Authors: Michael Dibdin
My only previous contact with Blake’s work had been in a class I took at college. Like a lot of people back then, I’d been seduced by the idea that Blake was an acidhead born ahead of his time. All that stuff about seeing the universe in a grain of sand, we’d been there, done that. Hell, we’d seen it in an empty Coke bottle, a crumpled cigarette packet, a capsized cockroach. We were old hands at relative reality, and although Blake had never actually dropped himself (but it was hard to score good shit back then) and tended to maunder on at times (but it could have been really neat if Pink Floyd had set it to music), we decided in a slightly patronizing way to add the old buffer to our gallery of proto-hippies like Huxley, Hesse and the rest. We knew where he was coming from. It also didn’t hurt that the professor who taught the class was young and hip and, according to the student guide, graded generously.
As I said earlier, it was there that I had first run into Sam. We wrote our final papers together over a thirty-six-hour period, with the help of twelve tabs of high-grade amphetamine we had pooled our money to score, knowing we would never get the damn things finished any other way. Sam managed to scrape by with a passing grade, although only after I had gone through his paper and suggested numerous changes and additions. It was therefore all the more of a shock to see him stride into the hall after lunch that afternoon and launch into a lengthy exegesis on a passage from
Jerusalem
in front of the assembled company. There were nineteen of them in all, six men and thirteen women, ranging in age from the mid-forties to a girl who looked no more than sixteen, if that. So I was doubly chagrined to discover that the one person I wanted to see, and if possible sit next to, was not there.
For some reason, Andrea didn’t appear. No one remarked on her absence, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask where she was. This was a bitter blow. She hadn’t been at lunch either, and I had been counting on seeing her at the lecture, given that attendance was apparently obligatory. That was certainly the impression I had got from Mark when he approached me while I was finishing up my bowl of Rice-a-Roni.
“Right after this we have the reading. Stick around. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
“It’s never too late, they say,” I replied lightly.
His hard, glazed gaze transfixed me.
“Some people, it’s too late when they’re
born.”
Despite this heavy hint, the only reason I stayed was in hopes of seeing Andrea. Whatever Mark might say, Sam clearly had the last word, and he had told me that morning that I didn’t have to do anything except veg out and enjoy myself. But I stuck around, and of course Andrea didn’t show. And once there, wedged in among all the others, I found it impossible to get up and walk out.
Not only did everybody else turn up, but they all stuck it out to the very end, listening attentively in reverential silence. When I was teaching, I’d had a hard enough time getting my students to concentrate for twenty minutes at a stretch on texts with far more to offer than Blake’s homespun comic books, with their apocalyptic bombast and jejune mythologizing. Yet Sam had these waifs and strays and dropouts, not to mention tough sons-of-bitches like Mark, hanging on his every word for almost three hours.
We were seated cross-legged on the floor throughout, as if to dispel any lingering doubts I might have had that Blake was a pain in the ass. Once we had taken our places, Sam strode in, carrying what turned out to be a facsimile edition of Blake’s illuminated edition of
Jerusalem
. He was dressed the same way that he had been all morning, but his bearing and presence were very different. He moved in a springy, feline way, and he radiated confidence, knowledge and power.
The session began with a reading:
I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose
.
Having declaimed these lines in a loud, stagy voice, Sam closed the book like a Bible and looked at us in silence, as though to gauge their effect on us. After a protracted pause, he went on in a deliberately contrasted tone, quiet and husky, as though talking to himself.
“You’ve listened to the word of God. But have you heard it? Do you understand it? Do you know what it means?”
I glanced at my neighbors.
The word of God?
I was thinking. But none of them appeared to share my consternation.
“
DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS
?” Sam screamed suddenly at the top of his voice.
No one answered. I had a terrible urge to say “Beats my pair of jacks!,” but in the circumstances I felt that such levity would be frowned on.
“Of course you don’t,” snapped Sam, answering his rhetorical question. “You don’t have the first fucking idea! Even the blowhards out there who are always ready to give attitude about the decisions I make.
Especially
them.”
He fixed Mark with a glare.
“If it wasn’t for me, you zit-brains would still be hanging out on some street corner trying to find the truth at the bottom of a quart of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty. Think about that, next time you dare question the word of Los!”
I remembered the children addressing Sam that morning as “Los.” When I had asked him why, he’d told me that I should know the answer. At the time, I’d thought he was just being his usual smart-ass self, but now I realized he was right. Los, of course, was one of Blake’s allegorical characters. I couldn’t remember much about him, except that he was called “the Eternal Prophet.”
His introductory harangue over, Sam started in on his exposition of the text. This was unconventional, to say the least. “The Humanity in deadly sleep” supposedly referred to the masses of people living in ignorance of the truth. Commingled with them were “emanations” and “specters,” which Sam apparently conceived of as zombie-like creatures of human appearance but lacking a soul. He, Los the Prophet, had an overview of all time, past, present and future, and was engaged on a program to awaken “Albion”—the “Eternal Man”—from his ignorance and thus bring Time to an end.
This, I think, was the gist of Sam’s speech. Just like a regular preacher, however, he kept throwing in other snippets of text in an attempt to buttress his position with a show of scriptural authority.
“Blake says of these specters, ‘To be all evil, all reversed and forever dead: knowing and seeing life, yet living not,’ chapter ten, lines fifty-seven and eight, and again in chapter eight, lines thirteen through eighteen, ‘My Emanation is dividing and thou my Spectre art divided against me. But mark I will compel thee to assist me in my terrible labors. To beat these hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death I am inspired. I act not for myself: for Albion’s sake I now am what I am, a horror and an astonishment.’
“And in line thirty-five he says, ‘For I am one of the living: dare not to mock my inspired fury!’ Think about it, you guys! Anyone out there who figures just because he knows the truth means he doesn’t need to respect discipline and absolute obedience needs to read chapter eleven, lines five through seven, ‘Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems; that whenever any Spectre began to devour the Dead, he might feel the pain as if a man gnawed his own tender nerves.’ Now you might say, ‘Huh? Specters can’t feel pain, any more than the dead.’ Right?
“Wrong!
These are no ordinary specters! These are the ‘cruel Shadows’ Blake talks about in our text for today. The truth has been revealed to them, but they have rebelled against Los’s System and tried to go their own way. They have been received into the body of Albion and granted the gift of eternal life, but they prefer to ‘devour the Dead.’ And their punishment is to be cast out and hunted down, made to ‘feel the pain as if a man gnawed his own tender nerves.’”
And so on. For all Sam’s talk of disobedience and rebellion, every single person there crouched docilely on the floor for almost three hours while Sam ranted and raved and swaggered and strutted in front of us, cowing us into submission with his lunatic gloss on Blake’s allegory. I tried not to listen, to think of other things, or of nothing, but Sam’s voice kept breaking through my defenses.
At one point he held up the book he was reading from to show us one of the engraved illustrations, and I suddenly realized why the painted designs on the VW van had seemed to familiar. They were all motifs from Blake’s work, airbrushed on to the VW to form a collage. “Blake is very important,” Sam had told me when we met back in Minneapolis. I was beginning to understand just how important he was to Sam, but the key to the whole charade continued to elude me.
Then, at last, it was over. Sam stormed through a final bout of bullying, exhortatory rhetoric, then abruptly turned and stalked off without another word, disappearing through the same door from which he had emerged that morning, and slamming it behind him. For a moment no one moved, as though they were awaiting permission to dismiss. Then Mark, followed closely by Rick and two other men, got up and everyone started to stir.
I got painfully to my feet and wandered outside. The weather had turned again. A cold wind seethed in the woods all around, and ridges of slowly moving gray cloud covered the sky. I went back inside, put another log on the fire and tried to make sense of what I had just witnessed.
In principle, the setup seemed simple enough. Sam had created a religion using Blake’s work as his bible and casting himself in the role of Los, the prophet. What I didn’t understand, no matter which way I twisted it around, was how he had convinced his followers to buy into it. What were they getting out of it, except an obligatory series of lectures from someone whose only distinction was that his interpretation of the subject was even wackier than Blake’s own?
Still, what did I care? None of this had anything to do with me, I reminded myself Meanwhile I decided to solve the more specific mystery of Andrea’s whereabouts. I went over to the door through which Sam had disappeared and knocked gently. There was no answer, so I turned the handle and peered in. What I saw was so amazing that I opened the door and went inside.
The dimensions and the construction of the room were all it had in common with the one I had been allocated, or the two next door where Rick and Andy slept. The floor was thickly carpeted, there was a window with curtains, the air was warm and dry, the lighting bright yet muted. But what stood out above all was the quantity and quality of consumer durables on view. There was a Bose home-theater stereo system right next to a fifty-inch Mitsubishi slimline television. A desk to one side supported an Amerigo multimedia computer with CD-ROM and assorted peripherals, including what looked like a laser printer. A vintage Stratocaster guitar lay on the sofa. The cellular phone Sam had mentioned, an expensive Motorola flip-down model, was on the matching chair opposite. There were shelves and shelves of CDs and videocassettes, and the small amount of vacant wall space was covered in framed color reproductions of illustrations from the Blake canon.
I stood staring at all this in amazement. I had figured that Sam must be doing all right from whatever scam he had going, but I’d had no idea just how sweet it was. How the hell did he manage to justify this kind of lifestyle when his followers were living in boot-camp conditions all around him?
Although the room was empty, I could hear noises from next door, the kind I associated with someone taking a shower. I wandered over to the shelves and perused Sam’s CD collection. This provided another surprise. There was some jazz, and a few reissues of the rock albums we had used to listen to back in Minneapolis, but the bulk of the collection was classical. Wagner was largely represented—there were three complete
Ring
cycles alone—but also Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich. I moved on to the videos, but most of them were blank tapes whose labeling—
Andy (Russell): Kansas City
—made no sense to me. I was examining one of these more closely when I happened to glance to my right.
I had been so preoccupied by all the things that were in the room that I had totally overlooked the one thing that
wasn’t:
a bed. I’d also forgotten that Sam couldn’t be taking a shower, because the water shortage on the island meant that such an amenity was unavailable even to him. The solution to both these puzzles now became clear. While Mark, Rick and Andy had to make do with a single room each, Sam had commandeered an entire wing for his own quarters. The room I had entered was just the first of three in line. In the next I noticed yet more incongruous luxuries, including a pool table and what looked like a cue case mounted on the wall. But my attention was drawn by the third room, at the end of the suite, where Sam stood groaning before a woman on her knees who was enthusiastically blowing him.
Jostling somewhere at the back of my mind was the conviction that the woman was Andrea.
That
explained why she had not attended the reading. She was Sam’s personal sex slave and had to remain in his quarters in order to service him as soon as his performance was concluded. I left quickly, closing the door quietly behind me. A group of about half a dozen people were sitting in front of the TV. They all stared at me as I emerged, and I realized that I was still holding the videocassette I had taken from the shelf.
“Hi, guys,” I said as casually as I could, and headed off across the hall to my room. The contrast with the sybaritic conditions I had just left made it seem even more squalid than before. Setting the cassette down on the chest of drawers, which was still full of Mark’s clothing, I lay down on the bed and tried to rest. But it was impossible. The more I tried to relax, the more agitated I became. After a few minutes I gave up and returned to the hall.