,” tells me he has no objection to my calling attention in a new post to some of the points raised in our conversation. So that’s just what I’ll do.
Jordan’s a research specialist in anthropology for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. He’s the author of the book Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis, scheduled for publication next year; also a Young Adult novel on a UFO theme, Saucerville, scheduled for this October.
From Jordan Hofer's blog, on "Evolutionary Ufology: A New Synthesis"
Jordan writes: “I taught human evolution at Oregon State University for seven years before the recession hit and my position was cut. Around that time my best friend of 33 years had a very clear sighting of a large, black, equilateral triangle, with white flashing lights at each apex, fly low and slow over his house, emitting a deep thrumming sound that rattled his windows. He was astonished, to say the least. The sighting deeply affected him. He had told fellow coworkers about his sighting and was called a liar to his face. He was in need of a friend who would believe him, take him at his word of what he witnessed. I was skeptical at first, but my loyalty soon won out (especially after I left the confines of academia) and I joined him in his search for an answer to what he had seen.”
I was deeply moved by Jordan’s story, and I told him so.
“As you may gather,” I wrote in my reply, “I am fairly committed to disbelief in the physical reality of UFOs. (Except in the banal sense that the planet Venus, mirages, etc. have a physical existence.) The history of the past 65 years of UFOlogy seems to me to demonstrate this. Yet we do have stories like your friend’s, which it’s impossible to disbelieve without outraging all that makes us human.”
Several months ago, at a lunch with my old friend Professor Rachel Elior, a scholar of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I expressed the view that people experiencing journeys through the seven heavens of traditional Jewish cosmology, seeing angels, demons and the like, are hallucinating. A graduate student who was there accused me of “epistemic violence.” The charge seemed to me nonsensical. After all, when people report seeing things that we know don’t exist—like those seven heavens—surely they’ve got to be hallucinating, don’t they? (Unless they’re lying. And I don’t like calling people liars.)
Especially if we accept the point I gather Oliver Sacks made in his recent book Hallucinations, which I’m sorry to say I still haven’t read–that it’s simply not true what we often think, that having hallucinations is a mark of insanity.
But would I have the courage to maintain this remorseless logic, in the face of someone like Jordan’s friend?
One of the things that makes J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience such an affecting human document, is that this broad-minded, warm-hearted scientist seems continually to have struggled with this question. He quotes the “frank and artless remarks” of children who’ve seen UFOs. “This is the truth, and there is no hoax implied since that is a serious offense at this school.” “ … we give you our Scout’s Honor that this is not a hoax or optical illusion.” (Though of course if it were an optical illusion, the three Boy Scouts who saw it presumably wouldn’t have been aware of that.) “Although I am only a child, please believe me.” (Referring to a sighting, of a cigar-shaped object, made on January 19, 1967; all quotes from p. 14 of Hynek’s book.)
UFOlogist J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986), in his cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977)
Hynek also tells an awful story of the fate that befell an Ohio deputy sheriff named Dale F. Spaur who, in the early morning hours of April 17, 1966, chased in his patrol car a UFO “big as a house” and so bright “it’d make your eyes water.” Spaur wasn’t the only person who saw the object, or even who chased it; there were three other witnesses. Which makes what happened to Spaur all the more appalling.
“This,” Spaur told Air Force investigator Hector Quintanilla, “I have never seen nothing like it before or after or in the wildest far-fetched imagination. I know you can have an optical illusion or even see something moving or like if you look through a piece of glass or something … I can go along with this. But nothing this big. In my wildest dreams I don’t think I could have ever imagined or seen anything like it” (p. 106).
The outcome?
“Subsequently, Spaur was singled out for unbearable ridicule and the pressure of unfavorable publicity. The combination of events wrecked his home life, estranged him from his wife, and ruined his career and his health. He is no longer [as of 1972] with the police force, and, it is reported, he subsists by doing odd jobs” (p. 108).
I doubt if Dale Spaur is still alive in 2013, but it’s possible. I’ve often thought about what I would say to him if he confronted me, and my disbelief in UFOs, with his story. I know you’re not lying, I would tell him. (Although, to tell the truth, I don’t really know that.) And if you were hallucinating it wasn’t because you’re crazy but because the human mind has potentials we hardly begin to suspect, and hallucination is probably one of them. The bottom line is that I don’t have the slightest idea what you saw or what made you see it. I don’t think it can be a visitor from outer space, because if it was we’d surely have unequivocal proof of the presence of such visitors by this time, which after all is nearly a half-century after your experience. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency in figuring out what you saw, because a half-century later we still don’t know what it was, or what any of the really baffling UFO cases were, and we don’t seem to be any worse off for that ignorance …
Except, of course, for poor Dale Spaur.
How lucky Jordan Hofer’s friend was, to have had a friend like Jordan!
And remember the little boy who saw the cigar-shaped object on January 19, 1967, and begged the gentlemen of the Air Force UFO project to please believe him, even though he was only a child?
There’s postscript to that one, too.
Go to the “Welcome” post on this blog, and sift through the “responses” to it.
And wonder.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Psychology, UFOs | Tags: Dale F. Spaur, hallucinations, J. Allen Hynek, Jordan Hofer, Oliver Sacks, Rachel Elior, religious experiences, UFOs | 9 Comments »
Drawing Dirty Pictures – Philadelphia UFO, January 1974
January 22, 2013
A little boy goes into a psychologist’s office. The psychologist gives him an inkblot test, telling him “These are some pictures I’ve drawn. What do you see in them?”
What the little boy sees is sex. Sexual organs. Couples engaged in sex acts. In picture after picture.
After the fifth or sixth picture, the psychologist bursts out: “Young man, you’ve got a problem!”
“Why me?” the boy demands. “You’re the one who’s drawing all these dirty pictures!”
– Joke from my junior high school (as middle school used to be called)
So is it me? Or the picture?
"Tim's" drawing of the Byberry UFO
To the right you’ll see a witness sketch of a UFO, observed over Philadelphia in January of 1974. What that UFO looks like to me … Do you see it too? (But to be fair, I’ve already suggested to you the direction my thoughts are going. You can’t be unbiased now.)
Is it my own dirty mind that’s putting it there? (Sorry, sexy mind; such things aren’t dirty anymore, as they were back in junior high.) Or is it really in the drawing, a clue to what that UFO really was?
By which I mean, what it meant to the man who saw it.
I’ll give you the facts–as old E.J. Ruppelt said in his classic Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. You decide.
For these facts, I depend on an article by Matthew Graeber entitled, “The Cat and Mice Game,” in the November-December 2009 issue (Vol. 1, no. 4) of the journal SUNlite. I’ll summarize Graeber’s piece and give some quotations from it. But I’d encourage you to consult the article itself, available on the Web. (Go to http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite1_4.pdf and scroll down to page 20.)
The date: night of January 15, 1974. The location: a field on the grounds of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. This psychiatric hospital, with its grisly history of patient abuse and neglect, no longer exists. It was closed in 1990, demolished in 2006 (Wikipedia). At the beginning of the 60s, the name of the place was proverbial to those of us who grew up in its vicinity. “Aaaah, they oughta send you to Byberry!” we used to taunt each other on the school bus. Does the sighting’s taking place near Byberry have some significance? (And I don’t mean the significance it would have in some predictable, stupid joke about “loonies” seeing UFOs.)
The initial observer was a 23-year-old auto mechanic who wouldn’t allow his name to be used. Graeber calls him “Tim.” Later Tim was joined by his 22-year-old wife “Sarah” and her parents, whom he’d called from a pay phone. While the sighting was going on he also phoned Graeber, who set forth into the wintry night and futilely circled the area in his car, looking for Tim and his in-laws. Graeber was in the right place, he later discovered. But he never saw the witnesses, and never saw the UFO.
The UFO was a low-flying object, carrying lights though apparently not itself luminous. It flew slowly, noiselessly, at times hovering in the air. Sometimes it seemed close enough to touch the branches of the trees. Tim told Graeber’s wife, over the phone, that “the UFO was actually approaching his family as they were parked, and when he would turn his auto’s headlights on, the object would retreat back into the darkness. There were also times when the UFO would playfully blink back at the auto’s headlights as if in response.” As if it had some special connection with Tim and his in-laws; as if it were a part of them that had appeared to them in the sky.
Wait a minute! I can hear you saying. There wasn’t any UFO! This was obviously a nasty prank at Graeber’s expense (you say), to send him on a wild-goose chase into the frigid, snowy night. In his article, Graeber offers cogent reasons for thinking this isn’t so. Whatever was or wasn’t flying around the skies over Byberry, it certainly seems that Tim and Sarah and her parents–all of whom Graeber was able to interview the next day–were honestly convinced they’d seen something they weren’t able to explain.
The four witnesses sketched for Graeber what they’d seen. And here comes the really strange part. Tim’s drawing was so different from the others’ as to seem like he’d seen an entirely different object.
The illustration on p. 23 of Graeber’s article is based on their sketches. “Tim’s UFO was a cylindrical object while his wife and her parents were certain it was a double convex disc-shaped object”–like two soup bowls fastened together at the rims, with a Saturn-like ring around it and a bulb-like protuberance at its top. (In other words, a pretty conventional flying saucer.) “To compound the discrepancy, their UFOs lighting placement and coloring didn’t match Tim’s UFO either. Additionally, Sarah and her parents were positive the UFO had a revolving rim, while Tim’s UFO hadn’t such a pronounced feature.
“When I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the group they seemed to be genuinely surprised and dismayed about the whole thing. Tim simply couldn’t believe they thought the UFO looked as they had sketched it. While Stan shook his head in disbelief at what his son-in-law thought the object looked like.
“I had never encountered such a vast difference in a simultaneously observed multi-witnessed event. It seemed to me that if the incident were a hoax, the hoaxers probably would have been able to tell the same story about what the object supposedly looked like. One would think that would be one of the first things they would discuss and agree upon. Yet, here it was in black and white, three of four observers sketching a double-convex disk with a dome and revolving rim, and the fourth witness saying it was a cylindrical craft. Yet, all had observed the same UFO at relatively close range (50 yards being the closest estimate) with the aid of two automobile’s high-beam headlights.”
As Graeber interviews the family, he gradually gets to know them better. It comes out that Sarah is pregnant. It comes out that she and Tim live with her parents. It comes out that she and Tim aren’t exactly married.
Think back to the mid-70s, if you’re old enough to remember them. Among wide and growing segments of our population, it was accepted as natural and appropriate for unmarried couples to sleep together, live together. (A big change from ten years earlier; the sexual revolution came in between.) Unlike today, it wasn’t accepted for unmarried couples to have children. You made sure to use birth control. When that failed, there were big decisions to be made. Fast. Under pressure.
Now think of Tim and Sarah. Contraception has failed them. It’s no great leap to imagine that this failure has pitted Tim on the one side, against Sarah and her parents on the other, over what Tim ought to do about it. In the sky, Tim sees a mirror of his own life crisis.
Look at his drawing; ignore the labels; tell me what you see.
What I see is a penis detumescing, shooting out sperm, sheathed in a condom that’s ruptured precisely where it needs to stay intact. This is Tim’s UFO. Sarah and her parents, mirroring their (assumed) three-against-one conflict, agree it was something entirely different.
So what did these people see in the sky? (And why didn’t Graeber, driving around the same area, see anything like it?) More important–by what psychic mechanism did the mundane, agonizing, grinding tension of an unwanted pregnancy come to be translated into celestial vision, seen by four people at the same time though not in the same way?
And why at Byberry? Does this reflect Tim’s perception that his life had turned insane? That the home he had to share with his girlfriend’s parents, and the painful conflict that could never be quite escaped, was a kind of madhouse? I can’t answer these questions. But if you’ll grant that I’m seeing in Tim’s drawing what’s really there, and that it’s an uncanny reflection of his real-life situation, then we have no choice but to ask them.
“Generally speaking,” Graeber writes, “UFO witnesses would be cooperative with our investigators … but, when the subject of psychology came up many terminated their participation. I think they felt their personal life was not part of a random encounter with a UFO, and to imply it might have been was often felt to be an insult of some kind.”
Or, they knew unconsciously that the encounter wasn’t “random.” That a psychological inquiry would turn up something they preferred not to face.
At first, Graeber says, Sarah and Tim agreed to answer his psychological questions. But then Tim changed his mind. This about-face, and his insistence on strict anonymity, suggest there was something about the sighting Tim was deeply ashamed of–that he, and perhaps his in-laws too, wanted to communicate yet keep hidden.
Conveying yet concealing … that’s the function of the UFO.
Graeber writes: “I have taken the position the UFO experience is the observer’s encounter with the unknown [a reciprocal encounter--recall how the UFO responded to the witnesses--DJH]–and it really doesn’t matter what the researchers (Pro or Con) think of the experience–it’s much more a matter of how that sudden, shocking and unsuspected encounter was perceived by the witnesses– How it may have affected them on both conscious and subconscious levels of their being (e.g., how the experience impacted their model of the real world and their place within it).”
And the other way around.
by David Halperin
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Thomas Jefferson, Meteorites, and Lawrence Anthony’s Elephants
January 16, 2013
” … it was easier to believe that two Yankee Professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven.”
– Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
So (allegedly) said our third President on the subject of meteorites. The UFOlogists will never let him live it down.
I thought of Jefferson and his meteorites when I heard, somewhat belatedly, the story of how a herd of wild elephants marched in solemn procession across the South African bush to pay tribute to their recently deceased friend, the great conservationist Lawrence Anthony. It’s a marvelous story, a heartwarming story. So marvelous, so heartwarming, that my first thought was: it can’t possibly be true.
The elephant procession, from the Fan Page for "Thula Thula - Exclusive Private Game Reserve." "Tonight at Thula Thula, the whole herd arrived at the main house, home to Lawrence and I. We had not seen them here for a very long time. Extraordinary proof of animal sensitivity and awareness that only a few human can perceive."
The event is supposed to have taken place last March, in the days immediately following Anthony’s sudden and untimely death on Friday, March 2. The earliest full account of it that my Google search turns up is a post by one Tanya Waterworth to IOL News, website of the South African news agency Independent Online. The post is dated Saturday, March 10:
“For 12 hours the huge beasts slowly made their way through the Zululand bush until they reached the house of the man they loved – to say good-bye.
“That, according to the son of conservationist and adventurer Lawrence Anthony, who passed away while on a business trip to Johannesburg last Friday, was the profoundly moving sight at Thula Thula Private Reserve this week. …
“There are two elephant herds at Thula Thula. According to his son Dylan, both herds arrived at the house after Anthony’s death.
“‘They had not visited the house for a year-and-a-half and it must have taken them about 12 hours to make the journey,’ said Dylan.
“The first herd arrived on Sunday and the second herd, a day later.
“‘They all hung around for about two days before making their way back into the bush,’ said Dylan.”
The Facebook Fan Page for “Thula Thula – Exclusive Private Game Reserve” has the following post, dated March 3. “Tonight at Thula Thula, the whole herd arrived at the main house, home to Lawrence and I. We had not seen them here for a very long time. Extraordinary proof of animal sensitivity and awareness that only a few human can perceive. And Lawrence was one of them. Thank you for your wonderful messages. Lawrence’s legacy will be with us forever at Thula Thula.“ The post is accompanied by the dramatic photo (above) of the elephant procession, which sure looks like it was taken in daylight. I don’t know who the “I” is but I’m assuming it’s Anthony’s widow Francoise. You’ll notice her date is not the same as the one given by Dylan Anthony. “Tonight” would be Saturday, March 3, while according to Dylan the herd arrived the following day.
The obituary for Anthony that was posted on March 8 to the online The Telegraph (UK) ends with the sentence: “It has been reported that after his death his beloved elephant herd came to his house to say goodbye.“ The New York Times, four days later, provided a little more detail: “Since his death, his son Dylan told reporters, the herd has come to his house on the edge of their reserve every night.“ I don’t know–though I suppose I can imagine some possibilities–how Dylan knew (if Waterworth quotes him correctly) that the elephants came from a part of the reserve that was a 12-hour march distant.
On YouTube there’s a video, posted April 18, of a speech given by Dylan at a graduation ceremony of the University of Kwazulu-Natal, where he accepted a posthumous honorary degree on his father’s behalf. Dylan speaks of “the outpouring of love and condolences from people around the world” over “the past few weeks since he passed away,” but doesn’t mention the elephants. But given the context, and the brevity of his speech, I don’t know that I’d have expected him to.
The fullest version I’ve found, undated as far as I can see, was posted by Rob Kerby on beliefnet.com. It’s obviously based on Waterworth’s story, to which Kerby provides a link. “For 12 hours, two herds of wild South African elephants slowly made their way through the Zululand bush until they reached the house of late author Lawrence Anthony, the conservationist who saved their lives. … For two days the herds loitered at Anthony’s rural compound on the vast Thula Thula game reserve in the South African KwaZulu – to say good-bye to the man they loved. But how did they know he had died March 7?”
Of course Anthony didn’t die on March 7, but five days earlier. (And the date of March 10, given in the heading of the beliefnet.com story for the elephants’ appearance–”a solemn procession on March 10 that defies human explanation”–is also wrong.) But Kerby’s question is a good one–perhaps the central question raised by this story. And one for which Kerby doesn’t even try to give an answer.
Instead, he quotes the deeply moving words of Rabbi Leila Gal Berner: “A good man died suddenly … and from miles and miles away, two herds of elephants, sensing that they had lost a beloved human friend, moved in a solemn, almost ‘funereal’ procession to make a call on the bereaved family at the deceased man’s home. … If there ever were a time, when we can truly sense the wondrous ‘interconnectedness of all beings,’ it is when we reflect on the elephants of Thula Thula. A man’s heart’s stops, and hundreds of elephants’ hearts are grieving. This man’s oh-so-abundantly loving heart offered healing to these elephants, and now, they came to pay loving homage to their friend.”
Yes. Wondrous.
The elephant procession, from IOL News. It seems to be a different photo, but of the same occasion--which was pretty plainly during the daylight hours.
Consider the implications. Not only, as psychologist Marc Bekoff (“Ph.D. in Animal Emotions”) commented a few days after the event, that the higher animals are capable of grief and mourning. We knew that already. We knew that pets have abiding connections to their masters, even after the masters’ death. But now we have unequivocal evidence of something far greater, more astounding. Wild animals know love, friendship, loyalty for humans as well as for each other. Indeed, in their love and loyalty they might serve as moral examples for our species. Beyond that: at least some animals have mysterious psychic powers, channels of knowledge that can only be called paranormal.
The old legends of their secret, inexplicable wisdom turn out to be rooted in reality.
There must be more to their existence, and to ours, than the tangible and the physical.
From here it’s no great leap to the hope that we’re not bounded by the physical; that some part of ourselves (and our fellow-animals), perhaps manifested as abundant love, remains immortal even while our bodies rot in the ground.
Who wouldn’t want this to be true?
Yet consider how drastically our contemporary scientific conceptions would need to be changed, if it’s true.
This is a lot of weight to put on the testimony of two people. Even if they’re not–as per the supposed Jefferson quote–Yankee professors.
But what are we supposed to do? Say that the bereaved wife and son of a humanitarian giant–partners in his noble work–were probably lying? Or at least, were seriously deluded? Or at least, didn’t have the integrity to speak out when flagrant, comforting falsehoods were circulated in their names?
It’s not a choice I much want to make.
Neither, I’d guess, do those indefatigable debunkers of urban legends, the people at www.snopes.com. They list the status of the story as “undetermined,” concluding tersely: “Research in progress.” The date of that posting is 16 July 2012. That’s exactly six months ago. I’m not holding my breath waiting to hear about further “progress.”
Meanwhile–that crack of Thomas Jefferson’s? About the lying Yankee professors? Turns out he never said any such thing.
This I learn from a fascinating post by Anna Berkes, research librarian at Monticello. The remark for which Jefferson’s been so pilloried was first attributed to him in 1874, nearly 50 years after his death, on the basis of no evidence whatever. His real thoughts about meteorites are expressed in a letter of 1808:
“We certainly are not to deny whatever we cannot account for. A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty. A cautious mind will weigh well the opposition of the phenomenon to everything hitherto observed, the strength of the testimony by which it is supported, and the errors and misconceptions to which even our senses are liable. It may be very difficult to explain how the stone you possess came into the position in which it was found. But is it easier to explain how it got into the clouds from whence it is supposed to have fallen? The actual fact however is the thing to be established, and this I hope will be done by those whose situations and qualifications enable them to do it.”
And the same goes for psychic elephants.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Psychology, Religion | Tags: elephants, immortality, Lawrence Anthony, lawrence anthony elephants mourn, meteorites, psychic animals, Thomas Jefferson, urban legend | 4 Comments »
“The Color of Electrum”–Ezekiel Visits the 60s
January 10, 2013
Novelist and poet Valerie Nieman, author of Blood Clay, did me the honor last month of “tagging” me for a writers’ blog hop on the theme of “My Next Big Thing.” Val posted on her current project, a gripping, suspenseful novel called Backwater, about a young girl’s coming of age and her encounter with horrendous crime. (You can read all about Backwater at http://valerienieman.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-next-big-thing.html. I’ve had a sneak preview of the manuscript–and it’s terrific!)
We were asked ten questions about our latest project. And my latest is the sequel to Journal of a UFO Investigator, to which I’ve given the title The Color of Electrum.
At the bottom of this post, you’ll see the writers I’m tagging, and when and where you can read about their exciting new work.
Now here’s the ten questions, and my ten answers …
1. What is the working title of your book or project?
The Color of Electrum.
2. Where did the idea come from for the book or project?
Ezekiel's vision, as re-visioned by William Blake
I was a sophomore at Cornell University in April 1967, when eight students and a professor were killed in a mysterious night-time fire in their residence hall. The Watermargin House, where I lived at the time, was particularly close to the students of that residence hall, and after their home was destroyed in the fire we found places in Watermargin for several of them to live.
Some weeks later, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a pounding on the door of my room. I staggered out into the hallway and found it filled with Watermarginers making their way to the fire escape. One of us had smelled smoke, awakened and alerted the others. A few minutes later we stood outside the house, mostly pajama-clad, as our burning, smoking couch was carried from the living room to the back porch and thrown out onto the lawn.
There were no casualties that night. We all got out safely. But we knew that whoever had set the fire in the residence hall had now come after us and might be back. For the rest of that semester we kept watch at night, hidden at the top of the stairs, watching the door for intruders. I remember sitting with a friend from my first-year Arabic class, a length of heavy iron pipe in my hand, going over verb conjugations for the final exam while we waited for the arsonist to return. (He–or she, or whoever it was–didn’t show.)
On May 22, 1967–the day before the Watermargin fire? or is my memory playing tricks?–the Cornell Daily Sun published a strange article entitled “Fire Passages Read,” which I clipped out of the paper and still have in my files. It began: “A series of meetings at the Cornell Heights Residential Club to discuss death–at which passages from Ezekiel 1:1-13 describing the ‘burning coals of fire’ on the fifth day of the fourth month were quoted–preceded the April 5 fire at the club, according to reliable sources.”
Ezekiel’s fiery vision in “the fourth month, the fifth day of the month”–a fire at Cornell on the fifth day of April. Coincidence? I don’t think anyone ever found out. But I’d long been fascinated by Ezekiel’s vision (with its overtones of UFOs), and the idea intrigued me. There were other dates in the Book of Ezekiel, attached to the prophet’s subsequent visions. The Watermargin fire didn’t correspond to any of them.
Nor did the third fire, which I heard about at the end of May while I was having breakfast in the cafeteria of the student union. “Went out into the hall,” I heard a fellow say at the end of the table–”all went up in flames!” He was describing what had happened the night before in his Collegetown apartment. Again, there were no casualities in this incident. Were any of the people from the residence hall involved? I don’t know.
This was the last of the fires. No one was ever charged in connection with them, and as far as I’m aware the mystery has never been solved. I don’t intend The Color of Electrum to provide the solution. Rather, it imagines what might have happened if the initial fire had taken place exactly one year later than it did–April 5, 1968, a little under twelve hours after Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. And if Danny Shapiro–protagonist of Journal of a UFO Investigator, now in his freshman year at Carthage University–had been caught up in the swirl of (mostly fictional) events that the fire set moving.
3. What genre does it fall under, if any?
Perhaps mystery, perhaps thriller. Most essentially, a literary novel, “coming-of-age” in that Danny continues his struggle toward sexual and moral manhood. I intend to convey something of the madness of the late 1960s, when real life in this country had turned as surreal as Danny’s teenage UFO journal.
4. If applicable, who would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
For Danny, perhaps someone like Ben Feldman–but bearded, bespectacled, and his good looks understated. (In the book, Danny “never thought of himself as handsome, but maybe that was a mistake. … Nothing wrong with his face. Agreeable, kind; no obvious disfigurements, unless you counted the thick horn-rimmed glasses he’d been obliged to wear since he was a little kid.”)
And Annie Sharabi, Danny’s main love interest … she’s Yemenite-Jewish, but I could see her played by Arab or Latina actresses. Maybe a younger Salma Hayek, chunkier and less glamorous but with the sensual allure and the ability to convey Annie’s deep anger? I’ll leave that to the casting director.
5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your manuscript or project?
Danny Shapiro, college freshman and former “UFO investigator,” finds himself caught up in the late 1960s world of drugs, sex, and would-be revolution–while mysterious, deadly fires, timed according to the Biblical Book of Ezekiel, come striking ever nearer to him.
Ezekiel's vision, as re-visioned by Matthaeus Merian (1593-1650). "And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind ... with a fire flashing up ... and out of the midst thereof as the colour of electrum, out of the midst of the fire" (Ezekiel 1:4, American Jewish Version, 1917)
6. Will your book or story be self-published or represented by an agency?
My agent is the incomparable Peter Steinberg.
7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I tend to work on one project, leave it alone for a time while I’m working on another, and then come back to it after months or years. I began writing an initial draft of Electrum in the spring of 2007, and stopped in the middle because I couldn’t see where the story was going. Early in 2010 the fogs cleared and I started writing again from the beginning, with a complete draft finished in May of 2012. Does this count as the “first draft”? If so, the answer is: a shade over two years.
8. What other book or stories would you compare this story to within the genre?
In using fiction to evoke the phantasmagoric atmosphere of 1968, with The War as malignant spectral presence, I see myself as doing something akin to John Updike’s Rabbit Redux and Nancy Peacock’s Life Without Water. (Or, for a different period, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.) Danny’s automobile trip from New York State to California, which dominates the second half of the novel, echoes Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; the theme of a long and uncertain journey with a dangerous companion reminds me of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. In the concern with the loss and (shaky) recovery of religious faith–shades of George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter and some of Updike’s early stories. In its hearing of ancient Scriptural resonances in a troubled modern context, there’s a resemblance to Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
But the comparison that keeps coming to mind–oddly, perhaps, since The Color of Electrum is hardly juvenile or even YA literature–is with Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Jim Hawkins” goes on a quest that’s in part a search for the caretaking, guiding father he’s never had. He returns, seasoned and a bit hardened, with a treasure of maturity that isn’t to be found in any pirate chest. So, with all the necessary adjustments (sex, drugs, radical politics) factored in, does Danny Shapiro.
9. Who or what inspired you to write this book or story?
In 1993, I published a monograph on the prophet Ezekiel, entitled Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology. The argument of the book was that Ezekiel was an extraordinarily gifted but tormented man, dominated by rage and dread of female sexuality. I often wondered: what impact would Ezekiel have on a modern person who fell under the spell of his wild, stunning imagery? I remembered how I had nearly died as a college sophomore, perhaps (if the Cornell Daily Sun article was to be trusted) at the hands of such a person–and at the same time I knew how susceptible I myself was to that spell. I also remembered a theory advanced at the time of the fires by a friend of mine: that the arsonist intended the burnings to be a purge of the sexual “sin” in places like Watermargin or the residence hall, much as Ezekiel himself might have done. And I asked that old novelist’s question: what if … ?
Originally I reached a dead end. And then Peter Steinberg and I had lunch, and he encouraged me to write a sequel to Journal of a UFO Investigator, and I thought: maybe this is it. And I introduced Danny Shapiro as the main character of Electrum, which originally he hadn’t been. And this required me, because of Danny’s chronology in Journal of a UFO Investigator, to shift the date of the novel from 1967 to 1968. I discovered then, to my astonishment, that the Martin Luther King assassination would have taken place the evening before the fire. And then everything that I needed to do became clear. And I can’t tell you anything more because it’ll be a spoiler.
The Rolling Stones, "Their Satanic Majesties Request" (1967)
10. What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?
Danny’s continuing innocence, even as he loses his virginity both figuratively and literally, and has one brush after another with violent death. Also his belief in God, which flares and then dies–but can’t stay dead–as he watches Ezekiel’s prophecies play out in the 1968 American nightmare.
Shortly after meeting Danny, Annie Sharabi–drug dealer’s girlfriend, granddaughter of a Yemenite Kabbalist–proudly tells him she’s an atheist.
“I am too,” said Danny. He took the pipe from her hand. Their fingers touched lightly.
“No you’re not.”
Her certainty amused him; he burst out laughing. She laughed too. He took the deepest drag yet, held it until he thought he might pass out. … Around him he felt the music swelling, carrying him up with it. And now there was Annie’s voice, singing along with the Rolling Stones: “‘She comes in colors everywhere, she combs her hair, she’s like a rai-i-i-nbow.’”
“‘Like the appearance of the bow in the cloud on the day of rain,’” Danny quoted from Ezekiel’s vision, “‘so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face.’”
She smiled. He grew dizzier, flew higher. “Told you,” she said.
PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Tuesday, January 15: Laine Cunningham, author of Message Stick and He Drinks Poison, posts on her novel Light and Purple Blooms. “Through a lifetime spent in devotion to church, husband, and the mainstream definition of a good life, Lana Crossfield has betrayed herself. After divorcing both her husband and her church, a pregnant woman she knows is murdered and the unborn fetus is cut from the womb. She must help a community of women survive this horrific betrayal.” http://writersresourceblog.com/2013/01/15/the-next-big-thing/
Friday, February 1: Nancy Peacock, author of Life Without Water, Home Across the Road, and A Broom of One’s Own, posts on The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, a historical novel spanning 1860 to 1875, set in Louisiana and Texas. http://nancypeacockbooks.com/wp/blog-hop/
Monday, February 4: Linda Hanley Finigan, author of Love and War, posts on her novel The Weight of the Heart. “A party boat sinks on the Thames. An extravagant birthday gala ends in disaster. From the caterer and crew to the high society guests feting a wealthy plastic surgeon on the decks above, The Weight of the Heart weaves together an international cast of characters, grappling with the foibles of their lives in the course of an evening that will end in tragedy–Downton Abbey meets Ship of Fools at the end of the twentieth century.” http://loveandwar-novel.tumblr.com/post/42278512309/my-thanks-to-david-halperin-author-of-journal
Friday, March 29: Peggy Payne, author of Revelation and Sister India, posts on her about-to-be-published novel Cobalt Blue, “a turbulent gorgeous ride into sacred sex, compulsion, obsession, unmentionable attractions, and ultimate empowering redemption. ‘Cobalt Blue is entrancing and unsettling,’ says Angela Davis-Gardner, ‘a novel that gets at the marrow of sexual and spiritual experience. Peggy Payne is one of our most gifted writers.’” http://www.peggypayne.com/blog/?p=2384
Visit these writers’ blogs and comment! Keep the circle moving!
Posted in Journal of a UFO Investigator, Psychology, Religion, The Color of Electrum, The Writing Life | Tags: 1960s, arson, blog hop, Cornell University, Ezekiel, fires, Journal of a UFO Investigator, residence hall fire, sexual revolution, Six-Year Ph.D. Program fire, The Color of Electrum, Watermargin | 6 Comments »
Kris Kringle, Christ Child – Some Outsider Thoughts on Christmas
December 20, 2012
“And the angels came, did you hear them sing?
In the shining light of the maternity wing
Sayin’ ‘People, do not be afraid, Love is new!
In the Heart of every child Love is born to you.’”
– Kathleen Hannan, “Every Child”
It’s that awkward time of year again. When store clerks puzzle over whether to wish me a merry Christmas as they ring up my purchases, and, after looking at my patently Jewish features, settle on “Happy holidays.” “Same to you,” I say. I’d have said the same if they’d said “Merry Christmas” but they don’t know that. Probably they fear “offending” me.
Awkward. But when they do say “Merry Christmas,” I also feel a bit awkward. You can’t win.
The irony is that, since beginning to identify myself as a Unitarian Universalist, I do celebrate Christmas. It’s a holiday that’s fascinated me since I was a little Jewish boy in a mostly Christian school, trying to shut my ears against the almost unearthly beauty of the carols I knew I wasn’t supposed to sing.
My current “celebration,” in case you’re wondering, consists mostly of going with my wife to a Unity church on Christmas Eve and singing those carols; letting the tears flow, some years, as I lift the lighted candle at “Silent Night.” In worship, not of the historical Christ Child–though he certainly existed; Jesus, like the rest of us, had to have been an infant at one time–but of something pure and holy born within each one of us. Born perpetually, but most perceptible in the sacred stillness of this night.
Volumes have been written on the true meaning of Christmas, mostly by people who are Christians by culture if not faith, for whom the holiday has been part of their awareness as far back as they’ve had awareness. Forgive the presumption of a few observations by an outsider, written as though he were an anthropologist from Mars–which, at this season of the year, I perhaps am–taking notes on the festival.
The "world-tree." What the Christmas tree represents? (Art by Josephine Wall, http://www.josephinewall.co.uk/.)
This extraterrestrial anthropologist will note, first, that Christmas is an eight-day holiday, beginning on December 25 and ending on January 1. (He’ll find in one popular song traces of a time when it lasted twelve days, but this is clearly a thing of the past.) If he has any awareness of the Jewish religious calendar, he’ll note how the eight-day festival has its parallels in Judaism. There’s Hanukkah; there’s Passover. And like Passover, it’s the first and last days of the holiday that are full festivals, the time in between being half-holiday, half-secular.
He’ll then notice that the iconography for this eight-day festival features a linked pair, a tiny child and an old man. At the beginning of the period, these two figures are the Christ Child and Santa Claus. At the end, they’re the New Year and the Old Year. He’ll suspect that, not only are the two pairs different representations of one basic idea, but the Infant and the Old Man are at bottom the same person. If he’s told that one of the names for the Old Man is “Kris Kringle”–from German Christ Kindl, “Christ the Little Child”–he’ll nod (or whatever Martians do) and say, Yes, just as I thought.
He’ll nod again when told that the Old Man has a certain propensity for coming down chimneys–as babies do, when dropped there by storks.
Santa at the chimney ...
He’ll say: This is a holiday about regeneration and rebirth. About the human longing to be born anew as our aging process reaches its end, just as the sun’s light is reborn when it reaches its point of deepest darkness.
But of course there’s more. A festival doesn’t have the power and resonance of Christmas unless it can coalesce a whole range of meanings, yearnings, and hopes–some of which may contradict each other–into a few rich symbols.
He’ll look at the Christmas tree. And as a trained anthropologist, albeit from another planet, he’ll be reminded of what folklorists call the “Weltenbaum,” the “world-tree.”
“The Weltenbaum is found in the mythology of many peoples and is an ancient symbol of the cosmic order. As world-axis (axis mundi), it stands in the center of the world. Its roots reach deep into the earth and its crown touches or carries the heavens. And so it binds together the three planes of heaven, earth, and underworld.” So the German Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia adds: “It may also be strongly connected to the motif of the tree of life.”
“Its crown touches the heavens.” Is that why there’s a star at the top of the Christmas tree? he’ll wonder. Is that why it’s adorned with lights, as its branches wend their way upward through the splendors of the starry sky?
Our Martian will listen to the song about the Old Man as God of judgment. (“He’s making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice”–as God does at the Jewish New Year.) He’ll notice what happens to those who’ve “passed” the Old Man’s scrutiny, as they awaken from beneath their blanket of snow. (“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …“)
... and the Infant, like the Old Man
“The kids in girl and boyland
Will have a jubilee
They’re gonna build a toyland
All around the Christmas tree … “
And if he’s read the Christian Bible, he’ll think of the blessedness of those who’ve been found “nice” in the final judgment, reproduced–in the ideal fantasy, at least–in every family’s living room:
“God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain … Then he showed me … on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. … And night shall be no more …” (Book of Revelation, 21:3-4, 22:1-5).
At the heart of it all–the Old Man, miraculously turned at the end of each year into a newborn babe. The two extremes united in the Love that’s always newborn, that has (in the words of Unitarian minister Mary Grigolia) neither beginning nor end.
“And the angels came, did you hear them sing?
In the shining light of the maternity wing
Sayin’ ‘People, do not be afraid, Love is new!
In the Heart of every child Love is born to you.’”
Lyrics from Kathleen Hannan’s “Every Child,” soon to be available on her CD “Seen & Unseen: Songs from the Light of Midlife.” I’ve heard most of these songs–they’re wonderful. You can preorder at http://www.kathleenhannan.com/.
Today’s post is my last for 2012. I’ll be back on January 10, talking about my new project, the novel that’s the sequel to Journal of a UFO Investigator.
This will be part of a multi-author “blog hop” on the theme of “My Next Big Thing,” to which I was invited by Valerie Nieman, author of Blood Clay. Read about Val’s “next big thing”–a gripping, suspenseful novel about a young girl’s coming of age and her encounter with a horrendous crime–on her blog, http://valerienieman.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-next-big-thing.html.
Wishing happy holidays and a great 2013 to all!
Posted in Psychology, Religion | Tags: Christ Child, Christmas, Christmas tree, Hanukkah, Kris Kringle, rebirth, regeneration, Santa Claus, stork babies | 6 Comments »
UFOs and Apparitions – “They Weren’t There, But I Saw Them”
November 13, 2012
“I know they weren’t really there,” the lady told me. “But I did see them.”
She was talking about the UFO aliens she saw standing outside her home when she was a child, looking out through her bedroom windows. She’s a charming person, in her fifties although she looks much younger. I met her a couple of months ago, and she told me her story.
I believe both parts of her statement. No, the UFO beings weren’t really there. But yes, she did really see them.
Morton Schatzman, "The Story of Ruth"
Our conversation prompted me to reread a book I’d first read almost 30 years ago, Morton Schatzman’s The Story of Ruth (Putnam, 1980).
Schatzman, an American psychotherapist practicing in London, tells the story of a 25-year-old woman from the US who came to him in desperation. She was being persecuted by her father, a dreadful man who’d brutally raped her as a little girl. Only her father was still, physically, on the far side of the Atlantic.
What she was seeing was an apparition of her father, a being who looked and sounded and even felt so real that when he passed between Ruth and some object–let’s say, a portion of the far wall of the room she was in–he blocked it from her sight. As if she not only hallucinated his shape, but also the absence from her vision of whatever was behind the spot where that shape passed.
It’s an amazing tale. Not least remarkable are the parts where Schatzman, ever the dogged experimenter, tests over and over whether anyone else ever sees Ruth’s apparitions. (Because after a while she’s able to conjure up her apparitions, of her father and other people, in his office and elsewhere.) Mostly the results are negative; no surprise. But there are a few tantalizing clues that in certain circumstances Ruth’s visions can be shared, at least in part, by others. This may have implications for multiply witnessed UFO sightings.
As her therapy progresses, Ruth doesn’t lose her apparitions. She learns to control them, make them come and go at her will. To produce friendlier ones than her malevolent father.
Her husband Paul, for example.
Once when Paul is out of town and she’s feeling lonely, “I started making an apparition of Paul. When it appeared, it was nude and looked just like him. Neither of us said anything. I was lying on one side of the bed, and he lay down on the other beside me …”
I won’t repeat what follows. Suffice it to say that the apparition feels to Ruth absolutely real, solid, tangible. And male.
Under Schatzman’s guidance, Ruth gradually comes to see herself not as a half-insane victim of paranormal harassment, but as possessor of an extraordinary talent.
Extraordinary. Not unique.
Julian Jaynes, whose mind-blowing 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I’m now reading for the first time, speaks of a young biologist’s wife who told him after one of his lectures “that almost every morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long, informative and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead grandmother in which the grandmother’s voice was actually heard. This came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never previously mentioned it, since ‘hearing voices’ is generally supposed to be a sign of insanity.”
Those labeled insane often do have hallucinations. Which is a bad thing. Or not?
“At a suspicion of hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to eliminate this rival control over the patient. But it has never been shown that hallucinating patients are more intractable than others. Indeed, as judged by other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have more positive expectancies toward others in the hospital than nonhallucinating patients. And it is possible that even when the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be helpful to the healing process” (Jaynes, pp. 86-88).
Like Ruth’s visions.
Rereading Schatzman’s book in a cheap paperback edition (Zebra Books, 1981), I was disappointed not to find the passage that had most stuck in my mind from the hardcover. Did some editor eliminate it? Or did I hallucinate it?
In a footnote, perhaps, Schatzman quoted from Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. Hamlet, in his mother’s bedroom, sees his dead father and hears his commands. To his mother he says:
“Do you see nothing there?”
The queen replies:
“Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.”
And Schatzman–if my memory is correct–asked: “How did she know, I wonder, that ‘all that is I see’?”
Excellent question.
Think about it, the next time you look out your window and don’t see UFO aliens on your lawn.
by David Halperin
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Posted in Psychology, UFOs | Tags: "The Origin of Consciousness", "The Story of Ruth", apparitions, ghost in Hamlet, hallucinations, Julian Jaynes, Morton Schatzman, UFOs | No Comments »
Israel UFO – “Why Do UFOs Fly in Threes?” (Shlomo Shoval)
November 7, 2012
“Loneliness! What won’t people do on account of it? And this loneliness, what is it really, but the cosmic loneliness and dread of abandonment that I talk about all the time, from which you can be saved the moment the first UFO lands here and one sort of creature or another comes out of it and gives you a friendly greeting.
“And if you ask me how I manage always to get back to UFOs and extraterrestrials from practically any subject I deal with, I’ll ask you the opposite question: How come you always wind up talking about food or sex or money or health or soccer, no matter what you’ve started out discussing? … Extraterrestrials and UFOs aren’t serious, respectable enough subjects, compared to the ones you like to talk about?”
The paragraphs above are taken from the 120-page-long ramblings of a man who’s half an extraterrestrial–or maybe one-third, or one-quarter; he isn’t sure which–who’s wandered among the galaxies and their alien races through a multitude of incarnations and reincarnations, and now has returned to Earth as to his boyhood home. He’s the hero of Shlomo Shoval’s Hebrew novel Lamah ha-Abameem Taseem B’derekh K’lal Bishloshoht, U-madua ha-Haizareem Lo Ohaveem L’hitztalem? Which means: “Why Do UFOs Generally Fly in Threes, and Why Don’t Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken?”
Front cover: Shlomo Shoval, "Why Do UFOs Generally Fly in Threes, and Why Don't Extraterrestrials Like to Have Their Pictures Taken?"
The book was published in Israel in 2000. As far as I know, it’s never been translated. All the passages quoted here are my own translations.
“And if you tell me that you don’t see [my extraterrestrial origins] in any obvious way just by looking at me, this is because all through my journeyings I tried really hard not to assimilate myself too much to them, so I could preserve some Earthly identity and quality–at least on the outside–maybe deliberately, or in my inner awareness that some day I’d come back here as a normal civilized person, and not just any civilized person but a kind of preacher, maybe a prophet in a certain manner of speaking, not to say redeemer or at least proclaimer of redemption, or if we want to use language that’s a little more cautious and a little less pretentious: as someone who deals in practical redemption.”
About halfway through the novel we began to get hints about the more mundane aspects of the (unnamed) speaker’s life. He’s a middle-aged man, married, with a three-year-old son and a somewhat older daughter. He’s currently engaged in building a landing strip for UFOs in his back yard, in consequence of which his neighbors and so-called “well-wishers” have gotten half a dozen restraining orders against him. His wife is threatening to leave. His mother-in-law is looking into psychiatric hospitals.
His otherworldly experiences have broadened his horizons. Especially where sex is concerned.
“My stand is unequivocal: we live today in an open, pluralistic, democratic universe. I don’t believe anyone has any call to meddle, for example, in whatever relations may develop between a beautiful female from Alpha Centauri with a perfected brain cluster and some total ass from the Nile Delta. If she’s hot for him and wants to have complete or partial sex relations with him by mutual consent and practicing safe sex, that’s her private affair. Even if she picks some invertebrate or mollusk to do it with, that’s still nobody’s business.
“I also think that, overall–in spite of the great multiplicity of life forms in the universe–when all is said and done loneliness is still the cardinal problem, and, some people say, even the number one killer. Not only, therefore, is there no need to criticize, condemn, forbid, ban, or vomit upon anybody who takes part in any sort of exceptional contact whatever, but rather the contrary: one ought to show acceptance and understanding for all of these, even organize meetings and symposia. … In the name of that loneliness … I salute all lovers, whatever they may be.”
A comic novel? I suppose. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. Yet a somber undercurrent keeps making itself felt–nowhere more powerfully than near the end, when the narrator tries to figure out what he’s been gabbling about for the past hundred or so pages of cosmic peregrination.
“When all’s said and done, I’ve tried to tell you a good story before bedtime, before that long and final sleep you’re going to have one of these days and from which you’ll never wake up in spite of all the stories they tell you, all the promises they make you, including everything I’ve said and promised and assured you myself. … The long night draws near, and I haven’t much more to say beyond Good night, sweet dreams.”
At the heart of the UFO fantasy: loneliness, death. Not unlike my own belief, which I’ve expressed in a variety of places, that the crux of the UFO mythos is the terrible paradox of death:
“Death–the most essential and familiar part of us all. Born in us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, the instant we’re born. Yet also death–alien! Beyond all alienness! Through it I’m not me anymore; I’m nothing at all. … Easier to conceive of the most fantastic star at the edge of the farthest galaxy, the most inhuman, unrecognizable form of life and intelligence than to conceive of death.” (Journal of a UFO Investigator, p. 185.)
Back cover: praise for the book from "Sirius Book Review," "Andromeda Times," and other distiguished periodicals
One of the greatest of our writers, the late Gore Vidal, appears to me to have had a parallel intuition. And now I detect something similar in Shlomo Shoval, in a novel written for a country to which, a generation or two back, UFOs meant nothing at all.
I learn from the bio printed on the back cover–just beneath the enthusiastic blurbs from distinguished publications like the Sirius Book Review (“At last! Something good has come out of Planet Earth”) and the Andromeda Times–that Shoval lives in Jerusalem, and was born in 1947. Same year as me. Facing his “long night” from about the same perspective as I face mine.
Why do UFOs fly in threes? (They don’t, actually.) Why don’t extraterrestrials like to have their pictures taken? Shoval never says. No matter. He’s written a strange, remarkable book, well worth reading by anyone, human or extraterrestrial.
Someone ought at least to translate it into English.
Posted in Israel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, Psychology, UFOs | Tags: death, ET, extraterrestrials, Gore Vidal, Israel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, loneliness, Shlomo Shoval, UFOs | 4 Comments »