The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle & Terry Castle

Author:Terry Castle & Terry Castle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

A man is looking for a lost key. Another man comes to help him look. They can’t find it. The other man says, where did you lose it? The first says in the house. The other man asks, why then are we looking for it here in the garden? Because the light is better here, says the first.

Now it’s true, under normal circumstances, being asked to embellish (“without censorship”) on a kooky little wisdom-tale like this one should have been right up my alley. (Ooh…yeah…I get it…Wow. The LIGHT is better here……) But I was dumbstruck. All I could think of was that Keith, still smiling beatifically at me, was amazing—warm, trippy, charming, colloquial, nothing like the person I had imagined or (hah) that my evil, square, and desiccated team of mock-interviewers had prepared me for. A Sufi parable? The real riddle, perhaps, was who was the stunning “Keith”? A shaman? A helper from another realm? Some sort of magus figure—like the one in the John Fowles novel or Hesse’s Glass Bead Game? He obviously possessed some refined and uncanny magic. For a man of his age, I noted, he had smooth well-preserved skin and fantastic wet dark eyelashes. I was frankly astonished, yet at the same time felt relaxed with him, in an almost metaphysical sense. As he continued looking deeply into my eyes I experienced a hot rush of gratitude: he acted as if he knew me—down to the squalid core—and was nonetheless prepared to cherish everything about me.

Granted, when it came, my answer was girlish and muzzy—some not very good made-up thing about how the light was “like life” and the house was “death.” I was trying to sound spiritual and deep. No doubt he sensed the spuriousness, however, for with what I immediately took to be yogic omniscience he told me that I had not yet brought all of my intuitive “power” to bear on the situation—I wasn’t really opening up to him. My psychic energy, usually febrile, was somehow blocked.

Me? Not using my intuitive power? Not opening up? Blocked? However gently proffered, this criticism of my visionary faculties could not go unmet. Though dimly aware I still wasn’t exactly responding to the Sufi thing, I began blathering away fairly wildly on the theme of “blockage” itself—how it reminded me of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich’s concept of armoring: the harmful binding of orgasm energy—“orgone,” in Reichian lingo—that modern society supposedly produced in human beings, resulting in war, destruction, neurosis, and Having-a-Pole-Up-One’s-Ass on a global scale. I had recently seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dusan Makaveyev’s X-rated 1970 documentary about Reich, and had been much impressed. As far as I was concerned, WR was a martyr in the struggle for sexual enlightenment. (The Food and Drug Administration imprisoned him for quackery in 1956! He died in prison! How grotesque! How sadly typical of our fucked-up country!) To channel the precious orgone in a healthful manner (or so I seemed to recall from several eye-popping scenes

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