V. Jekyl and Hyde

V. Jekyl and Hyde

At this point I note the necessity of backtracking a bit, to review  my mind the state vis a vis the para-psychological.  As has been discussed at length in previous chapters, I was in touch with numerous astral entities  who gave me constant counsel throughout my years in Idaho, and during my stay at the Big U.  I had become less and less interested in the phenomenological aspect of this super-mundane connection, but I had sporadically kept up my meditations, and had continued to receive  advice, comfort, and prophecies sufficient in weight, helpfulness, and accuracy to sustain my belief in the reality  of this elevated dimension of my life.  Because of the intense disappointment of my failure to realize my dream of acquiring a university position, after I came back to Idaho, I turned against God; I doubted  the veracity of my para-psychological insights.  I was extremely pissed.  

My biggest bone of contention with God was over the fact: that I had been assured time and time again, by my astral counselors, that I would in fact get a job, not to worry, it was my destiny, and the Great White Brotherhood was looking out for me.  When none of this came true, “Ba-frikkin-loney!” I said. I not only came to despise those impressions that had been so positive, but I began to feel like a fool for ever having believed in them; I actually began to think that I had fallen prey to hostile astral influences whose purpose it was to confound and undermine the best years of my life.  It was all a hoax, a delusion I had perpetrated on myself, a fantastic cosmic joke of  which I was the unwitting butt.  

Of course, this lapse of faith led me to the same cosmic paranoia which had tortured me way back in Santa Cruz, nearly 20 years ago.  I became, once again, tormented by an hysterical fear of death, and a dark pessimism concerning my fate, my future, and the existence of my soul.  This condition lasted for a terrible two years, but when I started doing better, working with my students, and with my school, I developed a renewed interest in spirituality and began reading  pertinent material again, trying to resuscitate my lost beliefs.  

A turning point came  at the time of Tina's legal problems over the publication of her first book.  It is not possible to give any details concerning this problem; suffice it to say that one of the key persons in the book was trying to block its publication on the grounds of a violation of privacy.  This was extremely traumatic for all, since these arrangements had been solidly made by a verbal contract years before the book was finished, and now, well after the fact, this person was trying to destroy five years work. Not only did the problem come between Tina and her entry into the literary world, it ended at a longstanding friendship, one of the most important relationships in her life.  It was during this crisis, that I began to investigate Buddhism  and Magic simultaneously.  I prayed to the Saints, and worked at  extending my power and will into the astral fabric. I'm sure that Tina's work with her lawyer was more significant in the positive outcome, than my efforts with astral projection; nevertheless, I felt a real, honest  connection with superhuman forces and intelligence, once again, and I began to believe that there was something there after all.  

This led to fresh forays into  meditation and other religious practices  which gave me even more confidence in the  metaphysical beliefs which I had so recently abandoned.  I began a new series of musical compositions on mystical subjects, and once again called on higher powers for aid and insight.  I opened myself once again to the subtle influence of intuitive  intelligence on my thinking, and listened once again  to the speech of invisible lips of  written in translucent letters on the movie screen of my higher mind.  

I wish I could say that all these developments were sweetness and light--they were not.  Looking back on it now, and I can see that my increased spiritual sensitivity somehow resulted in a more pronounced hypersensitivity to the types of social allergies that had made my aspergers condition so difficult to live with.  It was about this time that we first learned  of the existence of Asperger’s Syndrome, (it had been first clinically recognized and labeled only a few years before (1994)), and although it was a great comfort to finally have a sympathetic  explanation for the heretofore inexplicable failures  that had plagued me my entire life, I really had no idea what to do with this information.  Instead of using this knowledge to create positive change in my behavior, I used it, rather, to justify and excuse my behavior; if anything I got worse rather than better.  I remember with  particular chagrin, nay, humiliation, fits of temper I began to indulge in with Tina. 

Remember that, at this time, she too is getting worse; she is becoming more sleepless, more irritable, and more intolerant of me.  The knowledge of aspergers had changed her  attitude toward toward me as well; at first, she also took some comfort in having an explanation for my failures, but eventually she began to look on me as irreparably damaged goods, with no hope of restoration.  This made her even more impatient with my antic behavior, which impatience enflamed, even more, my resistance to change.  I became even more entrenched in the attitude that certain obnoxious behaviors were simply part of my personality  which I was powerless to change, indeed unwilling to change. I was terrified of change, because, I thought, in changing I would give up something of my true self, and become an empty shell of a man, with no passion, with no intensity, with  no substance.  

Let me underline this one point --I honestly thought that throwing a short temper tantrum, raising my voice, and indulging in abusive language, over any imaginably trivial thing, was not only a personality trait intimately linked to my essential self, but, on that account, that it should not be taken personally, it didn't mean anything, and should be easily forgiven. Tina explained to me on more than one occasion that there was scientific evidence to prove that when a voice was raised beyond a certain decibel level no information except the volume of the voice could be taken in; she tried to make me understand that all she heard when I yelled at her, was that I was yelling at her.  Would to God I had heard her tell me this.  Would to God I had been able to believe it.   

This was a central component in our marriage's dysfunction: I felt that my fits of temper were transitory, not deeply felt, and therefore insignificant, and ultimately forgivable-- that this behavior never touched the essential connection between us; meanwhile Tina was being worn down by it, bit by bit, and  more and more unable to compensate for the damage I was doing to her.  To both of us it was like there were two of me: one, the sensitive, the aspiring artist, whose lofty affections were worth, contained, all things to my loved one, whom I revered, nay, worshiped as an idealization of the perfect woman, the perfect mate, the perfect artist; two, the mad maniac who was capable of vicious attacks in private or, worse, in public, with no sense of fair  play, propriety, or temperance.  

It was not that I was one or the other, it was that-I-was-both that drove  Tina crazy; she could not handle the fact that at one moment I might be speaking to her tender words of deep affection and admiration, comparing her with the greatest minds of the 20th-century, and praising her work as some of the greatest writing ever created, and then in the next paragraph berating her as a blithering idiot incapable of  performing such simple  tasks as writing down the amounts of checks written downtown, or putting up the windows in the car.  I honestly thought that these  opposite sides of myself could exist harmoniously side by side-- that there was no contradiction, only complexity, only, ultimately, interest. What a jerk.  What an idiot.                 

Anyway, as this Jekyll and Hyde syndrome continued to develop, the way was being prepared for my move to Alaska, and Tina's move to San Jose.  It seemed that  the dark Star of our destinies was setting, that my astral advisers had proved true; our dream of happiness  and success was a mere nine months away.  Only  I did not know about Dan Tucker, and Tina did not know about bipolar manic depression.