Campfire songs are suggested, and I don’t see why not. We are too isolated for anyone to hear us. And it is very late. The moon is a high, hard rind through sweating cedars. Hives prickle my neck from all the fungi around. The city is far away, only the occasional magnesium flare through hemlock and Douglas fir. Something in our small fire cracks like a pistol shot. I’m a bow-legged chicken, I’m a knock-kneed hen, Felix sings, his lisp almost indistinct, and the rest join in, even The Kevster, who during the past few weeks has taken to lurking on the perimeters with a sneer perma-pressed onto his face. Never bin so happy since I don’t know when. Except for Pudding, who stares at the sky, as always, as if waiting for a signal.
Pudding is the only one I’ve never been able to get through to.
My troubles began almost a year ago, with the publication of an obscure scientific document, a paper rife with antiquated language and reactionary ideas (the lingua franca of fear). Science is on thin ground these days and particle physicists were up in arms: “[We’re] damned if we’re going to stand by and let a handful of rogue advocates of quantum quackery overrun quantum mechanics, a field of research that could lead, finally, to a Theory of Everything” (Brisbane Convention Report, 2011, p. iv).
Snake oil was mentioned. The phrase half-baked was deployed. String theory was draped around the text like rolls of crepe paper livening up a fiftieth-anniversary party.
You would have been hard pressed to even find a mention of the report online until a Danish newspaper ran an inflammatory series of editorial cartoons on the “debate.” Deepak Chopra shoving a Dr. Seussian Schrödinger’s cat into a microwave oven. Anthony Robbins® putting it “doggie style” to physicist Niels Bohr, who knelt on a bed of burning coals. Uri Geller dining on Einstein’s entrails à la The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover using a large bent spoon. Esoteric “European” humour at its worst.
But the Internet being what it is, the gist of the argument was soon translated into Amerikan. It was at that point that things took a turn for the worse.
Our belief in human energy fields, in mind-over-matter responses to our increasing health problems, threatened not only the physicists but those in the field of conventional medicine. Powerful alliances were formed. 1 They unfortunately had, have, an erroneous understanding of bioenergetics: “The belief that human consciousness controls reality,” the scientists scoffed. Controls is a misnomer. Manipulates is closer; defines would be more accurate.
Was it altogether too simple-minded of me to ask: Why can’t we just get along? (“What the Heck?” promotional brochure, March 2012.) Apparently so. Because it was soon afterwards that the death threats began.
Dodge has brought his girlfriend with him. I’m not convinced this was a good idea. Sam is a slippery one, very all-Amerikan in her locution, yes ma’am, absolutely ma’am, and with a look on her face some may describe as beatific, but that strikes me as bland. Her energy field is like a clear-cut, with no remaining signs of life, not even a termite.
She sits in a patch of sun filtered through fern and cedar, telling Felix a story, the light glinting off her wedding finger, Dodge hovering around them like some kind of manservant. She wears what is called a “purity ring” and has persuaded Dodge to wear one as well. To put it bluntly, the rings are a symbol of sexual abstinence, although Sam didn’t put it that way. She just held it up in front of my face and said, “True love waits.” Then she patiently told me, as if I were a small child, that it was a reminder of the commitment she had made to God to remain pure until marriage. I should be relieved, but somehow I find this offensive. Isn’t Dodge good enough for her? Is this what constitutes sex education in Amerika today?
So much hard work over the years, so many appearances made while hopped up on antihistamines or fighting rogue waves of menstrual cramps, scalp itchy with excess sebum, wondering when I last had the opportunity to take a shower. Did I ever let on that I was suffering? You succeed through terrorizing the negative impulse (My Emotional Fatwa, Golden Agouti Press, 2009, p. 64). This is, I contend, because you’re never going to stop the rain by whinging. 2
I clap my hands and announce that it’s time for our daily Pronouncements. Time to break up this little idyll.
The word pure really irks me. “Gets my tits in a knot, Alice,” as my friend Ingrid would say.
We sit cross-legged in a semicircle. A bird demonically shrills somewhere in the forest canopy. “I am striving to overcome the urge to snog Sam until my lips fall off,” pronounces Dodge. 3 The Kevster makes a rude noise, and Sam covers her face with her purity-ring hand.
“That is so not a serious Pronouncement,” says Cinders. She is the follower who has taken my teachings most to heart. The Kevster likes to refer to her as Rulebook.
“I am striving to stop eating so many high-fructose, high-glucose snack foods,” says Cinders, who struggles with body image. During Pronouncements we are meant to pledge to overcome something standing in the way of our future happiness.
“I am striving to overcome doubt,” says Sam, somewhat cryptically in my opinion, but I don’t ask, “Doubt about what?” You could say that I am striving to be a more tolerant person.
Sam is older than Dodge by about six years. Technically, at nineteen, he is still a teenager, although legally speaking she cannot be accused of robbing the cradle. Still, there is a way I have found her looking at me at times, woman-to-woman you could call it, that is unsettling.
“I am striving to control my bladder at night so I can have a sleepover at Dexter’s place when we get home,” says Felix. I grant him an encouraging wink. Felix is reassuringly goal-oriented. That we may not be going home anytime soon would not be useful information to impart to him at this point.
The Kevster remains silent. Pudding as well, but that goes without saying.
The worst accusation from the scientists, on a personal level, was that we were “confusing bioenergetic fields with the ether.”
If our energy fields don’t exist-what is this? This luminous face turned skyward, pale irises, the flecks in them wildly kaleidoscopic, her skin, that way of looking. Pudding has such an intense aura. There are times I have witnessed static crackling blue from her scalp, her fine hair rising and quavering like the tentacles of a sea anemone. It is as if she is communing with the unseen particles in the air around us, decoding them into her private language somewhere deep in her hermit kingdom, in her Arkadia.
I have far from given up on what quantum mind theory may be able to do for Pudding. In the TRIUMF cyclotron, the gigantic particle accelerator at the university, various matters and antimatters collide to release pure energy in the form of gamma rays. The subatomic particles travel in the accelerator in a spiral, and a spiral is the primary geometric form in which thought waves travel. If we could get within shouting distance of these gamma rays and direct them to interact with Pudding’s already overactive energy field, perhaps they could unlock her from inside her private realm. 4 The radiation issue remains unresolved. But it is a risk I’m willing to take.