She began by revealing to us that her name was not her name. She had been born Virginia Peasley in East Waukheegan, New Jersey, but had escaped in search of adventure, love, beauty and the meaning of life. Adventure was tiring, love was fleeting, beauty was fading, and the meaning of life had thus far eluded her. She was sure, however, in the power of those who took other names. Of those who placed upon themselves a literate symbology of their essential selves and merged with their presence as a word. She had a faith in words she herself did not recognize. It was unconscious. Unconsidered. As are all true faiths. And all the truly faithful.
She sat cross legged in a high backed wooden rocking chair. A pink shawl was wrapped around her neck, as an executioner might wrap a lover’s noose. As one might engineer the most adoring act of autoerotic asphyxiation. When she spoke, the vivid pink fabric would vibrate to the tremor of her vocal cords.
We were all here, she told us, because of Josef. And because of what Josef had to teach us. Josef was from a different time. But a time that could be ours. A time that was ours. It only waited for its moment to come. For us to reach the essential median between the past and the future. The dying moment of the present that never exists.
I paraphrase. She was incapable of such poetry.
All oneness, she suggested to us, was achieved by the realization of oneness. Josef was teaching to us that the unity of all thing was not only of the now. Of the hear and now. Of the day to day which is the fetish of all decadent spiritualists. It reached across time. It taught us that time was one. That the oneness of existence reached across time. Asian faiths, she told us, revere their ancestors. In this way, they fulfill a responsibility to the past, to the dead. Now there was an even more extraordinary prospect. The fulfillment of our responsibility to the future, to the not yet born. And this fulfillment was not longer mere sanctimonious moralizing on the holiness of children. It was real. It was here now. Talking to us. We were no longer required to relegate the future to the abstract, over against the unbreakable concrete of the past. The future was speaking to us through Josef6, and it was carrying dire portents. There was no longer any need to predict. Now we knew. We knew the possible outcome of our everyday movements. The plentitude of sins we were daily committing against the innocents of Josef’s time. We had to believe that this voice which was whispering to us from across the quantum spectrum was here for a reason.
The tyranny of the gathering was at the height of its powers.
A bespectacled man with a trimmed beard and a semi-castrato voice expressed his sympathies with Jennie. He began to talk about the exigencies of his upbringing. His insoluble conflict with his father. The necessity of finding wholeness in a world driven by consumerism. This led to an earnest exchange regarding organic farm products.
I felt the conversation was drifting from its original intent.
That was when Riverrain spoke up. Riverrain was the scion of a commune dedicated to the healing possibilities of primal scream therapy. She barely spoke above a whisper. Her jet black hair was pinned backwards with a violence which was shocking in its chastity. Black eyeliner encased the sockets in her skull, the flesh of which was rendered a porcelain white through the fervent application of powder and foundation.
She was born, she told us, in late 1977. Given the confluence of dates, she was certain that Josef6 was actually her father. It explained, she told us, everything.
This was the low point of the evening. But it served, at least, to lead us back to Josef6.
Jennie announced that we would go around the circle and announce our opinion of why Josef6 was here and what we should do about it. A few people twisted uncomfortably in their seats, but the totalitarian presence of others was enough to coax a reply.
The bearded man wanted to work for peace and harmony.
Riverrain wanted to file a palimony suit.
A black woman who was roughly three hundred pounds overweight was sure he was Jesus.
A white woman whose body was made up entirely of toothpicks covered with ulceritic flesh believed he had come to teach her how to eat again. Halfway through her three sentences she coughed and blood was glimpsed on her lower lip.
A young man in a black bandana was deeply enthusiastic about the anarchistic possibilities presented by Josef6’s prophetic statements. He was of the personal opinion that nuclear war could present a magnificent opportunity for human freedom.
A portly accountant in a suit and tie announced his intention to become a ballet dancer.
Jennie looked disapproving. Which was eminently understandable. To her credit, the exquisite veneer of perfect calm never left her face. Her eyes, however, did grow slightly wider. And at one point her pupils were clearly dilated.
After the confessionals were finished, she looked down at the floor for several minutes in complete silence. My studies had long since convinced me that this was a regular and generally successful practice for gurus in training. The calculated use of silence, or any such premeditated manipulation of inscrutable or disconcerting behavior, was essential to focusing the attention of the otherwise easily distracted. In order to bring the imagination to bear on the state of lucid dream required by the semi-mystical experience, it is first necessary to disturb the cognitive expectations of the initiate. This is accomplished by the use of bizarre or confusing patterns of behavior which confound the standard mores of human interaction. The classic case being the Buddhist master who leaves his student to sit outside in a driving rainstorm and only admits him into the monastery when he has stripped himself completely naked and spent several days squatting in a peat bog.
Jennie, it was clear, was a natural.
When she raised her head after a long interval, it was to suggest that we all say a prayer of her own composition. Each of us stood and took the other’s hand. The raw discomfort of personal contact simultaneously bonding us together and causing us to loathe the very sight of our opposite. Several people were clearly deeply unhappy with the partners with which coincidence had presented them. Shifting one’s position in the circle was, of course, impossible by this time. It would be an unequivocal statement of rejection which, in the face of all these watching eyes, would probably cause irreparable damage to the recipient.
People, generally speaking, only refrain from being cruel out of shame. This is, I suppose, one of the advantages of collectives.
Not that this motley collection that constituted ourselves was anything but a cursory attempt. A brief and barely comprehensible sketch of a collective. Nonetheless, there we were, all of us in each other’s hands and in the hands of Jennie Ruptha, who, for the first time that evening, smiled something that resembled an expression of genuine happiness and contentment.
The smile, through sheer chance, fell on Riverrain, who blushed so intensely that the crimson could be glimpsed under her layers of whiteface. Those paying close attention no doubt also saw the indulgent expression of compassion and affection which crossed Jennie’s face and allowed Riverrain to regain her composure without public remonstrance. It was a generous act on Jennie’s part. If her hair had caught fire and burned the top of her scalp to a black crispy mane of bubbled flesh I doubt Riverrain could have been more embarrassed. There are certain people who retain a default position of embarrassment. An all purpose capacity for mortification. It has only one setting, and eliminates completely the possibility of embarrassments of varying magnitude. It is, I suppose, a fairly effective defense mechanism. Although it contains, of course, the ever present threat of profound overreaction. The inevitable price, I suppose, presented by the possibility of indifference to infinitely more horrendous traumas.
With this momentary expression of compassionate exchange finished with, Jennie bowed her head and spoke in an assumed baritone drawl. Her prayer was as follows:
Josef, grant us the wisdom to perceive the present, to erase the past, and to bring a more beautiful and united future. Give us the strength to change and to commit change. Make a gift of your wisdom to those of us who believe and want to believe. Heal those of us in pain. Feed those of us who are hungry. Make peaceful those of us who are at war within ourselves. Make one the world and the world one. Amen.After we had all intoned the benediction in a low, somewhat dissonant drone, there were smiles on all the faces and a profound look of peace in several sets of eyes. People shook hands, exchanged numbers, made brief conversation, and then left with their heads held slightly higher than when they came. A few took their exit together, their heads turned towards each other in energetic conversation.
I took my leave alone, to return to my studies and my twin unknowns. As I did, I paused in the doorframe and looked back.
There, under the migrainic fluorescent lights, were Jennie, the bespectacled man, and a smiling Riverrain, their mouths moving swiftly and their heads nodding in obvious and total consensus.
