Under Spells and Other Narratives

By Theodore Lyons

In Under Spells, a Buddhist author recounts his simultaneous influences after living out some of the experiences of various authors and their characters. On the verge of homelessness in Sans-Abri (Without Shelter), he decides not to stay in a shelter but rather outdoors, like Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and his followers in the 5th century BC, and painfully conquers the elements. Having studied astronomy and astrology, he finally charts his horoscope in Little Green Men and learns how and why his life turned out the way it did. In Chez Moi, he journeys again to Maine and eastern Canada while he has the chance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483677675

Theodore Lyons

Theodore Lyons majored in English at Illinois Wesleyan University and edited for several journals. His other books include 91 Gordon Street and Two Occult Tales.

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Copyright © 2013 by Theodore Lyons.

ISBN:      Ebook         978-1-4836-7767-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 09/17/2013

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CONTENTS

UNDER SPELLS

1 UNDER CHRISTIE’S SPELL

2 UNDER CASTANEDA’S SPELL

3 UNDER HUXLEY’S SPELL

4 UNDER PLATH’S SPELL

5 UNDER CAMUS’ SPELL

6 UNDER LAWRENCE’S SPELL

7 UNDER KING’S SPELL

8 UNDER DRABBLE’S SPELL

9 UNDER ELIOT’S SPELL

10 UNDER FLAUBERT’S SPELL

11 UNDER POE’S SPELL

12 UNDER MAUGHAM’S SPELL

13 UNDER HEMINGWAY’S SPELL

14 UNDER du MAURIER’S SPELL

15 UNDER STEVENSON’S SPELL

16 UNDER MACLAINE’S SPELL

17 UNDER CAYCE’S SPELL

18 UNDER LEEK’S SPELL

19 UNDER TOLSTOY’S SPELL

20 UNDER SAINT-EXUPÉRY’S SPELL

21 UNDER 51’S SPELL

SANS-ABRI

1 SLEEPING OUTSIDE

2 NUMEROLOGY

LITTLE GREEN MEN

1 THE ANGEL RAPHAEL

2 BY JOVE!

3 MESSENGER OF THE GODS

4 LAND OF ILLUSION

5 LEO RISING

6 BEYOND THE ASTEROID BELT

7 THE DRAGON

CHEZ MOI

1 A CLAIRVOYANT

2 MURIEL ELAM

3 MARIE BOURBON

4 THE GABLES

5 MURIEL’S GHOST

6 ANCIENT BLOOD

UNDER SPELLS

1

UNDER CHRISTIE’S SPELL

I grew up watching Doctor Zhivago (1965), starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel in 1957, which was banned in the USSR for about 30 years. It was probably on television every year for decades—there’s no telling how long, and for all I know, it’s still on TV. I even saw it featured in a recent Google advertisement. Much as I had always admired Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago, I didn’t give her another thought for a long time, until humanities class my freshman year of college; when our professors made us watch McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, based on Edmund Naughton’s novel McCabe (1959). I don’t remember why we had to watch it, but I can never forget missing a question about it on the final exam: who said?: I’ve got poetry in me!—I think McCabe said it.

The following year, my roommate, a stage actor who went by KC, who was helping me with a paper on Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1920), mentioned in passing, as if it were almost meaningless, that one of his classmates in the School of Drama got a minor role as a maid in Heaven Can Wait (1978), starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. KC then said, almost as casually, Oh, I’ll sleep with anyone to get to the top—and he meant it. I was floored to learn that a student at our college got a part in Heaven Can Wait; even more floored than when my roommate the previous year had casually mentioned, likewise as if it were nothing, that he had played keyboards on a song written for Barbra Streisand. There was no doubting him; he could play piano blindfolded with one hand tied behind his back. Our little college had a bizarre knack for producing students who made it big somehow or had their brush with success; it wasn’t a big group, mind you, but it was growing. For example, our basketball team’s center got a fat contract with the Seattle SuperSonics and went on to enjoy a great professional basketball career; and it was batted around that the actor McLean Stevenson, born across town from our college, also went to school there for awhile before graduating from Northwestern.

KC often joined us late—like 2 or 3 a.m.—looking for a nightcap, an unfinished beer, a cigarette butt, anything; and my friends across the hall, where I might be found at that time of the morning, usually had something going still, like the remnants of a little party.

When I was a senior, long after KC had graduated, one of his friends named Kent, also a stage actor, dropped by and mentioned that he had just visited KC in Chicago.

How’s he doing? I naturally asked.

Drinking heavily, said Kent.

It took me many years before I could really appreciate what Kent meant: unable to get that first big role, KC was probably wallowing in unemployment or disillusionment. I went through it myself later, but I kept going, kept writing, kept working any job I could find.

About 20 years later, in 2002, I was unemployed again, but I had just finished writing a bunch of new short stories, which was at least something to show for myself. The next morning, I had a larger-than-life dream in which KC told me that I’d have to rewrite one or two of these stories from memory. That afternoon, my computer crashed as I was saving my documents, and I lost all the stories that I’d just written; but as KC predicted, I later rewrote one or two from memory. I then understood that he was dead.

In 2012, 30 years after I graduated from college, when I was writing an anthology called Horror and Sci-Fi, I had been scrounging around for films based on horror and sci-fi novels, books, and short stories. Amazon had the film of Daphne du Maurier’s story Don’t Look Now (1971), directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie; I had read this story many years earlier in Tucson and remembered that it was quite good and fit well into these genres. The film surprised me with its nude love scene, but then again, nothing in Christie’s brilliant career was really surprising after all; with her films, it was never anything but a question of how she would top herself.

As I considered that I couldn’t omit Ray Bradbury from a horror anthology, I decided to read his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and found the film of it, also starring none other than Julie Christie. I marveled at the symmetry of my Horror and Sci-Fi anthology, featuring two films with Julie Christi; and suddenly, the whole book was running in twos—Poe, King, Coppola, Blatty, du Maurier, Farrow, Thewlis. When I was young, whenever I thought of horror and sci-fi, Julie Christie never came to mind, but of course, now she does.

2

UNDER CASTANEDA’S SPELL

I discovered Carlos Castaneda when I was 15, a high school sophomore researching the occult for a term paper on Salem witchcraft. In library periodicals from which I was culling ideas and information, I constantly ran across his book excerpts, which I couldn’t understand, although they were lucid, readable, and simply written: for example, when I read about him flying, and seeing out of the sides of his head, like a bird. I didn’t know that he was smashed on peyote and often functioning in a different perceptual dimension that ours because his book excerpts naturally had been taken out of context. I also couldn’t understand, at 15, why his name always appeared under the subject heading of witchcraft in Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. I didn’t know why I had picked Salem witchcraft (1692-93) as a subject for a term paper—but how much are we conscious of at 15? It wasn’t until 22 years later, when I finally started reading his books just before he died in 1998, that I found out that he had been investigating and reporting on Yaqui sorcery. As I aged, I began researching astrology, Buddhism, and reincarnation, and reading books like The Celestine Prophecy (1993), so I understood that we’re born with specific interests and tendencies because of our past lives, and born under certain powerful influences that may shape our destinies. I say may because some people fail to recognize or master those influences and tendencies, especially negative ones.

Strangely enough, I didn’t start reading Castaneda until I was 37. Who can say why? Perhaps that was the cosmic timetable guiding me. I had just moved to Portland, Maine, and had brought along a copy of Castaneda’s book A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971). I started reading it in a Laundromat on Congress Street and later referred to Castaneda in my second novel, which I finished writing in Portland (my reason for moving there). Practically all of Castaneda’s books were set in the Sonora desert, in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, so his subliminal influence was probably exerting itself on me because 18 months later I moved to Tucson, Ariz., to finish writing my third novel; but at the time, I wasn’t thinking of Castaneda so much as executing the plot of the novel. While I was there, I chanced to find a copy of his book Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1972); in which he went to Ixtlan del Rio, southwest Mexico, near Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco. I naturally referred to Castaneda in my third novel as well because some of what he wrote fit nicely into a novel with desert settings.

After I started writing my fourth novel in Jan. 2001, which came by fits and starts, I endured long periods of idleness and aimlessness until I finished writing it in Dec. 2008. During that eight-year period, I was unemployed for about 58 months, so I frequently had nothing to do then but read, write, and research. From 2004-06, I read all of Castaneda’s other books, which was no great time drain since it only meant reading another 9 or 10. I had learned from Somerset Maugham that all an author should do is read and write, regardless of whether he’s so fortunate to find an odd job along the way. One of the most important things I learned from Castaneda is that it’s the quality and content of our writing, not the quantity, that matter. Do you really have anything new to say? If not, you’d better find something new to discuss, or something so old it sounds new, like Yaqui sorcery, or hook it. I couldn’t help referring to him heavily in my fourth and fifth novels about a half Puerto Rican writer named Ish Hercule, no stranger to hallucinogens, Santeria, and the occult; but there again, Castaneda and his experiences fit in well with much of what I was writing because he was a South American anthropologist educated in California, and parts of my fourth and fifth novels are set in the desert Southwest.

To acknowledge my scholarly and almost personal debt to Castaneda, I wrote a lengthy poem about him, and his friendship (and tutelage) with Juan Matus, entitled simply Castaneda for my first poetry book; centering on people who influenced my writing and my life—mostly authors, artists, adventurers, and occultists. Castaneda had been all of these and more. I have explored what he discovered in Sonora and spent his life writing about, and as far as I can tell, everything that he learned from Juan Matus was and still is valid, but it’s not for everyone. Part of Castaneda’s success was due to timing: occult books, movies, and TV programs dominated the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s because people then, especially in America, were less materialistic and more interested in astrology, channeling, and the spiritual plane; contrary to what the Catholic church has been telling the gullible public about sex scandals involving priests—the only ones back then with loose morals.

3

UNDER HUXLEY’S SPELL

When I was 18, I read Aldous Huxley’s controversial but stupendous novel Brave New World (1932)—about a savage from New Mexico and the loveless world capital, London, at a distant future epoch—for Senior Composition my last semester of high school. I had always admired our Senior Comp teacher, who earned my unqualified respect for assigning a risqué novel like Brave New World: it made quite an impression on me, as it does on most readers, but mine was a lasting impression; so when I chanced to lay my hands on a French copy of it (O Nouveau Monde Magnifique) 11 years later in the Congo, I couldn’t resist the impulse to take it back to my post on the other side of the country. In my defense, let me hasten to add that when I finished reading it, I at least left it in my rented house, for whomever wished to read it next, if anyone; since for logistical reasons it wasn’t possible to return the book to our training center in Bukavu, which had been my intention during the 14-odd months that I worked in the Congo, but then our program was abandoned, and Bukavu and much of the Congo was sacked and under siege during the intermittent wars that erupted there and around Rwanda. Thinking back on it, I wish I had kept it: I would’ve reread it a few more times by now. In 1992, when I started writing my first novel, set in francophone Africa, my memories of this rare French edition of Huxley’s Brave New World fit in so well that I referred to it over the course of several chapters.

After I had been in the Congo for a month, one day a girlfriend and I were messing around on a Ouija board, and a Ouija spirit indicated that I’d live in New Mexico when I got home, but I didn’t ask when. I moved to New Mexico 12 years later, only for the summer as it turned out; but I couldn’t help thinking back on rereading Brave New World in the Congo—of all places. I had already visited two cities in New Mexico, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, because of an earlier sojourn in Arizona, so I settled on Las Cruces, in southern New Mexico; and I got a lengthy discussion out of it for my fourth novel, including Roswell’s UFO museum, which I visited while I was apartment-hunting. In Las Cruces, I found a cheap copy of Huxley’s last book, his utopian novel Island (1962), and read it while I was job-hunting. Even though I knew something of Huxley and his writing, I was surprised to learn that he died the following year, in 1963, a proponent of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and obviously a mystic. In Island, a counterpart to Brave New World, the cynical journalist Will Farnaby was shipwrecked on the fictional island Pala; a utopian community where people used drugs and contraception, went into trances for super learning, and made daring climbs to a temple as a spiritual preparation.

When I started writing Lucifer’s Roles in 2004, I read Huxley’s historical narrative Devils of Loudun (1952), a compelling, well-written account of alleged cases of demonic possession at a convent in Loudun, France; where a priest named Urbain Grandier was burned at the stake in 1634 allegedly for making a pact with Satan and seducing a bunch of Ursuline nuns. The Ursulines, founded in the 16th century, were a religious order dedicated to teaching; named after Ursula, patron saint of their founder, St. Angela Merici in Brescia, Italy. I concluded that those particular cases of demonic possession were bogus, and that Grandier was murdered by a mob of fanatics, subservient to a wave of religious hysteria and fervor that swept across Europe and New England; culminating in the execution of a bunch of innocent, if irreverent landholders in Maine and Massachusetts in the late 17th century. It’s unlikely that any of those cases of demonic possession were legitimate, but it’s a matter of historical record that quite a number of people were executed during the 17th century for sorcery and witchcraft, a capital crime then—hung, crushed, burned at the stake, or shackled and neglected in what amounted to medieval dungeons.

About 90 years after it was published, I read Crome Yellow (1921), Huxley’s first novel, which T.S. Eliot referred to in his epic The Waste Land—surprisingly because Huxley was a total unknown at the time but was on the verge of greatness; probably because he spent his writing career exploring unusual, futuristic, and controversial themes (drugs, fornication, trances, contraception, test-tube babies, world domination, utopian societies, and the like). I mainly read Crome Yellow because I had written a mock epic, based on The Waste Land, entitled The Tundra. Crome Yellow includes, for example, an oddsmaker named Priscilla Wimbush, who calculated horoscopes for racehorses and footballers; and a character named Mr. Scogan, who disguised himself at Crome’s annual Bank Holiday fair as a palm reader named Sesostris, a name Eliot unconsciously borrowed for The Waste Land (Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante/ . . . wisest woman in Europe,/With a wicked pack of cards.)

4

UNDER PLATH’S SPELL

During my second semester of college, I read a letter from Sylvia Plath to her mother in our textbook (Readings for Writers) for English Composition—a required class at our university. Many years later, I read in a biography about Sylvia that she had depicted her mother somewhat less than positively in The Bell Jar (1962), an autobiographical novel; and so that letter that I had chanced to read my freshman year of college suddenly had a much deeper meaning than our class could’ve understood at the time. I was torn at the close of my freshman year between majoring in English or business, but my heart was set on English, usually the harder road with fewer rewards; although I took some business classes my last two years of college. I still believe this was a decent compromise, since two of my friends over the years, both A-students whose opinions I always respected, majored in English and economics. In an American literature class my junior year, I read some of Sylvia’s poetry; including Lady Lazarus, an autobiographical poem about an amusing but haunting woman who tries to kill herself every 10 years.

When I finished college, I got married and went through a long period of unemployment, with nothing to do but cook, apart from a trimester of graduate school. In my spare time, I read voraciously, mostly novels and short stories that hadn’t been assigned in any of my classes. My wife had a bunch of paperbacks in our headboard, one of which was Sylvia’s novel, The Bell Jar, about her first suicide attempt; so I read it right away, having remembered her letter to her mother that I had read my freshman year of college. I had thumbed and leafed through this copy of The Bell Jar many times at my wife’s apartment before we got married; so I recalled Sylvia’s sad and beautiful poem at the back, Madwoman’s Love Song, which was soon among my favorites.

I had been vaguely familiar with her tragic life—one of those horrible stories of icons of Americana, like so many that I grew up with in the 1960s, who died suddenly, accidentally, or deliberately; and so she was always at the forefront of that hush-hush group, with the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and a bunch of musicians who our parents and teachers didn’t want to discuss much because they impinged on taboo subjects like murder, cover-ups, adultery, overdose, and scandal. When I started writing my first novel, I read Ronald Hayman’s biography, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991): about her literary prizes, awards, scholarships, and grants; her unsuccessful suicide attempt; her graduate degree and tenure as a college instructor; her séances and troubled marriage to the poet Ted Hughes; their two kids; and how she eventually killed herself. Naturally, I couldn’t help referring to her whenever my novel drifted toward unsavory subjects like drugs, suicide, and the afterlife. I always thought I owed it to myself to read anything touching on her life, so I later read one of Hughes’ poetry books, Crow: from the life and songs of the crow (1970); especially since he became a poet laureate. Consequently, I also read Anne Sexton’s complete poems while I was writing my fourth novel, since she and Sylvia had known each other and had felt that talking about their unsuccessful suicide attempts was really living. I understood what they were talking about for I had escaped death at least twice from snakes and vectors in the third world; and I knew how thrilling it is to discuss and relive a brush with death. Then of course, I couldn’t stop myself from moving to Boston to continue writing my second novel; and before long, Anne and Sylvia and I had a lot in common since we were all suicidal authors who had lived in Boston. I had even taken the game to the next level like Hughes by marrying someone hospitalized for trying to kill herself, although neither of us wanted to get married; and I doubt that neither Hughes, nor Anne Sexton, nor Sylvia, at the risk of being hypocritical, would’ve chided me for that.

As the dark years passed, and my life slowly unraveled, I referred to Sylvia in all of my novels and even in some of my short stories. I don’t know what it was with her; but I couldn’t get her out of my head. Her life and her writing were like alluring and addictive contraband and controlled substances firing my blood; and wherever I went, something or someone was fanning the flames. For