Into Magic (3)

In that article, I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than I was to pretend that nothing had happened to me. Yet I made no attempt to describe meeting my “higher self,” because for a general audience a thirdhand description would be worse than none at all. (Thirdhand, in that they would have had to interpret my interpretation of my experience.) It is one thing to describe a thing to someone who may use that description as a guide or as a trail marker. It is quite another, futile, thing to describe it to those who will then judge its validity offhand, without having had the experience and without making any attempt to have the experience.

Between the end of the seminar and the appearance of my article the following weekend, I was busy absorbing and applying the lessons and the promise I had received from the internal events of the weekend. For instance, my brother Joe.

Joe had died at age 30 in 1979, eight years earlier, and I had never done the mourning his death required. Now I knew that things left unresolved between us could perhaps be fixed. All day Wednesday, beginning at daybreak, as a sort of background to my waking life, I had an image of myself riding the unicorn,  “across the dark water,” flying to find him.

Early on Thursday, we alit., coming down not near another willow tree as I had expected, but on a seashore, barren and featureless. On the sand was a giant tortoise with arms and legs and head inside the shell. This was Joe’s unicorn. A very appropriate image: pulled in, withdrawn, self-protected from a hostile world.

I had been very unjust to Joe, his whole short life. For whatever reason, so many things about him irritated me, and this was long before I became able to cast a critical eye on my own judgments and reactions. Only after he was dead could I see his virtues. The priest delivering his eulogy, a family friend, had called him “the upright man,” and I had realized, in a sudden instant reassessment, that this was precisely what he had been. The things about him that irritated me really didn’t matter. I had lived with the upright man, and had not recognized him. Now I was wanting to make amends, but he was withdrawn within himself.

I said how sorry I was for how I’d been to him when we were children, and how I’d tried as adults (in every way but actually saying it, I realized now) to make up for it. I said how sorry I was for how it worked out. I started to say we’d go now, and then realized that I was talking and not asking. So I asked what he would prefer.

That old, patient, infinitely experienced turtle head came out then, not slowly but all at once, and I embraced it around its neck (which was bigger than I was) and kissed it. I had to first overcome a certain revulsion against appearance – just as in life. I decided we would stay a while, and was still there when I recorded the meeting in my journal.

That same day, I went up to the newspaper’s library, and as I came through the door, one of the women there had said, “Look, it’s Frank DeMarco!” The newsroom budget for Sunday had mentioned that I would have a piece on the Shirley MacLaine seminar. It was my first experience of how much underground interest there is in the subject. Also on Thursday, I made a point of having lunch with Bill Wood, my boss, to tell him about the article that was going to appear on Sunday. I didn’t want him to be blindsided, but I had delayed as long as I could, fearing that he would prevent it from being published. Already, without my quite noticing it, I was putting publication of my experiences ahead of everything else: job, “respectability,” relationships.

On the Monday following, I went to work braced for a wave of criticism or ridicule. Instead, I got lots of reinforcement. Reporters and editors talked to me (carefully!) in the hallways, showing intense but strictly private interest, even fascination. Lots of people were interested, but few were willing to be known as interested.

This one article introduced me to the New Age community throughout Hampton Roads. In 1987, they had never seen a newspaper article give first-hand and favorable coverage to a metaphysical event. A local radio host asked me to appear on his show to talk about the seminar. A fellow journalist at another bureau said she was interested in her inner self, and asked if I could suggest a starting place or a book. Another colleague, an older man, called to say that he and his wife had “a certain amount of experience” in the field themselves, had liked the article, and admired my courage in letting it be published. Again, an experience of people’s trepidation. It wasn’t long before I found out why. The criticism followed in a second wave.