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By Root 6079 0

on my parents and on Demmie Vonghel and Von Humboldt Fleisher. The texts said that actual communication with an individual who had died was possible though difficult but demanded discipline and vigilance and a keen awareness that the lowest impulses might break out and raise hell with you. A pure intention must police these passions. So far as I knew my intention was pure. The souls of the dead hungered for a completion of their purgatory and for the truth. I, in the Pension La Roca, sent my intensest thoughts toward them with all the warmth I had. And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything. Real questions to the dead have to be imbued with true feeling. By themselves abstractions will not travel. They must pass through the heart to be transmitted. The time to ask the dead something is in the last instant of consciousness before sleeping. As for the dead they reach us most easily just as we awaken. These are successive instants in the time-keeping of the soul, the eight intervening clock hours in bed being only biological. The one occult peculiarity that I couldn’t get used to was that the questions we asked originated not with us but with the dead to whom they were addressed. When the dead answered it was really your own soul speaking. Such a mirror-image reversal was difficult to grasp. I spent a long time pondering that.

And this was the way I spent January and February in Madrid, reading helpful texts, sotto voce, to the departed, and trying to draw near to them. You might have thought that this hope of getting next to the dead would weaken my mind, if it didn’t actually originate in mental debility. No. Although I have only my own authority for saying so, my mind appeared to become more stable. For one thing I seemed to be recovering an independent and individual connection with the creation, the whole hierarchy of being. The soul of a civilized and rational person is said to be free but is actually very closely confined. Although he formally believes that he ranges with perfect freedom everywhere and is thus quite a thing, he feels in fact utterly negligible. But to assume, however queerly, the immortality of the soul, to be free from the weight of death that everybody carries upon the heart presents, like the relief from any obsession (the money obsession or the sexual obsession), a terrific opportunity. Suppose that one doesn’t think of death as all sensible people in their higher realism have agreed to think of it? The first result is a surplus, an overflow to be good with. Terror of death ties this energy up but when it is released one can attempt the good without feeling the embarrassment of being unhistorical, illogical, masochistically passive, feebleminded. Good then is nothing like the martyrdom of certain Americans (you will recognize whom I mean), illuminated by poetry in high school, and then testifying to the glory of their (unprovable, unreal) good by committing suicide—in high style, the only style for poets.

Going broke in a foreign country I felt little or no anxiety. The problem of money was almost nonexistent. It did bother me that I was a phony widower, indebted to the ladies of the pension for their help with Rogelio. Rebecca Volsted, with her face of scalding white, was breathing down my neck. She wanted to sleep with me. But I simply went on with my exercises. Sometimes I thought, Oh, that stupid Renata, didn’t she know the difference between a corpse-man and a would-be seer? I wrapped myself in her cloak, a warmer garment than the vicuna Julius had given me, and I stepped out. As soon as I hit the open air, Madrid was all jewelry and art to me, the smells inspiring, the perspectives lovely, the faces attractive, the winter colors of the park frosty green and filled with vertical strokes of the lightly