Travels (49 page)

We ended the session.

When I came out, Gary asked me what I thought of the session. I said that it just seemed the kind of detailed fantasy any decent student of Latin could come up with on short notice. I had had four years of Latin.

“I thought it was pretty genuine,” Gary said.

“Gary, I’m a
writer
, for God’s sake. I make up fantasies for a living. I do it all the time. I’m good at it. This wasn’t a past life.”

I certainly believed that this gladiator fantasy had value—as an expression of a way I often felt. I was very clear that from time to time I felt myself in great danger from other people, that I needed to block off any feeling of sympathy toward them, because I saw myself in combat with them and needed to be able to kill them, at least symbolically, without qualms. That kind of psychological armoring was a personal problem that I was aware of. To see it take this form was not surprising.

I didn’t believe it was any past life.

“I don’t know, this was pretty convincing,” Gary said. “Your manner was pretty convincing. Once or twice I thought you were going to hit me.”

I told him I was sure it was just a fantasy.

And that is what I feel today. The kind of evidence that I have seen for clairvoyance or telepathy—evidence that leads me to accept these phenomena as unquestionably real—I have not experienced for the idea of past lives. It may be there. But I haven’t experienced it. No event in my life convinces me that I have lived before.

Or, to put it another way: if the ability to enter into the persona of a long-dead person is a genuine phenomenon—if such things are really possible—it still does not necessarily imply that we are recalling past incarnations. There are other possible explanations.

* * *

One day Gary suggested I try astral travel. “Why not?” I said. I was ready for anything, except more past lives.

Of course, astral travel was equally trendy, but I had had more experience with the idea of “out-of-body experiences.” I had done such things since childhood, when quite by accident I discovered I could shift my awareness out of my body and move it around the bedroom. The most comfortable place seemed to be a corner of the ceiling, looking down on myself. But I could also send my awareness outside, and roam around the backyard, or through the house, if I didn’t mind the feeling that I was snooping on other people.

As a kid, I didn’t think anything about this. It was just a way to spend time before you were sleepy. I assumed that anybody could do it. Sometimes in museums, if things got boring, I would amuse myself by trying to guess what was in the next room. But that seemed pretty ordinary, too.

One summer, after college, I had worked at Columbia Medical School. I had a dormitory room for the summer, at Physicians and Surgeons Hospital. The room was bare, nothing in it. I used to lie on the bed at night, go up to the ceiling, and look down on myself lying in bed. By then I was old enough to think this was odd. I had pejoratives to apply to it, like “dissociative state” and “schizophrenia.” So I stopped doing it.

Anyway, the idea of astral travel didn’t seem too alarming, and I tried it with Gary. It is, after all, just another kind of guided meditation in an altered state. I visualized my chakras glowing brightly, spinning like white spirals. Then I visualized myself leaving through my third chakra, moving up to the astral plane—which to me appeared as a misty yellow place.

So far, so good. I began to see why people so often imagined heaven as misty or cloudy. This misty astral plane was agreeable. It was peaceful to be standing here, in all this yellow mist. I felt fine.

“Do you see anybody here?” Gary said.

I looked around. I didn’t see anybody.

“No.”

“Stay there a minute and let’s see if anybody comes.”

Then I saw my grandmother, who had died while I was in medical school. She waved to me, and I waved back. I wasn’t surprised to see her up here. I didn’t feel any particular need to talk to her.

So I just waited around. This astral plane was rather featureless. There weren’t any palm trees or chairs or places to sit down. It was just a place. A misty yellow place.

“Do you see anybody else?” Gary said.

I didn’t. Then:

“Yes. My father.”

I felt worried. I hadn’t had an easy time with my father. Now he was showing up while I was vulnerable, in an altered state of consciousness. I wondered what he would do, what would happen. He approached me. My father looked the same, only translucent and misty, like everything else in this place. I didn’t want to have a long conversation with him. I was quite nervous.

Suddenly he embraced me.

In the instant of that embrace, I saw and felt everything in my relationship with my father, all the feelings he had had and why he had found me difficult, all the feelings I had had and why I had misunderstood him, all the love that was there between us, and all the confusion and misunderstanding that had overpowered it. I saw all the things he had done for me and all the ways he had helped me. I saw every aspect of our relationship at once, the way you can take in at a glance something small you hold in your hand. It was an instant of compassionate acceptance and love.

I burst into tears.

“What is happening now?”

“He’s hugging me.”

“What are you feeling?”

“It’s … all over,” I said.

What I meant was that this incredibly powerful experience had already happened, complete and total, in a fraction of a second. By the time Gary had asked me, by the time I burst into tears, it was finished. My father had gone. We never said a word. There was no need to say anything. The thing was completed.

“I’m done,” I said, and opened my eyes. I had bounced right out of the trance state.

I couldn’t really explain it to Gary—I couldn’t really explain it to anybody—but part of my astonishment at the experience was at the speed with which it had occurred. Like most people who have had therapy, I had an expectation about the pace of psychological insights. You struggle. Things happen slowly. Years may go by without much change. You wonder if it is making any difference. You wonder if you should quit or hang in. You work and you struggle and you make your hard-won gains.

But what of this experience? In less time than I took to open my mouth to speak, something extraordinary and profound had happened to me. And I knew it would last. My relationship with my father had been resolved in a flash. There hadn’t even been time to cry, and now that it
was over, crying seemed after-the-fact. I had no desire to cry. The experience was already finished.

This made me wonder if my ideas about the normal speed of psychological change might be incorrect. Perhaps we could accomplish massive change in seconds, if we only knew how. Perhaps change took so long only because we did it the wrong way. Or perhaps because we expected it to take so long.

New Guinea
 

I am in a house made of thatched grass in Tari, a remote province in the highlands of New Guinea. Sitting around the open fire are a half-dozen muscular men, naked except for grass skirts and hornbills on their necks and sticks piercing their noses and colorful paint on their faces. Outside, I hear the leathery flapping of fruit bats moving through the night. I am staying here for the next four days and my friend Anne-Marie is asking about Rose, the woman whose house this is.

In the light of the fire, Rose picks at the bloody stump of her index finger while we eat dinner. Anne-Marie inquires whether Rose has injured herself.

“Naw,” says our Australian guide, Nemo. “She cut it off.”

Anne-Marie is horrified. “She cut her finger off?”

“Yeah, she got angry.”

“What about?”

“Hebrew’s new wife. See, Rose is Hebrew’s second wife, and when he told her he was going to take a third wife, she got mad and cut off her finger. As a protest.”

Hebrew, the husband, sits there by the fire. Anne-Marie asks what he felt about this.

“Me no liking this,” Hebrew says in pidgin. He switches to English for us. “Rose better stop this foolishness or I divorce her,” he says, and pounds his thigh for emphasis.

“Want to see the finger?” Nemo asks. “She kept it; you can see it if you want to.”

“Maybe after dinner,” Anne-Marie says.

Rose sulks and cleans the stump of her finger.

“I told her not to pick at it,” Nemo says, “but I guess she knows what she’s doing.”

As I watch this, all I can think of is the carpeting in the elevators of the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.

We slept in the Shangri-La Hotel the night before. It is a very nice high-rise hotel, but because so many travelers to Singapore have crossed the international date line, they tell you the day in the carpeting. You get on the elevator and the carpeting says “
TODAY IS SATURDAY—HAVE A NICE DAY
.” Or whatever day it is. They change the carpeting each day.

Now, one day later, we are in a thatched hut in the middle of New Guinea, surrounded by painted men. A young girl of three or four stares at me solemnly. She is Rose and Hebrew’s daughter.

“How old is your daughter, Hebrew?”

“Eight,” Hebrew says.

This is clearly wrong. “He doesn’t know how old she is, mite,” Nemo explains. “None of these blokes knows how old they are. Doesn’t matter here.”

For some reason this startles me more than the grass skirts and painted faces. They don’t know how old they are? At the Shangri-La Hotel, one whole wall of the lobby displays digital clocks giving local time around the world. The Shangri-La Hotel has twenty-four-hour telex and secretarial services. Here the people don’t know the time. They don’t know their age. Their age doesn’t matter to them. I have trouble conceiving a world where your age doesn’t matter.

This world is not what I expected in any case. I had arranged to spend some days in a hut in a native village. I imagined a semicircle of huts in the jungle, one of which would be used by me. The visitors’ hut. I expected to be smack in the middle of village life. But this hut stands alone. When I go outside, I cannot see any other huts, only surrounding fields owned by Rose where
kai-kai
, vegetables, are grown. There is apparently no village at all, but Nemo explains that the “village” of the Tari people refers to the neighborhood, to all the other, similarly isolated houses in an area covering several square miles.

In fact, each Tari house and field is hidden behind massive sculpted dirt bulwarks fifteen feet high. As you drive down a road, you see only these bulwarks on all sides. With overhanging vegetation, the road is a kind of tunnel.

The ramparts are built for defense, to prevent surprise attacks. For the tribespeople of New Guinea are continually at war, and always alert to the possibility of attack. Like the Sicilians, they live in an atmosphere of perpetual vendetta.

Before we arrived, we had some vague concern for our safety. Nemo assures us there is no problem. Killings are carried out according to tribe and clan; as outsiders, we belong to no tribe or clan, and therefore are exempt from hostilities unless we happen to get in the way. Meanwhile, I have difficulty matching the cheerful personalities of the Tari men with their readiness to kill.

Anne-Marie and I retire to the next room, crawl into sleeping bags. In the light of a kerosene lantern, I look at the beautiful pattern of thatching on the walls. Mice squeak and scamper within the walls. We hear the bats flap outside, and flying foxes. In the adjacent rooms, there are arguments, crying infants. Fleas hop around in the sleeping bag, bite, fly up my nose.

Finally I manage to go to sleep. My last thought is: What am I doing here?

After Greenland, New Guinea is the largest island in the world. Its land mass is roughly equivalent to Sweden. Three million people live here. It is a mountainous country, which means there is great diversity of habits and language. People separated by intervening mountain ranges develop their own customs and language; seven thousand languages and dialects are spoken here, although pidgin is the
lingua franca
.

In fact, New Guinea consists of three entirely separate environments. There is a coastal environment, which is very like nearby Pacific islands, such as New Caledonia and New Britain. Then, in the north, there is a flat, hot jungle region, where life is organized around rivers, principally the Sepik and its tributaries. But the majority of the population lives in the mountainous interior of the New Guinea Highlands, and these people were not even known to exist until the 1930s. Although much has happened in the subsequent half-century, parts of the country remain remote. Here tribal life continues more or less as it always has.

I wanted to be among tribal people, to experience what life was like for man for thousands of years before what we call civilization, and so I have come halfway around the world and now find myself in a thatched hut in a mountain province, trying to go to sleep with fleas hopping up my nose.

* * *

I am here in New Guinea wrapped in layers of romance.

The romance of the anthropologist: I will talk to these colorful natives and learn their ways. Many of them speak English, which is a convenience for the visiting anthropologist on a tight schedule. But I quickly discover that everybody tells me a different story. This is particularly noticeable when it concerns that subject dearest to my heart, me. For example, if there is a fight in some other place, such as the city of Mount Hagen, and one of Hebrew’s relatives kills someone from another tribe, then the dead man’s kin may come looking for Hebrew to pay him back. Under those circumstances, am I, the innocent visitor, in danger? Most people say no. Some people shrug. Some people say yes: if the war party can’t find Hebrew they will kill his wife or his children, and if they can’t find the wife or children they may decide to kill me.