Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [208]
“With your gift for putting things succinctly, what things I could write,” he said, “seeing that I know a thousand times as much as you. Of course I have to take a little advantage. After all, I’m the guy who puts the thing together—the whole ball of wax. But it would be the minimum basic. On the other hand, if you’re tired of your way of life, and you sure ought to be, you could settle here in Texas and become filthy rich yourself. This place has big dimensions, Charlie, it’s got scale.”
But this reference to scale, to large dimensions, didn’t fill me with business ambitions, it only reminded me of a stirring lecture by a clairvoyant that I had read on the plane. Now that did impress me deeply and I tried to comprehend it. After the two Cubans and the man from Boston got into the Cadillac with us and began to smoke cigars, so that I became carsick, to think about clairvoyance was as good a thing to do as any other. The car tore out of town, following the coastline. “There’s a great fish place along here,” said Ulick. “I want to stop and buy Hor-tense some smoked shrimp and smoked marlin.” We pulled in and got some. Starving, Ulick ate pieces of marlin before the fish was removed from the scale. Before it could be wrapped he had already pulled off the tail-end.
“Don’t gorge,” I said.
He paid no attention to this, and he was quite right. He gorged. Gaspar, his Cuban crony, took the wheel and Ulick sat in the back with his fish. He kept it under the seat. “I want to save this for Hortense, she dotes on it,” he said. But at this rate nothing would be left for Hortense. It wasn’t for me to conjure away a whole lifetime of such extraordinary greed, and I should have let him be. But I had to put in my brotherly two cents, giving him just the touch of remorse you wanted from your family on the eve of open-heart surgery as you crammed yourself with smoked fish.
At the same time I was concentrating on the vision the clairvoyant had described in such extraordinary detail. Just as soul and spirit left the body in sleep, they could also be withdrawn from it in full consciousness with the purpose of observing the inner life of man. The first result of this conscious withdrawal is that everything is reversed. Instead of seeing the external world as we normally do with senses and intellect, initiates can see the circumscribed self from without. Soul and spirit are poured out upon the world which normally we perceive from within— mountains clouds forests seas. This external world we no longer see, for we are it. The outer world is now the inner. Clairvoyant, you are in the space you formerly beheld. From this new circumference you look back to the center, and at the center is your own self. That self, your self, is now the external world. Dearest God, there you see the human form, your own form. You see your own skin and the blood inside, and you see this as you see an external object. But what an object! Your eyes are now two radiant suns, filled with light. Your eyes are identified by this radiance. Your ears are identified by sound. From the skin comes a glow. From the human form emanate light, sound, and sparkling electrical forces. This is the physical being when the Spirit looks at it. And even the life of thought is visible within this radiance. Your thoughts can be seen as dark waves passing through the body of light, says this clairvoyant. And with this glory comes also a knowledge of stars which exist in the space where we formerly felt ourselves to stand inert. We are not inert but in motion together with these stars. There is a star world within us that can be seen when the Spirit takes a new vantage point outside its body. As for the musculature it is a precipitate of Spirit and the signature of the cosmos is in it. In life and in death the signature of the cosmos is within us.
We were now driving through swampy, reefy places. There were mangroves. Here was the Gulf sparkling alongside. There was also a great deal