ST. LOUIS BLUES TO CONVERSION

I had just left the Macrobiotic community in the Roxbury district of Boston, disillusioned with Michio Kushi’s vision of “the Kingdom of God,” which he said one attained by proper eating, namely the brown rice (& etc.) diet. True, one did attain an exhilarating state of consciousness when on the #7 (strictly rice) diet, but it was clear to me that what had a beginning must have an end, and if one entered the kingdom of illumined consciousness by “proper eating” then if that eating stopped one must leave it. Nor was brown rice available everywhere in the U.S. in 1967, so it was at best a tenuous illumination. I wrote Mr. Kushi a note as to why I was leaving, hopped in my ‘65 Volvo, drove down to Westchester in New York where I left the car with a friend, and hit the road hitchhiking with a few dollars, a light carry-bag, and a sleeping bag. I forget the highways I used, but I remember snow falling as I left NYC headed for St. Louis, Missouri – and from there, who knew? The part of the city I arrived in seemed sort of small-town and desolate, but I connected with some folks who looked like they were of the Human Tribe (as hippies were sometimes referred to in those days) and was directed to a crash pad, where I found a place to lay my head and stash my gear. In the evening I went to a counter-culture nightspot called The Crystal Palace and hung-out for a while. I met a biker there, John, who gave me some speed in a pill, which I took right away, for I was hungry to get high – I’d been straight so long! It hit me pretty hard – that is, I was tripping – for my system was still fine-tuned, as I’d only been off the rice a day or two. John and I hung at the Palace for a while, and he went back to the crash pad with me, then took off.

There was a young woman in the house, Eve, blonde and friendly and pretty. I was attracted to her at first sight. But I was having visions of sorts, or one might call them insights into the deeps of being. During this time the Doors’ album, Crystal Palace, was in the air, the song with the words, “a Roman wilderness of pain, where all the children are insane,” burning into my awareness as if it were the motto of our lives! Another archetypal evening in the wilds of the howling psychedelic heartlands.

An excruciating awareness rose in me to counter the desire I had for Eve: the very act of desiring rippled the still waters of perfect union: the effort of our souls to obtain the object of our desire was incompatible with the perfection of ontologic-erotic union, and thwarted the realization of it. In the realm of spirit whatever we strive to grasp eludes us! It seemed that the souls must each – and together – be in a state of perfection before they could join in a union of perfection. It was beyond me, and I did not know the laws of being so as to attain this.

I’d intuited these things from various experiences and insights: pondering the vision of illumination held forth by Wilhelm Reich, how that the “genital character” – his view of what the optimally healthy human is – contains bodily the universal energies which are the illumination sages mistakenly sought through non-sexual mystical experience; and combining this Reichian “sexual mysticism” with insight I’d had on acid and mescaline: the lively interaction of a man and a woman within each other’s beings, which did not disturb the perfection of their union in love, gave me to envision how pure and exquisite an interaction could be.

Why at this time it came to the fore of my consciousness I don’t know. Somehow I knew I was an alien to Eve’s heart, that if I tried to enter I would defile and disturb it. Our beings could not be united in love, not in that union of hearts and bodies I sought. This was a devastating revelation, for after half a year or so of celibacy, and high for the first time in quite a while as well (getting high was looked down on in the macrobiotic community as propelling the being into an intensely yin – spiritually feminine, ultra-receptive – state), and after a year of Reichian therapy (dismantling “character armor,” not the orgone box route), my longing for the love of a woman was profound!

O for a woman
‘s love

o for the lightninged
o for the Eros ruby-fired
o for the sweet and wondrous lipped
o for the ontologic embracing
o the fierce succoring

love of a woman.

I could see it was not to be, and this impasse between what I wanted with all my heart and my inability to attain it showed me I was broken deep in the springs of my being. I went downstairs to my little room and crashed in a state of terror at the devastation that was now manifest in my consciousness. I had no downs to knock myself out, and would just have to ride it through.

And then horror upon horror! I could hear in the closed room across the hall a woman groaning in pain – I knew it was Eve! – and two men talking. I knew she was being raped! I had the hunting knife in my bag I’d had with me in Mexico, its tip broken but restored on a grinding wheel to a sharp point, the blade honed keen. Having been in the Marines seven years earlier I was still in good shape, and not afraid to fight, and I wanted to get up off my mattress and route those men and stop what was happening, but I was so ravaged with my own terror I couldn’t move; I had no strength to even get up!

In the morning John came by to see how I was. I told him what had happened; he went next door, but they were gone. He asked around, and then came back to me and told me they’d given her heroin, and when she was incapacitated took advantage of her. I asked him if he’d get me some downs as I couldn’t bear my consciousness. He came back with some a while later, but I had a different plan by then. I’d thought of Ginsberg’s Howl, and the lines in it of some in our generation who, in a state as desperate as mine,

“presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with…shaven heads…demanding instantaneous lobotomy…”

That would do it! A lobotomy would fix my inexorable anguish, would remove the guilt, the self-loathing, the awareness of the impossibility of love! So I asked John if he would find a mental institution and drop me off there, as a lobotomy was what I wanted. I declined the downs as I needed to stay in touch with what I was doing. I had my gear with me; I would not have to go back to the pad. We drove and drove, never seeming to find a madhouse. After a while it didn’t seem necessary anymore; the pain had receded; I could live without a lobotomy. John dropped me off somewhere in the “straight” section of town. I’d had enough of the “Roman wilderness of pain, where all the children are insane”!

I think back, writing of this now some thirty-eight years later, and ponder the care, patience and helpfulness of John, to the stranger that I was to him.

Away from the house of my (and Eve’s) woe, the speed having mostly worn off, I managed to call my sister (I forget what state she and her husband were living in then), and told her I’d had a nervous breakdown in St. Louis, MO (how else to explain my condition to her?), and needed some money to get a cheap hotel room, eat, and after a few days catch a bus back to NYC. She came through for me, and I ate pretty much plain oatmeal for a while, and my system stabilized, and the wounding of my heart withdrew into the depths so that I could live again without a mountain of anguish crushing me down.

Back in New York City, I borrowed some money from the mother of an old girlfriend of mine (which I paid back in a few months), and got a 2-room apartment on 95th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, with a brilliant view of the Triboro Bridge, a fifth-floor walk-up for around $48 a month (those were the days!). I had my sleeping bag and a few belongings, and was comfy. I got a job at Schrafft’s Restaurant as a dishwasher, and then got promoted to coffee-boy, which meant I got a large coffee urn on a wheeled cart that was filled up on lower shelves with pastries and coffee cakes, which I took to office buildings in the area (the restaurant was in the 50s on Madison Avenue).

During my off time I would visit friends on the Lower East Side, do some grass and acid (but always had some Thorazine or Vitamin B-12 or downs to counter a bad trip if need be), and kept a low profile. I remember meeting one of my dad’s old friends (both he and mom had been dead some years by then) on the street in midtown – Nate was his name – part of the Jewish business, legal and social community dad belonged to (he in real estate and insurance), and Nate asked me how and what I was doing. I told him I was a coffee boy at Schraffts’, and doing well. He paled when I told him that, evidently embarrassed at my low station in life! But I was a poet, with a paying job, and content with my lot, and marched to the beat of a different drum than my dad and his colleagues. I remember dad once telling me, “I’d rather you earn one honest dollar than write a thousand poems.” I was for years the black sheep of the family, getting kicked out of this school and that, a wild and unprincipled youth. Around age 20 I’d had a vision – while on organic mescaline (my first trip) – of the depth and profundity of life and of people’s beings, and was on a quest to plumb what I could of these, and the counter-culture seemed filled with kindred spirits, and thus I was pretty much “a rolling stone, no direction home,” 25 now, a seeker, a hitch-hiker, two of whose heroes were Kerouac and Dylan.

On my rounds with the coffee cart one stop was at the editorial offices of Seventeen Magazine. Among the people who came to me for coffee was this petite, lovely young woman, an editor there, Sherry. I was quite taken by her, and she responded with great pleasantness. (I had deeply buried the awareness of my ontologic dilemma, and this was not on my mind.)

I wrote her a poem, and the simplicity and beauty of it stunned her; the menial servant whose palm she daily crossed with silver was an accomplished poet, a seeker in the deeps of being, and a seeker also of her love.

She waited till I was alone one day, and told me she had a man, though she was deeply touched by the poem. I accepted her words quietly, though inwardly set my heart to pursue her.

I was occasionally tripping in the days following, and also writing poetry. Writing to / of Sherry the ontologic dilemma surfaced again in my awareness, with a vengeance. This time it was without the anguish of my failure to help Eve in her trouble (though that pain remains in my heart to this day!), yet by itself it was as a light that shone throughout my being, revealing afresh the broken deeps of my self. I had, in line with Reich's view of illumination, and my own sense of spiritual experience from mescaline and acid awareness, come to believe that I would enter into an experience of salvation – perhaps with a small “s” – through the love of a woman.

But it was so clear to me that to desire a woman, to seek to “grasp” her into my being, to exert any effort to this end, would irreparably trouble the still waters of effortless union, and break the perfection I sought. This may not make sense to some, but it hit me like a death-blow. It meant that I was alone, seeing as I could not effect such union as I sought by any effort, and my heart was too needy for love to acquiesce in that state. I was in the Void, absolutely alone, and without the illumination that gives Life.

I went up into the countryside to see Lisa, an old and true love, and she said to me, “Steve, I love you, but I can't help you.” Back on the road again, death hounding me like a nightmare dog, noiseless but steady.

As I was up in Westchester already I went to Croton to pick up a camera I’d left at a camp for disturbed children I had worked at.

The lady and her family who were caretakers of the place were Christians from Estonia (I think they had fled the Communists). This woman, Lea, was an evangelical born-again Christian. Wouldn't you know, she started in on me. I thought she was a real fanatic, and when she began telling me about her version of Jesus I resisted her vigorously. After all, I taught reincarnation and the spirituality I had learned among the Sufis and Theosophists to my friends, and was not interested in what I saw as retrograde primitive religiosity that was ignorant of genuine spiritual consciousness. Notwithstanding my desperate spiritual state at that time, I wanted no part of this lady's Christian stuff, with her “Jesus died for your sins on the cross” as a constant refrain in her incessant raving. I was getting a headache listening to her. I was a very forceful character, but she was as forceful as I. It was a clash! And while she was speaking, and I on the verge of leaving, a light from Heaven shone into my heart, and with my inner sight I saw the glory of a Being whom I knew to be the Lord Jesus, and He looked upon me in His heart-rending love and majesty, and it was as though He had been crucified – for me! – and yet was alive, similar to what I later read in John's vision in Revelation 5:6, “And I beheld, and lo...stood a Lamb as it had been slain...”

I was struck speechless! She kept talking, but I hardly heard her. This spiritual Light and Glory was what I had longed for in all my searching! This was the Life that lifted one above the wheel of birth and death, this was the Love that made one complete and not driven in the seeking of earthly loves. And all this was in a Person! Jesus! I had been sure it was “a state of consciousness” I attained to through effort, or meeting an enlightened Teacher, or my karmic due. But it was an actual Person who was in Himself Deity! I was thoroughly shocked and humbled. I was so proud, so arrogant, so sure of my own way. It was with me as with a seer (I'd later read – Charles Spurgeon), who said, “I looked at Him, and He looked at me, and we were one forever.” From that moment on, I was His. Love at first sight.

I couldn't even say anything to Lea. I told her, “I’ve got to go!” and on the way out she handed me a little Gospel of John (in the old Authorized Version). All the way back to NYC I was aware of the presence of Jesus Christ. Up to this point in my life I'd never read the Bible, save as literature in college, or a book among other “holy books.” During my conversation with Lea, I had said to her, when she talked of worshipping Jesus, “What is a man that I should bow the knee to him? We are all on the path to becoming Christs!” But that evening, when I got to my bare, simple apartment, in the presence of this One who was to me unequivocally God – while in the shower – I bowed the knee to Him, and wept...for love, for joy, for sorrow...and shortly after wrote this poem:

LORD


How You know

in the river of my heart

flowing through these words

what is too deep for the words to say

sorrow too molten

joy too free

thankfulness too profound

Oh Man, You are my Savior!

What a joy to be in the presence of the Light I had so long sought among the world’s sages, and for this Illumination to be in the friendship and love of – heart-union with – a Person! The little Bible tract of John's Gospel, when I read it, was illumined by Him just as was my heart: the words of the Gospel were one with the Spirit of Him whose presence shone so ravishingly within me! They were His words! And this holy Spirit continued to shine in my heart with an ineffable radiance that bespoke infinite wisdom, love, and power – this was the Person of the living God!

It was this I knew, and nothing else. I did not have a Bible at this time. And I did not know the commandments the Lord gave to those who would follow Him.

I entertained in my mind that I would get a girlfriend I liked, and who wanted to be with me, and we would get married by dropping acid together and joining in sexual union. I thought – in my abysmal ignorance – this was proper and holy.

Two weeks later I drove up to see Lea again, and tell her what had happened to me. I figured Christians were supposed to wear crosses, so I bought a silver one with a chain and wore it about my neck. When she saw me, she asked with some disbelief and dismay, pointing to the cross, “What’s that?” I said, “I’m saved.” And she, incredulously, “How did that happen?” And I recounted the events starting with her telling me about Jesus. She asked if I had a Bible, and said I had to get one. And she directed me to go to a church in the City not far from where I lived.

So I went back home to the city and began more properly to live as a believer. As I read through the Bible I saw a passage that said we were to “submit…to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13), and I realized my drug days were over – no more acid or grass, etc, as it was my new Lord’s will. On my wall I wrote with a marker words from Proverbs, to beware falling into sexual sin with “the strange woman…for her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on Hell.” Any visitors saw these words that reflected my new state of mind. All who knew me were fairly shocked.

I continued in my job as coffee boy. How communicate to Sherry my new state of mind, my new love? The people on the various stops I made (in more than one building) continued to be friendly (who wouldn’t welcome the guy with quality coffee and pastries? – this way before Starbucks et al came on the scene), and they’d regularly say, “How ya doin’, Steve?” For me to just answer, “I’m fine, thanks,” did not accord with the blazing new truth and reality of my being. So I started to say, “Thanks to Jesus I’m alright” or “Thanks to Jesus I’m fine.” It was difficult to do that, as I was very proud, and the disdain I often received upon saying that hurt. I could see that the Self I had built up was arrogant and enamored of grandiose conceits, and this did not want to yield to the Lordship of Jesus, and so it was a battle of loyalties, Self versus Jesus. Nor did it help when people asked me, “What do you mean?” when I confessed Jesus. I really didn’t have sufficient knowledge to give a coherent answer. But as I read the Bible, and the few Christian books I found, I was a little more able to give an answer for my faith. I took to writing Scripture verses in a little 5 X 7 picture frame which I hung with string from my coffee urn, such as, “My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. –Psalm 121:2” or “Hear my cry O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I. –Psalm 61:1”

After a month or so I had the confidence to ask Sherry to meet me for a cup of coffee after work and talk about what had happened to me. I had been going to Rock Church, a Pentecostal assembly in the ‘60s on the east side, and I thought I was getting an idea of what the “normal” Christian life was like, although a lot of the Pentecostal stuff was strange to me. I tried to tell Sherry how wonderful Jesus was, and that He was the Savior of the world, and how my life had changed radically. I don’t think she believed. In 2005 I still pray for her, assuming she is still alive on the earth. So many women I have known and loved! Many of you I still pray for.

This was the spring of 1968. Thirty-seven years later I look back, marveling on the skill, wisdom and power of the Shepherd who undertook to save my soul, but more than these, on the longsuffering love and patience He knew beforehand He would need to extend to me to secure my eternal well being.

O, a great and terrible love I sing.

EXECUTING JUDGMENT

“For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.” 1 Corinthians 11:31

How I got to be sitting in the police chief’s office tripping on acid is the exterior heart of this story. But I will begin by approaching its interior heart.

The year was 1985, and the Lord had two years earlier broken me of seeking the love of woman outside wedlock. The story of that, in the mostly destroyed book of poems, A Fire In The Lake, tells of His using a woman (did He use Delilah of old?) to effect great change – and devastation – in me. From the last lines of the last poem:

My adventure and song are finished.
If I sing and adventure again
it will be as one raised from the dead, Heaven-sent.
For she who stripped me utter was God’s instrument.

This “adventure” was the odyssey of an occultist-poet warrior-priest who fell from his Master's presence into the abyss in the human heart, and found himself in the archetypal heartlands of humanity – a waste and howling wilderness – where he began to search for the way back. He could not fathom the cause of his fall – there was no fault in the Master – and he could not see the snare of deception he had been taken in, and the demons wasted no time in seeking to kill his will to live. The “song” was the story of all this, as well the ontologic-erotic unions with the women he met, for such only kept him aloft over the seething abyss and the gnawing hunger of dread Thanatos lurking therein.

A brief word about “the occult”: its root meaning is hidden (from view), concealed, covered over, coming from the Latin occulere; in medicine it is used as in the terms “occult blood in the stool,” or “occult carcinoma.” I use it in a neutral sense, not specifically referring to demonic practitioners (as common usage does) unless so indicated. The term “occultist-poet” may also refer to the spiritual activities of a saint. The prayers (and prayer warfare!) of a saint as well as the spells of a sorcerer are both in the realm of the occult – hidden from human eyes! – or so is my use of the word in these writings.

Back to 1985. A year earlier, in the summer, I sent my daughter to visit her mom in NYC, and I went up into the mountains – a remote area in the wilderness of the southern Catskills – to fast and pray. After two weeks I became discouraged and came out. This whole business of fasting was at the center of the snare, erected on a foundation of spiritual ignorance, but I could not yet see that. He nonetheless heard my cries, the One who watches over His children, and was preparing a terrible deliverance, snatching me before I plunged over the edge. But that is another story, too far ahead!

And so I went about my life in the small town of Woodstock, New York. Like a lion caged, tormented by its wardens, I went. The cage was my sins – keeping me from the air of Heaven my spirit longed to breathe – and the keepers malign spirits. My closest friends knew I belonged to Christ, as did most of the town, for I would write in the local paper – under the nom de plume Steve Levin – about my adventures in drugs and love, and also of my true but lost Love. In Toleration City I was accepted and loved; in those days I spoke for myself, not for Christ, although it was clear for whom my heart longed. I say I was caged – a prisoner – as I didn’t know how to escape: repentance supposedly required a long fast, which my distorted faith would not sustain. And even when I did fast well, I did not have the inner stability of a sound faith. I must have fasted and failed some hundreds of times. It was when, some years earlier, eating had become sin to me, that I – with grief – forsook the Way.

My 5-year-old cub and I came to Woodstock from NYC in 1978. I had just wrapped up publishing and distributing a journal, The Lightning Herald: Un Journal De Poètes Terribles, and wanted a simpler life for us both, she now of age to go to school. So we settled in, the town receiving us warmly. I did free-lance child-care work (having good human services references from NYC), and then was a Teaching Assistant in a special-needs school.

I continued to write my book. I sought out the local seers and leaders among the Christians, seeking to gain insight into my condition, which no man could speak to, and so I remained aloof from the churches, due to the kind of life I lived, and the heart I had. From a letter to the editor of Woodstock Times in 1979, when Dylan’s newest record came out:

To the Editor:

Why I just broke my record of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming: it ain’t that I don’t love ya, Bobby, and it ain’t that I don’t think you’re true, it’s that I don’t want to hear none a’ that stuff till that train done come and stopped. Maybe you’ll tell me, “Now is the day, and this is the hour,” but I heard them words before, I even read ‘em in the Bible, but I also read about “a kingdom that cometh in power, and not in word,” and that ain’t here, not by a long shot.

It ain’t no use for me to listen, it don’t do nuthin’ for me except to break my heart, tear it between love and my own integrity. Got I any integrity to speak so to you? My own peculiar path I walk, and if any man on the earth can minister the spirit of Christ to me according to my needs, and the needs of my world (is it not mine? am I not its poet?), him I will listen to. But don’t you preachers come beatin’ a path to my door if you can’t raise the dead, heal the sick, and establish your kingdom of grace in full power, ‘cause I’m sick of guilt-trippin’ spiels and words that break but don’t quicken. Try to quicken the stones if you will, but don’t come knockin’ on my door, my heart is as hard as a diamond to anything less than the apostolic reality, and I do make short work of preachers who come preachin’ anything less.

I don’t reckon you to be preachin’, Bob, but rather singin’ love songs, that’s why I broke your record—rather that than my heart. An’ I’ll go my own path through this bloody world, and know what love I can, an’ maybe I’ll see ya at the station. Oh yeah, an’ I got my own song to sing, an’ I know it well.

It was intolerable to me that my consciousness should be that of a meat-head, someone with no spiritual or psychic awareness, existing simply in the baser appetites, such as eating. This is why I got high, so my heart would have a life in the realms of consciousness. Better to exist spiritually in the outlaw regions than not at all! Better an outlaw than a meat-head! And so I lived my life, thinking myself hero and anti-hero at the same time. For how it pained me to knowingly enter and function in the realms of sorcery in disobedience to the worthy King I was sworn to serve. And in this darkness how terrible the ontologic depths: once, while still in the City of New York, I saw in my own heart the reality of the living dead and cried out in a poem, “O zombie I!” For such did I see myself to be (and mistakenly believed): without the life of God, the living dead. To knowingly be such a denizen of the realms of horror! But as I wrote in those days, “Better terrible truth than none at all, or the usual hype and jive.”

What if Dostoevsky
were a poet
after acid
in this day

what if Rimbaud
were alive today
in children of integrity
come what may

what if
Dylan
had a brother
who now took his stand

Un Poète terrible

A title I had given myself was just this, un Poète terrible, a new breed of being on the earth (not un Poète maudit as some suggested I change the journal’s name to), for I loathed the term sorcerer yet functioned in that realm. And hated the powers of darkness.

You who think to judge me, what option would you have had me take? To end my life? Or to exist bereft of consciousness? Which latter would have been an intolerable form of death to me. I found no help among the Christians. I sought the Lord with long fasts among wild dog-packs and bear in remote wilderness. No! Better an outlaw than dead meat! My blood was too hot, and heart too engaged with the worlds of letters and spirits and humans to lie down and die. I would live!

One of the poems of that time:

WOODSTOCK BREAKFAST

Never heard of it? Well, it’s
coffee & acid

lean and hearty fare
for those
with feet on the earth,
hearts in the tower
of vision

on this the dark planet.

Breakfast of fools
and champions.

But in ’85 I was thinking more and more of seeking once again to walk with Christ. I may not have talked about it much – my friends in town were not interested in this – but it was on my heart. When I thought of my ongoing life without Him, and of my young daughter without a true knowledge of Him from my heart to hers, I was filled with a quiet dread. One of the things I sometimes did when I felt my mind filled with cobwebs, and my heart shallow and restless, was to take a hit of acid. And so I sought out two different friends to cop from. In case one was beat I’d at least have the other, as I hated expecting to trip, and nothing happening.

One friend was a street person with good connections, and the other a human services professional, likewise with access to quality stuff. They both came through, and so I had two hits on me.

I dropped one in town, I think at my friend Karen’s house – she like a sister to me, and a fellow poet – as that was where I often hung out, and from there I went to the village green, but when awareness became as intense as a storm I realized I wanted to be somewhere more peaceful.

I drove home some three miles to Peter Pan Farm (the real name of the place in those days), and went to a field near the cottage where my daughter and I lived. She was nearby with another family who were friends of ours. I had bought a pint of muscatel to take the edge off, and sat in the field sipping my wine, relaxing in the increasing awareness.

I don’t remember when I first became conscious of it, but I sensed an evil spirit, and it did not go away. This is one of the problems with these kinds of drugs – they give you direct and immediate access to the realm of spirits. Often I have no awareness of them at all – I avoid like the plague even any hint of such, but occasionally it happens. Once in New York I was on acid and interacted with this man whom I sensed was into deep evil, and even after I left him a spirit’s presence I felt when near him dogged me wherever I went, and I walked down the city streets, actually haunted. It is a terrible feeling being in their presence, the foulness, the malignity, the horror that such an entity has a personal interest in and direct access to my being. And one never knows what evil may materialize under their influence. It is unnerving!

Some of you reading this will of course think me mad and given to hallucinations – I expect that from those with an anti-supernatural worldview – but others of you will know I may indeed be speaking the truth. And mind you, the genre of this piece you are reading is not fiction, but visionary adventure, non-fiction. I mean, it happened as I tell it. Yes, my perceptions and understanding may be off in some things, and that is a key part of the larger story, but you must judge for yourselves if I have my wits about me, and see clearly in these things I say, or no.

I could not bear it, being vulnerable to a demon, and not knowing what might occur. It is not just a static entity, emanating like a street lamp, but a being sworn to my destruction – and under orders from beings higher up, and answerable to them in their horrid cruelty, yes, even to their own – and if we were already in each other’s presence….I was not ignorant of the possibility of a direct assault upon me, and what would be the outcome of that – at best – but me undone in a mental institution somewhere.

I could not endure this infernal creature’s presence in my perceptual field, unpredictable and violent. I had to take up a weapon against it, and there is only one place in all of existence where such are forged, and available to those who know their proper use. Regardless of the grief that may follow – the failure – I had no choice but to avail myself of the armory of Heaven, and get ahold of a Spirit-blade – the one issued to me called Lightning Sword – and go after this spirit. You attack one rightly and they flee.

And so, tripping, while I poured the wine out into the field, I went to my Lord, approaching the presence of His majesty with these words, “Lord Jesus, forgive me and cleanse me with Your blood.” He and I had been through this before, and we minced no words. His little brother come to Him in desperation and repentance would be received. We knew each other’s hearts. (What I didn’t know – and needed to know to walk what Isaiah called the highway of holiness – I would not learn till I was as good as dead, at the end of my own strength and wisdom. This would be some years away.)

The glory of my King flooded through my heart, and I was quickened with Power, the life of Heaven. Against such no demon can stand. I turned to the demon and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and in the power of His Spirit who is the life of my spirit, I command you to go from me.” It was that simple. My words were as sharp and penetrating as a razor-edged blade, but such a blade as would cut into spirits. (John Bunyan called such a weapon “a right Jerusalem blade.”) The spirit left, and did not return.

I drew near to my Lord. It had been so long I was away from Him. What a joy to be approved and in His favor once again! And so I remained a while, rejoicing. Then I received intelligence in my understanding – the Lord communicates with his people in various ways – indicating a course of action He desired of me, and the reasons behind it. I suppose I could also put it, this was my conscience, and my intuitive grasp of the implications of my having taken the acid in light of my having made a profession of faith in the town, however faulty my profession and life were. Even so, it is the light of Christ’s Spirit that informs and quickens my conscience; He is the intelligence of my intelligence.

I saw how my friends could easily say, upon my speaking of my renewed communion with Christ, “Steve, that sounds great, but as I see it this ‘communion with Christ’ is just a part of your acid trip. You got any more of this great acid?” And they could rightly say that, for it was in the midst of the trip I sought and found Him, and the distinctions I would try to draw separating Him from the acid experience would be but sophistries in their eyes, just clever words covering what they saw (or seemed to see) was the truth of the matter. For everyone knows – who is experienced with LSD – that there are many so-called “Christ consciousness” experiences folks have while tripping, and this would seem to them but another such delusion, or peculiar subjective experience.

I saw I needed to do something to nullify the grounds for these conclusions. I would execute judgment on the criminality of the act by turning myself in to the police, thereby condemning the having taken LSD, while leaving my union with Christ inviolate and free from the impugnment of it being acid-based, for it was in Christian respect of the law I judged myself a transgressor.

I was afraid of what might happen at the police station, but it was crucial I follow my conscience, and maintain the integrity – the credibility – of my testimony of Christ. So I told my daughter I was going into town for a while (it must have been 5:30 or 6 in the evening), and that I would see her in a while. I said I was leaving the car, and walking. I walked because it was against the law to drive while under the influence of drugs, and Scripture enjoins I should obey the just laws of the land. I walked the few miles into town rejoicing, and also a little nervous at what might happen. I went straight to the station house, which was on Tinker Street – one of the two main streets in the village – and asked the dispatcher at the window if I might speak to the Chief (which is how we called him), who at this time was Richie Ostrander. Chief Ostrander came and opened the door, and let me in, and invited me into his small office. He said, “How can I help you?” He knew me from around town, had given a talk on police work to the children in my special ed class, and I was on nodding terms with him. Part of my disguise as high-flyin’ outlaw poet was to have my hair cut short in a military style, which I had often sported since my days in the Marine Corps, and to officialdom I appeared Mr. Straight, compared to the long-haired hippies in town.

I said, “Chief, I have a confession to make. I took some LSD, and as I’m a Christian I know it’s wrong, and I’m turning myself in.” He asked, “Are you on it right now?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Excuse me a minute,” and walked out of the office. I think he alerted one of his deputies to be at the ready in case I were to go crazy. He came back in and sat at his desk across from the chair I was in. He said, “What can I do for you? Do you want to go to jail?” And I said, “No.” “Are you carrying any of the drug on you now?” I replied, “No.”

I liked the Chief. He was gentle with me. I knew he went to the Methodist Church in town – I had seen him there when I visited that congregation. So I knew that at the least he had an understanding of Christian thought. (I had seen a number of good men – and later, women – on the Woodstock police force, where kindness ruled in their dealings with the people.) I knew he was puzzled as to why I was there in his office. “Chief, I’ve turned myself in because I’ve been talking about Jesus Christ to people in town – and I have tried to live the Christian life – but I got depressed and discouraged, and reverted back to my older ways, and took the LSD. I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway. When I came to my senses I asked God to forgive me, and He did. But I know I have lost my credibility as a follower of Christ with some of the people in town, such as those I got the drug from, and others. So I wanted them to know that I didn’t look lightly on this that I have done, but knew it to be a sin in God’s eyes, and a violation of the law of the land, and I have executed judgment on myself by turning myself in to the law.”

He said, “You don’t want to go to jail. Will you tell me who you got the drug from?” I said, “No, Chief, I’m not a rat. And these are just street users, not dealers.” He said, “Well, what would you like me to do to you?” And I replied, “Let me go, and I will not do this again. I have learned a hard lesson. I just needed to execute this judgment on my actions, for the sake of my testimony to Christ in town.”

He asked, “Where do you live?” And I told him. He then asked, “Does anyone else live with you?” I said, “Yes, my 12-year-old daughter. I’m a single parent.” He said, “Is she home now?” And I said, “Yes.” He asked, “How will you get home?” I said, “I’ll walk. That’s how I got into town. I like walking.”

He asked, “Can I trust you to go home and not have any trouble?” He could tell I was calm and emotionally stable with him in the office (the Lord’s Spirit was the peace of my heart). He said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll let you go home, but I want you to call me here in the station later this evening, and let me know how you are. Will you do that?” I said, “I will. And thank you for your understanding.”

I left the police station and stopped over at Karen’s house, looking for my street friend, as I had given him the extra hit of acid once I knew the first one I took was good. When I saw him I said, “John, would you please do me a favor and give me that hit back? I know I gave it to you, but I really need it!”

And so he did. As soon as I was out of his sight, and passing on the bridge over Tannery Brook, I tossed it in the water. I didn’t want his or anyone else’s trip on my conscience. And I never took another such drug – imagine having to go through that again! With cause I could be thrown into an asylum! And I would not trifle with God in this.

I was now free. Free to speak of my Savior without fear of the rejoinder that my faith – and experience of God – was simply an extension of an acid trip. And I rejoiced in the wisdom and graciousness of my Lord. I walked home with joy and peace in my soul.

This is one story from a visionary adventure, which still goes on twenty years later, part of A Great And Terrible Love.

PREFACE

The year is 2009. The Tower of Vision, in centuries past occupied by poet-seers, has been empty so long the people have forgotten it exists.

Dangers lurk everywhere: economies falter and many middle class go homeless; multitudes – even Americans – suspect their governments (often rightly) of ill designs against them; fanatics of various religions urgently desire to trigger their own Armageddons, the greater the better – desiring especially biological, chemical, or nuclear events – human life cheap in their eyes. One thinks of the lines by Yeats.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

One thinks also of Tolkien’s vision of the encroaching shadow of Mordor, but there he had Hobbits in the wings, with elves, dwarfs, and men to stand against the evil. What do we have? Fiction-holes to bury our heads in.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

will never be written

because, first, who cares
for even a great sprawling fiction
since there is not one Dostoevsky alive
to fill it with living vision

and then, again, who cares
for but another fantasy
however shot thru with genius
in these archetypal days of our reality

no, a novel is a plaything
of genius, and peoples
to make up for the absence
of an epic Poet

only the actual matters
anymore, only the truth
of these our lives & this our world
has any relevance whatever

and it is in the works

THE GREAT AMERICAN POEM

Yet it is clear poetry cannot sustain the modern attention, so a “great American Poem” would not pan, though perhaps a marriage might be arranged, where prose unites with poetry (a body of work embedded with poems as a sturdy sword-hilt with gems). Only to have the tower truly occupied!

This to introduce a story. Not a fiction, but visionary adventure non-fiction. The history of the protagonist-cum-anti-hero shown in a series of scenes, revealing the character of one we will follow for some years through all manner of madness, love, occult combats, spiritual adventure, eventually moving to the present, the cutting edge of which can be seen now in Lightning Sword: Journal of the Apokalypse.

As they are formatted in html more stories will follow.