For Nasima and Kaia: Reflections on the Inferno.

For Nasima and Kaia: Reflections on the Inferno
“The Inferno” took place over a two week period in July 1968 while your mother and I were living in Las Vegas. Why did I use that term? First of all, “The Inferno” is a reference to two authors, Dante and August Strindberg, both of whom wrote books called THE INFERNO, books that deal with hellish ordeals in the underworld that led to deeper vision of first and last things. Dante’s work was produced in the context of late medieval Christianity, that is, with a belief system that featured heaven, hell, and purgatory, ending with a cosmic beatific vision. Strindberg called his ordeal an Inferno experience because it paralleled a descent into the underworld, that is, it was the psychological equivalent, an encounter with personal demons that had long haunted his inner world. He experienced a schizoid episode that put him over the edge of sanity. In other words, it resembled an acid trip; he came back to terra firma. I would describe my INFERNO along the same lines: it was hellish and schizoid, but also visionary and mystical. It also happened during the infernal heat of the Mojave Desert in the summer. At certain moments during the ordeal I felt like I was a stand-in for St. Anthony during his trial in the desert: being under attack by unspeakable demons, alone, cut-off, and locked into a bottomless pit of blackness. (Something else I share with Strindberg is we both had psoriasis.)
This may sound strange to you two but I was poised between the sun and moon for those two magical weeks. The torrid orb of the sun dominated the daylight hours and the moon was the magnetic center of the night time hours. They both assumed an extraordinary significance for me during the length of the ordeal. They were like the polarities of consciousness for me and my life was the pendulum that swung back and forth between the two orbs of energy. They were the two ends of my psyche, the orange ball of fire during the day, and the white sphere of nighttime illumination, Sol et Luna. I always would go outside at dawn to stare at the rising sun coming up over the mountains on the eastern horizon; that was just before I would go to bed for several hours as I had stayed up all night during the summer. I did that for 5 summers while living in Las Vegas. At night I often took walks and sat out in the open desert and stared at the moon for long minutes, as if mesmerized, as if its vibe and power were penetrating me from that great distance in the heavens. I know how that must sound peculiar to you but that is how it felt to me at the time. It was up there and down here simultaneously. In the two week period of The Inferno the moon obviously changed shape but in my memory it was always a full, perfect, super-bright white circle. The Inferno state, while terrifying on certain levels, bestowed on me feelings of Cosmic Consciousness and a sense of the oneness of all things, which I have never lost.
For all the details of The Inferno please read PRIMUS ROTA, preferably the second version, which is not on the computer yet.
The first year after the experience was very strange. I was lost in a fog, nothing looked the same, and things had been transfigured. I’d go to the supermarket at 3 AM and see showgirls shopping after their shows with their make-up still on; to me they were like gaudy apparitions with goop on their faces. I was flying high inside The Magic Theater that Herman Hesse wrote about in one of his novels. I wasn’t sure if a veil had been ripped away from my perceptions or if one had been added. When the semester started I went through the motions of teaching, just like before, but I was no longer identified with my actions; my career and my role on campus were like ashes in my mouth. They had lost their previous flavor. I walked among my colleagues like a ghost, not connecting with them either. They were puppets in a play I was no longer part of. I was not the same individual anymore, but exactly who I was, I wasn’t at all sure. But I did know I could not continue to do the same kind of painting and drawing that I had been doing for the past 4 or 5 years. The experience that was my Baptism by Fire had me thinking I had to find another way, a manner and style more aligned with my new if hazy understanding. New self-knowledge had me thinking and feeling down different avenues, which, I felt, called for a new expression.
The second semester that school year, 1968-1969, was a time of decision for your mother and I. She decided she wanted to go back to school for a Masters in film and dance. Since I needed time to evaluate the Inferno experience, I was game to try and obtain a leave and go with her to wherever she wants to go to school, which turned out to be the University of Oregon. The Administration was more than happy to give me a leave (without pay) to get rid of me for at least a year. It was a smart move to get out of town; it lifted me out of a context where prodigious events had taken place and helped me establish a new perspective that allowed me to think anew about what had happened to me in, of all places, Las Vegas.
I went to Eugene seeing myself as one of the “burnt ones,” a notion I ran across in FLAWS IN THE GLASS, the autobiography of Australian novelist, Patrick White, a Nobel Prize winning writer. Some of the characters in his novels are called “burnt ones” because of searing experience of one kind or another. They are souls anointed by fire, by being in extremis, being thereafter ‘touched’ or capable of wider scope and understanding. Being burnt also separates you from the herd. I felt so different because I was walking around with a secret in my heart that I felt I’d have a hard time trying to explain it to others. My interior life had been had been elevated and expanded, but yet I felt the Mark of Cain was on my forehead, which made me feel vulnerable and exposed to danger or ridicule. I had had a dramatic experience that few people have, of the hidden chakras, of death and rebirth, of luminous vision and mystical knowledge, but I was reluctant to talk about these things openly. I was convinced people would think I was one crazy son-of-a-bitch. I did take a lot of shit from the political activists on campus who were very irritated with me for withdrawing from political activism—they saw me as a cop out—and could not buy my story of a transformation from “born agitator” to “introspective voyager.”
This is when the ascetic ideal became meaningful to me, a notion I conceptualized as “God’s Athlete over the Abyss.” Where that idea came from would be tedious to trace here; but let me illustrate what I mean. There is a story about J.M.W. Turner that is apt here. You saw many of his paintings at the Tate Museum in London in 1998. Turner wanted to understand the nature of a storm at sea, so he could portray it better in his work, so he had himself tied to the mast and suffered through a raging storm. Or take the example of Vincent van Gogh who wrote about a similar orientation in one of his letters to his brother Theo.
“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. They leave that philosophy to those who like it. Let the storm arise, the night descend; which is worse, dangers or the fear of dangers? For my part I prefer the reality, the danger itself.”
Turner survived his storm, prospered and lived a long time with honors bestowed on him. Van Gogh committed suicide while in his late thirties, but the fecundity of his creativity and its expressive quality and power cannot be questioned. I have survived my INFERNO too, which came in three phases, and when I die I will leave a testament to what I have learned on this twittering orb of a planet.