The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

7

I VIEWED MYSELF as Jeff, weeping off by myself in the margins of the house, weeping over someone I cared about. Where is this going to end? I wondered. It has to end. And it seems not to have an end; it just goes on: a sequence of explosions, like Bill Lundborg's computer trying to figure out what the highest number less than an integer is, a hopeless task.

Not long thereafter, Kirsten came out of the hospital; she gradually recovered from her digestive ailment, upon which cure having happened, she and Tim returned to England. Before they left the United States, I found out from her that her son Bill had gone to jail. The U.S. Postal Service had hired him and then fired him; his response to being fired had been to smash the plate glass windows of the San Mateo substation. He smashed them with his bare knuckles. Obviously he was crazy again. If it could be said at any time that he was ever not.

So I lost track of everyone: I did not see Bill again after that day he visited me; I saw Kirsten and Tim a number of times

Kirsten more often than Tim-and then I found myself alone, and not very happy, and wondering and speculating about the sense underlying the world, assuming that any sense existed. Like Bill Lundborg's periods of sanity, it was a dubitable thing.

The law office and candle shop, one day, ceased to be in business. My two employers got busted on drug charges. I had foreseen it. More money could be made in the sale of cocaine than in the sale of candles. Cocaine at that time did not enjoy the fad popularity that it enjoys now, but the demand even so amounted to an inducement that my employers could not refuse. The authorities managed to accommodate them in their inability to say no to big bucks: each man got a five-year prison term. I drifted for a few months, drawing unemployment compensation, and then I squeezed in as a retail record clerk at the Musik Shop on Telegraph Avenue near Charming Way, which is where I work now.

Psychosis takes many forms. You can be psychotic about everything or you can concentrate on one particular topic. Bill represented ubiquitous dementia; madness had infiltrated every part of his life, or so I presume.

The fixed idea kind of madness is fascinating, if you are inclined toward viewing with interest something that is palpably impossible and yet nonetheless exists. Over-valence is a notion about possibilities in the human mind, possibilities of something going wrong, that did it not exist it could not be supposed. I mean by this simply that you have to see an over-valent idea at work fully to appreciate it. The older term is idee fire. Over-valent idea expresses it better, because this is a term derived from mechanics and chemistry and biology; it is a graphic term and it involves the notion of power. The essence of valence is power and that is what I am talking about; I speak of an idea that once it comes into the human mind, the mind, I mean, of a given human being, it not only never goes away, it also consumes everything else in the mind so that, finally, the person is gone, the mind as such is gone, and only the over- valent idea remains.

How does such a thing begin? When does it begin? Jung speaks somewhere-I forget which of his books it is mentioned in-but anyhow he speaks in one place of a person, a normal person, into whose mind one day a certain idea comes, and that idea never goes away. Moreover, Jung says, upon the entering of that idea into the person's mind, nothing new ever happens to that mind or in that mind; time stops for that mind and it is dead. The mind, as a living, growing entity has died. And yet the person, in a sense, continues on.

Sometimes, I guess, an over-valent idea enters the mind as a problem, or imaginary problem. This is not so rare. You are getting ready for bed, late at night, and all of a sudden the idea comes into your mind that you did not shut off your car lights. You look out the window at your car-which is parked in your driveway in plain sight-and you can see that it shows no lights. But then you think: Maybe I left the lights on and they stayed on so long that they ran the battery down. So to be sure, I must go out and check. You put on your robe and go out, unlock the car door, get in and pull on the headlight switch. The lights come on. You turn them off, get out, lock up the car and return to the house. What has happened is that you have gone crazy; you have become psychotic. Because you have discounted the testimony of your senses; you could see out the window that the car lights were not on, yet you went out to check anyhow. This is the cardinal factor: you saw but you did not believe. Or, conversely, you did not see something but you believed it anyhow. Theoretically, you could travel between your bedroom and the car forever, trapped in an eternal closed loop of unlocking the car, trying the light switch, returning to the house-in this regard you herewith are a machine. You are no longer human.

Also, the over-valent idea can arise-not as a problem or imaginary problem-but as a solution.

If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need.

There exists very little likelihood that you will travel in a loop between your parked car and your bedroom for the rest of your life, but there is a very great possibility that if you are tormented by guilt and pain and self-doubt-and vast floods of self-accusations that hit every day without fail-that a fixed idea as solution will, once it is happened upon, remain. This is what I next saw with Kirsten and with Tim, upon their return to the United States from England, their second return, after Kirsten got out of the hospital. During the period that they lived in London that second time, an idea, an over-valent idea, one day came into their minds, and that was that.

Kirsten flew back several days before Tim. I did not meet her at the airport; I met her at her room on the top floor of the St. Francis, on the same noble hill of San Francisco that Grace Cathedral itself enjoys. I found her busily unpacking her many bags, and I thought: My God, how young she looks! In contrast to the last time I saw her ... she glows. What has happened? Fewer lines marred her face; she moved with deft flexibility, and, when I entered the room, she glanced up and smiled at me, with none of the sour overtones, the various latent accusations I had become familiar with.

"Hi," she said.

"Boy, do you look great," I said.

She nodded. "I quit smoking." She lifted a wrapped package from a suitcase open before her on the bed. "I brought you a couple of things. More are on the way by surface mail; I could only fit these in. Do you want to open them now?"

"I can't get over how good you look," I said.

"Don't you think I've lost weight?" She went over to stand before one of the suite's mirrors.

"Something like that," I said.

"I have a huge steamer trunk coming by ship. Oh, you've seen it. You helped me pack. I've got a lot to tell you."

"On the phone, you hinted-

Yes," Kirsten said. She seated herself on the bed, reached for her purse, opened it and took out a package of Player's Cigarettes; smiling at me, she lit a cigarette.

"I thought you quit," I said.

Reflexively, she put out the cigarette. "I still do it now and then, out of habit." She continued to smile at me, in a wild, yet veiled, mysterious way.

"Well, what is it?" I said.

"Look over there on the table."

I looked. A large notebook lay on the table.

"Open it," Kirsten said.

"Okay." I picked the notebook up and opened it. Some of the pages showed nothing but most of them had been scribbled on, in Kirsten's handwriting.

Kirsten said, "Jeff has come back to us. From the other world."

Had I said, then, at that moment: Lady, you are totally crazy-it would have made no difference, and I do not castigate myself because I failed to say it. "Oh," I said, nodding. "Well; what do you know." I tried to read her handwriting but I could not. "What do you mean?" I said.

"Phenomena," Kirsten said. "That's what Tim and I call them. He sticks needles under my fingernails at night and he sets all the clocks to six-thirty, which was the exact moment he died."

"Gee," I said.

"We've kept a record," Kirsten said. "We didn't want to tell you in a letter or over the phone; we wanted to tell you face-to-face. So I waited until now." She raised her arms in excitement. "Angel, he came back to us!"

"Well, I'll be fucked," I said mechanically.

"Hundreds of incidents. Hundreds of the phenomena. Let's go down to the bar. It started right away after we got back to England. Tim went to a medium. The medium said it was true. We knew it was true; nobody had to tell us but we wanted to be really certain because we thought possibly-just possibly-it was only a poltergeist. But it isn't! It's Jeff!"

"Hot damn," I said.

"Do you think I'm joking?"

"No," I said, with sincerity.

"Because we both witnessed it. And the Winchells saw it, too; our friends in London. And now that we're back in the United States, we want you to witness it and record it, for Tim's new book. He's writing a book about it, because this has meaning not just for us but for everyone, because it proves that man exists in the other world after he dies here."

"Yes," I said. "Let's go down to the bar."

"Tim's book is called From the Other World. He's already gotten a ten-thousand-dollar advance on it; his editor thinks it'll be his bestselling book by far."

"I stand before you amazed," I said.

"I know you don't believe me." Her tone, now, had become wooden, and edged with anger.

"Why would it enter my head not to believe you?" I said. "Because people don't have faith."

"Maybe after I read the notebook."

"He-Jeff-set fire to my hair sixteen times."

"Wow."

"And he shattered all the mirrors in our flat. Not once but several times. We would get up and find them broken but we didn't hear it; neither of us heard anything. Dr. Mason-he's the medium we went to-said that Jeff wants us to understand that he forgives us. And he forgives you, too."

"Oh," I said.

"Don't be sarcastic with me," Kirsten said.

"I'll really truly try not to be sarcastic," I said. "It is as you can see a great surprise to me. I am left without words. I'll certainly recover, later on." I moved toward the door.

Edgar Barefoot, in one of his lectures on KPFA, discussed a form of inferential logic developed in India by the Hindu school. It is very old and has been much studied, not just in India but also in the West. It is the second means of knowledge by which man obtains accurate cognition and is called anumana, which is Sanskrit for: "Measuring along some other thing, inference." It has five stages and I will not go into it because it is difficult, but what is important about it is that if these five stages are correctly carried out-and the system contains safeguards by which one can determine precisely whether he has indeed carried them out-one is assured of going from premise to correct conclusion.

What especially dignifies anumana is step three, the illustration (udaharana); it requires what is called an invariable concomitance (vyapti, literally "pervasion"). The anumana form of inferential reasoning will only work if you can be absolutely certain that you indeed possess a vyapti; not a concomitance but an invariable concomitance (for example, late at night you hear a loud, sharp, echoing popping sound; you say to yourself, "That must be an auto backfiring because when an auto backfires, such a sound is created." This precisely is where inferential reasoning-reasoning, that is, from effect back to cause-breaks down. This is why in the West many logicians feel that inductive reasoning as such is suspect, that only deductive reasoning can be relied on. The Indian anumana strives for what is called a sufficient ground; the illustration requires an actual-not assumed-observation at all times, holding that no concomitance can be assumed which fails to be exemplified). We in the West have no syllogism exactly equal to the anumana and it is a shame that we do not, because had we such a rigorous form by which to check our inductive reasoning, Bishop Timothy Archer might well know of it, and had he known of it he would have known that his mistress waking up to find her hair singed does not, in fact, prove that the spirit of his dead son has returned from the other world, from, in essence, beyond the grave. Bishop Archer could and did fling around such terms as hysteron proteron because that logical fallacy is known in Greek-which is to say, Western-thought. But the anumana is from India. The Hindu logicians distinguished a typical fallacious ground that wrecked the anumana; they called it hetvabhasa ("merely the appearance of a ground") and this deals with only one step in the anumana out of five. They found all sorts of ways to fuck up this five-stage structure, any one of which a man with Bishop Archer's intelligence and education would have-or should have-been able to follow. That he could believe that a few weird unexplained events proved that Jeff was not only still alive (somewhere) but communicating with the living (somehow) shows that, like Wallenstein with his astrological charts during the Thirty Years War, the faculty of accurate cognition is variable and depends, in the final analysis, on what you want to believe, not what is so. A Hindu logician living centuries ago could have seen at a glance the basic fallacy in the reasoning that argued for Jeff's immortality. Thus the will to believe chases out the rational mind, when ever and wherever the two come into conflict. This is all I can assume, based on what I now was seeing.

I suppose we all do it, and do it often; but this was too glaring, too basic, to ignore. Kirsten's lunatic son, palpably schizophrenic, could show why asking a computer for the largest number short of two is an unintelligible request, but Bishop Timothy Archer, a lawyer, a scholar, a sane adult, could see a pin on the bedsheet beside his mistress and leap to the conclusion that his dead son was communicating with him from another world; moreover, Tim was writing it all up in a book, a book that would first be published and then read; he not only believed nonsense, he believed it in a public way.

"Wait'll the world hears about this," Bishop Archer and his mistress declared. Winning the heresy confrontation perhaps had convinced the bishop that he could not err; or, if he erred, no one could pull him down. He was wrong in both respects: he could err and there were people who could pull him down. He could pull himself down, for that matter.

I saw all this clearly as I sat with Kirsten at one of the bars in the St. Francis Hotel that day. And there was nothing I could do. Their fixed idea, being not a problem but a solution, could not be reasoned away, even though, finally, it amounted to a further problem on its own. They had tried to solve one problem with yet another. That is not how you do it; you do not solve one problem with another, greater problem. This is how Hitler, who uncannily resembled Wallenstein, had tried to win World War Two. Tim could admonish me about hysteron proteron reasoning to his heart's content-and then fall victim to the merely occult nonsense-stuff of popular paperback books. He might as well have believed that Jeff had been brought back by ancient astronauts from another star system.

I hurt, thinking about this. I hurt in my legs; I hurt throughout. Bishop Archer, who hysteron-proteroned me up and down the street, he being a bishop, I being a young woman with a B.A. from Cal in liberal arts-I had one night heard Edgar Barefoot talk about this anumana Hindu thing and I knew more or could do more than the Bishop of California; and it didn't matter because the Bishop of California was not going to listen to me any more than he was going to listen to anybody else, over and beyond his mistress, who, like himself, was so steeped in guilt and so messed up by intrigue and deceit-emanating from their invisible relationship-that they had long since ceased to be able to reason properly. Bill Lundborg, shut up in jail now, could have set them straight. A taxi driver picked at random could have told them they were calculatedly destroying their lives-not just by believing this, although that alone was sufficiently destructive, but by deciding to publish it. Fine. Do it. Wreck your goddamn life. Cast charts of the stars, cast horoscopes while the most destructive war in modern times is raging. It will earn you a place in the history books-as a dunce. You get to sit on the tall stool in the corner; you get to wear the conical cap; you get to undo all the social activist shit you ever engineered in concert with some of the finest minds of the century. For this, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., died. For this you marched at Selma: to believe-and to say publicly that you believe-that the ghost of your dead son is pushing pins under the fingernails of your mistress while she is asleep. By all means publish it. Be my guest.

The logical error, of course, is that Kirsten and Tim reasoned backward from effect to cause; they did not see the cause-they saw only what they called "phenomena"-and from these phenomena they inferred Jeff as the secret cause operating in or from "the other world." The anumana structure shows that this inductive reasoning is not reasoning at all; with the anumana you begin with a premise and work through the five steps to your conclusion, and each step is airtight in relation to the step before it and the step after it, but there is no airtight logic involved in inferring that broken mirrors and singed hair and stopped clocks and all that other crap reveals and, in fact, proves another reality in which the dead are not dead; what it proves is that you are credulous and you are operating at a six-year-old level mentally: you are not reality-testing, you are lost in wish fulfillment, in autism. But it is an eerie kind of autism because it revolves around a single idea; it does not invade your general field, your total attention. Outside of this one spurious premise, this one faulty induction, you are clear- headed and sane. It is a localized madness, allowing you to speak and act normally the rest of the time. Therefore no one locks you up because you can still earn a living, take baths, drive a car, take out the trash. You are not crazy in the manner that Bill Lundborg is crazy, and in a certain sense (depending on how you define "crazy") you are not crazy at all.

Bishop Archer could still perform his pastoral chores. Kirsten could still buy clothes at the best stores in San Francisco. Neither of them would smash the windows of a U.S. Postal Service substation with their bare fists. You cannot arrest someone for believing that his son is communicating to this world from the next, or believing, for that matter, that there is a next world. Here the fixed idea shades off into religion generally; it becomes part of the other- worldly orientation of the revealed religions of the world. What is the difference between believing in a God you can't see and your dead son whom you can't see? What distinguishes one invisibility from another invisibility? Nonetheless, there is a difference, but it is tricky. It has to do with the general opinion, a slippery area; many people believe in God but few people believe that Jeff Archer sticks pins under Kirsten Lundborg's fingernails while she is asleep-that is the difference, and when put that way the subjectivity of it is plain. After all,

Kirsten and Tim have the goddamn pins, and the burned hair, and the broken mirrors, not to mention the stopped clocks. But the two of them are making a logical error, for all that. Whether the people who believe in God are making an error I don't know, since their belief- system cannot be tested one way or another. It simply is faith.

Now I had been formally asked to sit in as a hopeful spectator to further "phenomena," and were they to occur I could, along with Tim and Kirsten, vouch for what I witnessed and add my name to Tim's forthcoming book-a book that, his editor had said, would undoubtedly outsell all his previous books based on less sensational material. But I could not be disinterested. Jeff had been my husband. I loved him. I wanted to believe. Worse, I sensed the psychological motor driving Kirsten and Tim to believe; I did not want to shoot their faith-or credulity-down because I could see what cynicism would do to them: it would leave them with nothing-leave them, once more, with staggering guilt, a guilt neither could cope with. I found myself, then, in a position where I had to comply, at least pro forma. I had to allege belief, allege interest, allege excitement. Neutrality would not be enough: enthusiasm was required. The damage had been done in England, before I was brought in on this. The decision was already made. If I said, "It's bullshit," they would continue on anyhow, but bitterly. Fuck the cynicism, I thought to myself as I sat with Kirsten that day at the St. Francis bar. There is nothing to be gained and a lot to lose, and anyhow it doesn't matter; Tim's book is going to get written and published-with or without me.

That is bad reasoning. Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. But that was my reasoning. I saw this: if I told Kirsten and Tim how I felt, I could look forward never to seeing either of them again; they would cut me off, lop me away and discard me, and I would have my job at the record shop- my friendship with Bishop Archer would be a thing of the past. It meant too much to me; I could not let it go.

That was my faulty motivation, my wish. I wanted to keep on seeing them. And so I arranged to collude and knew that I was colluding. I decided that day in the St. Francis; I kept my mouth shut and my opinions to myself and I agreed to log the expected phenomena, and so I came to be a part of something that I knew was silly. Bishop Archer wrecked his career and not once did I try to talk him out of it. After all, I had tried to talk him out of his affair with Kirsten, to no avail. This time, he would not merely out-argue me; he would drop me. The cost, to me, would be too great.

I did not share their fixed idea. But I did as they did and talked as they talked. I'm mentioned in Bishop Archer's book; he gives me credit for "invaluable assistance" in "noting and recording the day-to-day manifestations of Jeff," of which there were none. I guess this is how the world is run: by weakness. It all goes back to Yeats' poem where he speaks of "the best lack all conviction" or however he phrases it. You know the poem; I don't have to quote it to you.

"When you shoot at a king you must kill him." When you plan to tell a world-famous man that he is a fool, you must face the fact that you will lose what you cannot bring yourself to lose. So I kept my fucking mouth shut, drank my drink, paid for my drink and Kirsten's, accepted the presents she had brought me from London, and promised to watch for fast- breaking phenomena, for all new developments.

And I would do it again, if I had the opportunity, because I loved the two of them very much, both Kirsten and Tim. I loved them far more than I cared about my own probity. Friendship loomed large; the importance of probity-hence, probity itself-dwindled and at last vanished entirely. I said good-bye to my integrity and kept my friendships alive. Somebody else will have to judge if I did the right thing, for I am still not disinterested; I still see only two friends, just returned from months abroad, friends I had longed for, especially with Jeff dead ... friends I could not survive without, and, deep inside me, a subtle factor urged me on, a factor I did not admit to that day; I took pride in the fact that I knew a man who had marched with Dr. King at Selma, a famous man whom David Frost interviewed, whose opinions helped shape the modem intellectual world. There you have it, the essence of it. I defined myself to myself-my identity-in terms of being Bishop Archer's daughter-in-law and friend.

This is an evil motivation and it pinned me; it had me caught fast. "I know Bishop Timothy Archer," my mind uttered to itself in the darkness of the night. It whispered these words to me, bolstering my self-esteem; I, too, felt guilt over Jeff's suicide, and by participating in the life and times, the customs and habits of Bishop Archer, I lost my own self-doubts-or, at least, felt them diminish.

But there is a logical error in my reasoning-as well as an ethical one-and I had not perceived it; through his credulity and superstitious folly, the Bishop of California intended to barter away his influence, his power to control public opinion, the very power that drew me to him. Had I been able to timebind adequately that day at the St. Francis, I would have foreseen this-and done differently. He would not long be a great man; he connived to transform himself from authority to crank. Thus, much of what drew me to him would soon vanish. So, in this respect, I stood in as deluded a state as he. This failed to register on my mind that day. I saw him only as he was then, not as he would be in a few years. I, too, was operating at a six-year- old level. I did not do any real harm, but I did not do any real good, and I debased myself really for nothing; no good came out of it, and when I look back I long bitterly for the insight I have now, long to have had it then. BishopArcher swept us along with him because we loved him and believed in him, even when we knew he was wrong, and this is a terrible realization, a matter that should incite moral and spiritual dread. It does that, in me, now; but it did not then; my dread came too late; it came as hindsight.

This may be tiresome prattle to you, but it is something else to me: it is my heart's despair.