Joy Ride
am a normally mild-mannered associate professor of physics at a
small Jesuit college in the San Francisco Bay Area. I want to make it clear at
the outset, however, that I exist at the margins of my profession, due to an
alter-ego problem that I have more or less willfully cultivated. While I am
known on my own campus as one who is concerned about the philosophical
and spiritual underpinnings of science, and thus am tolerated, I am known to
the fraternity of physicists as a royal pain in the arse, a radical, frothing
eclecto-conceptualist who doesn�t stop at the harmless Hindu pablum dished
out by guys like Capra or the nice, tidy paradigmatic pronouncements of guys
like Kuhn, but who insists on trying to tear the throat out of physics each and
every time he opens his mouth, and even has the gall to drag in linguistics
and goddam psychology.
So be it. I am a lone wolf who only dons sheep's garb for the occasional foray across the bay to that great fort on the hill, LBL, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the University of California, where, once or twice a year, I cannot help prowling the labyrinthine corridors until I chance upon a hapless junior graduate student. Then, twitching with excitement, trying not to slobber, I gather my theoretical muscles and set upon him (he is always male, and nearly always Chinese, but to me he is Little Red Riding Hood embodied).
"Excuse me," I say, "can you tell me the speed of light in a vacuum?" I am extremely direct with these fellows, because (1) they move about this world as though tiptoeing gingerly through minefields of equations, and have absolutely no room in their heads for small talk; and (2) they are complete suckers for a question like this: of course they can tell me the speed of light in a vacuum, and in their impatience they proceed to do so. They may answer with an abrupt, "c," or they may deign to spell it out down to several decimal places. I could care less; I go straight for the kill:
"If it's a vacuum, what's light doing there?"
And that's it. No mortal physicist and certainly no first-year grad student of my acquaintance, has ever raised more than a pitiful defense. They cough, turn red, fumble with the shirt collar, swallow the Adam's apple, and then WHAM, the jugular:
�Has it ever occurred to you that c might be a limiting, rather than an attained, velocity?�
They froth and gurgle some more, but the end is near. I do fully intend to devour this poor soul, but I also mean to reconstruct him. It will take me only about three minutes, standing there in the corridor, to explain the simple but devastating chink in the General Theory of Relativity, upon which I, drug-crazed and fully incited to riot, stumbled, oh these many years ago, down along Telegraph Avenue, in full flight before a phalanx of police and then suddenly frozen, cross-sected by a guillotine of revelation that came slamming down from heaven knows where, and that I will now wield in turn, to destroy this young man's career. His career, that is, in the West, in the Scientifically Developed World. Now he too will be unwelcome, a black sheep at best, a wolf if he dares open his mouth; and he will have no choice but to tuck tail and go slinking back to Taiwan or Hong Kong or the mainland, to take a teaching post in some muddy rural precinct and be forgotten.
But wait! The poisonous gift I have forced upon him will not lie quiet and suffer the death of its host. It rumbles and lurches about in him, now compelling him to launch diatribes at hapless students, now prompting him to dispatch suspect research papers to hungry editors of regional journals, but always constantly driving him to spread the contagion: I humbly submit that the next great wave in physics shall spread out of the East.
Enough prologizing, then, and on to the main event.
I was hiking in the open hills above the college one blustery day in the fall, when I heard the sound of a helicopter behind me, directly over the school. Traffic helicopters are common along the freeway corridors of the Bay Area, but do not often venture out the road that leads to our quiet institution: I turned to see what channel deemed us newsworthy. I couldn't make out any markings at all, but I did notice it was accompanied by three turkey vultures, flying in rather tight formation. A government chopper, then, hauling in yet another decrepit bureaucrat to conduct a star chamber on our research spending.
Leery of cowpies � I was in a bit of a rush and had continued to stumble along backwards as I looked up � I turned back to the trail, and was just about to wonder why the 'copter hadn't been descending, when it scooted out from behind a cloud high above the ridge east of me, nearly 90 degrees and at least three miles from where it had been not two seconds earlier � or had it been two seconds? Had I fallen in a wink into some entrancing submental process, only to pop out of it at hearing the sound again? But I couldn't for the life of me remember not hearing the sound during those two or three seconds. I whirled about to look for the vultures. Gone. The chopper itself was continuing to advance matter of factly down the ridge. But no sooner had I mentally said so (I had already begun to construct this narrative, truth to tell), than, almost as if in direct, teasing response, it dove steeply and disappeared below the ridge.
Time to write this one off: I was lapsing into one of the minor paranoid fantasies that are my daily fare; I'd stepped in another of the little post- psychedelic potholes that pepper my psychic landscape. "Make that 'cowpies,'" the thought train continued, rushing at its normal breakneck speed into the linguistic netherlands. And just at that instant I became acutely, agonizingly (but ecstatically!) aware that time, that steady old friend, had unaccountably ditched me. In the endlessness that ensued I could and did make the intimate acquaintance of each and every blade of fresh green grass, every cow with neck lowered to munch it, each � yes, each cowpie that had splattered to earth � knew on a first-name basis every atom that vibrated with infinite languor in the sea of air before me . . . through which now sailed, straight toward me, the helicopter.
Then I got it. It wasn't that time had stopped, but that I had. And the presence of the helicopter, moving so easily yet purposefully in my direction, could only mean one thing. One thing that was indisputably confirmed by the golden-green humming-buzzing rhythm-wave that at some point in this horrible-delectable forever had arrived from the chopper and triggered in me massive recogition-puzzlement and then, as it cascaded down from one chakral center to the next, a vertiginous, emptying sort of relaxation- catalepsy that, when it reached the terminus, left me without one iota of control over my bladder and bowels, which, seizing this rare opportunity, completely voided themselves.
Leaving me, then, with only one, obvious, thing: the knowledge that they had returned. I scuttled off into the sea of utter panic; but the sudden recognition that I could not physically scream even if I wanted to, coupled with what I have described as the ecstatic, also the delectable, also the intimately familiar aspect of the situation, allowed me to crawl back out of that tide and dry off, as it were; so that now, from every pore of my beleaguered body there began to flow that same humming-buzzing rhythm- wave, but transformed into the warm, protective "mantle of the wolf" that I had first donned that night . . . but no, that story must wait.
Suffice it to say that I have always had a peculiar affinity for the dog, the wolf, the coyote, and their brethren. Indeed, my wife, who is Chinese, was quick to remark, on the first weekend after our wedding, when I had circled the living room floor several times and then plopped down for a mid- day nap, that this was just what she expected from "a dog," that is, from one born in the year 4693 (1946). And, at the moments when I have most exasperated her and we have tangled, she has several times uttered a final sigh and then muttered some mumbo-jumbo about the unfortunate influence of the "golden-green-fire dog star." This baleful body is actually an amalgam, near as I can tell, of elements from two different oriental systems of astrology; but as a descriptive device it is quite apt: I do on occasion howl and puke fire.
And so, while editorial considerations prevent me from sharing the convoluted and rather embarassing tale of how I first came to wear the "mantle of the wolf," you will at least appreciate that I feel at home in it. And never did it feel more comforting, buzzing softly around my head, shoulders, and back and down my legs, than it did now, because I knew it made me the match, ultimately, of whomever and whatever I was to face. I might require obedience training or housebreaking at the hands of my new masters, but, because I had spontaneously created the mantle I now wore (and had worn, however tenuously, that first time), and because I had fashioned it from the whole cloth they had presented me � that is, had transmuted the overwhelming and potentially annihilatory wave that struck me into a standing wave of positive power about me � I was no longer afraid. To speak of.
The chopper floated softly to a landing before me, scattering cows in exquisitely amusing slow motion, and two men stepped out. Two male humanoids, that is, Causasian to the point of Aryanism. As a French- Canadian Jew, I could not help noticing this, indeed being shocked by it. I would have preferred (or so I told myself) the short, scrawny, bug-eyed fellows from before.
"Peace!" said one, "We have come to quicken you." "I'm Dean and he's Don," said the second. I should explain that their speech was entirely soundless, at times even wordless: it was as if they were right there inside my head, or that "inside my head" was no longer a relevant construct. (I should also mention that in the excitement of the moment I failed to really nail down which of them was Dean and which Don. Ascriptions by name later in this narrative are thus arbitrary.)
What they said next � they said it in unison � was perhaps the most shocking thing anyone has ever said to me: "You've done very well. We're all proud of you."
I've shown you the rift in my soul. I've made it clear that I am not always a good person. I've suggested, if I haven't said it outright, that my marriage is flawed as well. My wife is not merely resigned to my going, she predicted it and indeed has stated that she would never have consented to marry me had it not been perfectly obvious I would soon depart, leaving her with a townhouse in the City and a green card. Not that I'm going away forever, or even that far away; it's quite possible, I think, that I may be allowed down for occasional weekend furloughs � but I'm getting ahead of myself.
My wife loves me. My parents and brothers and sisters loved me, but no one has ever loved me like my wife. She has transformed me. Lacking her dangerous, fertile, implacable Dragon-Lady influence, I should never have found the Wolf in me. It's just that, as she said this morning, "I can't imagine living the lest of my life with you." She's sweet.
Yes. We were about to board the 'copter. Our limbs have come unstuck, our shoes and trousers have been magically removed and our nether parts cleansed, and we are tip-toeing toward the door. "We have come to quicken you," they have said. We feel the Compleat Fool.
Inside, I am handed a pair of shorts (blue vertical stripes) and strapped into a body-length seat that feels like it's constantly shifting itself to make me comfortable. I sit there and look around. It looks much like the interior of a helicopter. I realize I haven't talked back to these guys, not a peep. I aim a tentative thought at the rear of Dean's head: "What the fucking hell do you think you're doing?"
"Turn down the volume," comes the answer. And, from Don, "A bit less emotional static would also be appreciated." Then silence. OK, we're communicating.
We lift off. I can't see anything but blue sky and clouds, but the rate at which the clouds are changing suggests we are going more or less straight up, and quickly. There's no sense of acceleration whatsoever. If anything I feel lightheaded, floaty. Hungry, too. Ready for anything, really. Feels like my whole life has been a series of crude, protracted warm-up exercises for this moment when I'd soar free of the earth. In a Huey. Uh-huh. I'm absolutely certain I've been picked up by aliens or their representatives � for several long seconds I'm back at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park, summer of '67, the Airplane wailing, lifting 100,000 souls into the air:
And up there in the sky, but hidden (but obvious to they who are high), the Seed of the Revolution, the Navel of Mary, broadcasting to all the tune, golden-green humming-buzzing rhythm-wave, that I've heard my whole life, through all the static: they've come back for us. We're saved.
But no. The tune fades, the revolution turns its jacket inside out and goes back to work. Much of value is created: marriages, babies, companies, products, movements. And not one of us who knew is ever truly satisfied, because that hole in the sky is still there. Finally, in middle age, at this most ironic of all junctures, I ascend through it.
Do I love my wife? Yes, but not as well as I had planned. My marriage was to be a marathon and I was to be heroic down the stretch. Here I was in the middle miles, still feeling cocky, the Wall nowhere in sight. And now I'm going straight up � end of race.
"Am I going straight up because I wanted to, or because you wanted me to, or because 'they' wanted me to?" I ask.
"All of the above," comes the answer, quick as a wink.
I'm a little chary of this telepathy stuff. Something crucial is missing here. Ah, and I know what it is, don't I: there had been a cork in the Klein bottle of the world, and that cork was me. The foil wrapper was removed, the wire basket painstakingly untwisted, the cork oh so carefully nudged and tugged � and it now shoots straight up. It can only go through the hole in the sky and back around and out through the middle of everything, because that's the way this world is made and ever shall be, and I can never leave it . . . I was doing my best, you see, to cognize the experience around a few simple, manageable ideas, drawn mostly from my childhood and second (psychedelic) childhood. Yet I knew � and the constant golden-green buzzing rhythm line laid down by Dean and Don confirmed it � that I was spot on, and yes it "really was happening," um-hm, and about time, too, wasn't it.
The windows ran black, the cabin stretched and yawned, and Dean and Don swivelled about in their chairs. I looked at them through great black empty eyes that saw my whole life and the whole earth, and that cried very much and shone with endless, empty hope. They looked back at me with eyes that had been and would be mine forever.
"Welcome home."
"It's good to be home" � while the small, scared voice of an associate professor of physics at a small Jesuit college in the San Francisco Bay Area cried out its fear, shame, and desperate demand for nonexistence.
"It's all right. You've been, and will be, a human being . . . for some time now."
"Thank you."
"Think nothing of it."
Ha ha. But I knew � knew it was all right, knew it was all over, knew the entire schtick, except for one little nagging . . .
"What we need � what they need � from you is navigational assistance."
"What for?!"
"You see, you're human . . . [I aggressively waited for him to add, "like us." He did not.] That makes you part and parcel [Words hardly suffice for what was communicated here, but, for reasons I'll soon come to, this story must be written, not to mention published.] of this world we're now orbiting.
"As you've perhaps begun to understand, flying, particularly within the meteorological and psychic atmosphere [Ah, words do fail.] of a planet like yours, requires something more than a sure hand on the joystick."
"Of course."
"Indeed, flying, as we know it and as we propose to teach it to you, is what might be called a 'consummate activity.'"
"OK."
"To fly as we fly is to become, and by your passing to remake, the entire world about you, as you will surely appreciate from Le Canard's Corollary to Einstein's General Theory."
�Yes.�
"You were right, you know: the speed of light is indeed an asymptotic limit, not an actually attained velocity; yet one can in a sense attain it, by becoming � and thereby becoming responsible for � everything, while in the same instant giving it all up � throwing in the towel, as your Douglas Adams might say."
I could see what he was getting at, and I was beginning to squirm against the straps. Why was meeting God so much like going to the dentist?
"Of course, to take it with one when one goes � to take one's mind, body or, in the present case, flying vehicle along � is an even better trick, and is not in fact possible unless one fully � and we mean 'fully' � intends to come back 'lickety-split.'"
"I �c.�" (I was trying to be funny. They gave no indication of having got it, though they must have, since they'd got everything else.)
"Yes. One does not cheat. One is either on, or off, the bus, as your Kesey would have it. Yet, one has help."
"Oh?" (I include these admittedly meager responses because they are the only literary device I could come up with to indicate that I was still in attendance and trying to cooperate. Actually, my participation and extent of comprehension seemed rather to be taken for granted.)
"One is allowed to compromise, to tell 'little white lies,' even. One is permitted, indeed helped, to come and go to and from the universe in regions where the field density is extremely low, without the requirement that one become or be responsible for the ongoing creation of regions that lie further afield . . ."
"Regions," Don chipped in, "that may be characterized by a greater and therefore more sensitive density of creative intelligence and its byproducts, radiation and matter."
"Matter," I added, "being of course just a slower, which is to say a more 'bent' or 'compressed,' form of radiation." (I was beginning to think they'd picked up the right guy; the vivid images of having every decayed and impacted wisdom tooth in my soul drilled and pulled simultanously without novocain were receding.)
"Indeed. You were right about the fallacy of rest mass, but you were just slightly 'out to lunch,' as your Burroughs might say, with your insistence that the weak field, the sparse radiation, in a near vacuum not be conceptually neglected."
"Not that you were wrong" � Dean took up the litany � "in attacking physicists for being narrow-minded engineers; but you didn't finally have the sense to realize, or accept, that God � the creative emptiness from which we all derive, and to which we return � does what it jolly well pleases."
"Because it's not an it." (I was swinging now.)
"In a notshell." (The image was conveyed of a Kleinian sombrero � now it was they who were being funny; we were having a grand time.)
"It's not like I had a lot to go on, you know."
"That's what they all say; but yes, you were rather in the thick of it down there."
"As an associate professor of physics at a small Jesuit college," Don added.
"No wonder you were con-fused," said Dean. (The hyphen was definitely there, even if the word wasn't.)
"But this business of rerouting the careers of Asian graduate students in the hope that a little forced adversity would eventually lead to a new star rising out of the Eastern muck . . ."
". . . Was just a bit much," finished Don.
"So why didn't you stop me?"
"That's not the way it works, Se�or."
"In the �atmosphere� of a planet like yours," added Dean.
��Navigational assistance.��
"You got it, buster." ["bustard"? � As the pot with the guilt and fear was pulled back to the front burner, I was beginning to have trouble telling which images were theirs and which my own.]
"We need the sure hand of a native on the stick," said Don.
"But I never even got to the second world in Super Mario!"
"You weren't properly motivated."
"Um, are we talking carrot or are we talking stick?"
"We're talking stick."
(Oh-oh. Not talking dentist anymore, talking general practictioner: primal circumcision terror, manhood on the block, initiation rites just around the bend.)
��. . . paintit red and wite and it wer split flatways so it wer a dubble flat stick,� in the immortal words of your Hoban.� (Don was blithely citing a crucial passage in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, which I had read but you may not have. I highly recommend it for additional insights into the matters touched on here. The quoted passage is a reference to the character Mr Punch's "1 Big 1.")
"Talking stick, healing stick," said Dean.
"My penis." (Might as well out with it.)
"No. Your schtick."
"Uh . . ."
"Your 'karma,' to use an old Hindu term that has enjoyed a surprising revival in your era."
"Your career, to put it in '90s terms."
"Your career as an 'applied psychophysicist.'" (These guys didn't miss a beat: 'applied psychophysicist' was my favorite fantasy term for myself, as I entertained large international audiences of initially hostile colleagues, wowing and dismaying them with on-stage demonstrations of local violations of sacrosanct physical laws. I'd never breathed the phrase to anyone.)
"Now apply your hand to this, if you will."
Before I describe the "this," I must beg you to indulge me in one more significant if highly personal digression. I have described, in a very general way, my wife's character and my own and the state of our marriage. It will not require a great deal of imaginative interpolation, then, to understand that while we have found impressive peaks of mutual sexual interest to scale over the years, we have, more often than not, been inclined to ascend them individually and at spatiotemporal odds with one another. That is to say, when she felt like climbing, I often felt like relaxing in the hut, and vice versa. I have, therefore, found it both necessary and desirable to revive a habit which I first formed at the tender age of eight.
I had been very sick with measles, was feverish, had not eaten for two days, and was quite cross with my mother. Finally, at her wits' end, she called in a babysitter and fled the house (or so it seemed to me; more likely she was simply going shopping). The babysitter proved to be the new girl from around the block, who was known to have breasts. More significantly to me, though, she had long, straight black hair and deep, wide-open brown eyes. She came to my bedside. Bending down to look at me, she spontaneously caught her hair in one hand (to prevent it running over my face) and held it rather tightly under her chin, which made her appear, through the tiny, fluttering crack in my left eye, to resemble � simultaneously and with no hint of conflict � the Blessed Virgin and a Hawaiian dancing girl. She said, "You're awake."
I shut the eye and silently dissimulated. She emitted an exasperated sigh and left the room. I remember distinctly that it was just after 11 a.m., though I can't imagine how I might have known, since I was no longer allowed to have a clock in my room. The sun was flowing in like the sweetest of butter through the high southeastern window. I kept the eye squeezed tight in order to hold her image. I saw her walking a Hawaiian beach, slowly, head down, her body covered in a long black habit, showing only her slim brown hands, clasped in prayer.
A tropical breeze nipped at her heels and playfully lifted the edges of her garment. She walked on, unfaltering and unseeing, until she had passed me. When her back was to me the wind rushed up behind and roughly exposed her calves, then filled the habit from within and split and spread it out from her back and shoulders like great black wings. She rose several feet above the brilliant white sand: her perfect Polynesian bottom hovered there an entire wonderful eternity. Then she sighed the sigh she'd sighed looking down at me, and crumbled to earth, a black, sand-starred mantle dancing fitfully.
The wind rose, and with it the waves. Out to sea a storm, fractured by the sun as it strained to reach the shore. My body rolling, rolling in the waves, rolling in the sand, rolling in the darkening sky, rolling rolling, out and out and back around into the middle of everything and out, leaving me lying there, dick in hand, crying with fear, joy and disbelief.
Dean had pointed at the floor and from it had emerged a very lingam- like metallic post, rounded and then slightly pointed on top and inscribed over its whole length with elaborate but illegible characters that seemed to subtly brighten and fade in places, and shift and transform one into the next. It rose soundlessly to eye level and stopped. He indicated I should grasp it at its top. I extended my left hand and rested it on the surprising, glans-smooth surface. It seemed to warm to my touch and respond beneath it, as the couch had done.
"Two hands for beginners," said Don.
I laid the other hand upon it and stood up; it came further out of the floor as I did so, and began to distinctly glow/hum with the familiar golden- green rhythm-wave, which, as I shut my eyes and let my knees draw up around it, grew in intensity and moved into me, until I was it and was nought, was the World Phallus, the World Tree, and upon my skin was written the lives of one and all of us. I understood what Dean and Don had not been able to say, even without words, even with hearts so empty they now blazed and whirled like white giant stars in quickening compassionate orbit about the infinitely small and weighty black hole that was all that was left of me, devouring itself forever and howling for the mantle to be lifted by the wind, once and for all and my kingdom come, come.
I did, and had help.
I was a fly-boy now, and the question at hand was, where would I � my karma, my career, my schtick � take us next. It was also apparent I was to be navigatee more than navigator: we would be pulled inexorably along the leylines of my soul's inmost urges, to where the emptiness, the need, was greatest. No one could fly these missions like I could, because no one � certainly no goyim Space Brothers � had screwed up in quite the complex, destructive, but eternally optimistic way I had. But wait � yes! there must be others, many others (144,000, then?) who had been taken up and quickened and who had their own impressive balls of string to unwind. I saw the skies awash with the windblown silver seed of our � no longer lonely! � desire.
Off, then, through space and time to trace the faint, wavering footsteps of the first of those whom I had sent on a Long March: from Berkeley to Hong Kong, north and west in a long, jagged arc � bouncing with him on painful third-class train seats, howling with him in rage and despair � to the pretty, muddy little town and through the long years � the weeks, the hours, the minutes! � of junior high school science instruction. To the day when the smaller than average, plumper than average, far brighter than average little girl walks into his classroom for the very first time and looks up at him expectantly, demandingly.
She gratefully takes everything he can give � not the rote nonsense of the textbooks, but the precious, dangerous things I had passed to him in those few minutes in the corridor, the jewels he has so cautiously grown and hidden beneath the floorboards of his heart, down the years � and then she understands something more, something much bigger and more useful: that she knows what is really going on, and why and how. It is she who has called us here now, then, to save her teacher, to be her friends, to give her the power-tools for the shaping of a new world.
And then off to an open, cow-spotted hillside above a small Jesuit college in the San Francisco Bay Area, to deposit a bemused associate professor of physics in a rumpled black, star-strewn mantle and clean underpants. He sits up slowly, shakes his head at a final telepathic transmission ("'Don't flog your dummy too much,' as your Gary Snyder might say.") and gazes up, as the chopper rises in a fast, silent arc and is gone.
But not for long. There is work for me here, things only I can attend to, but it will not take forever. This story must be published (a minor detail but apparently important), my department placated, my estate set in order.
My wife understands, is happy for me and everyone I will help, is not overly impressed with my fate. She waggled her middle finger at me (a disarming Chinese habit) and gave me a look, when I first told her, like, "You had to go to outer space in a flying saucer to see the nose between your eyes. Light?"
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