. . death. Arrgh! How Wiggs Dannyboy hated that word.
His reaction to “death” was neither terror nor resignation, avoidance nor morbid longing, shock nor denial, but, rather, fury. Controlled fury. Challenge, if you please. Combat. Wiggs was at war with death and had vowed never to surrender.
The declaration of war had been drawn up while he was in Concord State Prison. He had been transferred to Concord from a federal penitentiary in the Midwest at his own request after the incident in which a guard had poked out his right eye with a matchstick.
In the investigation that followed the blinding, it was revealed that Dr. Dannyboy had been subjected to almost continuous physical and mental harassment during his months in federal custody. The media, which, while it may have condemned Dannyboy's life-style and philosophy, had always found him good copy, fanned the story into a scandal. In addition, there was the threat of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. The government was hardly in a position to deny the request for transfer.
At Concord, Wiggs was near friends, mavericks who had managed to remain on the Harvard faculty or who had entered one or another of the “New Age” businesses that flourished in Cambridge and Boston. His pals kept him supplied with books from the university library and with the latest journals and papers in his fields of interest: anthropology, ethnobotany, mythology, and neuropharmacology. They paid him gossipy visits, monitored his health, and delivered his occasional contributions to The Psychedelic Review. They smuggled out the half-frozen dinner roll into which he had freshly ejaculated, rushing it to the parking lot where his ovulating wife (who was eventually to jilt him for a more available partner) received it and immediately did with it what she had to do: the origins of Huxley Anne.
It was, despite the many difficulties of prison life, a reasonably productive and stimulating period. There was plenty of time for contemplation, however, and Dr. Dannyboy used it to review what had been accomplished in the sixties, by himself and like-minded others. Then, he placed those accomplishments within the context of history, not merely the official history, with its emphasis on politics and economics, or the more pertinent history of the various ways that we have lived our daily lives since we first crawled out of the ooze or swung down from the foliage, but also the higher, more complex history of how our thought patterns, our nervous systems, our spiritual selfhoods have developed and changed.
This much Wiggs concluded: illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition; in every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals, living their lives upon the threshold, at the gateway of the next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization is probably still hundreds of years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of these elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole, thereby laying a significant patch of brick in the evolutionary road. He thought of the age of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. ("The Celts would have produced a major culture, too,” he told Priscilla, “if the Church hadn't got hold o' them first.") Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1971.
Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age, Wiggs admitted. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
Moreover, Wiggs believed that the American womb eventually would bear fruit. The United States was the logical location of the next enlightened civilization. And since the sixties phenomena had at least prepared the soil — many of the individuals who had successfully mutated during the sixties were carrying on, out of view of the public eye — the next flowering was probably no more than a decade or two away.
Even though, in social terms, the sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone, and Wiggs was proud that he had been able to lend a helping hand in ushering in that dizzy period of transcendence and awareness (transcendence of obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of inner reality). Still, he was dissatisfied. Anxious. Unhappy. It wasn't prison or the blinding that was bothering him, they were small sacrifices to make for what had been accomplished. It was something else, something that had haunted him since boyhood, undermining his every triumph, dulling his ecstasies, amplifying his agonies, mocking his optimism, spitting in his ice cream.
It was, he came gradually to realize, the specter of death.
If a person leads an “active” life, as Wiggs had, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just above his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we “live on” in the memory of the lucky ones still kicking.
Wiggs wasn't buying that “live on in memories” number. He had typed himself a small footnote in academic and social history. More important, he had, in his opinion, contributed to the evolution of consciousness in his time. But that sort of immortality was a hollow prize. If what he had accomplished in his “electronic shaman” days in the sixties was destined to have an impact on the future, he wanted to be around to enjoy it.