The Adding Machine (16 page)

Let us consider a variety of truth quite different from the religious variety: the truth of the scientist. At the present time the nearest we can come to an absolute in this area is 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light. Responsible scientists do not hesitate to say that it is ‘impossible’ to exceed the speed of light, and the word impossible presupposes an absolute standard of possibility. And this absolute in turn presupposes some validity of the measurement tools and the human nervous system that made and recorded the measurements. The so-called scientific method is generally thought to apply to the law of cause and effect. It is however precisely the physical scientists, who have most rigorously examined matter itself, that have punched the first respectable holes in the whole fabric of cause and effect with the inferential discovery of the black hole. The gravity of a black hole traps even light, so that escape is impossible, since escape from the gravity of a black hole would require the impossible, namely, exceeding the speed of light. In a black hole no known natural laws apply. Can we then infer conditions where none of our laws apply including the constant speed of light? Truth in this area seems to end with a question mark.

I will speak now for magical truth to which I myself subscribe. Magic is the assertion of
will,
the assumption that nothing happens in this universe (that is to say the minute fraction of the universe that we are able to contact) unless some entity
wills
it to happen. A magical act is always the triumph or failure of the will.

Among so-called primitive peoples, if a man is killed in a fall from a cliff, the friends and relatives of the victim start looking for a killer.

‘This is the work of Izzy the Push,’ says the Chief grimly.

Primitive thinking? Perhaps... In
Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain
we meet a Russian psychic who was able, from a distance of a thousand miles, to knock a subject unconscious, by the projected force of his will... Well, a moment of unconsciousness on a mountain trail...

It is related that a freelance journalist with papers and pictures in his possession proving CIA involvement in the Bay of Pigs was on his way to keep an appointment with an editor and show him this material. Now it just so happened that the freelance youth was hitchhiking, and it just happened that a CIA man picked him up. The CIA man did everything he could to dissuade the boy from publicizing the material. He failed and called a special number in Washington. On the way to the editor’s office the boy was hit and killed by a laundry track. So that cleaned that up. Murder by car perpetrated during a ten-minute walk through city streets? I recollect the old days in Chicago, when the driver often had to follow the target around for weeks in a souped-up car before he got a clear shot. The Company must have had a way
of pushing
the target in front of the truck...

The magical push or pull, which potent magic men achieve by a projection of their malignant will, reaches its purest form in defenestration: the subject, standing near a window, is suddenly sucked out, as if a vacuum had opened before him. I suspect that the Company relies on some machine, perhaps a device that projects a hologram. Scientists say that lasers could move satellites in space. Even a little push at just the right moment when the subject is off-guard,.. maybe a pretty boy or girl gives him the Company Smile ... just a nudge is all it takes.

Certain pragmatic observations are useful for travellers in the magical universe. One law, or rather expectation, is that lightning usually strikes more than once in the same place.

Here’s a big fire in a Kentucky night club, over a hundred dead. Heroic busboy announced the fire and calmed the guests, or the casualties would have been higher. Look through newspaper morgues. Yes, there was a fire in that location before in another night club. No injuries. And here is a night spot on the border between France and Switzerland. Pop group called ‘Der Sturm’ playing. Two hundred dead in fire. There was a fire there before. Several injured. One incident tends to produce similar incidents. Incident may relate to a place, a set of circumstances, or a person.

You can observe this mechanism operating in your own experience. If you start the day by missing a train, this could be a day of missed trains and missed appointments. You need not just say ‘Mektoub, it is written.’ The first incident is a warning. Beware of similar incidents. Tighten your schedule. Synchronize your watck. And consider the symbolic meaning of missing a train. Watch particularly for what might be a lost opportunity.

Suppose you encounter a rude clerk, waiter, bartender, elevator man. Shuffle through the morgue of your memory. It’s all there. Why he’s a dead ringer for a rude clerk in Tangier, London, Hong Kong. Even used the same words. You asked for an item and he said.. .

‘I never heard of it.’

Stop. Look. Listen. What were you thinking just before this affront was offered you? What keyed the previous incident in? Empty your mind. Let your legs guide you. You may remember a disinclination to go into that shop in the first place. Stop. Change. Start. You will notice that pleasant encounters with nice friendly helpful people also come in series. And the only valid law of gambling is that winning and losing come in streaks. Plunge when you are winning and stop when you are losing.

‘To him that hath shall be given. From him that hath not shall be taken even that which he has.’

Any system in gambling or in life that entails doubling up when you lose is the worst possible system.

Writers operate in the magical universe and you will find the magical law that like attracts like often provides a key note. The sinister clown in
Death in Venice.
The stories of John Cheever abound in such warnings of misfortune and death ignored by his compulsively extroverted and spiritually underprivileged Wasps.

I gave my writing students various exercises designed to show how one incident produces a similar incident or encounter. You can call this process synchronicity and you can observe it in action.

Take a walk around the block. Come back and write down precisely what happened with particular attention to what you were thinking when you noticed a street sign, a passing car or stranger or whatever caught your attention. You will observe that what you were thinking just
before
you saw the sign relates to the sign. The sign may even complete a sentence in your mind. You are getting messages. Everything is talking to you. You start seeing the same person over and over. Are you being followed? At this point some students become paranoid. I tell them that of course they are getting messages. Your surroundings are
your
surroundings. They relate to
you.

I once read the life story of a leper. Years before he found out that he was going to be a leper he was riding a horse which bolted carrying him straight for a leper colony. Subsequently he turned his leprosy into a profitable part time business raising leprous armadillos for the government research center.

If you can cool it and achieve a detached viewpoint you will see that in many cases incidents are neither good nor bad nor especially potentous, occupying a neutral area. Here I am, up at 72 and Broadway, way out of my neighborhood up there for a doctor appointment. I pass a Deli and decide to go in and get a few items. No stores near where I was then living on Franklin Street below Canal. I notice a young man in the store. Later he is sitting opposite me in the subway going downtown. I see then that we are in the same incident band and I
know
he will get off at Franklin Street. No he wasn’t following me. No tail would be that clumsy. We were both out of our neighborhood, both thought of the same thing at the same time ... Better pick up some .. . and we intersected ...

There are many variations of the walk exercise all designed to show the student how incidents are created and how he himself can create incidents. Artists and creative thinkers will lead the way into space because they are already writing, painting and filming space. They are providing us with the only maps for space travel.
We are not setting out to explore static pre-existing data.
We are setting out to
create
new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness. As Brion Gysin said, when they get there in their trillion dollar aqualungs they may find that artists are already there. The similarity between Brion Gysin’s pink picture of a desert landscape and the pictures of Mars sent back by Saturn 11 is immediately apparent to anyone who looks at both pictures. The caption of the Mars picture points out the letter B G on Martian rocks... an accident of course carved by wind and sand. In 1963 I wrote ‘1000 mile per hour wind here, storms ... crackling sounds .. . dry and brittle as dead leaves the scouting party climbed a rise and there was our ship half buried in sand.’ Years later I heard about the high wind velocities said to exist on the surface of Mars.

What you experience in dreams and out of the body trips, what you glimpse in the work of writers and painters, is the promised land of space. What Christians and Moslems talk about has to be actually
done
by living people if we are going to survive in space or anywhere else.

The shift from time to space may involve mutations as drastic and irreversible as the shift from water to land.

In the beginning was the word and the word
was
God. And what does that make us? Ventriloquist dummies. Time to leave the Word-God behind. ‘He atrophied and fell off me like horrible old gills’ a survivor reported.’And I feel ever so much better.’

Maurice Chevalier prances out with his straw hat...

Some time ago a friend conveyed to me the melancholy news that Codethyline Houde would henceforth (owing to the Common Market) be dispensed on prescription only. And I felt the same deep pang of loss as I experienced when they ripped the urinals from the streets, tore down Les Halles, and cut down the trees in the Grand Socco of Tangier and changed the spelling to Tanger. T’is gone, t’is gone ... another comer of the 19th century ... brightness falls from the air... the urinal, Les Halles, the trees ...

‘Codethyline Houde .. .’

‘Oui Monsieur... une ou deux?’

‘Deux.’

I’ll remember her that way.

‘The things we have never had remain. It is the things we have that go .. .’

‘Maintenant il faut une prescription, Monsieur...’

When I think of these passings, they appear to me as if I were looking at something far away and long ago through a telescope. I can see myself propped up in bed, a bottle of little pink pills and science fiction books on the night table, the bones ache and racking cough of Hong Kong flu soothed by this beneficent preparation, squirming with sheer comfort beneath the covers like some 18th-century English gentleman who has taken to his bed for the winter. And I remember when I still had the habit after a day in jail...

Pharmacie .
.. green neon letters in electric blue twilight... washed down twenty-four pinkies with a café crême, then it hit the back of my neck and crept down the backs of my thighs and there was this Edith Piaf number on the jukebox ...

And I remember Les Halles, not as I saw it in the Fifties and Sixties, but as I saw it on my first solo trip to Europe at age eighteen after a night of drinking.. . onion soup, smell of sawdust, red wine, urine and bread... The cab driver who parked his cab and asked me into a bar for a drink. He was talking about the Stavinsky riots: ‘Et tout d’un coup... Bthruuuuuuup’ (a sound like ripping cloth) When you hear machine guns you know its serious ... (knowing laugh of the dead)

It is fall and there are dead leaves in the street... somewhere around Auteuil... a long wall...

‘Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?’ Simon, do you like the sound of footsteps on dead leaves? Dead leaves drifting into the pissoir, sharp ammonia reek of urine ... there on the galvanized iron, words that could have been written by Rimbaud: ‘J’ aime ces type vicieux, q’ici montre la bite’ — I like the vicious types who show their cocks here ... Un soldat jeune, tres jeune, glances sideways ... Oh la la... Well t’is gone t’is gone ...

I can see the old opium peddler there under a tree in the Grand Socco, his gold teeth glinting in the sun. Jane Bowles got up a petition to save the trees and that old bitch Madame Porte, who ran the Porte Tea Room, refused to sign, saying: ‘Je n’ai pas une opinion.’I do not have an opinion.

It is the things we have that go... the urinals... Les Halles ... the trees ... Tangier ... Codethyline Houde ...

Codethyline Houde ... A preparation of dehydrated codeine sold across the counter in France until the recent ruling —

Finnies nous attendons bonne chance... Quite a story connected with this. In 1960 four young men got together in Paris and bought a Land Rover to cross the Libyan desert. Their names were Armstrong, Shannon, Pelieu and Yves Martin. The first two were American, the other two French. They picked up a guide in Aswan near the Sudan border. Months later an Egyptian patrol found the stalled Land Rover. Four corpses were in or near the car, but advanced decomposition made identification difficult. Who was missing? Was it the guide? The Egyptians said it was Shannon. A diary was found in the car and this is the last entry ...