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By Root 6009 0

what I did with myself? Elderly, heart-injured, meditating in kitchen odors, wearing Renata’s cloak in the biffy—should it concern anyone what such a person did with himself? The strangeness of life, the more you resisted it, the harder it bore down on you. The more the mind opposed the sense of strangeness, the more distortions it produced. What if, for once, one were to yield to it? Moreover I was convinced that there was nothing in the material world to account for the more delicate desires and perceptions of human beings. I concurred with the dying Bergotte in Proust’s novel. There was no basis in common experience for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And I was too queerly haughty to take stock in the respectable empiricism in which I had been educated. Too many fools subscribed to it. Besides, people were not really surprised when you spoke to them about the soul and the spirit. How odd! No one was surprised. Sophisticated people were the only ones who expressed surprise. Perhaps the fact that I had learned to stand apart from my own frailties and the absurdities of my character might mean that I was a little dead myself. This detachment was a sobering kind of experience. I thought sometimes how much it must sober the dead to pass through the bitter gates. No more eating, bleeding, breathing. Without the pride of physical existence the shocked soul would surely become more sensible.

It was my understanding that the untutored dead blundered and suffered in their ignorance. In the first stages especially, the soul, passionately attached to its body, stained with earth, suddenly severed, felt cravings much as amputees feel their missing legs. The newly dead saw from end to end all that had happened to them, the whole of lamentable life. They burned with pain. The children, the dead children especially, could not leave their living but stayed invisibly close to those they loved and wept. For these children we needed rituals—something for the kids, for God’s sake! The elder dead were better prepared and came and went more wisely. The departed worked in the uncon-scious part of each living soul and some of our highest de-signs were very possibly instilled by them. The Old Testament commanded us to have no business with the dead at all and this was, the teachings said, because in its first phase, the soul entered a sphere of passionate feeling after death, of something resem-bling a state of blood and nerves. Base impulses might be mobilized by contact with the dead in this first sphere. As soon as I began to think of Demmie Vonghel, for instance, I received violent impressions. I always saw her handsome and naked as she had been and looking as she had looked during her climaxes. They had always been convulsive, a series of them, and she used to go violently red in the face. There always was a trace of crime in the way that Demmie did the thing and there had always been a trace of the accessory in me, wickedly collaborating. Now I was flooded with sexual associations. Take Renata, there was never any violence with Renata, she always smiled and behaved like a courtesan. Take Miss Doris Scheldt, she was a small girl, almost a blond child, although her profile hinted that there was a Savonarola embedded in her and that she would turn into a masterful little woman. The most charming thing about Miss Scheldt was her lighthearted bursting into laughter during the conclusion of the sexual act. The least charming was her dark fear of pregnancy. She worried when you hugged her naked in the night lest a stray spermatozoon ruin her life. It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people. This was why I looked for-ward to acquaintance with the souls of the dead. They should be a little more stable.

As I was only in a state of preparation, not an initiate, I couldn’t expect to reach my dead. Still, I thought I would try, as their painful experience of life sometimes does qualify some people to advance more rapidly in spiritual development. So I tried to put myself in a proper state for such contact, concentrating especially