The Other, Again

It has happened again. When this first occurred, I resolved not to write about it or think about it, for fear of losing my mind. Now it has happened again, on January 20, 2010, I know I must write myself through it. I shall write it as a story others may read in the hope that with time I, too, will be able to read and remember it only as a story.

     There was still a rheum of dirty snow about the leafless trees in the park, and ice on the paths, but I found it mild enough to sit on a bench near the lake house and contemplate the frozen pond. My little dog lay at my feet. For a few moments, the city around me was still, with an air of anticipation, like someone holding his breath. I had seen no one in the park, and was mildly irritated when a man sat down on the other end of the bench. My dog wagged his stub, but he is loose with strangers. I glanced at the newcomer out of the corner of my eye. He was very young, with long dark hair falling over his shoulders from under an absurdly romantic beret. No doubt one of the transient college kids who come and go in my neighborhood, or one of the hungry artists who hang their pictures for a week at a time in the transient basement galleries.

    He made an awkward ritual out of stuffing and lighting a cherrywood pipe. The heavy fruited scent of his tobacco carried me back across time, to an awkward young man I had once known well.
     I turned to him and asked if he was smoking Amphora tobacco.

    Without meeting my eyes, he agreed that he was.

     I inspected him more closely, the wide shoulders and narrow body, the silk scarf at his throat, the maroon-colored journal book, big as a child's tombstone, in his hand.

    "Then I know who you are." I told him. "You are Robert Moss, though you sign your articles and poems R.J. Moss in The Canberra Times and the student paper."
     He returned my inspection. "I know you from somewhere. Are you one of Dad's brothers?"

     "I am Robert Moss. I am you. I've just lived a lot longer."

     "You're crazy."
     "What year do you think it is?"
     "It's 1965, of course."
     "You are mistaken. Today is Wednesday, January 20, 2010."
     "Don't come the raw prawn with me! It's bloody 1965."
     I was tickled by the way that, when rattled, he became a bit more of an Aussie than was his natural style. "Then you are living in Bruce Hall on the campus of the Australian National University. In your bookcase you have Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal and Dante's Inferno in Italian - but not the rest of the Commedia, because you have not yet found the comedy in life - and the Penguin editions of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Homer. You also have a blue-bound copy of Kautilya's Arthashastra, which fascinates and repels you because it teaches that the law of life is 'big fish eat little fish.'"
     R.J.Moss was not impressed. "Of course you know what books I have in my room. I'm dreaming, and you're a part of me that for some reason is appearing as an old man with white hair who's been eating rather well. So you know what I know."
    "Did you know that the man who loaned you the Arthashastra will become your father-in-law?"
     As he stared at me, I added, "You haven't met his daughter yet, but you will, when she comes out from England. She'll get a job in a bookshop, your natural hunting ground. On the day you first speak to her she'll be helping a customer who wants to purchase a map of the world that does not include the United States."
     "You are one of my thought forms, and you will disappear if I tell you to."
     "You got that from one of your books on magic, probably Dion Fortune. Try it if you like. It won't do you any good."
     "You claim I am going to marry my professor's daughter."
    "Yes, but it won't last. You will marry much too young, with too much of life ahead of you to stay in a nest. Anyway, for a while you'll be seized with a reckless desire to fight battles. You'll get over it, but not until you've been blooded. Then you'll marry again. You'll notice the woman who will become your second wife when she tells you she can dream the result of a horse race."
     "This is definitely a dream."
     "Where do you think you are now?"
     "I'm sitting at the edge of the lake in Canberra, and it's bloody hot. That silly water jet doesn't make things any better."
     He made the motion of fanning his face. I recalled that in that absurdly oversized book he lugged everywhere with him, he had drawn a picture of Nietzsche at the edge of madness, and written an interminable series of poems for a girl, now lost, he called Lady of Khorasan, even though she had bad teeth and had never been outside New South Wales, except to study in the dreary capital, set down in the bush at an airless remove from the ocean beaches that are the country's lungs.
     At this age, he lived for poetry, I remembered. Perhaps I could move him with a line he had not yet encountered, more than with a preview of his future that, while factual, seemed to him full of impossibilities.
     "I will say something you do not know but whose reality you will accept because it is poetic truth. Are you willing to hear?"
     He nodded.
     "Il faut vivre comme un ours."
     He frowned a little. "'One has to live like a bear?' Is that right?"
     My turn to nod.
     "Who said that?"
     "Flaubert."
     "Not possible."
     "You haven't read enough Flaubert to know. And you have yet to write a novel. You will write novels, and will publish many. More important, you will meet the Bear and this will change everything." My tone indicated that we were no longer talking about any bear, but the Bear. "You won't understand until he comes for you, and that will be in North America, when you are twice your present age."
     "This is the strangest dream. I don't believe I'll remember any of it. But just in case, if you have lived my life ahead of me, what can you tell me that can help me?"

     I considered telling him: you'll break hearts and your heart will be broken in turn, but you must never stop living from the heart. There is one who watches over us and never leaves us. Swim whenever you can. Listen to your dreams and move always in the direction of your dreams. Beware of a woman with razors in her eyes, and a sheriff in the Blue Ridge Mountains who makes moonshine in his bathtub. Never lose your sense of humor, once you find it again. Don't reverse your steps once you have crossed the Pont Neuf. Define yourself, as many times as necessary, to escape being defined by others.

     What I said was, "Twenty-three years from now, you will be booked on an early plane to Philadelphia, with the intention of driving to a certain house in coal miners' country, in Lancaster County. You must not take that plane."

     "What's in Lancaster County?"

     "Trust me on this. Will you remember?"

     He shrugged. I knew he would forget, but an hour before he was due to leave for the airport, twenty years into his future, more than twenty years into my past, a dream would remind him. I knew this because - but for that dream - I would not be alive today and we could not be sitting on this bench together.

     He surprised me by saying, "I have something for you: Ich bin ein Funke nur vom heilengen Feuer."

     I remembered now that I - that is, he - had taken some German in order to read Rilke in the original. My German did not stick; I can barely manage to order sausages in a beer cellar.

     "Rilke?"

     His mouth curved into a faintly superior smile. "It seems I know things that you do not." His mood flickered like a shadow on the ice. "This is the strangest dream. I know I'll forget it. If not, you would have known we would meet this morning."

     I thought of a fantasy by Coleridge. A man dreams he is in paradise, and he is given a flower as proof. When he wakes, he has the flower in his hand.

     "Let's give each other something," I proposed. I dug in my pockets, and came up with a wad of crumpled bills. I separated the least disreputable and handed it to him. He examined the face of the wigged man inside the oval, and lingered over the occultists' pyramid on the back with the eye in its floating apex. I drew his attention to the small text next to the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury: "SERIES 2006".

     He groped in his own pockets in turn, and produced a gum-nut.

     "Look at the time," he jumped up. "I must be going."

     As he rose, my little dog jumped up too, wagging his stub.

     "There's one thing more," I said. "Dogs love you no matter what."

     "I know."

     We did not shake hands or have body contact in any way. We walked away from each other in opposite directions. I did not look back; I cannot say whether he did.

Postscript: One day after this encounter, I cannot find the gum-nut I put in the breast pocket of my shirt, which I threw in the laundry hamper at the end of the day and only searched this morning. When I walked my dog today, I made a point of not returning to the bench by the lake.

     But something is still in play because I noticed that the big maroon journal - his journal, from 1965 - has surfaced in the room I use as my archive. It was clearly visible near the top of a stack of notebooks in an open documents box. Of course I had to pull it out. I treated it as I do any book, opening it at random to see what comes up.
     The book of R.J.Moss fell open at pages numbered 114 and 115 in his hand. The bottom half of page 115 was filled by his drawing of Nietzsche staring into the pit of madness. The upper half of page 114 contains his copy of a word-picture of Stefan George by Andre Gide, in French. Below this, in script running diagonally across the page, giving the general impression of a wing, R.J.Moss inscribed several verses of Stefan George including the line

Ich bin ein Funke nur vom heiligen Feuer

with the translation

I am a spark of the holy fire.

THE OTHER BORGES

Jorge Luis Borges' story"The Other" came to me twice, in mysterious ways, over the holiday season. Just before Christmas, I woke with the certain knowledge that there was something by Borges that I had not read that I needed to find that day. I have many editions of Borges on my shelves (I've been reading him since 1970) but I went to my nearby magic bookshop at opening time to see if anything popped up. There, atop a pile of new arrivals, was a translation of Borges' late collection The Book of Sand.      
    The opening story is "The Other", in which Borges, seated on a bench beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969, encounters a young man who proves to be his own younger self, who thinks he is sitting by the lake in Geneva in 1919 and is reluctant to believe this this encounter can be other than a dream. Borges gets the attention - and wins the partial belief - of his younger self by reciting an amazing line of Victor Hugo that the young man has not yet discovered, about the "hydra-universe" twisting its "scales of stars."
    The following weekend, ranging around in the early hours in the midst of leading a workshop, I opened a 500-page edition of Borges' Collected Fictions, in Andrew Hurley's excellent translation, as a random act of bibliomancy, and found myself at the first page of "The Other", again.

     Like Borges, I am intrigued by the possibility - for me, a certainty - that we can meet our past and future selves. In homage to the great Argentine writer, I have borrowed the outline of his story, just as he borrowed the ideas and the form of a story by Kurd Lasswitz (which he reviewed in an essay titled "The Total Library") to craft his celebrated "Library of Babel".

Text adapted from "The Other, Again" in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

RM Journal drawing at top: "Writing on the Wall (or Hanging Stanzas)" from a dream of February 22,2021 I associate with Borges

Borges and Lucy the Literary Cat

My cat Lucy showed her pleasure when I started reading a newly acquired book, Jay Parini's Borges and Me. This is a delightful memoir in which, as a young would-be writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania who had never previously heard of Borges, Parini finds himself driving the great Argentine author around Scotland in a tiny rust bucket in 1970.
    Lucy sniffed and licked the spine of the book. She then posed for photos with it, unprecedented for a kitty who is usually camera-shy.
    I had just been reading the chapter in which Borges stands up in a rowboat on Loch Ness to recite the song of creation that enrages the monster Grendel in Beowulf. In his excitement, he falls into Nessie's waters, blind and unable to swim, but is still undaunted when fished out, insisting that he has roused the Scottish Grendel.

 

Lucy had just begun to assert herself as a literary cat. The following evening, she made a strong effort to pull a book off the piano stool that (along with the top of the upright piano) serves as my book table in my reading corner. There are some sixty books in my piles of current reading. The book Lucy wanted was The Arabian Nights.
    Having rescued The Arabian Nights, I reopened Borges and Me, again at random. I read about a remarkable synchronistic encounter involving a discovery in a copy of The Arabian Nights.
    Borges has suffered a fall. The doctor who is summoned is a woman named Brodie.
    The name excites Borges.
    "Aberdeen?"
    The doctor tells him her grandfather was from Aberdeen.
   "Was he a missionary in Africa, then in Brazil?" Borges pursues.
    Dr Brodie is stunned. How could the Argentine writer know? Her grandfather wasn't well known and come to think of it he may have been her great-grandfather.
    "He left behind an abbreviated account of his travels," says Borges.
    "This is true?"
    "I would never make anything up. Unless, of course, the world failed to provide sufficient material." 
    Borges proceeds to explain that "one day in a library in Buenos Aires" he found a narrative written by Dr Brodie's ancestor stuffed between the pages of the Arabian Nights.
     Slack-jawed the doctor admits she has never read the Arabian Nights.
     Borges shakes his head. "One who has failed to read The Arabian Nights is, well, an innocent, and this is dangerous."

      What he does not tell the lady doctor (and is not in Parini's book) is that he composed the "abbreviated account" he claimed to have found in The Arabian Nights as "Doctor Brodie's Report". It is the title story in a collection he had just finished translating with Norman di Giovanni. These were the first stories he had published in 17 years. I got my copies of the translation and the original Spanish edition down from the Borges shelf in my personal library. 
     Borges declared in his preface to the first edition of El informe Brodie that he now aimed to deliver "straightforward stories" that "try like those of the Thousand and One Nights to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive". Quieren distraer o conmover y no persuadir. "Doctor Brodie's Report"is a mock-realistic tale of a sojourn among primitive people - the Yahoos - who attract each other's attention by throwing handfuls of mud.
     I could hear the Scottish doctor saying again in her brogue, "This is true?"

 The following day I picked up Borges and Me again and read about Borges' visit to the Carnegie literary in Dunfermline. He not only sniffed the books, he licked one of them.
     Parini recalls: "He picked a volume and began to greedily lick the spine, his tongue like that of a cat. There was, I thought, lust in his eyes."
    When the librarian protested, Borges said "Some books should be tasted" and ran his tongue along the whole length of the spine.
     Lucy knows.

Arthur Koestler suggested there is a Library Angel whose invisible hand makes books appear in magical ways. I am living with a Literary Cat whose paw has a similar but visible effect.

Call me Scheherezade

Lucy is eyeing the Arabian Nights again. I open my edition - a recent translation by Hussain Haddawy - at random, always my preferred way to approach a book. I read the opening lines of the Tale of the Enchanted King, from the Twenty-Second Night:

My story, and the story of the fish, is a strange and amazing one, which, if it could be engraved with needles at the corners of the eye, would be a lesson to those who would consider. 

Right before this we are given a frame for the tale, or rather a frame within a frame. Scheherezade must tell a story every night that will entertain the misogynist king; he will kill her as soon as he becomes bored. Within this frame we hear the story of another king who wants to know why a young man on the terrace of an impossible black palace has been turned to stone up to his waist.  
    The young man agrees to tell his story on one condition. He wants the undivided attention of his audience.
     At the black palace, the half-petrified man tells the king, "Lend me your ears, your eyes and your mind.".
      In the palace of the her tyrant king, Scheherezade knows her life depends in coming up with a tale that will hold his attention. I feel I know this situation intimately.

"Call me Scheherezade," Borges says to Jay Parini in 1970. I am back in the book whose spine Lucy licked. I am both shocked and elated by this find. I made the same statement five years ago, when I recognized that the myth I am living is that of the storyteller who must produce a new story fit for a king every night in order to stay alive. This is the theme of the first and last of the tales in my book Mysterious Realities. Now I discover that Borges beat me to this statement, by half a century. He added, according to Parini in Borges and Me, that "The Arabian Nights is the source of everything I do."

A shelf elf throws The Dream of H.G.Wells at me

Just before I sat down to write this morning a shelf elf flung H.G.Wells’ novel The Dream at me from the top of a tall bookcase holding fiction in the room where I do much of my horizontal meditation. Of course I had to interrupt what I thought I was doing and explore the themes I had just been given. In the last pages on Wells' novel I read:

    "It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a dream, a dream within this life; and this life too is a dream. Dreams within dreams, dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the Dreamer of dreams, the Being who is all beings."

     In the novel a man living 2000 years in the future falls asleep in a ruined city and dreams he is in the body and life of a man in London in the early 20th century. The dream is presented as an entirely real experience of another life.
     Another character in the novel reports a dream of a shorter, wilder life experienced in a very different body.

    "I dreamed the other day that I was a panther that haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very toothsome dogs. And how I was hunted for three years and shot at five times before I was killed. I can remember how I killed an old woman gathering sticks and hid part of her body under a tree to finish it on the morrow. It was a very vivid dream. And as I dreamed it by no means horrible. But it was not a clear and continuous dream like yours. A panther's mind is not clear and continuous, but passes from flashes of interest to interludes of apathy and utter forgetfulness."

    The theme that personal evolution involves relations between past, present and future personalities - alternate and other selves - was of consuming interest to Wells, though many of his readers have missed this aspect of his work. After The Dream, he wrote Christina Alberta's Father, a novel in which a man of modest circumstances thinks he is simultaneously, across time, King Sargon of Akkad.
    The framing device of the dream was used repeatedly by Wells (see A Dream of Armageddon). He also makes us aware that a dream of this kind is more than a literary device; it is a portal to real experiences in other times and other worlds. I have heard that Wells himself dreamed of life as Sargon, who gets a glowing report in his Outline of History.

The Magnet in the book

Sometimes, beyond the play of the shelf elves who make books and papers appear and disappear, I sense other minds and other hands. In the early hours I found my copy of Yeats' Autobiography off its shelf, on a table where I had not placed it. There was no occult reason for this; it had been moved, with a small pile of other books relating to the poet, as part of a house cleaning.
    I accepted the invitation to revisit Yeats' life through his words. Opening the book at random, I found myself reading a lively chapter on his mixed relations with the Irish mystic, artist and writer George Russell, who used "A.E." as his pen name.
    This morning, I opened another book in that pile. It is a collection of occasional pieces, mostly literary and art criticism, by A.E., titled The Living Torch and published by Macmillan in 1938, that I found in a used book store near Mount Vernon in Washington State a couple of years ago. I had placed it in my forest of books without examining it closely.
    This was evident, because when I opened The Living Torch at random, I found five loose pages hidden inside the book. They are written a fine lady's hand from an earlier time. They are fair copies of five of A.E.'s poems. The lady who made these copies was meticulous. She noted the publication date (1926) of the edition of A.E.'s Collected Poems from which she borrowed the lines she copied, and the number of the pages where these poems may be found.
    I sat very still as I read the poem on the top page. It is titled "Magnet" and it begins as follows:

I had sweet company
Because I sought out none
But took who came to me,
All by the magnet drawn.

For me, in the final stage of completing a book on the workings of synchronicity, this was quite, quiet perfect. Within the past week, I had actually borrowed a line from A.E. (from A Candle of Vision) as a section title in my own book: "Your own will come to you." It develops the idea that we draw people and situations to us magnetically, through the energy that is with us. I did not know that A.E. had written a poem on this theme until just now.
    The later part of his poem, I must note, develops a darker tone. It seems that A.E. (described by Yeats as first and last a "religious teacher") is reflecting, ruefully, on an affair of the heart which tempted him to set aside the austere spiritual discipline he imposed on himself. I wonder whether, in her secret heart, the unknown copyist was stirred by her recognition of herself in a similar drama to make "Magnet" her own, by putting it in her own hand.

The Black Chow Named Bear

One of my personal superstitions is that a black dog in a friendly mood is a good sign for any day. I received confirmation just now, with a further tender ripple of synchronicity.

I am walking my little dog when a big furry black dog comes bounding along, unleashed. His head and chest are huge. When he rushes up to us, wanting to play, I see that he is very like a bear.
    “Bear!” his owner calls him.
    He’s a chow.
    A black dog named Bear, happy and off the leash – and of Chinese origin.
    Chows were kept as hunting and guard dogs in ancient China and Mongolia, and were considered good eating. Our use of the word “chow” for food probably originates from the edible dog, whose meat was available in Chinese restaurants until not that long ago.
    The Chinese piece offers an interesting sample of synchronicity: I had been working some Chinese elements into a draft chapter of a novel earlier that morning, and had returned to reading some Chinese classics. Just before walking my dog and meeting the chow, I had entered these thoughts from Chuang Tzu in my notebook:

How do I know that we who hate death are not lost children who have forgotten their way home?

And better still:

Fools think that they are awake.

Note: Shelf Elves among My Journals

I lifted the report above from my journal for January 4, 2007. I did not go looking for it; it came looking for me. I was reshelving binders and the typed page with the chow story came  fluttering out, into my hand.
    My favorite form of bibliomancy is to open an old journal at random and see what it gives me. Sometimes an old journal – or a shelf elf lurking nearby – chooses to speak to me before I consult it.
    This is also an example of how, when you decide to study synchronicity, the world gives you ever more experiences of it.

Shelf elves, dream detectives and Dante

I am determined to hold on to my copy of Dante. This is a paperback edition with a black cover. I want to finish my notes on his description of different orders of reality, and of angels. Numbers are very important here, including the number 12.

I jotted this dream in my journal on Saturday morning, and went back to work on the first chapter of my new book, especially scenes from my life when I was nine and when I was 18 going on 19. Aged nine, I died during surgery in a Melbourne hospital and seemed to live whole life somewhere else before i came back. At 18, I wanted to die because I had lost the first woman I loved; instead of dying that night, I wrote a poem.
    I paused in my writing and reflection and posted a quick note on my Dante dream on my Facebook page, which I use for punctuation and refreshment in a day or night at my desk. My brief report immediately had a score of dream detectives working on my Dante clues. One of them found a reference to the number twelve early in Dante's poetic memoir La Vita Nuova (The New Life).
    I jumped on this lead. I could not locate a copy of Dante's Vita Nuova in my own library (where the resident shelf elves are known to hide as well as reveal) but the excellent used book shop down the street was open. No, they did not have a copy of La Vita Nuova but it might be in a copy of The Portable Dante that had come in just that morning; it was there on the stand with the New Books, a paperback with a black cover. Yes, it contained the full text of La Vita Nuova.
    Three minutes later (I live dangerously close to this book store) I am at home leafing through the text. The translation is somewhat florid. Ah, this is because it is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I am seized by a personal connection. When I was 18, I played Dante Gabriel Rossetti and read some of his poems in a repertory performance of "An Evening with the Pre-Raphaelites" in Canberra, Australia. I read on. Nine is Dante's number in this unusual memoir, a medley of poetry and prose. He sees Beatrice for the first time when they are both nine years old. He encounters her again when they are both 18 (2x9, as he insists, at length). That is the year when he dreams her death, and then sees her carried to the heavens by angels when she actually dies.
    In La Vita Nuova, we see the first hints of the Divine Comedy that is to come, and begin

to understand how Dante could borrow the form of a lovely woman he could not have (because she was married young and died so young) for the spiritual guide who meets the pilgrim inside the gate of Purgatory when he has come up through all the terrors of the Inferno and opened his heart.
     Dante's "New Life" contains a very interesting account of a dream conversation with an inner guide. The guide appears as a beautiful young men dressed in white but addresses Dante as "my son." Dante makes it clear this experience is unfolding in a sleep dream, in which he recognizes the voice of The Young Man in White from previous dreams. As the poet tries to feel out the nature of their relationship, perhaps asking himself whether the Young Man in White is a projection (though that is not the language of the late 13th century), the inner guide tells him: "I am as the center of a circle, to which all points on the circumference bear an equal relation. With you, it is not so." (ch.XII; my translation).
    I was thrilled with the sense of recognition when I read these words. For me, they are a very exact description of the relationship between our ordinary personalities and a self that is at the center of a family of aspect personalities.
    The Dante of La Vita Nuova is ahead of himself. He not only takes the conventions of courtly love to a higher and more creative level, and helps to birth Italian as a language of literature (in the Tuscan dialect); he demonstrates the central importance of dreaming in the life of the soul and the sources of creativity.
    What is most important for me personally in this adventure in literary synchronicity and memory is that Dante created a new kind of autobiography. His "book of memory", as he called it, is woven from his dreams, visions and poems with just a little connective narrative. He omits personal names and details, making it clear that this is a memoir of his spirit, not his ordinary life. In my current book project, am attempting to do something analogous, untrammeled by traditions of courtly love and medieval religion. 

Dante as I met him at the Marché aux Puces,  St-Ouen de Clignancourt (c) Robert Moss