He came to the conclusion that the future of humankind lay elsewhere. John Allen began to believe in getting off.
That night at Arcosanti I am lying in bed watching the stars in the Arizona sky, thinking about the ghostly face peering through the half-light from inside Biosphere 2. If the earth must crumble into a poisoned miasmic shell, then I want to crumble with it. Rather that than be shut into a sterile pod and blasted into space to live a simulation of a life on some boiling sulphuric planet. Next morning, driving away from Arcosanti I recall the feel of the thick grey air over the pale brown sea at Dangriga, and I recall the coral sun creeping along the Canyon del Oro and by the time I have reached the freeway I have formed the conclusion that Ray Lightburn, John Allen and their like are prophets of doom, and that, god knows, those are the kind of prophets we least need.
There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute (#ulink_5f5df1b6-9819-568e-91b4-7c34927be39d)
‘Everything you are, except hydrogen, is made of stars.’
Very Large Array Telescope Visitor Center,
Datil, New Mexico
Polarized light drops silver contours around the rows of date palms. The dimming sun over Camelback Mountain is bloody with colour. A Latter-Day Saints temple across the street dissolves into gobbets of rosy haze. It’s magic hour in Mesa, Arizona, and I’m in a terrible mood. The mood stole up on me a couple of days ago. I don’t know why it’s with me, nor how to make it go. For the time being we are reluctant fellows. An endless stream of inner witterings has kept me awake at night, invading my dreams, tick tick ticking over breakfast. Cheerios, toast, black coffee. Black. Coffee. And the time is … sugar, sugar and milk. Nip nip nip. Buzzzzzz. Noyz noyz noyz. Tune out, turn off, drop dead. A terrible, terrible mood.
I’m sitting in the Paradise Cafe reading Arizona Light, the state’s premier New Age freesheet. One item catches my attention, an article on the back page about the rise in reported alien abductions. The article tells the story of a Sedona woman who claims her foetus was taken from her by some unknown thing when she was out walking in Secret Canyon near Sedona. It was an overcast day, but she noticed a very bright light through the trees, almost as if a shaft of brilliant metal were being lowered to the ground. After watching it for a while she began to feel she was locked in some strange form of time warp. Alarmed she turned back towards the mouth of the canyon, but however hard she walked, the scene around her remained unchanged. She could hear her own breathing as if it were the breath of a giant. She woke some hours or minutes later lying on the path with a peculiar feeling of emptiness, a little bruised, but otherwise ostensibly none the worse for wear. On a routine visit to her doctor she discovered she was no longer pregnant. Aliens had taken her child, and implanted a chip in her brain to ensure she would never recall in detail what had happened to her.
‘Hi.’ A woman in beads puts her glass of juice down on my table. She glances at the copy of Arizona Light. ‘Heading to Sedona?’ Sedona is to Arizona what Santa Fe is to New Mexico, only more so. There are more New Agers in Sedona than in the whole of the rest of America, bar Santa Cruz and Sausalito, California.
‘Driving?’ Her hair smells of Revlon Musk.
‘Hmmm.’ I feign indifference in the hope she’ll have the grace to leave me be.
‘Going up tomorrow?’
A minute ago I had no plans. Now it seems as though the plans have come to me.
‘Like to share a ride?’ She sits down in the chair opposite and begins sipping her juice.
‘Uh …’
‘Great, nine o’clock outside here?’
Nine o’clock it is then.
Nine o’clock sharp the next morning, the woman in beads looks as though she’s already been up hours. Caboose and I, on the other hand, are not good in the mornings. I am generally in a foul temper of one kind or another before ten and Caboose requires consideration until its engine has been running a while. Today it can barely cough up sufficient horsepower to get us past the University and on to the Paradise Cafe, even though I’ve had the decency to fill it up with super unleaded. The ingrate has also switched on one of its warning lights, the one with a picture of a triangle on it. Damned if I have the least clue what that means. Less troublesome to ignore it.
Half an hour on the road and it becomes clear that the woman in beads has two modes of conversation: interrogative and mystical.
‘You been to Sedona before?’
I shake my head.
‘Sedona is the most magical, powerful place in the world.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘After Lhasa. Have you been to Tibet?’
I shake my head
‘One of the most amazing experiences of my life. And the monks have been put down and suppressed. Like, you must go. You English?’
And so on. Eventually I ask her to read to me from my guidebook.
Sedona, Arizona is an isolated miniature sprawl in the upland Arizona desert, trapped picturesquely between scarlet, highwalled bluffs and the sky. Beyond Sedona the Colorado Plateau runs as far as the Utah mountains three hundred miles to the north. Between its southern most edge and Manti, Utah is a natural Maginot Line of trenches cut from rock by the Colorado River, the greatest and most splendid of which is the Grand Canyon. The region’s brilliant red buttes and monumental rocks have long been valued by Hollywood directors and location managers looking for backdrops to western shoot-outs. More recently, crowds have begun to migrate north in summer to the cooler uplands of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon from Phoenix and the Sonora desert. And for those on a higher spiritual and mental plane Sedona, Arizona, also happens to be the New Age capital of the United States.
JUST WHO WERE YOU IN YOUR PAST LIVES?
New Agers began turning up in Sedona some time in the seventies, drawn by the apparent discovery of power ‘vortices’ in among the rocks. These spots, not visible to the eye, were proclaimed to be centres of great electrical and magnetic energy, capable of producing minor miracles. The word spread and a remote little town, which was once nothing more than a thirsty farming outpost of the Verde Valley, rapidly gained its current reputation as a curative mecca for victims of chronic post-sixties syndrome. Sedona became an Oz, geographically and symbolically speaking; an oasis of colour and cool and metaphor in the immense desert Kansases to the south and east. What Mount Rushmore is to the spirit of democracy, Red Rock country is to the universal spirit, the cosmic all, the divine within. In August 1988 thousands of New Agers met in Sedona over a weekend with the avowed aim of activating the power of the vortices and lifting the planet to a new level of consciousness, a level without war, or hunger or brutality. For the three days of the Harmonic Convergence they held hands and hugged and chanted and banged out New Age rhythms on drums.
The woman with musky hair puts down my guidebook.
‘Then, only a year after the Harmonic Convergence, communism fell,’ she concludes, adding
‘Well, thanks for the ride,’ as we draw into Sedona. She topples out of Caboose beads first, then pokes her head with its musky hair back inside. ‘You should get that dash light fixed. See you around, maybe?’ No, I’m thinking, you will not. I am still in a terrible mood.
MAKE A QUANTUM LEAP IN YOUR
CONSCIOUSNESS TODAY!
I find a room to rent with a sofa bed, the use of the refrigerator and a shelf in the bathroom out in West Sedona at Sakina Bluestar’s place on Pinon Jay Drive. Sakina is not my first choice. My first choice is Dionne, who comes with the recommendation of the cashier at the New Age Drop-in Center. Dionne wants to know if I chant loudly, smoke alien substances or have Virgo in my ascendant. I admit to the alien substances, but am happy to say that Sagittarius is my ascendant. Dionne finds that her spare room is booked after all. So I throw in my lot with a woman called Sakina, who thinks she’s an alien, and her lodger Santara, who thinks she’s an angel, and a man named Solar who lives in a van parked out in the yard. Sakina Bluestar, without whom this chapter would not have been written, is dedicated to Sedona’s mysterious energies. They notified her one evening about ten years ago that she was to give herself up to the Great Spirit.
One of Sakina’s most pleasing characteristics is that she makes absolutely no apologies for herself. She accepts she has unusual tastes and asks you to take her as you find her. For example, she has a taste for Barbie dolls and has made a large collection of them. Several dozen blonde Barbies, brunette Barbies, Kens and Sams make her house their home. Some are dressed as mermaids and mermen, others as hippies and cosmic adventurers, but they are all, according to Sakina, first and foremost spirit people, walking spiritual paths, with needs, desires and disappointments like our own.
‘They keep me company,’ she says, showing me to my room.
Throughout the spring and summer Sakina takes in lodgers like me so that she can afford to head off to California in the autumn and set up psychic workshops.
The room she has to offer is airless and hot, but the light comes in all day, so with a breeze it could almost be pleasant. An old chromium blade fan sits broken in one corner, behind a bookcase. Along the window ledge are a few pictures of Sakina and postcards of the theosophical Ascended Masters done out in lurid colours like Catholic devotional pictures – St Germain, Buddha, Jesus, a woman in white grecian robes, whose profile is hand-labelled in pen underneath, ‘The Lady Cavendish’. A photogravure of Byron in Turkish costume sits on its side in a cheap frame between the window ledge and a little table.
Nota bene: if this were a work of fiction you might not believe in Sakina and her friends, but I lived among them and I am simply reporting what I saw. That it is bizarre is undeniable, but then, at the time I had only an occasional sense of just how strange my circumstances were. I don’t think anyone is immune to implausible beliefs, however rational and wilful they think themselves to be. It is an easy matter to deny everything you thought you knew and to believe its contradiction rather than to live out your days in bottomless isolation. Only the most rare of individuals will stand up for a belief when all around are declaring its opposite, for most of us feel more anxious to be at ease with each other than we do with ourselves.
A mechanic in a mom-and-pop garage next to the Circle K in West Sedona says that it will take a while to fix Caboose’s angry flashing dashboard triangle and cost $150. Since I have not yet eaten I wander over to a restaurant and order the once-through, self-serve salad bar. There is a trick to maximizing the pile of food you can fit on the plate. I can’t quite recall how I learned it, only that it is one of those little pieces of informational camaraderie that get passed around among impoverished travellers. The salad bar proprietor, his eye set to turning a profit, puts all the space-taking lettuce and ancient potato salad and so on at the beginning of the bar, and all the expensive ingredients such as meats at the end, in the hope that you will pile your plate up high with trash before hitting the pastrami. Bearing that single fact in mind it is easily possible to make two days’ meals from a single walk through, by first constructing a plate extension using celery and carrot sticks on the cantilever principle then stabilizing it by gluing the bits of carrot down with mayo and weighting the ends with cherry tomatoes. You pile the plate, starting with potatoes, pasta and so forth and following with fruits and vegetables which will stick onto the mayonnaise in the pasta and heap up nicely. Having eaten as much as you are able, you ask for a doggie bag. This is the part when all may be lost, for if your waitperson snitches on you the manager will kick up an unseemly fuss and throw you out, which is what happens to me.
The mechanic, meanwhile, has successfully completed the toilsome job of fixing one wire to another and has pocketed my $150. Every flea has another flea upon its back to bite it.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
YOU CAN BE AN AVATAR RIGHT NOW!
Later that afternoon Sakina Bluestar, clad in full Lakota Sioux ceremonial outfit, runs a dusting feather along the Barbie and Ken vacation van and tickles the breakfast bar at Pinon Jay Drive. ‘There just isn’t the time to do it all,’ she repeats as she goes. It seems churlish not to offer to help, since I have nothing in particular to do, but Sakina will not countenance it.
‘Dear, that’s so sweet,’ she says, ‘but the spirits of my things always kick up a fuss if I don’t attend to them myself,’ smiles affectionately and waves a castigating finger at a Ken who has fallen out of his seat. Sakina has so very many things of a spiritual nature it is hard to imagine quite when she gets the time to attend to all their needs. Over the fake fireplace there hangs a collection of Hopi dream catchers. Crystals sit on every shelf and in every corner. In one alcove is a kachina doll, in another a life-sized statue of Captain James T. Kirk; between the two, sage smudge sticks, mystic texts, relicry, feather headdresses, stylized portraits of Geronimo and other Indian heroes, spirit guide portraits and talismen and spiritual videos and exotic shells containing cosmic messages and every other sort of New Age gizmo. Strangely, though, Sakina is no materialist. She is proud of her collections in the way that children are proud of their gatherings of beach pebbles, not because they have any intrinsic value or are signifiers of intent, but because they are small comfits of personality.
‘Are you an extraterrestrial dear?’ she asks, later. A little forward for our first day together, but then this is America.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Ah, that’s probably why they won’t talk to you,’ pointing to the silent Barbie population. ‘Never mind. It’s all just chitter chatter really.’
