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Prophets

‘Eat your way to consciousness’

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DAY ONE

One afternoon in late April last year, sitting on a bed in the second cheapest motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, staring at the TV and waiting for something important to happen. A welcome-pamphlet lies open on the floor, turned to the page on altitude sickness and a small gold box with its wrapper printed ‘The Ark Bookstore, Romero St,’ squats by the remote control and digs into a toenail. Outside the high, empty air of a north New Mexico spring loiters in the parking lot and, beyond the lot, an idle slipstream of traffic waits for the lights on Cerillos Road before heading south into a thousand thousand square miles of New Mexico desert.

On one of the network channels Geraldo Rivera is quizzing a panel of prepubescent urban terrorists, closing for the commercial break with a hook: ‘What kind of society are we living in today? We’ll be right back with the answer.’ A web of contradictory signals baffles the screen, then surrenders to a Lexus ad. In among the static lies the insubstantial reflection of a woman with hair cut short as Irish moss. The inconstant lines about the mouth and the restive expression of the lips are set in, but the eyes, same dirty blue as the screen, appear unsettled, no more than holes. Those eyes I followed in the rear-view mirror half the way across the state of Texas. They seemed to me more solid then. Perhaps it was just that the light was different.

The border between Texas and New Mexico happens to be where the American West truly begins. All but the southern tip of western Texas belongs to the great plain lands, in geography as well as in spirit. The region still seems raw and new, without past or future, defined only by its current usage. For hundreds of miles across the Texas Panhandle only the monstrous panorama of derricks pumping crude disturbs the tepid sky. Beneath them lies the rich green Texan turf, metaphor for Texan style – brash, resilient, thrusting. In western Texas the air bears the odours of cattle shit and oil and the distant horizon appears as a glittering mineral line levitating just above the highway.

By contrast, all but the most northerly region of New Mexico is old and frail, a jumble of crepey rock and thinning, age-stained soil. Heading west, beyond Amarillo, TX, brittled turf gives out to bunch grass and yucca. The first blue mesas bubble the plain at Clovis, on the New Mexico border. All across eastern New Mexico the range stretches out vast and undulant to the curve of the earth, still open in places and the soil baked dun with red swatches between, like shortbread fingers laid out on a plate of ripened beef. This is where the magical palette of the south-west begins. Further west still the rivers dry up into arroyos, sagebrush replaces bunch grass and the tarry, fecund aroma of creosote bush competes with the smell of sage.

New Mexico towns are less ambitious than Texan towns; poorer too, by and large. Many consist in nothing more than a few mobile homes, a gas station and a single, neglected store selling liquor and animal feed. Maybe there will be a small polymall, laid out in horseshoe shape around a parking lot, with a Philips 76, a Bashas, a frozen yoghurt kiosk and a Radio Shack. Unlike the Panhandle, though, New Mexico is well-travelled. Along every main highway plantations of fast food joints and rest areas and cheap motels have sprung up. Every so often you drive by a WalMart or some other hyperstore strapped to the plain like a torah.

The southwest, and more specifically New Mexico state, is the place all America goes to find itself, just as it found itself in California thirty years before. Empty, yet historically rich, materially poor (forty-seventh poorest state in the Union) and thus apparently spiritually uncompromised, New Mexico has found itself become the baptismal font of secular and humanist America. Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith, is its focal point. Visitors and settlers congregate in Santa Fe to indulge in that peculiarly American pastime – working on the self. The deeper America’s spiritual crisis gets, the more spiritual self-improvement is deemed necessary and the more money and visitors fetch up in Santa Fe.

A greater number of American people believe in extra-sensory perception than believe in the existence of hell. Rolfing, rebirthing and psychic surgery are now more widely practised than rhinoplasty or liposuction. And even though most Americans would like to think of themselves as Christians, there are more alien abductions reported every year than sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. I read as much in an article, and found it easy to believe. In fact, on the strength of the article’s two assertions – more people believe in esp than in hell, and more Americans are abducted by aliens than are visited by the Virgin Mary – I took a plane to Texas and bought a wretched car and drove seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. There was something about the New Age that fitted into the American story, somewhere, or so I thought. And that, in brief, is why I am sitting watching TV in a cheap motel and waiting for something important to happen. I have with me a copy of The Aquarian Conspiracy, as yet unread, a gold card box, a guidebook to New Mexico and a hunch that whatever I find will tell me something about what is happening at the end of the century in which America finally became too big for itself.

Inside the gold box is a collection of cards and an instruction booklet. The booklet invites its reader to pick a card at random from the God Insight Box and connect to the eternal unity through the principle of synchronicity. Baking soda brings teeth up whiter than any ordinary toothpaste, adds a woman on the network channel. I close my eyes and pick a card:

As Above, So Below.

As Within, So Without.

Everything I see

is a Reflection of Me.

A rose bush taps on the window outside, sending an iridescent hummingbird spinning briefly above it before disappearing from view. Already the sluggish heat of the afternoon has passed, and in its place breathes an easy wind. The sky’s so cataracted with dust-filled clouds I can no longer see the sun. Maybe there will be some rain, but most likely it will not rain again until late July or August, when the late summer thunderstorms begin. I am considering naming the tin-can Chevy ‘Caboose’ from part of a line in a country song. Sums up a distant kind of affection, that word, and I don’t like to get too sentimental about cars. Sentimentality is something I avoid.

In the bathroom swigging Pepto-Bismol from the bottle it occurs to me that the insight card has got it wrong. It’s just not true that everything I see is a reflection of me, only the way I see it. The ghoul-face with its inconstant mouth grins modestly back from the bathroom tiles in cubist manner.

Back on the network Geraldo is being shown how to kick box by a Crips girl. I lean over for the remote, sending the gold box sliding off the bed and ejecting a ‘Don’t worry, Be Happy’ card with a smiley face printed around the text. The moment I see that smiley face I know I want my money back.

‘Hello, this is The Ark bookstore?’ says a man’s voice in uncertain tone.

‘I’m calling from a pay phone,’ I reply. I don’t know why I say this, but I often do, even when I’m not. ‘I came in earlier and bought a God Insight Box?’

‘Uh, huh,’ acknowledges the voice.

‘I’d like to change it.’

No answer.

‘I don’t know, it’s something about the insights. They don’t feel very deep to me. I thought they’d be deeper.’

‘Oh,’ says the voice. ‘Okey doke. No problem. Just swing by.’

A thin young woman sits cross-legged at the entrance of The Ark flicking through a picture postcard book of celestial beings. Next to her stands a man, about twenty, turning a gold loop around in his ear.

‘Angels?’ I ask as an opening gambit, pointing towards the book.

The man nods.

‘Uh-huh, I did a thesis. Healing studies,’ replies the young woman, returning to her pictures. The man reads my confusion and says ‘Cool,’ as both a confirmation and an expression of general amiability.

‘The thing about healing’, I volunteer, responding to the signal, ‘is it never seems to end. I mean, I never met anyone who was actually healed.’

‘Yeah, right,’ replies the woman, ‘I think I read a book about that.’ She tips her head to one side and gazes at me with an arch little smile.

‘English?’

I nod.

‘I went to Avebury once …’

The man with the gold hoop, who is oscillating awkwardly in and out of this conversation, introduces his friend as Nancy and himself as Walker, ‘ex-pro-surfer, ex-Angelino, currently member of Mobillus Trip’.

‘That a band?’ I ask. Walker, who does not seem at first acquaintance to be a man of great intellectual fluidity, glances down at his friend for reassurance, but, seeing she has already returned to her picture book, he takes stock and thinks for a few seconds, twirling the loop in its tunnel.

‘Hard-core funk rap psychedelic, with some West Coast hip-hop influences, uh, but we’re kinda dropping those.’

The skinny woman shakes her hair, looks up, ignoring the conversational diversion; ‘I had this dissertation to do on crop circles? I went to Avebury? And it was cool? I saw these things, like black butterflies hovering above the stones? And, like, I just knew that they were in touch with my higher self? It was like through the third eye?’ She taps her forehead.

I recall a newspaper article I had read some time before which had speculated that some of the stones would be removed to make way for a new road and relaid on a green site outside the town.

‘Wow.’ She wrinkles her brow. ‘You know, the Goddess is real strong there, I don’t think they would be allowed to do that. In Avebury, the Goddess is all over the place.’

‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’ I begin a retreat towards the centre of the store.

‘Hey,’ says the woman, tearing a corner from the book and scribbling something on it, ‘Here’s our number. Call.’

In a large aviary opposite the astrology section are stationed a dozen half-bald canary birds perched mute on dowelling rods. A series of Tibetan wind chimes moves in draughts, and behind a blonde wood counter at the back a woman wearing unbleached drawstring pants fiddles with a volume knob to adjust the level of whale song in the background. Another woman with a birthmark sits cross-legged on the floor behind the counter polishing a didgeridoo with a can of Pledge, but there is no sign of the man I might have spoken to on the telephone. A spirit of unease prowls around The Ark, due in part to its interior décor – an emulation of a home improvement catalogue circa 1972, with softly padded armchairs and cushions reeking of patchouli grouped around an Afghan rug – and in part to some ambience more mysterious. The customers, wary as beaten dogs, cling to the sides of the room, making occasional nervous sorties out from palmistry to crystals across a no man’s land of bean-bags. I make for the woman with the unbleached pants, and am attempting a precise explanation as to why the insights in the gold box are a little short of satisfactory, when my stomach gives an unexpected, vertiginous heave and sends a fragment of taco chip topspinning out onto the stripped wood floor.

‘Altitude sickness,’ I shrug.

The cashier shakes her head.

‘I don’t think we can change that Insight Box, now, ma’am,’ she says, as if the taco chip had automatically divested me of all consumer rights, ‘because you’ve already benefited from the Insights. You wouldn’t take a bottle of Tylenol back after your headache was all gone,’ she smiles indulgently, ‘I can recommend a few things for the altitude sickness, though.’ Altitude sickness is pronounced “Altitude sickness” and finished off with a small cough.

Ten minutes later I’ve agreed to purchase an African fetish (vegetarian camel tail-hair), two shards of crystal quartz in different good karma colours, four sticks of Bophuthatswana sandal-wood incense, a Hopi dream-catcher, a subliminal Higher Consciousness tape and a book promising to reveal what my personal task will be ‘in the glorious New Age, as we rapidly approach the “End Times” and the start of a new awakening for all of humankind’.

‘Where are you headed?’ asks the cashier, counting up the value of my purchases.

‘Los Angeles?’ I have no idea.

‘Oh, I went once,’ leaning forward and curling her hand around her mouth, ‘The entire city smelt of faeces.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s a long drive anyway,’ I reply, disheartened.

‘They’re having some real bad drainage problems.’

‘I probably won’t make it.’

‘Well, anyways, come back just before you set off and I’ll recommend some things for your psychic protection.’

‘Oh?’

‘Sure. Bad karma in LA. Whoopsi, here’s your credit card. Enjoy your purchases. And you think yourself into wellness, you hear?’

At the southern end of Romero Street, uphill from The Ark bookstore, is a flat, rusty griddle of iron tracks, switches, sidings and signalling from the old Santa Fe railroad. Some workmen are renovating a clapboard barn by Guadalupe St, which was once, perhaps, the station warehouse. It’s now still possible to drive across the old track to get from Romero into Guadalupe, but sometime in the near future the whole station will no doubt be cordoned off, polished up and converted into a museum of one kind or another, for Santa Fe is a tourist town, and said by those who think in superlatives to be one of the most beautiful spots in the USA. Downtown, towards the plaza and the Palace of Governors, where the Spanish and Mexicans administered most of what are now the states of New Mexico and Arizona from 1599 until the land was ceded to the USA in 1846, Santa Fe settles into a parody of its tour-guide hagiography – all narrow streets and landscaped verges, chocolate brown and pink adobe architecture, spicy historical air. The City Different, the chamber of commerce calls it. I’ve read somewhere that movie stars own more property per square foot of the city than anywhere else on the continent; more than in Aspen, Colorado, more than in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, more than in Los Angeles or Martha’s Vineyard.

In any case, Santa Fe may well fall by its own success. Marketed as a little pearl set on a desert sea, the town is beginning to sprawl. Cerillos Road, where the King’s Rest and most of the city’s cheap motels are situated, has become a long strip of fast-food palaces, sorry-looking lube joints and shopping plazas just like those in any other desert town. The strip even has its own rush hour as commuters from as far away as Albuquerque, sixty miles to the south, drive in to service the tourist business. Over the last ten years the price of real estate has risen so high that many of the hispanic families whose roots are in Santa Fe have already been pushed out to cheaper towns nearby, like Española and La Cienega. And so the town empties of the folk who both (in stereotype) attract and (in actuality) service tourism and fills up with folk who were once tourists returning as settlers and retirees – movie stars, ‘artists’, hangers-on, and, of course, people working on themselves.

After packing the crystals and Bophuthatswana incense sticks in my suitcase, I take two sleeping pills and a long draft of Pepto Bismol, set the Higher Consciousness tape running, open up the book and crawl into bed with the rest of the motel wildlife. ‘Thousands are here now to help the unenlightened endure the spiritual and physical transformation of our world, which is soon to be swept into a higher level of consciousness,’ reads the book blurb. The author’s face smiles up from the inside cover, next to a tributary poem. In the preface she promises to share her glories, before returning to the octaves of home.

DAY TWO

Seven in the morning. The Higher Consciousness tape has run the tape machine dry and is silent. I get up and take a long look at myself in the mirror, but can’t make out anything much different. Yesterday’s nausea has almost gone although I still feel a little light-headed. The altitude has subtely altered the tone of my muscles, which are firmer now than yesterday. I cannot say that I feel more conscious though. The instructions on the tape box fail to explain how long the tape takes to work, or, for that matter, exactly what it does. Does it expand conscious awareness of the conscious or expand conscious awareness of the unconscious, or increase higher consciousness or raise higher consciousness of consciousness or something entirely different? I should have asked in the store.

KIOT radio runs an early morning interview with Kenny Kingston, psychic to the stars, who claims ‘Harry Truman was the most psychic president the US ever had.’ Was that because of the Little Boy? Kenny K. doesn’t say.

Up on the dresser sits the God Insight Box waiting to be consulted. The insight for the day, printed on orange card, in soy-based ink, is ‘I can change any thought that hurts.’

The full weight of this piece of wisdom hits me in the shower. An end to personal failure and social guilt. I emerge feeling like a new person.

At ten Gita comes in to dust. Gita is the Indian wife of the Indian proprietor of the King’s Rest.

‘No work?’ she asks. I smile and shrug.

‘Alone?’ She considers this before adding,

‘Always alone,’ giggling at her own presumption. ‘Wasting time,’ she concludes as though witness to the sad but inevitable path of an anti-social life.

I make a decision to call Nancy and Walker.

‘Is that Walker?’

‘Yes,’ says Walker.

‘I’m in a payphone, Walker. What I wanted to know … what I wondered if you knew is why Santa Fe’s become, you know, a place where people, uh …’ – searching for an acceptable phrase – ‘… uh, work on themselves.’

‘Sure,’ says Walker, unfazed. ‘Ask just about anyone on the street. We’re all working on ourselves. It’s like, Santa Monica is full of surfers, and Santa Fe is full of seekers.’

‘But why is that?’

‘Well, the ocean’s there I guess.’ Walker pauses to give me time to get the joke. ‘Oh, you mean … I guess it’s, like, the energies and the desert, man.’

‘Desert energies?’

‘Uh, yeah.’

I am about to bring the conversation to a close when Walker adds: ‘You could go to a therapist, or an empath or a psychic or something.’ Some woman in Walker’s room starts mantra chanting.

‘Do you know anyone?’ ‘Om’ throbs over the phone like a distant headache.

‘There are, like, thousands of’em in this city. You should check the Yellow Pages.’

To me, psychics have always been the lament of evangelical Christians in suburban neighbourhoods, character parts in police dramas and a counsel-of-last-resort for the desperate. I suppose it had just never occurred to me that anyone could pick a psychic from the Yellow Pages and fix an appointment. My mother saw a clairvoyant after my father died. The clairvoyant told her that my father came out of the spirit world with this message: ‘Don’t drive so fast.’ It’s true, she does drive too fast. And then the psychic apparently said ‘Plus, you have a daughter who’s selfish to the core.’ But I don’t know if mum got the psychic’s name from the Yellow Pages or from somewhere else.

Much though I’d like to believe – I mean I really would – in psychic phenomena, and however comforting it would be to know that my father was up in the ether somewhere supervising my driving, I find it difficult to believe in anything without first understanding it. For example, as a child in a Catholic school, I found the Catholic notion of transubstantiation particularly tricky. I would worry about the finer details: how come Jesus’ body wasn’t all eaten up? Wouldn’t it be rotten after two thousand years? Even now, knowing that belief is based not on literal truths, but on metaphorical ones, I remain confused. Although I don’t believe in them, if a psychic told me I was going to die the next day, I’d probably still be worried.

‘I’m not going to any psychic from the Yellow Pages. You don’t know what you’re getting.’ This for my own benefit as much as Walker’s.

‘Sure,’ replies Walker, good-humouredly, ‘You could go see Chris Griscom. She’s got this school called the Nizhoni School for Global Consciousness and this, like, place, the Light Institute? They deal with the Earth Mother and the Goddess and all? Uh, it’s not psychic though, it’s more like consciousness and the healing energies. I kinda learned a lot from her. She converted Shirley Maclaine.’

With hindsight, I see that it was at this point I came to the realization that I was dealing not just with an unfamiliar set of behaviours but with an entirely foreign inner architecture. It was like being propelled back into that period in adolescence when even though everyone listened to the same music, you still felt that you were the only one who really understood the lyrics or that you were the only one who didn’t understand the lyrics, but that in any case you were alone. It occurred to me then that I was suffering from the kind of numb insensibility brought on by navigating through an emotional and intellectual territory that might be labelled ‘here monsters lie’ on the map of experience. This realization was to bring with it a solitude more complete than my habitual isolation. The longer I considered it, the more it gripped me. How long would it be before I scuttled back empty-handed to my familiar world or capitulated to the demands of the new one and assumed its principles and unconscious ideologies – in short, became one of them?

Mid-morning I order a cup of coffee and a donut at Galisteo News, a New Age-y dive which carries papers from outside the state and is popular with tourists and transplants. One of the local freesheets leads with the headline ‘Whole Life Special’, previewing some sort of New Age-fest to be held in Santa Fe the following week. It continues with the sub-header ‘Connect with the transformational energy of your “real” self.’ On the inside back is a picture of a thin woman with big hair and mascara, and underneath her the legend ‘Chris Griscom shows you how to expand your perception to include the multi-dimensional perspectives of global consciousness,’ with the address of the Light Institute of Galisteo and a phone number.

I have a friend, called Fergus, who lives in New York and is very dear to me. I cannot remember how we met, or where, so there can’t be much of a story to it. In any case, Fergus is one of four people I know who are currently living in the USA. Two have disappeared completely and the third always says he can’t talk whenever I call him. Fergus, on the other hand has promised to fly over and spend a weekend with me while I am in the southwest, but I don’t think he will. In some ways he’s reliable, but in others, he’s just another SOB.

‘Ferg, it’s me.’

‘You still in Texas?’

‘Santa Fe.’

Fergus, I know, does not approve of Higher Consciousness tapes and God Insight Boxes and psychics and angels, but I mention them anyway in the hope that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

‘Kooks.’

‘That’s easy to say,’ I reply, ‘but if enough people believe it, you can’t just write it off.’

A bitter laugh.

‘That’s the democratic principle, isn’t it?’ I’m wounded, ‘Anyway, how come you’re such a cynic?’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Fergus is wounded. ‘This is America, remember.’

‘OK, muddafukka.’

‘Much better.’

‘Fergus, I can change any thought that hurts.’ At that moment a voice comes on the line and asks for another $2.75. Then the phone begins ringing without my having hung up. ‘Hello?’

The voice replies ‘You owe $2.75.’

‘Yeah, I know, I’m just trying to find it.’

‘You owe $2.75,’ says the voice for the third time.

‘Look,’ I counter, needled, ‘I never asked for credit.’

The voice persists: ‘$2.75.’

I hang up. It rings, I pick up, a voice says ‘You owe $2.75.’ It’s still ringing ten minutes later, by which time I’m sitting in room 12 with the TV tuned into Oprah and a collection of compulsive eaters.

This is the start of my lost week.

Five days anyway. Five mornings at The Ark, five afternoons and evenings at the public library on East Macy Street. In between only Gita’s morning dirges – ‘Work?’, ‘Alone?’, muffins, coffee, Camels and a couple of unisom at bedtime. By the end of the week, I have conquered the astrological texts, esp and the paranormal, read interminable accounts of alien abductions, absorbed Tibetan reincarnation prayers, books on angels and Ascended Masters, followed recipes to make the body invisible, interpreted chanting records, xeroxed a chart indicating in diagrammatic form how best to hug a tree, taken advice on organising your own rebirth, skimmed guides to the millennium, noted apocalyptic predictions of the earth changes and begun the long preparation for a course in miracles.

At the end of the fifth day I compile a list:

PATHS TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT (NEW AGE)

1. Intuitive development

Chakras, auras, astrology, channelling, oracles, tarot

2. Creating your own reality

Transformational journeys, meditation, dreamwork, astral projection, brain machines, drugs

3. Transitions

Birth, death, reincarnation, past lives

4. Spirituality

Mysticism, Native American spiritualism, nature worship, the Goddess, the Crone, miracles

5. Consumption

Shopping

and resolve to make this my agenda.