Other World

By Garden Urthark

Set mainly in and around Washington, DC, at the end of the second and beginning of the third millennium and on an unknown planet in a timeless zone reachable by humans only after death, Garden Urthark’s novel is a combination romance, mystery, and metaphysical inquiry that will challenge your most-basic and unquestioned assumptions about love, sanity, and the afterlife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Garden Urthark
• Release date: Apr 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9780978516239

Garden Urthark

Bishuasi, la mia amore,nella mia vita, che meravglia.Mi trovo fra la perduta gente,voglio mangiare la tua melauna pezza alla volta, mentre,era tu, beh, che me l'ha offerta.Tu faccia me matto! Mia testavole con uccelli belle belle,mio cuore con luce dei stelle,brucciando secoli e secoli.Galessie brute e bellegridano contro nostri nemici!Vieni ai miei abbraccio muoro, da vero, senza bacci.Translation into English / Traduzione in ingleseSalvation, my love,in my life, what a wonder.I find myself among the lost people,I want to eat your appleone piece at a time, while,it was you, well, who offered it to me.You make me crazy! My headflies with beautiful beautiful birds,my heart with starlight,burning centuries and centuries.Brute and beautiful galaxiesthey shout against our enemies!Come to my hugsor I die, truly, without kisses.Garden Urthark is an enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.

Book preview

Other World

by

Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition

To Northrop Frye

and to my wife, Sung, and

our son, A.J.

And Orpheus received her, but one term

Was set: he must not, till he passed Avernus,

Turn back his gaze . . .

(Ovid, The Metamorphosis)

Do not stand at my grave and cry

I am not there; I did not die.

(Mary Frye, 1932)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

I. Book of Alona

II. Psychosis

III. Book of Life

IV. Book of Afterlife

V. Fabula

Afterword

Appendices

Appendix 1: Fiber Analysis

Appendix 2: Trinyon Halaka

Appendix 3: Excerpts from The Million Dollar Wound

About Garden Urthark

About the Artist for Other World

The Artwork

Other Titles by Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Acknowledgements

Copyright Notice for Other World

Preface to the First Edition

If I were a scholar researching the find of this book twenty centuries from now, I am sure that I would approach its various parts as I would stories from the Bible or from any culture’s mythology. Because the stories are together, they can be viewed from the basic perspective of forming a kind of unity. That is to say, using language from the world-renowned literary critic Northrop Frye, the stories can be seen to stick together like a group of myths because they represent an interconnected body of narrative that covers, if not all, at least a good part, of the kind of revelation that a society is or should be concerned about. Other World is a myth in the making, but its culture is not the culture of the United States or even Western Europe. The culture of Other World is world culture, and its symbols extend just as well to Buddhist enlightenment and Hindu reincarnation as to Christian revelation and salvation.

In his way the hero Moody Santo shares both the poverty and the outcast status of a Buddhist monk or of Jesus or any of his followers as he goes about the world in search of the answer to its mystery. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. Enough to say that Other World addresses the most basic components of myth: to tell a society’s views about life, the afterlife, and cosmology.

And as myths are stories about gods who are, in Frye’s definition, superior in kind to both other men and their environment, the same might be said for Moody and Norma, the main characters of this story, but only from the necessarily limited view of the uninitiated. De te fabula, or the story is about you, as Frye says, of what he called the romance form of literature, or secular scripture, descended, or developed, from myth. Science fiction tends to fit neatly into this category. And what we have here is a science-fiction tale, and not a myth, for one very important reason: the story lacks what Frye describes as the kind of social consensus that gives a myth its peculiar authority within a culture: Other World is not a myth, at least not yet. But it does have that realistic element characteristic of myth that can give a story a sense of being truer than fiction.

I am speaking now with some wonder, and astonishment, of the clothing Moody Santo, the hero of this story, was found in after his death. A detailed analysis of the clothing revealed that the fibers it was made of were neither natural nor manufactured. In short, they could not have been said conclusively to have come from or been made on Earth. This fact presented the major stumbling block to my simply dismissing this entire tale as either simply science fiction or an elaborate hoax. I have seen the fiber analysis with my own eyes.

Having met the flesh-and-blood Norma who appears as a central character in the tale, I have come to be a believer that something extraordinary, something far beyond the levels of ordinary experience, has occurred within the pages of this book. Only time will tell whether this something will prove itself by some unforeseen social consensus to be matter for our next mythology.

Tom Greenberg

Senior Editor

Introduction

I do not know of any writer who has faced the opposition I’ve faced. Henry Miller perhaps. I’m talking about an opposition unlike anything faced by Miller. Society has tried to extinguish me as a person, first by arresting and incarcerating me, second by labeling me a schizophrenic. I’ve received a death sentence of a kind, for from that moment on, everything I might write, everything I might do, would be called into question, would be suspect, would be considered unreliable. My entire view of reality had been extinguished with a single stroke. It was only one step further to extinguishing me completely as a person, first by medicating me, next, by requiring me to conform in ways that completely negated my entire sense of self. For once so branded, I could no longer find employment, could no longer make a friend. And as a strategy for ridding itself of me as an opponent, an enemy, the State did the next best thing short of actually executing me or imprisoning me for life. And I was an opponent to the State—to any State. I was not an anarchist, but I have a clear idea about the injustices and inequalities perpetrated by the capitalist system or State. And I showed that opposition down to the finest details of interpersonal communication and family and social life. No, I was not a member of the Communist Party or any party. I did not want to see the violent overthrow of this or any State. But I did want to see a redistribution of wealth. I did want to see values change.

I was a nonconformist. I had no girlfriend, though I loved women. I could see that relationships between men and women became polluted by the dirty System. There was no escape. The vows exchanged between man and wife were vows of selfishness and exclusion. Yes, I eventually married. But let me try to explain myself. I am a revolutionary. I have always known this. But the revolution I was in would not come clear to me for many many years and after much suffering. For as time passed, and opposition mounted, my enemies defined themselves, becoming clearer and clearer to me. Branded for life, cut off from all companionship, I realized early on that to keep my true self alive, the self under or beneath, as it were, the medication, the threats, the brute coercion of the psychiatric profession, the brute coercion of the work world, the brute coercion of the publishing industry, I would have to become a guerilla. My own private revolution for the liberation of myself and my family from the State, call it the System, would go on.

Free myself from what? Wasn’t the United States a democracy? Weren’t the people of this country the envy of the world? I knew I was not free. Business—capitalism—controlled the majority of the waking hours of the life of the citizens of the United States. And the business world was not organized as a democracy but as a despotism, a tyranny. I knew that neither I nor others were free under such a system. Certainly the poor were not and would never be free under such a system. For capitalism needed the poor. Without the poor, capitalism could not survive. Capitalism needed the haves and have nots. It needed a hell just as much as Christianity ever needed one. It needed a place of banishment, of punishment. And this place—poverty—or at higher levels—the kind of ostracism that would lead to poverty—was a highly necessary part of the entire System.

I became more than an outlaw to this System—I became like a Jew with a golden Star of David sewn into the fabric of my character. How could I even explain this to my son? I couldn’t. Yes, I had gone underground years before he was born, deep underground, just as thoroughly as any revolutionary who ever lived. Once branded, I had to conform or face imprisonment in a mental asylum for life—I had been so committed. The only way out was conformity. And the conformity was endless. It would stretch on for years, for decades. I would marry, I would work myself into a semirespectable position in society, all while remaining a revolutionary, a guerilla writer, a member of no party, a voice of no alternative system to offer of my own. I would have to hide now in ways I never dreamed I would have to hide. My parents had always cautioned me to conceal my working-class background. Both parents had been deeply ashamed of where they’d come from. I was not to tell anyone. Now I could be stripped at any moment of all respectability as a man and my Scarlet Letter, my Star of David, revealed upon my breast. Even my own son would want to disown me. Even my own son could be crushed. For the shame would be inherited. The crushing stigma would be passed from me to him. How could I ever explain myself to my own son? So had this monstrous society dealt with me, so effectively, so thoroughly, so efficiently. Travel the world and I would receive the same response. I had been deemed insane. I had even been certified. So when I was young and at the height of my power, with my whole life still ahead of me, it had all been taken away. My opposition would mean nothing, not in this life, not in this world, not anywhere or ever.

If I were a guerilla, I would have to find a way to explain myself. For explain myself I must, as Melville once said in another context, or else all this writing might be for naught.

In the 1960s, R.D. Laing explained that a certain type of schizoid personality had a good chance of becoming a schizophrenic. A schizoid personality was a personality that lived within a world of ontological insecurity. People with such a personality could not trust. They could not engage in the give and take of genuine relationships. A person might feel that if his or her true self were known, were revealed, that person would meet with utter humiliating rejection. My parents were this way about their past, their working-class backgrounds. A person with a schizoid personality was only one step away from becoming a schizophrenic, according to Laing. Not all people with this problem became schizophrenics—my parents certainly never did—but my uncle did, my father’s brother. He became a schizophrenic as a teenager, spending close to a year in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. However, he recovered and concealed this part of his background until he met with calamity when as a middle-aged man he was fired from a very high-ranking job as an attorney for NASA. I do not know really how he came to such a fate, but I am sure that the stigma that had pursued him through life must have played a part, raging after him like the Furies of ancient Greek myth.

Before he was murdered, my younger brother became a schizophrenic, and a few years later, I became one. The family was cursed. My father had been an alcoholic. He had abused his family and the lowly people who worked for him, the secretaries, the orderlies, the X-ray technicians. I had witnessed this abuse with my own eyes. My father lorded his power as a physician over the people over whom he held sway just as thoroughly as any tyrant has so wielded power in history. I am sure that if my father had had the authority, he would have had people executed, imprisoned, even tortured. He was emotionally abusive in the extreme, always picking his fights very carefully with weaklings: his children, his wife, his orderlies and secretaries, where his power reigned supreme. But my task here is not to write his biography or even to pass judgment on him. It was my opposition to him and every hypocritical thing he stood for that made me the revolutionary I am. Am I a schizophrenic? I don’t believe it. No more would any revolutionary believe he or she was a criminal when locked up for carrying on a revolution. Part of my punishment was to be medicated. I could take the medication. The medication would alter my behavior, making conformity less anxiety provoking. But it could not change my ideas. (He who’s forced against his will, is of the same opinion still!) What were my ideas?

Why or how had I come to be certified as a schizophrenic? How had my brother and my uncle? Were we all three deviants? I had come to the diagnosis by trying to become a professional writer. It is hard even now for me to untangle the mess that that created. For I refused to play the game. I did not want to work my way up or be initiated. I wanted to be recognized the way I thought every single individual should be recognized. Famed literary critic and scholar Northrop Frye stated it this way: he said that in the romance form of literature, for example, we were all kings and princes, not by birth, but because we were born. I didn’t believe I had to write a masterpiece to earn this recognition. I believe that I and every other person on the planet deserved it as a matter of course for being born. So even as I wrote, even as I won degrees and added to my recognizable store of tokens of achievement—a BA, an MA—none of this made me any more deserving than another person. This is what I mean when I say I refused to play the game. And so I refused to attend any graduation ceremony from high school on up to graduate school. I didn’t believe people should be praised for achievements of this kind. In my view, a person did not have to earn success. All people deserved it. I sought to impress no woman, I sought to impress no employer, I sought to impress no friend. But that didn’t make me less deserving, and I was angry because the world I was in didn’t see things that way.

Why should I have had plenty of money while growing up and my father and mother have had next to nothing when they were growing up? Did I want to support and perpetuate the injustices of a System like that? The answer was a resounding No! And so my rebellion started at a very young age, becoming noticeable when I dropped out of an exclusive private school at the age of 16, giving up all the advantages this school was supposed to give me, an honor student and gifted athlete. I would have none of that and I would get no sympathy. Quite the opposite. I found out that society can be very harsh. But that was the beginning of my descent outwardly—ascent inwardly. My first real loss in life had been a personal victory, a victory the society would want to make sure I would never enjoy. For immediately the System began the process of belittling and negating the value, any value, to what I had done. Even the other kids around me at the lower-middle-class school I had transferred to couldn’t make heads nor tails of what I’d done. Surely, I must have done something wrong. I can see very clearly now that the process was at work even here. The society might be able to understand a person who had lost certain privileges because of some moral flaw, but a person who had given up such privileges willingly and who had no intention of becoming a priest, say, or perhaps even a politician, such a person could not be understood, even by his peers.

Such a person within the capitalistic framework of dog eat dog, every man for himself, could only be seen as a fool. And I was an even greater fool in my family for saying that if I could help a poor black get into medical school by giving up my chance to go there I would do so. This was radical talk from my perspective. It may have been the beginning of what the society would take to be schizophrenese, the talk of a person who had lost touch with reality.

I brought home no girlfriend. No, I did not feel that I could be a man in the present society, not the kind of man I’d want to be. I surely did not want to be like my father, a have who had been a have not, for he told me that the problems of other people were not my problems; he abrogated all responsibility for the world’s ills in face of the reality of his own impoverished and tragic childhood. I did not want to be like him. And at the same time, I did not want to be impoverished myself. I didn’t want to give up all and become a priest, a choice that had actually been made by a member of our family, my father’s uncle, my great uncle, at whose ordination mass I had participated as a four-year-old.

I hated violence, so I was not about to support or endorse any kind of violent rebellion. And I did not trust groups—any kind of groups. I was an individualist, an extreme individualist of the Henry Thoreau or even Ralph Waldo Emerson stamp. How could that be so or why and how could that make sense? Where did my distrust of all groups come from and what did it mean? Political groups, religious groups, social groups: I distrusted—I disliked—all groups.

Groups were responsible for the persecution of the Jews. If Jews had not been in a group, they would never have been persecuted as a group. I was against all groups. Groups were responsible for World War II. Groups were responsible for the Vietnam War. Groups were responsible for all wars. I was against war. Thinking in terms of groups created groups of blacks and groups of whites. Thinking in terms of groups created groups of children with high grades and high test scores and groups of less-deserving children with lower grades and lower test scores. The whole greedy ugly mess of capitalism was based on the setting of one group against another by the bosses. Yes, Marx had seen this: blacks against whites, workers against bourgeoisie, poor against rich. Where had thinking in terms of groups like this got us? It had got us to the extermination of six million people. It had got us to the deaths of millions more. Classification had its place, perhaps—in science—but here we again come to an observation made by Ronald Laing. A person can either be seen as an object, one to which an entire scientific nomenclature and terminology can be attached, or a person, which is to say, as best as I can sum up such a view, as an experience, a phenomenon, a happening, more like a process or relation than an object, a process, an experience that eludes all simplistic formulations and labels. A person is just such a mixture of relations and interrelations between and among other persons. A person may in one respect be a member of a group, but his or her identity, in all its many faceted complexity, could never be reduced to such a classification.

Why was I then Catholic? I was not a member of any political party. In truth, I was a Catholic the way a schizoid was a Catholic. Being a Catholic helped keep me safe from persecution as one who had been judged to be a schizophrenic. But then, wasn’t that what all people who were members of groups could say? No, my true identity was beyond Catholicism. I participated in the religion as a practicing Catholic to protect myself from some of the worst elements of society, which were often to me the ultra conformists—the members of other religions. I could neutralize their distaste, even hatred, for a person such as myself by an appeal to religion. Catholicism was like the crucifix I held up to protect myself from a vampire. My alliance with Catholicism was like Mao’s alliance with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. My alliance with Catholicism was like the temporary truce I had called with psychiatry, a science that had done me irreparable harm. I was to psychiatry as the Vietnamese were to the Chinese. The Vietnamese had to submit to the Chinese historically in order to succeed with their own revolution. The Vietnamese hated the Chinese, likening submission to their much more powerful neighbor to that of prostitution. Yes, I had to compromise to survive. I had had to align myself with certain groups. I had had to use these alliances also to advance myself as best I could, but to protect myself at all costs. Yet here is the difference. I knew—I was conscious of involving myself with these groups even as I realized in myself that I was against so doing. In this respect, I was like a healthy person who could analyze his or her own neuroses in terms of Freudian psychotherapy rather than a blind neurotic unable to understand his or her own self-destructive behavior. I was awake and aware, a guerilla writer, a revolutionary such as the world had not heretofore witnessed or seen, yes, perhaps since Christ or Mohammed—with all proportion kept—so it would be better to keep to comparisons with great individuals such as Thoreau, even Bob Dylan. I do not compare myself with such individuals on a like for like basis. After all, as a schizophrenic, I would be expected to equate myself with Christ or Napoleon or whatever. I speak of examples, not identity. My true identity I was already sure about. I am and have always been a revolutionary.

I refused to conform in certain ways and yet I conformed absolutely in keeping with my ideas. If my program contained inconsistencies, so be it. As Emerson said, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. And so I kept to myself. I moved within a world of rejection so profound, I could have been in a bathysphere five miles under the sea or in a capsule five light years out in space. To live this way was difficult, but far better than being locked up on a mental ward, and I had sworn never to be so locked up again. Hence my conformity: my religious obedience to all psychological and psychiatric directives to take psychotropic medicines and observe psychotherapy appointments.

I took lithium for 20 years. The worst side effect of the medicine was frequent urination. Since I had experienced medicines with far worse side effects, I did not complain about this one, even if it meant I would be peeing perhaps 20 times per day. I had heard that lithium would change the color of my kidneys from red to green. This did not horrify me, but after 20 years of frequent urination, and after passing through the hands of several Pontius Pilate-type psychiatrists, I finally dredged up the bravery to request that my medicine be changed. My NIH psychiatrist at the time complied and I was switched to a new and much more expensive medicine, the side effects of which were unknown to me. Another side effect of lithium had been weight gain. This new medicine did not have such an effect, and I quickly lost weight, getting back down to my naturally slender self without the persistent worry about an expanding waistline that had bothered me with lithium.

But I am not writing a biography here. I am attempting to make a case for my sanity. Although certified as a schizophrenic as a young man, and having had to live under the stigma of that certification now for 28 years, I want to say at this point that I never believed that I was a schizophrenic or that I am one now or will ever be one. As I have tried to set forth here as clearly as I can, I am one who has been in conflict with my society over certain essential matters and this disagreement, this conflict, has brought down on me the full range of punishment reserved for those who enter such a conflict on the level of personal interactions as I have tried to set forth here. I refused to ally myself with groups and at the same time I did not force myself to make friendships or engage in any behavior out of fear. I simply would not be frightened into hurriedly finding a job or expediently forming a friendship. As far as relationships with the opposite sex went, I believed in true love and would settle for nothing less.

This thing about not acting out of fear deserves a little going into. Fearing God was one thing—fearing human beings quite another. I did fear God and I did and still do believe in God, an all-encompassing God who surpasses all religions. I refused to fear human beings, and I could not—I refused—to bow down and kowtow before authority figures—especially bosses, supervisors, and the like in the workplace. No, to me that type of servile, senseless behavior represented what I called kissing ass, and on the most stinky level.

Regretfully, I learned to fear human beings. For I was arrested, locked up, and medicated against my will in such a way as to cause me to actually flip out as I had never done before into a two-year catatonia—I don’t know what else to call it. Locked in a raging pain within myself, pain that I experienced while outwardly appearing OK, I believe I must have suffered as intensely as any victim who ever suffered on this Earth.

Yes, I learned to fear human beings, but not as one fears God—as one would fear the Devil. I had not believed much if at all in a Devil prior to this experience. But I would come to acknowledge that real evil of the kind that created the concentration camps had been loosed upon me and could be loosed again. I thus learned to kiss ass, to bow down, and to act out of fear. Once I learned this lesson, I became able to keep a series of dead-end job for many years and to even advance myself, all while I tended to the tunnels within myself of my own private revolution, searching for some manner of escape. I came to believe that the only real manner of escape would be an economic escape. Since I was against groups, I did not care to evangelize a group of my own. I allied myself with the Catholic Church, going to church regularly, observing all the laws of the church and making sure, as Ben Franklin would have advised, that other people could see that I was doing so.

If the times were out of joint for Hamlet, I was out of joint with my times. Because of that I have had to go underground, both within myself and within the outer System of interrelationships made up of family, friends, and the world of work. As a revolutionary in conflict with my times, I have been forced to become a guerilla writer, with the revolution remaining of making myself successful in an economic system I despise, but without recourse to means that I judge to be equally despicable, chief of which would be to identify with some one or another group or, or worse, espouse views I did not believe myself simply to make money as a writer. No, I have kept one place sacrosanct, that of my writing, as the only last remaining fortress and stronghold of truth. God help me if that should mean I will never see the end of my revolution in this lifetime—an all-the-more regrettable fate because such a fate would not only punish me, it would punish my wife and son, not to speak of my extended family and friends.

By labeling me a schizophrenic, this society has found a way to deal with my opposition more cheaply and effectively than locking me up in any jail. I thus remain a prisoner, though free, as this society would say, to live independently of any physical prison. As the poet Richard Lovelace said: Iron bars do not a prison make. At least I want my son and wife to know that neither they nor I have been born to suffer such imprisonment. I have recorded in Other World the truth of my experience and the whole truth and nothing but the truth of this experience as well as I have been able to find analogies for it in the literary forms available.

Just what is madness? An inability to function in society? The experience of hallucinations? Delusional thinking? Aberrant behavior? There does not seem to be any one answer. The definition could be any or all of these answers or a combination of them.

The ancient Greeks presented madness as a state of heightened awareness in which special gifts of prophecy or intuition accompanied some of the most heinous crimes a person could commit, including murder and cannibalism, often of infants. Dionysus, the god of wine, inspired madness in those who opposed his worship. So in The Bacchae, King Pentheus goes mad—his own mother tears him to pieces in a punishment brought on by his failure to believe in Dionysus.

There were still plenty of terrifically violent plays that mixed madness and savagery during Shakespeare’s time—such as Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—but the prophetic nature of madness would seem to have begun an ascent away from such savagery, at least in part, in more psychologically oriented plays like Hamlet and King Lear. By the time of 19th century American literature, Melville’s Ahab, the mad quester after Moby Dick, would tower up as a mighty pageant creature formed for noble tragedies, while the little known and less read book by Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, presented the unbelievable exploits of the peasant girl who almost single handedly liberated France from England.

Yes, here we have in the mysterious story of Joan of Arc a puzzling question: how was Joan able to accomplish the miraculous feats of clairvoyance and prophecy by which she won the allegiance of the entire French army if there were not something more to her visions (hallucinations?) than many today might suspect?

Keeping such ruminations in the back of our mind, we may now proceed to a discussion of the books that directly had an impact on Other World, realizing that a certain shift in perspective may be all that can help us distinguish an act of sanity from one of madness.

The tradition of madness in literature in America begins with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and can be traced right through J.R. Salamanca’s Lilith (1961), Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), Norman Mailer’s American Dream, and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1976). But it also includes films like Splendor in the Grass (1961) and A Beautiful Mind (2001). The Deer Hunter (1978) is notable in the compassionate treatment, a first, it gives to the mental breakdown of Stevie, a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Although the reality is that people touched by madness are generally shunned in America and throughout the world—like modern lepers of the 20th and 21st centuries—they still rise in art to fulfill at least a part of their prophetic function.

Other World carries on this tradition, but unlike Greenberg’s Rose Garden, which has been described as transparently autobiographical, Other World is clearly a fiction, one textured with layer on layer of detail from actual experience, but a fiction nevertheless.

What most distinguishes Greenberg’s book and my book from the others in this tradition is the realistic treatment given to the altered states of consciousness experienced by a character who is psychotic. Other authors are not able to venture into this area, with the exception perhaps of Norman Mailer, whose general province is an exploration of the psychopathic personality.

The epic scope of Other World is apparent in the narrative complexity and range of thematic development, imitating in its way the pattern of a romance that contains a tragedy. Just as the Christian epic from Genesis to Apocalypse contains Christ’s death and resurrection, so the epic story of Moody Santo’s descent from sanity into insanity and back to sanity contains Moody’s own death and resurrection.

Not since Shakespeare’s time, where characters thought to be dead miraculously reappear as living, has the theme of death and resurrection received so undisplaced and therefore radical a treatment in a work of fiction.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Imogen in Cymbeline, who appears to have been murdered and who then, assuming the identity of a boy, suffers a kind of second death after drinking an elixir, Moody Santo actually does die in Other World, only to return to his true love in this world when he arrives back from the dead to a life of quiet seclusion in what Northrop Frye would have described as the penseroso (thoughtful) resolution to this tale.

Is madness, then, as R.D. Laing suggested in books like The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience, a legitimate state of experience with much to offer the individual and the world? Is it possibly even a higher state, as the Greeks suggested, which we now strive with all our might to thwart and throttle with all the vehement enthusiasm of a modern Inquisition?

Literary genius has occupied an important relation to madness from the ancient world to this one. But not only the poet has been what might be called productively mad. Hebrew prophets from Moses to Jeremiah and after, inspired by God to everything from murder to the most ill-advised conflict with authority, have been so as part of a tradition that may go all the way back to that strange chimerical being, called the Sorcerer, who, etched on the wall of Les Trois Frères cave in France as far back as 10 to 20 thousand years ago, disquiets us with the knowledge that we do not really understand the origins of myth and religion as well as we might like.

Christ himself and Paul after him, also, endured accusations of madness. And many of them said, He [Christ] hath a devil and is mad; why hear ye him? (John 10:20). Demonic possession and madness went hand in hand in Christ’s time and were still going strong in Joan of Arc’s time and later in the Salem witch trials. Of Paul it was said, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad (Acts 26:24).

You be the judge. A story is set before you: what have you to learn from it? And would you rather that the story had never been told? Or do you find yourself drawn, fascinated, to a narrator who would hope to etch his character upon the membranes of your consciousness for the next ten thousand years?

From the half-deer sorcerer of Les Trois Frères to the fawn-clad Dionysus of Greek tragedy to The Deer Hunter of modern cinema, the god of madness appears and reappears. Now as the hero of Other World, he looks out at you from pages that offer shelter, not from wild beasts and cold, but from perhaps the greatest danger the precious identity of each individual has to face, the fate of a Moody Santo, a cursed, reviled, and yet exalted character who may be said to identify with that prophet whose own disgrace, a crucifixion, many people in a good portion of the world still believe to have led to the redemption of history in a resurrection that promises to make us all kings of kings.

Open your mind to what Melville called the sane madness of vital truth. De te fabula, or as Northrop Frye translated from the Latin: the story is about you. And as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Break free. Find the madness that has freed the world from every tyranny. There is death but there is also resurrection in Other World.

Moody Santo

I. Book of Alona

2/14/84

O bold and soaring Voice of all Time,

Thunder your Wrath through my beseeching Soul,

Scorch from the bluest heavenly Sublime,

And strike the Truth through Me, strike, strike, unroll,

Unroll in Waves on Waves of crashing light

Oceans of greatest Poets’ Desires,

Flood the World through Me and spend all my Might,

Surge through Me, surge, with lavalike Fires,

As those of Volcanoes that stream and flare

With savage, unearthly, titanic Blasts

That shake the whole Earth in the trembling Air

Till such Violence reigns that Nothing outlasts:

For I am so compelled for Love of You

To recreate the Universe anew.

Dear Sir/Madam:

I’m going to be sending you poems as I write them. The poems will define a psychological journey. I will not try to explain them as Dante once tried to explain the division of his poems into parts in the Vita Nuova.

I hope you will find the poems acceptable for publication. Thank you.

5/3/84

Dear Delbert,

To write in a 19th-century style were to capture an innocence that heroism live as in Homeric times, though we but communicate by letter: if you think my writing letters to you will help you with your English more than calling you by TTY, I will do it. C’mon, buddy, you can pass English. It can’t be that hard at Gallaudet. Let me explain this much: my studies in Melville may have kept me from the drawing room, but I am not a foreigner to the desire for female companionship. I cannot say that whenever it is a cold and drizzly November in my soul I take to the ship; I open Moby-Dick. Such a book is a lens for the transparent eyeball of my mind.

It seems almost as if I were to notice the weather for the first time. I am writing from the tree-lined way along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I came here because the trees are sailing ships upon the ocean of the sky. Their branches arch like rigging over the golden paths on either side of the reflecting pool and I sit and write in my ship’s log upon the deck of a ship. Lincoln’s monument is an enchanted island behind which the sun descends in all its fury, careening in a buttery globe of fire down through the wreckage of my universe. Birds carol sweetly of apocalypse, crickets chatter of the end of the world. If only I had not tried to be so much like Dad. Only the drone of planes along the Potomac reminds me that I dream.

I wanted to work a temporary job until I found just the right job and I’ve done that. I’ve found such a job. Let me tell you about it. It’s a job in the National Press Building as a secretary to a journalist. I have met the man. He is brusque and ill-mannered. But I suppose that is a mark in trade for all journalists. They must be so subservient to get information that they rule their own little worlds like proper tyrants, am I not right? Yes, you may laugh, I know, because I never read the newspapers, but my job is so simple as to be laughable. I could hardly keep a straight face while being given the instructions for my duties by the hag whose place I’m taking.

I worked so hard to get my degree. Now what have I got to show for it? It was only an MA, yes, but Ishmael, with much lesser credentials, asked the same question: why was it that fate put him down for such a hard lot as a common seaman on a whaling voyage when others were put down for easier fates in light-hearted farces, romances, or comedies? I’ll never know the answer any more than Ishmael did, unless I am the first to discover that fate is in the hands of invisible aliens. What I got was a degree. Now I suppose it will be my goal to suffer through an irrational process of initiation until I am ready to give my undying support to some supervisor. Semper fi! Can’t we just call this quits? I should try to publish my thesis—if I could only gain some recognition—if I were only more ambitious.

Stay where you are. The future may not be mapped out for you. But I hope you will experience nothing of this, this vast uncharted universe. We did not have the same father. You had no reason to rebel as I did. By the time you came along, Dad was different. He burned himself out on me—the drinking and the bad moods. He was a tyrant at home, dearly beloved at his precious job. If I could just take the people at that job and splash them with urine every time they spoke his name, even that would not be good enough for them, the nest of vipers. How we suffered day and night under the tyranny of Dad’s iron-fisted rule! You know how he made Mom’s arm black and blue that one time from punching her. But his consistently foul moods, his unceasing negativity, his haranguing criticism—the dearly beloved doctor at his never-quite-acceptable home with his inadequate wife and children. Oh, he was so funny! Such a man with a joke. We were the stooges, like zombies in a zoo, for the humor he bounced