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Motel Nirvana
Melanie McGrath


Now available in ebook format. ‘Motel Nirvana’ is Melanie McGrath’s first published book.A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.‘Motel Nirvana’ won the 1996 John Llewellyn Rhys ‘Mail on Sunday’ prize for the best new British writer under 35.









MELANIE McGRATH

Motel Nirvana


Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert









Dedication (#ulink_3030a41c-be64-50f2-80a7-c0c8aa8f32bc)


For Paul and my mother, Margaret




Epigraph (#ulink_f70545eb-7ab1-5909-a2ca-640089d3fe94)


‘What do I know of life?

What of myself?

I know not even my own

work past or present;

Dim ever-shifting guesses

of it spread before me,

Of newer better worlds,

their mighty parturition

Mocking, perplexing me.’

WALT WHITMAN,

‘On the Last Thoughts

of Columbus’




Contents


Cover (#u887e23f2-83b6-5fea-992d-f92f29c11822)

Title Page (#u6c8f08d6-ec4a-5631-b287-6c0da15e83c2)

Dedication (#ua3cf8abc-6cfc-54c5-8f11-919bdfc957c6)

Epigraph (#u7d6dbf46-ac8f-55f1-8e5e-00cc21d7f598)

Prophets (#uec7f4ae2-8a63-509e-abbb-3629e90c2acf)

Heading West (#u15371aaa-c1a3-54d4-b508-00362ec73970)

Getting Off (#uad8b4b58-9e02-527a-9116-25aad71ed1cc)

There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute (#u64de7fde-8133-5fb2-8d88-869f0f6c4169)

Highway 666 (#litres_trial_promo)

Postcard Home (#litres_trial_promo)

God’s Country (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grander Purpose (#litres_trial_promo)

Two Cities (#litres_trial_promo)

Standing People (#litres_trial_promo)

The Death Cult (#litres_trial_promo)

La Jornada (#litres_trial_promo)

The Firm (#litres_trial_promo)

Motels (#litres_trial_promo)

Love Junky (#litres_trial_promo)

Driving (#litres_trial_promo)

White Light, Greenbacks and Redskins (#litres_trial_promo)

Prozac Dreaming (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)





Prophets (#ulink_1c31eb9a-9e22-567b-be1d-27fd6fc3a855)


‘Eat your way to consciousness’

Advert in Magical Blend magazine




DAY ONE


One afternoon in late April last year, sitting on a bed in the second cheapest motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, staring at the TV and waiting for something important to happen. A welcome-pamphlet lies open on the floor, turned to the page on altitude sickness and a small gold box with its wrapper printed ‘The Ark Bookstore, Romero St,’ squats by the remote control and digs into a toenail. Outside the high, empty air of a north New Mexico spring loiters in the parking lot and, beyond the lot, an idle slipstream of traffic waits for the lights on Cerillos Road before heading south into a thousand thousand square miles of New Mexico desert.

On one of the network channels Geraldo Rivera is quizzing a panel of prepubescent urban terrorists, closing for the commercial break with a hook: ‘What kind of society are we living in today? We’ll be right back with the answer.’ A web of contradictory signals baffles the screen, then surrenders to a Lexus ad. In among the static lies the insubstantial reflection of a woman with hair cut short as Irish moss. The inconstant lines about the mouth and the restive expression of the lips are set in, but the eyes, same dirty blue as the screen, appear unsettled, no more than holes. Those eyes I followed in the rear-view mirror half the way across the state of Texas. They seemed to me more solid then. Perhaps it was just that the light was different.

The border between Texas and New Mexico happens to be where the American West truly begins. All but the southern tip of western Texas belongs to the great plain lands, in geography as well as in spirit. The region still seems raw and new, without past or future, defined only by its current usage. For hundreds of miles across the Texas Panhandle only the monstrous panorama of derricks pumping crude disturbs the tepid sky. Beneath them lies the rich green Texan turf, metaphor for Texan style – brash, resilient, thrusting. In western Texas the air bears the odours of cattle shit and oil and the distant horizon appears as a glittering mineral line levitating just above the highway.

By contrast, all but the most northerly region of New Mexico is old and frail, a jumble of crepey rock and thinning, age-stained soil. Heading west, beyond Amarillo, TX, brittled turf gives out to bunch grass and yucca. The first blue mesas bubble the plain at Clovis, on the New Mexico border. All across eastern New Mexico the range stretches out vast and undulant to the curve of the earth, still open in places and the soil baked dun with red swatches between, like shortbread fingers laid out on a plate of ripened beef. This is where the magical palette of the south-west begins. Further west still the rivers dry up into arroyos, sagebrush replaces bunch grass and the tarry, fecund aroma of creosote bush competes with the smell of sage.

New Mexico towns are less ambitious than Texan towns; poorer too, by and large. Many consist in nothing more than a few mobile homes, a gas station and a single, neglected store selling liquor and animal feed. Maybe there will be a small polymall, laid out in horseshoe shape around a parking lot, with a Philips 76, a Bashas, a frozen yoghurt kiosk and a Radio Shack. Unlike the Panhandle, though, New Mexico is well-travelled. Along every main highway plantations of fast food joints and rest areas and cheap motels have sprung up. Every so often you drive by a WalMart or some other hyperstore strapped to the plain like a torah.

The southwest, and more specifically New Mexico state, is the place all America goes to find itself, just as it found itself in California thirty years before. Empty, yet historically rich, materially poor (forty-seventh poorest state in the Union) and thus apparently spiritually uncompromised, New Mexico has found itself become the baptismal font of secular and humanist America. Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith, is its focal point. Visitors and settlers congregate in Santa Fe to indulge in that peculiarly American pastime – working on the self. The deeper America’s spiritual crisis gets, the more spiritual self-improvement is deemed necessary and the more money and visitors fetch up in Santa Fe.

A greater number of American people believe in extra-sensory perception than believe in the existence of hell. Rolfing, rebirthing and psychic surgery are now more widely practised than rhinoplasty or liposuction. And even though most Americans would like to think of themselves as Christians, there are more alien abductions reported every year than sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. I read as much in an article, and found it easy to believe. In fact, on the strength of the article’s two assertions – more people believe in esp than in hell, and more Americans are abducted by aliens than are visited by the Virgin Mary – I took a plane to Texas and bought a wretched car and drove seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. There was something about the New Age that fitted into the American story, somewhere, or so I thought. And that, in brief, is why I am sitting watching TV in a cheap motel and waiting for something important to happen. I have with me a copy of The Aquarian Conspiracy, as yet unread, a gold card box, a guidebook to New Mexico and a hunch that whatever I find will tell me something about what is happening at the end of the century in which America finally became too big for itself.

Inside the gold box is a collection of cards and an instruction booklet. The booklet invites its reader to pick a card at random from the God Insight Box and connect to the eternal unity through the principle of synchronicity. Baking soda brings teeth up whiter than any ordinary toothpaste, adds a woman on the network channel. I close my eyes and pick a card:

As Above, So Below.

As Within, So Without.

Everything I see

is a Reflection of Me.

A rose bush taps on the window outside, sending an iridescent hummingbird spinning briefly above it before disappearing from view. Already the sluggish heat of the afternoon has passed, and in its place breathes an easy wind. The sky’s so cataracted with dust-filled clouds I can no longer see the sun. Maybe there will be some rain, but most likely it will not rain again until late July or August, when the late summer thunderstorms begin. I am considering naming the tin-can Chevy ‘Caboose’ from part of a line in a country song. Sums up a distant kind of affection, that word, and I don’t like to get too sentimental about cars. Sentimentality is something I avoid.

In the bathroom swigging Pepto-Bismol from the bottle it occurs to me that the insight card has got it wrong. It’s just not true that everything I see is a reflection of me, only the way I see it. The ghoul-face with its inconstant mouth grins modestly back from the bathroom tiles in cubist manner.

Back on the network Geraldo is being shown how to kick box by a Crips girl. I lean over for the remote, sending the gold box sliding off the bed and ejecting a ‘Don’t worry, Be Happy’ card with a smiley face printed around the text. The moment I see that smiley face I know I want my money back.

‘Hello, this is The Ark bookstore?’ says a man’s voice in uncertain tone.

‘I’m calling from a pay phone,’ I reply. I don’t know why I say this, but I often do, even when I’m not. ‘I came in earlier and bought a God Insight Box?’

‘Uh, huh,’ acknowledges the voice.

‘I’d like to change it.’

No answer.

‘I don’t know, it’s something about the insights. They don’t feel very deep to me. I thought they’d be deeper.’

‘Oh,’ says the voice. ‘Okey doke. No problem. Just swing by.’

A thin young woman sits cross-legged at the entrance of The Ark flicking through a picture postcard book of celestial beings. Next to her stands a man, about twenty, turning a gold loop around in his ear.

‘Angels?’ I ask as an opening gambit, pointing towards the book.

The man nods.

‘Uh-huh, I did a thesis. Healing studies,’ replies the young woman, returning to her pictures. The man reads my confusion and says ‘Cool,’ as both a confirmation and an expression of general amiability.

‘The thing about healing’, I volunteer, responding to the signal, ‘is it never seems to end. I mean, I never met anyone who was actually healed.’

‘Yeah, right,’ replies the woman, ‘I think I read a book about that.’ She tips her head to one side and gazes at me with an arch little smile.

‘English?’

I nod.

‘I went to Avebury once …’

The man with the gold hoop, who is oscillating awkwardly in and out of this conversation, introduces his friend as Nancy and himself as Walker, ‘ex-pro-surfer, ex-Angelino, currently member of Mobillus Trip’.

‘That a band?’ I ask. Walker, who does not seem at first acquaintance to be a man of great intellectual fluidity, glances down at his friend for reassurance, but, seeing she has already returned to her picture book, he takes stock and thinks for a few seconds, twirling the loop in its tunnel.

‘Hard-core funk rap psychedelic, with some West Coast hip-hop influences, uh, but we’re kinda dropping those.’

The skinny woman shakes her hair, looks up, ignoring the conversational diversion; ‘I had this dissertation to do on crop circles? I went to Avebury? And it was cool? I saw these things, like black butterflies hovering above the stones? And, like, I just knew that they were in touch with my higher self? It was like through the third eye?’ She taps her forehead.

I recall a newspaper article I had read some time before which had speculated that some of the stones would be removed to make way for a new road and relaid on a green site outside the town.

‘Wow.’ She wrinkles her brow. ‘You know, the Goddess is real strong there, I don’t think they would be allowed to do that. In Avebury, the Goddess is all over the place.’

‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’ I begin a retreat towards the centre of the store.

‘Hey,’ says the woman, tearing a corner from the book and scribbling something on it, ‘Here’s our number. Call.’

In a large aviary opposite the astrology section are stationed a dozen half-bald canary birds perched mute on dowelling rods. A series of Tibetan wind chimes moves in draughts, and behind a blonde wood counter at the back a woman wearing unbleached drawstring pants fiddles with a volume knob to adjust the level of whale song in the background. Another woman with a birthmark sits cross-legged on the floor behind the counter polishing a didgeridoo with a can of Pledge, but there is no sign of the man I might have spoken to on the telephone. A spirit of unease prowls around The Ark, due in part to its interior décor – an emulation of a home improvement catalogue circa 1972, with softly padded armchairs and cushions reeking of patchouli grouped around an Afghan rug – and in part to some ambience more mysterious. The customers, wary as beaten dogs, cling to the sides of the room, making occasional nervous sorties out from palmistry to crystals across a no man’s land of bean-bags. I make for the woman with the unbleached pants, and am attempting a precise explanation as to why the insights in the gold box are a little short of satisfactory, when my stomach gives an unexpected, vertiginous heave and sends a fragment of taco chip topspinning out onto the stripped wood floor.

‘Altitude sickness,’ I shrug.

The cashier shakes her head.

‘I don’t think we can change that Insight Box, now, ma’am,’ she says, as if the taco chip had automatically divested me of all consumer rights, ‘because you’ve already benefited from the Insights. You wouldn’t take a bottle of Tylenol back after your headache was all gone,’ she smiles indulgently, ‘I can recommend a few things for the altitude sickness, though.’ Altitude sickness is pronounced “Altitude sickness” and finished off with a small cough.

Ten minutes later I’ve agreed to purchase an African fetish (vegetarian camel tail-hair), two shards of crystal quartz in different good karma colours, four sticks of Bophuthatswana sandal-wood incense, a Hopi dream-catcher, a subliminal Higher Consciousness tape and a book promising to reveal what my personal task will be ‘in the glorious New Age, as we rapidly approach the “End Times” and the start of a new awakening for all of humankind’.

‘Where are you headed?’ asks the cashier, counting up the value of my purchases.

‘Los Angeles?’ I have no idea.

‘Oh, I went once,’ leaning forward and curling her hand around her mouth, ‘The entire city smelt of faeces.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s a long drive anyway,’ I reply, disheartened.

‘They’re having some real bad drainage problems.’

‘I probably won’t make it.’

‘Well, anyways, come back just before you set off and I’ll recommend some things for your psychic protection.’

‘Oh?’

‘Sure. Bad karma in LA. Whoopsi, here’s your credit card. Enjoy your purchases. And you think yourself into wellness, you hear?’

At the southern end of Romero Street, uphill from The Ark bookstore, is a flat, rusty griddle of iron tracks, switches, sidings and signalling from the old Santa Fe railroad. Some workmen are renovating a clapboard barn by Guadalupe St, which was once, perhaps, the station warehouse. It’s now still possible to drive across the old track to get from Romero into Guadalupe, but sometime in the near future the whole station will no doubt be cordoned off, polished up and converted into a museum of one kind or another, for Santa Fe is a tourist town, and said by those who think in superlatives to be one of the most beautiful spots in the USA. Downtown, towards the plaza and the Palace of Governors, where the Spanish and Mexicans administered most of what are now the states of New Mexico and Arizona from 1599 until the land was ceded to the USA in 1846, Santa Fe settles into a parody of its tour-guide hagiography – all narrow streets and landscaped verges, chocolate brown and pink adobe architecture, spicy historical air. The City Different, the chamber of commerce calls it. I’ve read somewhere that movie stars own more property per square foot of the city than anywhere else on the continent; more than in Aspen, Colorado, more than in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, more than in Los Angeles or Martha’s Vineyard.

In any case, Santa Fe may well fall by its own success. Marketed as a little pearl set on a desert sea, the town is beginning to sprawl. Cerillos Road, where the King’s Rest and most of the city’s cheap motels are situated, has become a long strip of fast-food palaces, sorry-looking lube joints and shopping plazas just like those in any other desert town. The strip even has its own rush hour as commuters from as far away as Albuquerque, sixty miles to the south, drive in to service the tourist business. Over the last ten years the price of real estate has risen so high that many of the hispanic families whose roots are in Santa Fe have already been pushed out to cheaper towns nearby, like Española and La Cienega. And so the town empties of the folk who both (in stereotype) attract and (in actuality) service tourism and fills up with folk who were once tourists returning as settlers and retirees – movie stars, ‘artists’, hangers-on, and, of course, people working on themselves.

After packing the crystals and Bophuthatswana incense sticks in my suitcase, I take two sleeping pills and a long draft of Pepto Bismol, set the Higher Consciousness tape running, open up the book and crawl into bed with the rest of the motel wildlife. ‘Thousands are here now to help the unenlightened endure the spiritual and physical transformation of our world, which is soon to be swept into a higher level of consciousness,’ reads the book blurb. The author’s face smiles up from the inside cover, next to a tributary poem. In the preface she promises to share her glories, before returning to the octaves of home.




DAY TWO


Seven in the morning. The Higher Consciousness tape has run the tape machine dry and is silent. I get up and take a long look at myself in the mirror, but can’t make out anything much different. Yesterday’s nausea has almost gone although I still feel a little light-headed. The altitude has subtely altered the tone of my muscles, which are firmer now than yesterday. I cannot say that I feel more conscious though. The instructions on the tape box fail to explain how long the tape takes to work, or, for that matter, exactly what it does. Does it expand conscious awareness of the conscious or expand conscious awareness of the unconscious, or increase higher consciousness or raise higher consciousness of consciousness or something entirely different? I should have asked in the store.

KIOT radio runs an early morning interview with Kenny Kingston, psychic to the stars, who claims ‘Harry Truman was the most psychic president the US ever had.’ Was that because of the Little Boy? Kenny K. doesn’t say.

Up on the dresser sits the God Insight Box waiting to be consulted. The insight for the day, printed on orange card, in soy-based ink, is ‘I can change any thought that hurts.’

The full weight of this piece of wisdom hits me in the shower. An end to personal failure and social guilt. I emerge feeling like a new person.

At ten Gita comes in to dust. Gita is the Indian wife of the Indian proprietor of the King’s Rest.

‘No work?’ she asks. I smile and shrug.

‘Alone?’ She considers this before adding,

‘Always alone,’ giggling at her own presumption. ‘Wasting time,’ she concludes as though witness to the sad but inevitable path of an anti-social life.

I make a decision to call Nancy and Walker.

‘Is that Walker?’

‘Yes,’ says Walker.

‘I’m in a payphone, Walker. What I wanted to know … what I wondered if you knew is why Santa Fe’s become, you know, a place where people, uh …’ – searching for an acceptable phrase – ‘… uh, work on themselves.’

‘Sure,’ says Walker, unfazed. ‘Ask just about anyone on the street. We’re all working on ourselves. It’s like, Santa Monica is full of surfers, and Santa Fe is full of seekers.’

‘But why is that?’

‘Well, the ocean’s there I guess.’ Walker pauses to give me time to get the joke. ‘Oh, you mean … I guess it’s, like, the energies and the desert, man.’

‘Desert energies?’

‘Uh, yeah.’

I am about to bring the conversation to a close when Walker adds: ‘You could go to a therapist, or an empath or a psychic or something.’ Some woman in Walker’s room starts mantra chanting.

‘Do you know anyone?’ ‘Om’ throbs over the phone like a distant headache.

‘There are, like, thousands of’em in this city. You should check the Yellow Pages.’

To me, psychics have always been the lament of evangelical Christians in suburban neighbourhoods, character parts in police dramas and a counsel-of-last-resort for the desperate. I suppose it had just never occurred to me that anyone could pick a psychic from the Yellow Pages and fix an appointment. My mother saw a clairvoyant after my father died. The clairvoyant told her that my father came out of the spirit world with this message: ‘Don’t drive so fast.’ It’s true, she does drive too fast. And then the psychic apparently said ‘Plus, you have a daughter who’s selfish to the core.’ But I don’t know if mum got the psychic’s name from the Yellow Pages or from somewhere else.

Much though I’d like to believe – I mean I really would – in psychic phenomena, and however comforting it would be to know that my father was up in the ether somewhere supervising my driving, I find it difficult to believe in anything without first understanding it. For example, as a child in a Catholic school, I found the Catholic notion of transubstantiation particularly tricky. I would worry about the finer details: how come Jesus’ body wasn’t all eaten up? Wouldn’t it be rotten after two thousand years? Even now, knowing that belief is based not on literal truths, but on metaphorical ones, I remain confused. Although I don’t believe in them, if a psychic told me I was going to die the next day, I’d probably still be worried.

‘I’m not going to any psychic from the Yellow Pages. You don’t know what you’re getting.’ This for my own benefit as much as Walker’s.

‘Sure,’ replies Walker, good-humouredly, ‘You could go see Chris Griscom. She’s got this school called the Nizhoni School for Global Consciousness and this, like, place, the Light Institute? They deal with the Earth Mother and the Goddess and all? Uh, it’s not psychic though, it’s more like consciousness and the healing energies. I kinda learned a lot from her. She converted Shirley Maclaine.’

With hindsight, I see that it was at this point I came to the realization that I was dealing not just with an unfamiliar set of behaviours but with an entirely foreign inner architecture. It was like being propelled back into that period in adolescence when even though everyone listened to the same music, you still felt that you were the only one who really understood the lyrics or that you were the only one who didn’t understand the lyrics, but that in any case you were alone. It occurred to me then that I was suffering from the kind of numb insensibility brought on by navigating through an emotional and intellectual territory that might be labelled ‘here monsters lie’ on the map of experience. This realization was to bring with it a solitude more complete than my habitual isolation. The longer I considered it, the more it gripped me. How long would it be before I scuttled back empty-handed to my familiar world or capitulated to the demands of the new one and assumed its principles and unconscious ideologies – in short, became one of them?

Mid-morning I order a cup of coffee and a donut at Galisteo News, a New Age-y dive which carries papers from outside the state and is popular with tourists and transplants. One of the local freesheets leads with the headline ‘Whole Life Special’, previewing some sort of New Age-fest to be held in Santa Fe the following week. It continues with the sub-header ‘Connect with the transformational energy of your “real” self.’ On the inside back is a picture of a thin woman with big hair and mascara, and underneath her the legend ‘Chris Griscom shows you how to expand your perception to include the multi-dimensional perspectives of global consciousness,’ with the address of the Light Institute of Galisteo and a phone number.

I have a friend, called Fergus, who lives in New York and is very dear to me. I cannot remember how we met, or where, so there can’t be much of a story to it. In any case, Fergus is one of four people I know who are currently living in the USA. Two have disappeared completely and the third always says he can’t talk whenever I call him. Fergus, on the other hand has promised to fly over and spend a weekend with me while I am in the southwest, but I don’t think he will. In some ways he’s reliable, but in others, he’s just another SOB.

‘Ferg, it’s me.’

‘You still in Texas?’

‘Santa Fe.’

Fergus, I know, does not approve of Higher Consciousness tapes and God Insight Boxes and psychics and angels, but I mention them anyway in the hope that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

‘Kooks.’

‘That’s easy to say,’ I reply, ‘but if enough people believe it, you can’t just write it off.’

A bitter laugh.

‘That’s the democratic principle, isn’t it?’ I’m wounded, ‘Anyway, how come you’re such a cynic?’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Fergus is wounded. ‘This is America, remember.’

‘OK, muddafukka.’

‘Much better.’

‘Fergus, I can change any thought that hurts.’ At that moment a voice comes on the line and asks for another $2.75. Then the phone begins ringing without my having hung up. ‘Hello?’

The voice replies ‘You owe $2.75.’

‘Yeah, I know, I’m just trying to find it.’

‘You owe $2.75,’ says the voice for the third time.

‘Look,’ I counter, needled, ‘I never asked for credit.’

The voice persists: ‘$2.75.’

I hang up. It rings, I pick up, a voice says ‘You owe $2.75.’ It’s still ringing ten minutes later, by which time I’m sitting in room 12 with the TV tuned into Oprah and a collection of compulsive eaters.

This is the start of my lost week.

Five days anyway. Five mornings at The Ark, five afternoons and evenings at the public library on East Macy Street. In between only Gita’s morning dirges – ‘Work?’, ‘Alone?’, muffins, coffee, Camels and a couple of unisom at bedtime. By the end of the week, I have conquered the astrological texts, esp and the paranormal, read interminable accounts of alien abductions, absorbed Tibetan reincarnation prayers, books on angels and Ascended Masters, followed recipes to make the body invisible, interpreted chanting records, xeroxed a chart indicating in diagrammatic form how best to hug a tree, taken advice on organising your own rebirth, skimmed guides to the millennium, noted apocalyptic predictions of the earth changes and begun the long preparation for a course in miracles.

At the end of the fifth day I compile a list:

PATHS TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT (NEW AGE)



1. Intuitive development

Chakras, auras, astrology, channelling, oracles, tarot

2. Creating your own reality

Transformational journeys, meditation, dreamwork, astral projection, brain machines, drugs

3. Transitions

Birth, death, reincarnation, past lives

4. Spirituality

Mysticism, Native American spiritualism, nature worship, the Goddess, the Crone, miracles

5. Consumption

Shopping



and resolve to make this my agenda.




DAY EIGHT


Awake at six, feeling elated. It’s sunny outside, but cool still. A rust-coloured hummingbird motors around the agave outside my room. In the shower I am overtaken by the uncomfortable but undeniable possibility that the longer I spend alone the lonelier I may become.

My God-Box insight for the day is:

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood

printed in soy-based ink with a picture of an ancient swinging in a child’s playground.

A woman at the juice bar in Wild Oats on Cordova Street recommends wheatgrass juice on account of its positive impact on prana. She doesn’t say whether it takes prana away or gives it to you, but at $3 a pop you’d have a right to expect it to do one or the other, surely. She directs me to the seating area, where, pinned up on the corkboard is a notice advertising a drum birthing workshop: ‘The second day of the workshop is spent in birthing teams ritually birthing both your drum and yourself. You will be guided in how to co-ordinate sound, breath, your body and the team’s energy in order to give your drum the best life possible. A properly birthed drum will pull tremendous amounts of energy from you in order to begin its life, just as a baby does.’

‘You here for Whole Life or just doing some work on your-self?’ asks the juice-bar attendant, with the dilute resignation of a person who finds that life in the periods between trips tends towards the crushingly predictable.

‘Bit of both, I guess,’ I reply in non-committal tone. She waves away an insect, suppressing a yawn with a flailing hand.

‘Have you been out to the desert yet?’

I shake my head.

She opens her eyes in mild surprise, as if offended by my unconventional behaviour.

‘You must go! The life force there! I mean, the whole desert energy thing roots you into this amazing consciousness of your interconnectedness with all beings.’

‘What,’ I suggest, recalling the texts of the lost week, ‘transformative at the soul level?’

‘We’re talking molecular.’

‘So you’re saying it acts as a kind of metaphor for the holographic universe?’ I persist.

‘Right.’

‘Biocosmic resonation?’

She smiles a smile a highway wide. ‘Hey, you’re into that too.’ Then leaning in close enough for me to be able to smell the tang of grease in her hair. ‘Tell me, did we meet in a past life?’

‘Uh huh,’ I reply, returning the smile.

‘I knew I’d seen your face before.’

I’m driving to Chris Griscom’s Light Institute in Galisteo, about twenty miles south of Santa Fe, for a ‘Knowings’ in which people gather ‘knowing’ from themselves and ‘apply it from a place of enlightenment’. I had always imagined wisdom to be an accumulated quality, only now I am told it can be taught in Knowings workshops.

South of Santa Fe, the sky unfurls to an artificial blue, scribbled over with cirrus. Last night’s roadkill still lies moist and filleted on the highway, as yet undiscovered by the ravens sunning themselves in the squawbush on either side of the road. It is the first day of summer heat. The sun is yellow now; by noon it will shine as whitely as magnesium flare.

The highway passes right through Galisteo then out onto the other side, across the Galisteo basin. At speed, you might pass the village of Galisteo altogether before your eyes had even registered it. The main street is little more than a strip of dry clay messed up into troughs by the winter rains. A black mongrel dog tied to a loop set into an adobe wall pulls at its chain and howls. Caboose draws up and slides into the verge, too early for the ‘Knowings’. On the pavement lies an old fake swiss army knife, handle picked at by ants, blade sound enough. Near to the place where the dog is tied, two hispanic women and a man in a straw hat sit in the shade of a mesquite tree still covered in the papery casings of its lost blossom. Across the road towards the Spanish church, the plastic honeycomb from a six-pack drifts in the breeze. A car runs over it, slows momentarily then flows south leaving its image slipping into the heat shine.

The patrona of the local store is stationed on a wooden chair outside brushing away the dust with a Spanish fan. A radio tuned into a Santa Fe station spits out part of the signal. She follows me into the store, lined along one side with Uncle Ben’s; she smoothes her hair, lifts the plastic cover from a plate of danish pastries, wipes off a fly and moves along the counter. Taking my five-dollar bill and making a little show of it, she opens a wooden drawer where there are five-dollar bills and one-dollar bills, fixed together with an iron bulldog clip and passes back some coins. I sit up against a wall hard from the sun, sip from a bottle of warm, sweet soda and watch the black dog shivering on its chain. A boy with worn down shoes comes by carrying a bunch of mint with the leaves dragging in the dust.

Over the wall in someone’s garden two cockerels are doing violence to each other, throwing pieces of flinty stone up into the air and a chestnut horse with a paper fringe over its head to keep away the flies rubs its neck against a little bothy built into the wall. The chickens don’t bother it, the dog doesn’t bother it. A man passes in a tow truck, makes a wide turn at the end of the road and cuts the engine. He sits and waits for something to happen, but nothing does. Around the town in each direction lies almost silent a fauvist bowl of bluegreen laterite edged in navy where the sky scrolls down onto its beginning.

The world headquarters of the Griscom global enlightenment enterprise is a collection of modest little buildings surrounded by cottonwood bosque up a remote and self-effacing dirt track to the east of Galisteo. By six-thirty, fifty people or so have gathered in a prefabricated building on one side of the main administrative building, behind an adobe barn. To the front of this building a line of cars waits to park: Mercedes estates, Mitsubishi four-wheel-drives, GM minivans, the odd station wagon. A waspish woman in linen tells me she makes the round trip (seven hundred miles or so) from Denver each week. It costs her $50 in gas, plus the $15 Light Institute fee. Chris Griscom is a very fine person, and a very famous person she says. It occurs to me that since my last visit to America celebrity has become a moral value as well as informing the predominant popular ideology.

We sit and wait in silence. Every now and then Wasp’s stomach chirps. An Institute assistant, also dressed in linen, begins setting up tape machines and microphones by the door, and after a wait of a few minutes Griscom herself hovers in, head-to-toe white silk robes with white silk hair and golden tan, smiling an abstracted, internalized kind of smile, and stands with arms outstretched for the assistant to wire her up. Fully wired, she processes to a chair at the front of the room, lowers herself into it and does something Hindu with her hands.

‘Enlightenment is really the recognition …’ Griscom pauses, regarding with indulgent modesty the microphone clipped to her breast. The chic assistant grapples with the connection, the tape rolls, the microphone picks up and Griscom begins again. ‘Enlightenment is really the recognition and acceptance of all energies and the capacity to be where they intersect, where those spin points are, where the negative pushes itself into the light, or is drawn into the light, so that there is a correspondent intersection between the doing and the being.’

Her audience shifts, then settles. The wasp leans forward and starts to take notes.

‘Enlightenment’, continues Griscom, voice creamy, sweeping long silver hair languorously from her face, ‘has to do with freedom of choice. When you are looking at the incarnations that you’re looking at this week you’re having an opportunity to be the killer and the lover at the same time.’

A man behind kicks the back of my chair, causing a cold rill of sweat to leave its source between my legs and begin a journey across the thigh. Others fan themselves with their hands and purses. In my row about three along, someone struggles against sleep.

‘So, once we realize that even if you are there in the place of wrong there’s still a spark in there, there’s still something that, if you can look at it from a witnessing position which is what you’re sort of doing here, you can see that you did what you could with the consciousness you had, and that being didn’t understand wrong the way you might now, and so through that experience they gained some recognition.’

‘Does that mean we can go away and do anything we like, and still get enlightened?’ I whisper across to my neighbour.

‘Shh,’ she replies.

‘One of the lessons that has stopped human evolution at this point is the incapacity to see the purpose of all experience and therefore to embrace and comprehend what we would call the meditative. Everything is there exactly as it needs to be in order to allow the motion to continue because evolution is a part of the pulse, it is the pulse, of the universe. So, if we can sit in that space, letting even a flicker of the master that we have been, that we can recognize, that comes from our recognition from our incarnations, just a flicker of that to sit with us …’

A toddler runs over to the Griscom throne and attempts to mount. Griscom smiles and pushes it off.

‘… then we can perceive in a totally different way. The difficulty with linear is that it’s always out in front or behind instead of here, right here now. And with that, the scope to see its purpose, because it either hasn’t come yet, or it’s already shut off, then we can’t recognise purpose. Purpose is a living thing, it’s life itself, that ecstasy, when it needs no more explanation, it just is.’

I turn to my neighbour who is trying her best to balance the demands of note-taking and staring intently ahead.

‘I’m completely lost. What was that about linear?’

‘After.’

My eyelids begin an inexorable downward progress. Half an hour or so later I’m woken by the voice of the woman next to me, who is explaining to the assembly how she was psychically attacked in a dream the previous night and woke up to discover red welts all over her body, and Chris Griscom is congratulating her on fending off the psychic invader and mentioning the undeniable increase in the number of aliens feeding on human energies in the region and pointing out that this is happening to test our strength and make us more whole. I wonder vaguely if the hungry alien argument was part of the reason for Shirley Maclaine’s conversion to the New Age. I think I’m beginning to grasp Griscom’s vision thing. It goes like this: we are all here for a purpose, we’re entitled to constant bliss, we don’t need to feel pain, we are in the inevitable process of evolution, we can be free of our bodies and inhabit the universe. That’s about it, simply put.

And all those hungry souls, with their unsatisfying, slipaway lives, the souls of the ones who are not Shirley Maclaine and never will be, all the ordinary ones, can rest reassured by a simple weekly payment of $15 to the Light Institute of Galisteo that there is a higher reason for it all. Whereas, of course, there may well not be.

The way I see it, a pile of money goes round in circles in the little community of Santa Fe, and every time it comes round to the Light Institute of Galisteo, a bit more drops off.




DAY TEN


A queue winds down from the ticket booth at the Whole Life Expo in the town centre, across West Marcy Street towards the public library. From up ahead comes the sound of drumming. A printed programme available at the door details the lectures and workshops for the day:

* ‘Is there an Alien-Multinational Connection?’

* ‘Learn how bone-headed misinformants are placed in UFO conferences as speakers to baffle and confuse you’

* ‘The Vampire and the Psychic Gatekeeper,’ talk given by Helaine Harris, creator of Psychoshamanism™

* ‘The Virtual Reality of MetaNeurological Genesis’

* ‘The Properties of Extraterrestrial Science and Tibetan-Andromedan Intervention in World Affairs during 1993’

* ‘Soul Triggering of the Brain’s Joy Center – Super Conscious Self-Technics to Save Us From Extinction’, by Orayna Orr, empath

The list continues: workshops on angels, astral projection, colonic irrigation, past lives, auric massage and discovering the wild woman within. It’s going to be a busy day.

From among the vendors of extremely low-frequency headsets, magic wands, colonic irrigation suppositories, copper pyramids and high energy gloves I select the Kirilian photography booth. A Kirilian photograph can produce an image of the aura. Now the existence of auras seems pretty plausible to me. How else could a person sense when another enters the room, without seeing or hearing them? What other explanation can there be for the ability to detect a mood or tension in the air? It doesn’t matter to me whether the aura is electromagnetic energy, sixth sense, sophisticated heat detector, lifeforce, or anything else, only that it exists. To be able to have physical evidence of it would be an assurance that some things are beyond the reaches of science. It would be a sign that mysteries still exist. I have a hunch that, once I know all there is to know about my aura, I’ll feel more attuned to the New Age altogether.

While we’re standing in line, a woman in an outsized orange beret solicits my opinion of the Mississippi floods. Pictures of broken levees and devastated homes are being shown on every news programme on the TV, and occupy the front pages of much of the printed press too. I say I think they’re terrible.

‘No they’re not,’ replies the orange beret.

‘Really?’

‘Of course not, they’re all part of the earth changes.’

Haven’t I heard? The planet is on the brink of an apocalyptic phase, during which storms and floods and earthquakes and all kinds of natural disasters will kill most of the world’s population – especially the unspiritual ones – leading those remaining to a new era of peace and higher consciousness.

‘The Age of Aquarius,’ she says, ‘you must have heard.’

‘Is that the same thing as the New Age?’

‘Aquarius,’ repeats the orange beret, sounding confused.

A Kirilian photograph looks very much like a regular polaroid, as it turns out, but at $15 a shot it has to be different. In any case, Kirilian photographs are taken by a highly complex Kirilian mechanism, requiring the subject to place his or her palm on a metal plate and visualize the auric field while the booth assistant shouts instructions from beneath a piece of black cloth. There then follows a soft popping preceded by an intense white light, and the aura photograph spools from a flap in the side of the machine. Mine is a chemical green, with two livid haloes floating above it like aerial ringworm sores.

‘Oh my,’ says the booth assistant, ‘this is interesting. See that green? That’s healing. And the red is passion.’ Passion and healing, I’m thinking, not bad.

‘You have a young soul, not too many lifetimes here, full of energy, adventuresomeness, you’re highly active physically, probably travel a good deal, veerrry creative. I’d guess you make your living by your wits. You’re fascinated by what goes on in the world, are you in the news? Something like that, I’m only guessing.’

And she’s on to the next in line, orange beret. I indulge my ego in a small self-congratulatory moment. Young soul, fascinated, adventuresome. Hotdamn! My aura is telling me I’m the person I always wanted to be.

‘Oh my.’ The booth assistant is speaking to orange beret now, holding the beret’s aura image, ‘this is interesting. See that green? A young soul. Veery creative.’

I call Fergus collect to let him know first that my aura is green for healing, red for passion and second that the earth is about to implode. He seems unimpressed, but then he is a New Yorker. As I’m leaving the phone booth someone presses a flyer into my hands and invites me to a lecture at 4pm given by a Princess Sharula Dux who will be demonstrating the tools and format to bring the planet into the Aquarian Age as prescribed by the Melchizedek Temple of Telos. Topics covered will include passing through the astrological doorway of 12:12, and the restructuring of the Melchizedek Priesthood, the spiritual warriors and world leaders of the Golden Age. Pretty comprehensive.

At some point in my lost week I read about Princess Sharula and her theories. The Princess Dux I read about is a 267 year-old Ambassador from a subterranean city called Telos which is in turn part of the ancient underground kingdom of Lemuria, sister civilization to Atlantis and Mu.

At four sharp she arrives at lecture theatre number three, blinking at the crowd, an immensity in a marine-theme catsuit, and makes her way to the front of the room with that rolling gait peculiar to the corpulent, closely followed by a young outdoors type with long hair tied back in a ponytail, who introduces himself as Shield Dux and asks us to give a big hand to Her Excellency the Princess Sharula Dux, his beloved wife and distinguished Ambassador from the court of Telos.

Sharula wants her public to understand that the world is in disarray, convulsed by greed, natural disasters, cancer, urban violence, tax evasion and cruelty to animals. She wants us to know that we are standing at a crossroads in the 1990s. A crossroads, every generation needs to hear it. In the 1890s our great-grandparents were standing at a crossroads. We were standing at a crossroads when Martin Luther King took the fatal bullet, when Reaganomics was in vogue. We have always, I fear, been standing at a crossroads.

In Princess Dux’s opinion the New Age is coming pretty soon now, about as soon as it takes for the gargantuan crystal matrix computers of the universe to receive a cosmic refurbishment. There’s good news for Americans, says Dux; the United States of America is programmed to become the world’s first crystal matrix paradise because it is in America that the current global cauldron of ills is bubbling away the hardest.

Eventually, question time comes round, and no-one seems to have much to say so I stand and venture:

‘One thing I’ve always wanted to know is whether it gets a little smoggy down underground, you know, without the benefit of the wind?’

The princess smoothes her pearl-grey hair and winds a thread around one of the anchor buttons of her catsuit.

‘You must have learned such a lot in your 267 years.’

‘I have had the occasional enlightenment, it’s true. Actually, all our power comes from an electromagnetic injection into the crystal matrix that harnesses the ethereal power and provides energy for a million years. It is completely clean and entirely without ecological consequences. So, you see, we have no smog at all. You have yet to learn such technologies. Earth people are remarkably backward in some respects.’

‘You know, your majesty or whatever,’ I continue, emboldened. ‘I sometimes feel confused and barely human.’ There’s a rustle of recognition in the audience. ‘I do have this weird little birthmark on my back. Suppose I’m Lemurian, like you. I mean, how could I tell?’

She looks at me darkly, smile faded away to a little flicker about the nostrils.

‘I don’t think that’s likely, you’re probably just an extraterrestrial.’

Sometimes I can be so cheap it gets me down.

In the coffee bar, a Californian called Talon invites me to a free demonstration of his Tachyon energy bodysuits. Now, in different circumstances nothing would have kept me from Talon’s Tachyon energy bodysuit, but I am committed to the Brad and Sherry Steiger lecture at 5.30. No matter, says Talon, why doesn’t he swing by after the lecture, and he’ll give me an individual session ‘with no obligations’, so we fix a vague time and Talon wanders off back to his Tachyon energy booth and I never do discover exactly what Tachyon energy is.

Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger are New Age celebs, which is to say, they have made appearances on The Joan Rivers Show and can afford a half-page ad in the Whole Life Expo catalogue. Their books include Hollywood and the Supernatural and Mysteries of Time and Space. The most recent, Strange Powers of Pets, was a Literary Guild selection. In addition Sherry Hansen Steiger is a licensed publicist while Brad once won the Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence. The Milwaukee Sentinel apparently says they have ‘a wonderful understanding of the forthcoming changes.’

After a 267 year-old Princess, can anything surprise?

By their own account, Brad and Sherry Steiger stumbled across intimations of an answer to the question: ‘Who made us what we are?’, quite by accident. After years of painstaking research they discovered, almost as a by-product of their work into alien intelligence, that the great human tribe, far from being mere cosmic incidentals, had in fact been shaped many thousand years ago by collectives of advanced entities from other planets, and in particular from Venus. Suddenly, everything else made sense to them. The giant fossilized footprints they had come across in Peru (was it Peru? I forget) were obviously those of an advanced reptilian being which had evolved on earth and migrated to another part of the solar system; and the well-documented Mayan practice of elongating infant skulls by squashing them between boards was doubtless intended to be a sign of deference to the Indians’ oval-headed alien masters. Why, rock pictures show that the aliens even knew about photosynthesis and were employing it for their own ends, not least of which was to splice up some human genes and cross-breed them with other useful things – plants and spaceships. They’d even got the technology to manufacture human beings from the Madagascan common ring-tailed lemur.

And to think that without the Steigers the world would have remained ignorant of these things.

So the tenth day ends, without satisfaction, in room 12 at the King’s Rest. Gita has been in to clean and left a few nominal swirls in the dirt on the dresser. Outside the air is still as sleep and pearly with dusk. Roseanne Barr’s disembodied voice oozes through the wall from the room next door. For some days now I have felt a strange longing which is neither a longing for contact nor a longing for conversation, but rather, a need to be on familiar ground. Had I been travelling in the Solomon Islands I should have faced my isolation with greater equanimity, but every westerner expects at least to comprehend America, if not to feel in some measure at ease there. Here I find so many hints of common ground give out quite suddenly, like false byways. Someone you can rely upon to have an opinion about soap opera or McDonald’s turns out to have seen angels in her backyard and the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself a reincarnation of Nefertiti. Even among the seemingly familiar there can turn out to be almost nothing recognizable.




DAY ELEVEN


I wake with a start from some instantly forgotten dream as the sun begins to burn blue holes into the earliest light. Some overnight rain has stripped the rose outside of its petals leaving a few trembling stamens held fast in the arms of the calyx. A raven lifts itself from the roof and banks into the sky. The one other guest is packing his car and heading back home, to Colorado by the looks of it. There are no clouds now, just a wondrous filmic sheet flung about the earth and moving lightly in the void, as if pegged out to dry.

Remembering the despondent mood of the previous night, I unpack my African fetish, Hopi dream catcher and quartz crystals and arrange them about the room in an attempt to brighten up the place and construct the kind of homeliness which is at present missing. I light a Camel, drink the remains of last night’s root beer, now flat, switch on the TV and wonder why it is that all American anchorwomen have the same hairdo.

At around nine Gita knocks and, without waiting for a response, lets herself in. Looking down at me sitting on the bed she says, to no-one in particular, ‘Alone watching TV,’ with the satisfaction of one delivering a biographical summation for the purposes of an obituary.

Breakfast of sour frijoles and huevos a la plancha in a cafe in Española, a small, hispanic town about thirty miles north of Santa Fe. Black water runs out from the beans, leaving strange Rorschach blots on a stack of flour tortillas heaped beside.

These I point out to the waitress when she returns to fill my coffee cup.

‘What do they suggest to you?’

‘UFO? I dunno.’

‘Pick an insight card.’ She looks down for a moment at the little gold box, pincers a card between brilliant red nails, studies it a moment, throws it back on the table and pours the coffee.

The card reads ‘Slow down, you’re going too fast; You gotta make the moment last …’ with Paul Simon credited on the bottom in psychedelic letters enclosed by double quotation marks. “Paul Simon.”

‘What’s that for, anyhow?’ Before I leave she asks for it back to show to her boss, but he’s too busy loading a delivery of icecream into the freezer.

Sixties, sixties, sixties. Sometimes it seems as though the sixties generation unplugged en masse after Woodstock. Do they suppose that nothing’s happened since? Like, the end of the Cold War, like the digital revolution, like AIDS, like democratic elections in South Africa, like crack, like the rise and rise of the kind of people who still remember who Paul Simon was, or is, or who give a damn in any case.

Every time I hum the tune I get the line ‘you move too fast’ repeating in my head. ‘You’re going too fast’ doesn’t even scan.

During the drive back to Santa Fe it occurs to me that, despite having been in New Mexico for nearly two weeks, I have taken almost no account of the landscape outside the city limits, which is at least as great a draw to spiritual tourists as the New Age cafes and bookstores downtown. So I swing off the freeway at the next turning, signposted to Chimayo, and head up a single-track paved road onto a desert plateau lined in the far distance with naked mountains whose peaks, despite the sun, remain ice-powdered, giving them the appearance of cut salami sausages. A warm, desiccated wind exposes the matt grey underside of the sage and fragments the plain into a subtle mosaic of drab green and grey. Fifteen minutes of walking through the brush and my position feels unchanged, the mountains ahead as remote as Elysium. A deep cloud, dark as bomb dust, hangs over the horizon fifty or sixty miles away, tailing rain. I realize that it is not so much isolation that is at the heart of my dispiritedness, but claustrophobia.

Santa Fe is quiet today. Down in the plaza some Indian women are laying out jewellery on blankets under the shaded boardwalk of the Palace of the Governors. The afternoon wind has brought humidity, and the possibility of a thunderstorm; art stores and restaurants and parking lots are empty. Although the city is reputed to be at ease with itself, you only have to walk around the plaza before the tourists have arrived or after they have gone to sense the air of restlessness and disquiet. The chamber of commerce sells the city as a place of such antiquity and harmony that its three cultures – Hispanic, Native American and Anglo coexist in steadfast and separate juxtaposition, and extrapolates from this the myth that the City Different is a place of relaxed permissiveness. In fact, New Mexico has a history sufficiently long to have blurred the distinctions between Hispanic and Native American into a complex and pleasing slurry, without annihilating either. It is the newcomers who, unable or unwilling to grasp the subtleties of the place, have saddled it with the label ‘tricultural’ and, with that simple tag, rewritten history. A colonial census of 1790 recognized seven ethnic groups in Santa Fe: White Spanish; Coyote, or Spanish and New Mexican Indian; Mulatto, or half-Afro-American; Genizaro, who were Indians captured by Plains Indians and sold back to Spanish colonists as slaves; Indio or Indian; Mestizo, or a mixture of Spanish and Mexican Indian; and Color Quebrado, which pretty much summed up anyone left over. They were in part united by the conservative lifestyles most suited to harsh terrain and in part by trading alliances. Anglo-saxon culture, in particular liberal anglo-saxon culture, came late to New Mexico, and laid itself like skin on the soup beneath. Since the influx of wealthy, liberal, overwhelmingly white vacationers and retirees in the 1980s and 1990s, land prices have soared in Santa Fe. Every day a letter or an op-ed piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican mourns the conversion of the city from living place to outdoor museum.

I’m going to tell you about Pete. Pete makes his living as a New Age technoshaman. A technoshaman is a shaman with a computer, apparently. It’s a profession with a scientific bent. In fact, much that goes on among New Agers is of a scientific bent, for science can be harnessed in support of more or less any kind of ideology and, by being thus appropriated, spoiled for any other. Afterall, what does it matter if computers powered by crystal matrices and extra-low frequency psychic protector lenses and human beings grown from lemur babies sound improbable? Gene splicing and nanotechnology and virtual reality are pretty crazy too.

Pete the Technoshaman has been developing his technoshamanistic software for eleven years and has chosen to base his code on the Mayan calendar on the grounds that the mathematics of the Mayan grid is the same mathematics as the mathematics of life, a numerically reciprocal permutation table. Pete’s mission has something to do with the rising level of chaos, which, according to Pete, will lead inexorably to the world being in flames and bridges burning behind us.

‘There’s no going back to the Garden of Eden,’ he says, ‘which didn’t even really exist anyway.’

In his living room he has an AppleMac fixed to a number of electronic gizmos with flashing LED displays and impressive monitors. From here he carries on his practice, assisted by his wife, Beth, who is also and incidentally a shaman herself, although not of the technological variety.

Beth fetches some coffee.

‘It all looks, uh, amazingly complex, but how is this Mayan grid business actually going to make a difference?’ I ask.

Pete the Technoshaman gathers himself, sweeps his hair back, double-clicks on his mouse, and says with casual authority, ‘Hey, I’m doing my bit.’

The coffee arrives, and we sit at Pete’s Mac staring idly at a notice flashing on the screen which reads ‘You may activate the program at any time.’

‘You know,’ says Pete with palpable sadness, sucking on his coffee cup, ‘I don’t have answers as to what can happen to the teeming billions, man, but at least I don’t have to wonder what I’m doing here anymore.’

His friend Carl, stationed on the sofabed reading a copy of National Geographic, looks up and interjects:‘Yeah, it sounds so cold-hearted to say that not a lot can be done, but you know, maybe that’s not so bad. I mean, we’re spiritual beings, right?’

‘You know,’ says Pete, bringing up a graphic of the solar system on the Mac, ‘we’re in a wrenching transitional period. Some people would say that because you’re not handing out sandwiches in Somalia you’re not doing anything. But McKenna’s right. The world’s salvation is in pushing the imagination.’

Carl throws down his National Geographic and shakes his head. McKenna, I happen to know, is a West Coast writer who thinks that magic mushrooms provide an insight into alien worlds. He’s become somewhat of a cult figure among men of a certain age.

‘The whole world’s on LSD,’ says Carl, randomly.

‘Information’s the thing, man,’ continues Pete, ‘The future of consciousness and the future of medicine.’ He clicks on his mouse and brings up a flowchart marked in Greek lettering. Then, taking up a phial he walks over to Carl, yanks out a lock of hair with a quick flip of his wrist, puts the hair into the phial, and inserts it into a larger tube connected with electrodes to a piece of metal, and also by some mysterious means, to the computer.

‘This, for example, is kinesiology.’

‘Wow,’ says Carl, evidently impressed.

‘I just place my finger, thus,’ placing his right index finger on the piece of metal, ‘on the electro-kinesiological reaction plate and there’s an electromagnetic disturbance created by the hair that my finger picks up, as it were, intuitively. Understand?’

I nod; Carl simpers.

‘It’s the same as if I touched you. Any live cell will do, you know, because they all react in unison. I don’t need a liver cell to know what’s going on in the liver.’

I mention in passing that I had always imagined hair cells to be dead.

Pete’s wife returns from putting the baby to bed and proceeds to settle down to some other domestic chore.

‘I am a biological scientist,’ replies Pete definitively. In the corner of the room his wife bites her lip.

‘So you know, I rub my finger on the plate and intuitively click the mouse on this list, so.’

He removes the hair phial and replaces it with a bottle of colourless fluid.

‘All the restitutive elements – crystals, colours, food, so forth – are stored in the memory banks of the machine as holographic references, each item is associated with thirteen Mayan numbers, which store enough information on each substance not to have to bother having the real things.

‘Take this bottle of water here. We simply …’ Clicks on the mouse, two doubles.

‘And the numbers are transferred into an electromagnetic pulse so the geometry of the water changes. Or the same information can be transferred to a lamp, or coded as a fractal type for psychoemotional problems or a sound with the information subliminally tagged onto it.’

‘You mean, you don’t need to see your patients?’

‘Uh-uh. They just phone right up, and we send them a tape with the sound on it, whatever …’ He’s picking out the bottle of water and putting back Carl’s hair. From another room the baby begins to howl.

‘Oh Lordie.’

‘What?’ asks Carl, looking a little worried.

‘Just checked the energy levels. Seems like your digestive problem is somewhat better already.’

‘Yeah?’ says Carl.

‘See,’ Pete points to a chart on the screen, which has changed from blue to yellow. ‘If this technology developed you could just grow body parts. Incidentally …’ He double-clicks, the screen shifts, blackens and the message ‘You may activate the program at any time’ blinks back. ‘Tim Leary is speaking at the Sweeny Center today. Do you know who Tim Leary is?’

I smile.

‘Only one of the most important minds of the twentieth century.’ He rises from his chair and lifts a paperback from a pile under the coffee table. ‘This is an original signed copy,’ he says, holding the book out to me, then thinking better of it, he replaces the volume under the table, lining up the spine against a magazine beneath.

‘You get many clients?’ I ask, changing the subject.

Pete considers the question, which has taken him a little by surprise. Finally he says ‘The thing with clients is that a lot of the work is just caring for them, which, you know, doesn’t appeal to me. But I have to fund my research so we …,’ gesturing towards his wife, ‘take on a few clients. There are funding sources for fringe technology like this, of course, but they all want something for it. Nothing, for free, man.’

‘Pow pow pow,’ says Carl, knocking out the funding sources with his finger.

‘This thing, you know, called my reality, is based purely on my own experience.’ Pete clicks on the mouse and brings up a screen with a pattern of stars upon it. ‘Expand my experience, and, man, you really turn me on.’

There is a bookstall in the foyer of the Sweeny Center selling guides to enlightenment, with a list of all the great teachers who have ever attained nirvana, and how they did it. Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree and waited, and, after seven days without food and water, he saw the morning star and was enlightened into formless bliss. Ming travelled for years looking for enlightenment and eventually found nirvana when Hui-neng asked him ‘What is your original face, which you had even before your birth?’ Neither of them had access to a computer. The process of their enlightenments was tortuous and thoroughly unscientific. We leave it to science, these days, to reveal the mystery of the everyday. Perhaps Gautama and Ming would have done better with Pete the Technoshaman’s Mayan program.

Science, they say, is the Moses of the twentieth century and heaven knows, we need one.

There are, incidentally, no enlightened women on the list. There are books on women who run with wolves, women who love too much, women who love men who love other women, universal mother-women, crone-women, angels, goddesses, all sorts of women doing all sorts of things, in fact, but no enlightened ones. Why is that? The sales assistant suggests I listen to Joni Mitchell, whom she regards as highly advanced. I promise to think it over and buy a little beginner’s guide to Zen containing this fragment, by Tung-shan:

The man of wood sings,

The woman of stone

Gets up and dances,

This cannot be done

By passion or learning,

It cannot be done

By reasoning.

A man with a beard the colour of baked beans walks across my field of vision carrying a child in a turban, smiles at someone ahead and is devoured by the crowd. Here they all are, the success stories of late twentieth-century capitalism – sophisticated consumers, moneyed but not dangerously moneyed, educated, but not threateningly so – passing the hours irrigating their colons, birthing their drums and squeezing their higher consciousnesses. Fergus once remarked ‘there’s the work ethic and the self ethic and those two together made America what it is. If you have any criticisms I suggest you take them elsewhere. We’re very protective of our ethics.’

Five minutes before Timothy Leary is due to come on stage the man with the beard the colour of baked beans sits down next to me and produces a yellowing copy of Life magazine with Leary’s signature on it. Seeing me trying to catch the full inscription he leans over and whispers:

‘Grew up with Tim.’

‘Really?’

‘Man, he’s like, my hero. He’s like taken the principle of questioning authority and moved with that in a positive way. Like, I don’t even read the newspapers anymore on account of all the negativity. I’ve learned the hard way that everything you do has a purpose, it’s there to teach you something and it’s all OK … But we couldn’t have evolved this far without people like Tim.’

‘I missed the sixties.’

‘The sixties was really all about, personal growth, being anything you want to be, the power of positive thinking. I mean, I get some negative thoughts, and I think, hey, these don’t belong to me. That’s what the sixties was so … by the way, what’s your ascendant?’

In my mind’s eye there are petals back on the rose outside my room and there is a hummingbird feeding on the waxy spike of the agave flower.

Baked Bean spends the remaining hour of Leary’s talk in a state of intolerable suspense awaiting exactly the right moment to produce his faded copy of Life and ask Leary for an autograph. Meanwhile one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century fumbles around unrehearsed, contradicts himself, pauses, begins again, delivers a few lost eulogies to technology and digitalia, finally succumbs to his own boredom and produces a rave tape. A series of psychedelic images spirals round the room to a techno backbeat. During each lull, and there are many, Baked Bean puts his hand up, and then retreats rapidly, like a polyp feeling for its prey. Poor Baked Bean, I’m sure he’s not so bad, it’s just that I’ve had enough of him.

‘The only way it’s gonna happen is through science, right?’ he whispers. A strobe hits the copy of Life. The music, techno, bam da da boom. ‘I was at Woodstock, right?’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. And what did that do, right?’

‘Well, it was only a rock concert.’ The music stops.

‘People working on themselves,’ he nods his head in the direction of the crowd now filing out of the door.

‘Uh huh.’

He says; ‘From a scientific perspective you can’t do anything for anyone without healing the inner person. Start with yourself.’

‘Is that so?’

‘In my experience,’ he says, and leaves without the autograph. Ten minutes later he appears around a corner and hands me a leaflet about the spiritual implications of digitalizing dolphin song.

Here is the inconsistency of my position. I am envious of New Age certainties, but jealous of my own, which in general contradict them. Yet, if I am to make anything of the New Age I shall have to file those little prejudices away, for they will ensure that I fail in my attempt to comprehend the world I have chosen, temporarily, to inhabit. I admit to a tendency within myself to maintain a rather dismal inflexibility as shield against the clamour of contradiction. But at the same time I can see that the belief that there are no extra-terrestrials and the belief that there are coexist and have equal authority. It’s insoluble.

I fall asleep with the TV tinting blue the web of nerves behind my eyes, like moonlight on some electronic planet, and I wake up sometime before dawn, chilled to the soul. Above the parking lot of the King’s Rest Motel the sky is black and still as a darkroom, trapping in its invisible fibres the blossoms of a million stars.




Heading West (#ulink_ebc3268f-a774-5911-b297-b2a7d744ba24)


‘Where the earth is dry the soul is wisest and best.’

HERACLITUS

Memorial Day, driving into afternoon sun on what was once Route 66. On the opposite side of the highway two lanes bumper-to-bumper trudge towards the Continental Divide like a train of metal mules. Bowling beside me is a line of Recreational Vehicles also heading west. Now and then the aluminium pod of an old-style trailer passes by, cutting the air with reflections.

To an American, and more particularly to a westerner, the Recreational Vehicle must be an almost invisible part of the mobile landscape, but a European can only stare as the hulking trucks, passing themselves off as miniature moving idylls, lumber gracelessly along the freeway. We don’t have sufficient wide roads to accommodate them, our cities are too close together, the gas they require is too expensive, we are not rich enough to buy them, we go abroad for our holidays, and, most of all although this is changing – we do not recreate. Recreating is an all-American invention. Americans are compelled to possess their leisure as they are compelled to possess most anything, and to be fully the owner of their leisure, they must accumulate experience. This is why the American recreator will happily schedule in a dozen European capitals in a week, but still won’t hang around in the Sistine Chapel if the paper in the toilets runs out. For the American recreator it is the quantity of experience that matters, not its quality.

After two hours on the road I pull into a rest area, find a spot under a mesquite tree and doze a while with the air conditioning high. I wake up to a woman knocking on the window for two quarters to put in the soda machine. Quite a crowd has gathered in the parking lot, a line of RVs competes for space directly in front of the restrooms, map and vending machines. The woman returns, wanting to introduce me to her dogs. Jeez, dog-lovers.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘this place is full of Mexicans and Indians. Mexicans and Indians. Folks like us are outnumbered. At least it feels that way.’ We finish the soda in the ‘65 Scottie trailer she bought six months ago with the redundancy payoff from a marketing job in Pennsylvania. ‘Came out here, followed the myth,’ she says, ‘and I liked it.’ She doesn’t know how much longer it will be before she settles down somewhere and builds another life.

‘This dog here’s too old to be on the road,’ she says, ‘he needs a place where he can feel comfortable enough to go ahead and die.’

Pinned up in the Scottie is a portrait of Ross Perot taken during his presidential campaign, still looking like a VE-Day vet after all these years.

The rest area feels as though an RV convention pulled in; RVs piled high inside with kids and bulk-buy Kool Aid alongside modest little trailers with chromium trim and lines of rivets, looking like some by-product of rocket science. A couple descend from an ancient Winnebago with Illinois plates and sit under the shade of a cottonwood sucking Diet Cokes in silent contemplation.

Homelessness is a profound anxiety in the American psyche, a cyst buried in the deeper, more feral places of the mind. At the wheel of an RV you can travel a thousand miles and never leave home; there it is in miniature, rolling along behind. For American recreators the RV acts as a kind of mediator between the fear of homelessness and the fascination with freedom. Think of that couple eating up the miles in their mechanical homestead, raw with anticipation, drinking in the road, surveying with pride the empire unfolding before them – their empire. And think of that couple sitting watching TV or flipping cards or making out in a desert trailer park at the side of an indistinct highway on a blackened plain, pulled up alongside a line of other RVs bigger and newer and more expensive than their own.




Getting Off (#ulink_56b77608-b68a-5078-b9b5-236ffffb2183)


‘Beneath him with new wonder now he views

To all delight of human sense exposed

In narrow room nature’s whole wealth, yeah more,

A heav’n on earth …’

JOHN MILTON

The road north up through Tucson towards Oracle is known as the Magic Mile, although quite why it’s difficult to say. The kind of stores and services littered along it suggest a highway favoured only by truck drivers en route to somewhere else. Just where the mile begins there is a series of blacked-out bars with billboards made up of women’s torsos, announcing ‘24-hour show girls’. From the slow lane on the Interstate all you can see of the Magic Mile is a row of gargantuan cardboard legs in spike heels and garter belts the colour of cotton candy.

It’s a busy road, though, not because it runs up to Oracle, which is a sclerotic little nowhere of a place, but because a few miles beyond that town lies an oracle of another kind, as much of a draw to apostates and New Age types as Lourdes is to Catholics.

What drew me to this oracle was a set of circumstances sufficiently strange to warrant explanation. It began quite by accident in western Belize some years ago, in a ramshackle town called San Ignacio, near the border with Guatemala. I had become entangled in a brief and unhappy love affair from which I made a cowardly escape very early one morning by stealing away and boarding a bus heading to Dangriga, a swamp town on the Caribbean coast. There I found a boarding house and resolved to lie low. Creosote tar sweated from the stilted shacks gathered around the little harbour and the air was so sullen that it was difficult not to be lowered by it. At night liverish land crabs scuttled from their holes and took over the streets, like an army of dismembered hands. Every structure in Dangriga not actually made from mud was covered in it. A few lugubrious rastafarians hung about what passed for the centre of the town, which was separated from the swamp all around by a blue fug of burning weed. Dangriga’s only source of income, so far as I could make out, came from bussing snapper, lobster and the occasional barracuda to the inland capital. The men who could afford a dugout or a one-man, flat-keeled dory would put out at night and bring in their catch early the next morning. Those who had no boats became assistants to the others, or rastafarians – or both. The women would pass their mornings gutting and drying whatever fish were surplus to the day’s requirements on long lines of twine, hung over the doorways of the shacks and serving, incidentally, as mosquito nets. By two in the afternoon, everyone was asleep. There would be no-one left to talk to, nothing much to do but roll up a reefer, tune the radio to the station that played ska and marimba and settle down to watch the pale brown sea. I spent many days of distant, peaceless reverie like this.

Absolutely nothing that was not already on show had ever happened in Dangriga. No wars, no revolutions, no great passions of any sort. Dangriga’s history was without secrets.

According to my map a huge uninhabited atoll group called Turneffe lay directly out to sea from Dangriga. I would often sit wall-eyed in front of that brown bay and imagine Turneffe in the distance as a lush, mudless Eden. Without the listless daydream of Turneffe I like to think that I should have gone mad in Dangriga. I should not have done so, but I like to think it all the same.

About four years later I met the man who owned Turneffe, or at least, a little part of it. At least, he managed a little part of it for someone else. His name was Ray Lightburn, and he had some environmental project going, he said. Ray was what is commonly known as a charismatic – huge, commanding, almost insanely driven. He’d been a prominent trade unionist in Britain in the sixties, and he possessed a store-cupboard of anecdotes about political heavyweights he had known and met. Whether they were true or not didn’t seem to matter. Like many charismatics, who are after all expected to be emblematic rather than real, Ray was his own parody. Obviously, he liked it that way. In any case, back in Belize he’d made his political ambitions evident by sinking himself into the environmental movement and conspicuously raising the cash from a Texan oil billionaire with ecological leanings to buy up part of Blackbird Caye in the Turneffe cluster. Blackbird Caye was to all intents and purposes uninhabited at that time; a hippy with too much leisure on his hands had set up a little diving school on one side of the island, but it was Ray who got the money together to transform the Caye into what he envisioned would be an eco-tourists’ paradise. As he saw it, the islands’ future rested in tourism of one sort or another, and the only means to prevent them from becoming sites for honeymoon hotels and Clubs Méditerranées was to preselect the market. Ray was a prophet of the inevitable. The idea that the islands might be purchased to be left pristine evidently had not occurred to him, or if it had, he had dismissed it out of hand. Ray had a name to make. The Texan billionaire, Ed Bass, was perhaps his means to this end.

There was a large dolphin population down at Turneffe, which (until Ray stepped in) had enjoyed almost no contact with human beings. Ray’s idea was to hire a scientist who would take out crews of paying guests on ‘scientific’ expeditions to mark and tag these creatures. Ray didn’t really seem to know the details. ‘What species of dolphin?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I leave those things to the scientists. This is a great project. I believe in it.’

The scientist, a singular marine biology student, had accepted the post of tour guide cum researcher in order to complete her Ph.D. In exchange for accommodation and the use of a research boat the student would drag along on her expeditions a pack of dew-eyed puppies who had endowed the neighbouring dolphins with a range of miraculous capabilities, from an ability to heal inner children to the composition of sonic messages that would seek out and shrink malignant tumours. The eco-tourists would put out to sea each day, heady with expectation, and return in the afternoon in a state of mystic transcendence or savage disappointment, depending on whether or not there had been a sighting. The student’s job was single-handedly to control the mob in whichever mood, a task she went about with benign and systematic brutality.

Moored a little way off the coast of Blackbird Caye near to the eco-tourist compound was a reproduction Chinese junk, the Hercules. According to Ray, the junk was the scientific outpost of a project called Biosphere 2, a futuristic venture based in the Arizona desert. From time to time a limpid woman in a wetsuit would appear on the deck of the junk and wave at the lone scientist and her pride of tourists. The crew of the Hercules did not welcome visitors, said Ray.

This was just about all I knew of the Biosphere. I had come across a few speculative articles in the press and a few figures, such as the fact that the project had swallowed the $150m raised by a Texan magnate called Ed Bass (the same Ed Bass whose interests included Blackbird Caye), through a holding company, Space Biosphere Ventures. I knew that Biosphere 2 was the largest experimental closed environment on the planet – three and a bit acres sealed virtually airtight by a metal and glass frame – that eight people had been shut inside and left to get on with things, which they hadn’t managed quite to do, because the oxygen levels in the bubble had begun inexplicably to fall, necessitating the introduction of a new supply from outside. There had been rumours that Bass was influenced by a New Age cult led by a charismatic worker-poet whose aim was to begin life again somewhere out in space. Extraordinarily for these times, I had never seen an image of the Biosphere.

The last tourist bus has already left by the time Caboose and I turn off the highway onto Biosphere range. It is June, start of the rattler season – the heat so intense it pushes the air into strange, eddying flues and pulls at the ligaments in the throat. My fingers have fused to the wheel of the car and become woody and aged. Up ahead a paved track runs off the road and leads to a forlorn sentry house with a uniformed guard. Bumping across the cattle grid it feels as though I have crossed a border and am somewhere liminal that is not a part of America at all.

The hotel at the Biosphere is hunched along a mountain ridge above the complex proper, and has a view southward through the Canyon del Oro to the Santa Catalina Mountains beyond. I open my notebook and retrieve the number of Sam, a friend of someone I met in a bar outside Santa Fe. Sam now works at the Biosphere. The switchboard operator intercepts my call and promises to pass a message on.

In exploratory mood I throw off my boots, unpack my camera, take some tortilla chips from the mini-bar, flip on the TV (Star Trek – The Next Generation), flip it off, fetch a half bottle of Jim Beam from my suitcase and take off along the deserted paths running across the top of the ridge. To the east a mountain range glows hot from the reflection of the sunset and far below two huge, white-boned dome lungs spin in the shifting light like the eyes of spy insects. From the canyon to the south come the echoes of a woodpecker chipping saguaro cactus. Biosphere 2: two grand glass ziggurats embedded in the lilac rock of the Sonora basin and made insubstantial by the light, like some reinvented Crystal Palace, a grand and brilliant technological announcement. There are lights on in the human habitation tower which illuminate the surrounding metal frame in sodium flare and give the whole the air of an ethereal city. Tatty palms press up against the glass, below the palms floats a miniature ocean encircled by fibreglass cliffs. To the fore buff rocks, and upon them, stringy thornscrub scouring the structure’s frame, as if waiting its moment to punch through the glass and reclaim the air. A rustle in the bushes and a mule deer stumbles out onto the path and plunges down the slope of the ridge, leaving only a wave in the mesquite.

Back in room 11, there is no message from Sam. I lock the bolt and chain and call him again. Sam answers. Yes, he got my message, but he thinks I should talk to someone official. I just want to meet up, I say. Oh, he replies, he’s very flattered to be asked but he really feels it would be better for me to discuss the matter with a spokesperson. There is no ‘matter’, I reply, I just want to talk. But we’ve all signed agreements, says Sam, then clicks his tongue against his palate and hangs up. I ring back, but when he answers the phone I hang up on him too. Not revenge. I just can’t figure out what to say.

About two I take a couple of hits of J.B., swallow a unisom and fall into an easy sleep on top of my bed. Towards dawn I dream a series of amorphous dreams linked by their atmosphere of ambient threat. At about eight the telephone rings. Some stuffed shirt in the public relations department says he’s heard that I contacted Sam.

‘These things need to be done through the official channels.’ The roof beams begin to click in the heat.

A press pack mysteriously arrives at the same time as the chambermaid. Inside are a few factoid press releases, some xeroxed newspaper articles and a slim booklet about Space Biosphere Ventures. I browse through a couple, lose interest and take the first visitor tour beginning at the Orientation Center with its ‘environmental art’, followed by a supervised gaze in at the window of the Biosphere ‘Test Module’ and the opportunity to admire the complimentary tram which runs to and from the car park. I drift off and meander over to the Biosphere itself, where a desultory group of men and women sit in a small square of shade waiting for the official Biosphere tour guide to show up. From the Orientation Center, I have discovered precisely one fact – that Biosphere I is planet earth, which presumably makes Biosphere 2 the reissued version. A huddle of us collect in the shade and are rewarded eventually by the appearance of an anxious thread of a girl who busies down the pathway with a large black box slung about her hip, beating the box with the flat of her hand, as if it were a recalcitrant child she has grown too used to admonishing. The box, to which a microphone is attached, is careless of its chastisement and misbehaves from the start, puking up feedback, and spitting out white noise. Pretty soon it caves in altogether, which is no great disaster since no-one in particular is listening. They are eating. The skinny tour guide presses on, shouting bravely over the cacophony of fifteen men and women slugging back Coke and tamping down potato chips. I am trailing behind with my black notebook and a wetted pencil, waiting to catch a few ripe factoids and conduct a little independent research on the side.

Up close, the Biosphere looks remarkably like the new palm house at Kew Gardens near London. Unlike Kew, visitors to the Biosphere have not come to see the palms but the human inmates, the so-called Biosphereans or ‘expedition members’. Sadly for the visitors, the human habitation tower is cordoned off. There is absolutely nothing visible of a remotely prurient nature. Whoever heard of such a thing? There are murmurs of significant disquiet. The crowd, bored, overheated, and – crucially – having eaten all their snacks, are spoiling for a little rebellion. The guide tries her luck at mediating through the incipient mutiny by climbing down beyond the cordon and screwing her head to the glass in anticipation of a sighting. After a minute or so she comes up for air and says:

‘I seen one, planting crops.’

A shrunken ghost-face appears at the window and peers out briefly, causing the fattest man in the party to raise his eyes from his Coke and comment:

‘Looks damned near dead to me.’

‘Surprisingly,’ counters the tour guide, supposing she has the fattest man’s attention, ‘each Biospherean has lost on average only fourteen per cent of their original body weight.’

The ghost-face retreats back into a simulated salt marsh behind the glass.

‘What d’they eat anyway?’ asks a fat woman dressed in pink shorts.

‘Well …’ pipes up the tour guide. Something in her tone alerts pink shorts to the disturbing possibility that she is staring a lecture right in the face, when all she had been expecting was a sound-bite.

‘I guess they eat just the same as anyone else,’ says pink shorts, cutting the lecture off at the knees.

‘Well, you’d be surprised,’ perks up the tour guide. Jeez, she must be new on the job.

‘Meat?’

The tour guide smiles. Poor creature. So amiable, so anxious to please.

‘How’d they kill it?’ asks the fat man, sweating luxuriantly.

The tour guide swallows.

‘Gross,’ says pink shorts.

And for a single moment we tourers are of one triumphant fraternity, basking in the illusion of a common victory.

Ten minutes later, the tour guide disappears into the staff rest rooms with liquefying eyes. A few stragglers hang around with questions but twenty minutes later there is still no sign of her, which leads me to suppose there must be an escape hatch fitted round the back for precisely such awkward moments.

It has become another damned hot day and the nearest air-conditioned space happens to be a movie theatre in the tourist village showing “Meet the Biosphereans”. The quotation marks are important. No-one gets to meet the Biosphereans because they are sealed into a giant glass cage but anyone can “Meet the Biosphereans”. Not that anyone other than me actually shows up to “Meet the Biosphereans”, but they could have done. At the interactive Q and A after the show the projectionist, noticing a certain vacuum in the theatre, skips down the aisle, proffers an agonizing grin and says ‘Oh, oh, seems like you’ve got them to yourself, ask any question you like,’ so I say, ‘Wha’d they eat anyway?’

Back at the control desk the projectionist presses a button and Sally Silverstone, co-captain Biospherean, appears on the screen and begins to explain how to make a Biospherean pizza, at which point, under cover of the dark, I slink off to my room like a bad cur, lie on my bed with a can of beer from the mini-bar and watch a Tex Avery cartoon on the TV.

That evening I’m feeling lonely so I ask the man next to me in the Biosphere Cafe if he’d mind my joining him. We natter inconsequentially about this and that for a while. He shows me a scorpion under a prickly pear and mesquite pods lying on the desertic soil like dried-up slugs; ‘full of protein for the cattle’. He points out a place where the diamondback rattlers come out to snooze in the sun. I tell the story of Ray Lightburn and the sea at Dangriga, and it turns out that the man I’m talking to knows Ray Lightburn, because the man I’m talking to is John Allen, head of the Biosphere’s R&D. He’s been out to Blackbird Caye.

‘That’, he says, pointing to a blue peak illuminated by the sinking sun ‘is where Carlos Castaneda found himself.’ Allen loves the Sonora. He likes to think of it as the desert-lovers’ desert, a man’s man’s desert. Allen mentions the Biosphere – only to say that it is a gesture that will grow into inventions and gadgets and information, and, eventually, to the human colonization of the universe. I am briefly troubled that a man so wedded to his environment should long to occupy another, but the thought soon leaves me, replaced by admiration for the man’s ambitions. We talk on through books and travels, winding skeins of conversation. At about seven the sun strikes a silver lozenge on Allen’s bolo tie and projects an orange halo around his face. For those couple of seconds John Allen turns to look directly into the sun and smiles. And then he says, ‘So you’re one of those indomitable British traveller women.’ That really gets me.

A few weeks later I stumble on a paper written by Allen and shelved away in the library at Arcosanti, an experimental ecological community built on the desert uplands north of Phoenix. I take the paper out and read it, for no other reason than a general curiosity. About himself, John Allen writes:

I acted many roles to avoid creating a personality and by 1962 I was up to four distinct lives a day in Manhattan: a global technocrat, a Village writer working on the ‘Great American Novel,’ a hip adventurer and a revolutionary. By mid-1963 I added a fifth, an entrepreneur in high-tech and energy corporations and somehow, innerly, everything came to a stop.

It seems he was known as Johnny Dolphin then, or perhaps that was just his nom de plume. In any case, the man who is or was John Allen or Johnny Dolphin went off to Tangier and meditated himself out of his fix – a not wholly original activity in the late sixties. Later, towards the tail end of that decade, he put himself ‘into the hands of magician shamans’, somewhere in Latin America, and lived on strange herbs and his own mythology.

We are twenty-five years on and Johnny Dolphin now heads R&D at one of the most grandiose scientific longshots in history. How’d he get there?

According to his own testimony he ‘perceived intimations of a Planetary Mind’ around 1967, which he took to be the call of the Noösphere, a mystical realm apparently combining nature and technology in perfect balance. But this was not all that happened, for he also had a premonition ‘that the contours of a newer and mightier Mind are beginning to appear. I call it the Solar Mind – it’s the Mind capable of foreseeing the evolution of the entire solar system and making provision for the integrated operation of Culture, Life, Matter and Energy on that extraordinary scale.’

He came to the conclusion that the future of humankind lay elsewhere. John Allen began to believe in getting off.

That night at Arcosanti I am lying in bed watching the stars in the Arizona sky, thinking about the ghostly face peering through the half-light from inside Biosphere 2. If the earth must crumble into a poisoned miasmic shell, then I want to crumble with it. Rather that than be shut into a sterile pod and blasted into space to live a simulation of a life on some boiling sulphuric planet. Next morning, driving away from Arcosanti I recall the feel of the thick grey air over the pale brown sea at Dangriga, and I recall the coral sun creeping along the Canyon del Oro and by the time I have reached the freeway I have formed the conclusion that Ray Lightburn, John Allen and their like are prophets of doom, and that, god knows, those are the kind of prophets we least need.




There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute (#ulink_5f5df1b6-9819-568e-91b4-7c34927be39d)


‘Everything you are, except hydrogen, is made of stars.’

Very Large Array Telescope Visitor Center,

Datil, New Mexico

Polarized light drops silver contours around the rows of date palms. The dimming sun over Camelback Mountain is bloody with colour. A Latter-Day Saints temple across the street dissolves into gobbets of rosy haze. It’s magic hour in Mesa, Arizona, and I’m in a terrible mood. The mood stole up on me a couple of days ago. I don’t know why it’s with me, nor how to make it go. For the time being we are reluctant fellows. An endless stream of inner witterings has kept me awake at night, invading my dreams, tick tick ticking over breakfast. Cheerios, toast, black coffee. Black. Coffee. And the time is … sugar, sugar and milk. Nip nip nip. Buzzzzzz. Noyz noyz noyz. Tune out, turn off, drop dead. A terrible, terrible mood.

I’m sitting in the Paradise Cafe reading Arizona Light, the state’s premier New Age freesheet. One item catches my attention, an article on the back page about the rise in reported alien abductions. The article tells the story of a Sedona woman who claims her foetus was taken from her by some unknown thing when she was out walking in Secret Canyon near Sedona. It was an overcast day, but she noticed a very bright light through the trees, almost as if a shaft of brilliant metal were being lowered to the ground. After watching it for a while she began to feel she was locked in some strange form of time warp. Alarmed she turned back towards the mouth of the canyon, but however hard she walked, the scene around her remained unchanged. She could hear her own breathing as if it were the breath of a giant. She woke some hours or minutes later lying on the path with a peculiar feeling of emptiness, a little bruised, but otherwise ostensibly none the worse for wear. On a routine visit to her doctor she discovered she was no longer pregnant. Aliens had taken her child, and implanted a chip in her brain to ensure she would never recall in detail what had happened to her.

‘Hi.’ A woman in beads puts her glass of juice down on my table. She glances at the copy of Arizona Light. ‘Heading to Sedona?’ Sedona is to Arizona what Santa Fe is to New Mexico, only more so. There are more New Agers in Sedona than in the whole of the rest of America, bar Santa Cruz and Sausalito, California.

‘Driving?’ Her hair smells of Revlon Musk.

‘Hmmm.’ I feign indifference in the hope she’ll have the grace to leave me be.

‘Going up tomorrow?’

A minute ago I had no plans. Now it seems as though the plans have come to me.

‘Like to share a ride?’ She sits down in the chair opposite and begins sipping her juice.

‘Uh …’

‘Great, nine o’clock outside here?’

Nine o’clock it is then.

Nine o’clock sharp the next morning, the woman in beads looks as though she’s already been up hours. Caboose and I, on the other hand, are not good in the mornings. I am generally in a foul temper of one kind or another before ten and Caboose requires consideration until its engine has been running a while. Today it can barely cough up sufficient horsepower to get us past the University and on to the Paradise Cafe, even though I’ve had the decency to fill it up with super unleaded. The ingrate has also switched on one of its warning lights, the one with a picture of a triangle on it. Damned if I have the least clue what that means. Less troublesome to ignore it.

Half an hour on the road and it becomes clear that the woman in beads has two modes of conversation: interrogative and mystical.

‘You been to Sedona before?’

I shake my head.

‘Sedona is the most magical, powerful place in the world.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘After Lhasa. Have you been to Tibet?’

I shake my head

‘One of the most amazing experiences of my life. And the monks have been put down and suppressed. Like, you must go. You English?’

And so on. Eventually I ask her to read to me from my guidebook.

Sedona, Arizona is an isolated miniature sprawl in the upland Arizona desert, trapped picturesquely between scarlet, highwalled bluffs and the sky. Beyond Sedona the Colorado Plateau runs as far as the Utah mountains three hundred miles to the north. Between its southern most edge and Manti, Utah is a natural Maginot Line of trenches cut from rock by the Colorado River, the greatest and most splendid of which is the Grand Canyon. The region’s brilliant red buttes and monumental rocks have long been valued by Hollywood directors and location managers looking for backdrops to western shoot-outs. More recently, crowds have begun to migrate north in summer to the cooler uplands of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon from Phoenix and the Sonora desert. And for those on a higher spiritual and mental plane Sedona, Arizona, also happens to be the New Age capital of the United States.

JUST WHO WERE YOU IN YOUR PAST LIVES?

New Agers began turning up in Sedona some time in the seventies, drawn by the apparent discovery of power ‘vortices’ in among the rocks. These spots, not visible to the eye, were proclaimed to be centres of great electrical and magnetic energy, capable of producing minor miracles. The word spread and a remote little town, which was once nothing more than a thirsty farming outpost of the Verde Valley, rapidly gained its current reputation as a curative mecca for victims of chronic post-sixties syndrome. Sedona became an Oz, geographically and symbolically speaking; an oasis of colour and cool and metaphor in the immense desert Kansases to the south and east. What Mount Rushmore is to the spirit of democracy, Red Rock country is to the universal spirit, the cosmic all, the divine within. In August 1988 thousands of New Agers met in Sedona over a weekend with the avowed aim of activating the power of the vortices and lifting the planet to a new level of consciousness, a level without war, or hunger or brutality. For the three days of the Harmonic Convergence they held hands and hugged and chanted and banged out New Age rhythms on drums.

The woman with musky hair puts down my guidebook.

‘Then, only a year after the Harmonic Convergence, communism fell,’ she concludes, adding

‘Well, thanks for the ride,’ as we draw into Sedona. She topples out of Caboose beads first, then pokes her head with its musky hair back inside. ‘You should get that dash light fixed. See you around, maybe?’ No, I’m thinking, you will not. I am still in a terrible mood.

MAKE A QUANTUM LEAP IN YOUR

CONSCIOUSNESS TODAY!

I find a room to rent with a sofa bed, the use of the refrigerator and a shelf in the bathroom out in West Sedona at Sakina Bluestar’s place on Pinon Jay Drive. Sakina is not my first choice. My first choice is Dionne, who comes with the recommendation of the cashier at the New Age Drop-in Center. Dionne wants to know if I chant loudly, smoke alien substances or have Virgo in my ascendant. I admit to the alien substances, but am happy to say that Sagittarius is my ascendant. Dionne finds that her spare room is booked after all. So I throw in my lot with a woman called Sakina, who thinks she’s an alien, and her lodger Santara, who thinks she’s an angel, and a man named Solar who lives in a van parked out in the yard. Sakina Bluestar, without whom this chapter would not have been written, is dedicated to Sedona’s mysterious energies. They notified her one evening about ten years ago that she was to give herself up to the Great Spirit.

One of Sakina’s most pleasing characteristics is that she makes absolutely no apologies for herself. She accepts she has unusual tastes and asks you to take her as you find her. For example, she has a taste for Barbie dolls and has made a large collection of them. Several dozen blonde Barbies, brunette Barbies, Kens and Sams make her house their home. Some are dressed as mermaids and mermen, others as hippies and cosmic adventurers, but they are all, according to Sakina, first and foremost spirit people, walking spiritual paths, with needs, desires and disappointments like our own.

‘They keep me company,’ she says, showing me to my room.

Throughout the spring and summer Sakina takes in lodgers like me so that she can afford to head off to California in the autumn and set up psychic workshops.

The room she has to offer is airless and hot, but the light comes in all day, so with a breeze it could almost be pleasant. An old chromium blade fan sits broken in one corner, behind a bookcase. Along the window ledge are a few pictures of Sakina and postcards of the theosophical Ascended Masters done out in lurid colours like Catholic devotional pictures – St Germain, Buddha, Jesus, a woman in white grecian robes, whose profile is hand-labelled in pen underneath, ‘The Lady Cavendish’. A photogravure of Byron in Turkish costume sits on its side in a cheap frame between the window ledge and a little table.

Nota bene: if this were a work of fiction you might not believe in Sakina and her friends, but I lived among them and I am simply reporting what I saw. That it is bizarre is undeniable, but then, at the time I had only an occasional sense of just how strange my circumstances were. I don’t think anyone is immune to implausible beliefs, however rational and wilful they think themselves to be. It is an easy matter to deny everything you thought you knew and to believe its contradiction rather than to live out your days in bottomless isolation. Only the most rare of individuals will stand up for a belief when all around are declaring its opposite, for most of us feel more anxious to be at ease with each other than we do with ourselves.

A mechanic in a mom-and-pop garage next to the Circle K in West Sedona says that it will take a while to fix Caboose’s angry flashing dashboard triangle and cost $150. Since I have not yet eaten I wander over to a restaurant and order the once-through, self-serve salad bar. There is a trick to maximizing the pile of food you can fit on the plate. I can’t quite recall how I learned it, only that it is one of those little pieces of informational camaraderie that get passed around among impoverished travellers. The salad bar proprietor, his eye set to turning a profit, puts all the space-taking lettuce and ancient potato salad and so on at the beginning of the bar, and all the expensive ingredients such as meats at the end, in the hope that you will pile your plate up high with trash before hitting the pastrami. Bearing that single fact in mind it is easily possible to make two days’ meals from a single walk through, by first constructing a plate extension using celery and carrot sticks on the cantilever principle then stabilizing it by gluing the bits of carrot down with mayo and weighting the ends with cherry tomatoes. You pile the plate, starting with potatoes, pasta and so forth and following with fruits and vegetables which will stick onto the mayonnaise in the pasta and heap up nicely. Having eaten as much as you are able, you ask for a doggie bag. This is the part when all may be lost, for if your waitperson snitches on you the manager will kick up an unseemly fuss and throw you out, which is what happens to me.

The mechanic, meanwhile, has successfully completed the toilsome job of fixing one wire to another and has pocketed my $150. Every flea has another flea upon its back to bite it.

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

YOU CAN BE AN AVATAR RIGHT NOW!

Later that afternoon Sakina Bluestar, clad in full Lakota Sioux ceremonial outfit, runs a dusting feather along the Barbie and Ken vacation van and tickles the breakfast bar at Pinon Jay Drive. ‘There just isn’t the time to do it all,’ she repeats as she goes. It seems churlish not to offer to help, since I have nothing in particular to do, but Sakina will not countenance it.

‘Dear, that’s so sweet,’ she says, ‘but the spirits of my things always kick up a fuss if I don’t attend to them myself,’ smiles affectionately and waves a castigating finger at a Ken who has fallen out of his seat. Sakina has so very many things of a spiritual nature it is hard to imagine quite when she gets the time to attend to all their needs. Over the fake fireplace there hangs a collection of Hopi dream catchers. Crystals sit on every shelf and in every corner. In one alcove is a kachina doll, in another a life-sized statue of Captain James T. Kirk; between the two, sage smudge sticks, mystic texts, relicry, feather headdresses, stylized portraits of Geronimo and other Indian heroes, spirit guide portraits and talismen and spiritual videos and exotic shells containing cosmic messages and every other sort of New Age gizmo. Strangely, though, Sakina is no materialist. She is proud of her collections in the way that children are proud of their gatherings of beach pebbles, not because they have any intrinsic value or are signifiers of intent, but because they are small comfits of personality.

‘Are you an extraterrestrial dear?’ she asks, later. A little forward for our first day together, but then this is America.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah, that’s probably why they won’t talk to you,’ pointing to the silent Barbie population. ‘Never mind. It’s all just chitter chatter really.’

‘Are you?’

‘Of course. Most people in Sedona are.’

In Sakina’s kitchen, germinated herbal tea bags (used) hang from an empty bottle of Ivory soap. There is a mystic chopping board which emanates ultra low-frequency signals and protects your carrots and other chopped items from psychic attack. One of the gas rings fires in a semi-circle, the others are dead. In general Sakina recommends enchilada with sour cream and guacamole down at the Copper Kettle on Highway 89A, ‘$3.89, comes with biscuits, you won’t need another thing all day’ but she goes there less and less herself on account of the dwindling of her star guide business.

‘We had this perfect house in Cape Cod, overlooking the sea, but Philip went into the spirit world and I got out and moved west, thought I would get to San Diego. Never made it,’ she says of a life long gone. I’m reminded of a fallen sign in the backyard, partially covered by a stone, which reads ‘Philip Comyns, Medical Practitioner,’ followed by a series of letters in peeling gold leaf.




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