Now, we were returning home from the opera. I can’t remember what we saw. There was a little girl screaming “Auito!” at some point. All I recall is a vague feeling that crept over me no matter how much I tried to put it out of my mind. My husband could see something was off, but he too tried to put it out of his mind, I think.
It was midwinter. The city was brisk and cold, but that was nothing new: fluorescent lights breaking up the blaring neon ads. I thought hard about what troubled me, something growing in my chest, a thought, an emotion. Our driver had a clear path along the FDR. We arrived at our empty home in a steel tower. I looked out at the starless sky, the clouds and other towers. I had some wine, but my mind remained vaguely restless. Just after midnight, my husband was already pretending to be asleep, waiting for me to fall asleep so he could slip away into his workshop.
I slid into bed beside him and continued staring across the empty darkness. There was something on my mind in the open, but hidden in plain sight. It was the strangest experience that I could vaguely recall but not know. I don’t know how long I had been lying there. My husband started snoring gently which was a surprise. I guessed he was dreaming about cars, I knew he was secretly planning to purchase a Ferrari 308GT, in all its flat rimmed glory. He had worked so hard and tirelessly in trying to keep it hidden from me, moving money around, saving on other expenses, clearing his browsing history, all cute things to hide his upcoming purchase from me. He had found a perfect listing, something with less than 14K miles. I learned so much about cars tracking him, much more than I cared to know, but I do enjoy research. I found it ironic that he put more care and attention in trying to hide this from me than he did his mistress of times past when mortality picked at his heels. How long had we been married now, I had a hard time recalling? Anyway, I didn’t want to out him, who was I to ruin his fun, marriage and life. Anyway, I was curious to find out how he was going to explain the new Ferrari in the garage when it finally came.
I used to think life was so simple. Working in a dying field, surrounded by dying art forms, it doesn’t seem so simple anymore. Was this that moment for me, a Ferrari moment, time for a mistress, was this flipping heads 178 times in a row!
Still lying there in the dark, in the dark. Then I was absorbed by the images in my mind. Riding home in a car with my father. He parks the car and leaves me inside to have some beers with his friends. There’s a hill somewhere. I’m a little girl staring into the ponderous mist after school, somewhere sometime. These fragmented memories. Then a glance of something real. I started thinking about my job, as what was once called a journalist. I was thinking of the editor who hated me, which brought some reality and comfort to the situation. As long as I can remember I wanted to write for the newspaper, be a detective journalist, report on truth justice and the American Way. I wrote for the school newspaper, everywhere from prep to graduate. I loved it so. I loved the research, the action, the chance to expose the world. Would I be a war correspondent, there would be no shortage of wars and thrills. Then I began to know a bit of the world and saw there was nothing to expose and that it really is as it seemed. I was a pious child into my teenage years, a precocious religious genius, I guess meaning I was disillusioned earlier than my peers. Churches, temples, sects, gatherings groups all seemed the same to me. I found myself in the world eating piss and shit, and all these great leaders could offer were lobotomies, don’t ask about the feces just eat it and enjoy, or worse/better they would shit on the shit I already had to eat and called it divine shit. This was their water into wine? It was good and securing to know this, it gave me some certainty in the world, a rare thing.
I was so young, and tortured by finding myself in a profession I hated with no desire or ability to do anything else or this job itself. That it was dying replaced by machines and amateurs gave me some scapegoat for what was happening with me. Then I met my husband. Who loved movies, unashamedly, unabashedly, from the highest to the lowest, but mostly the mid. I mean Arachnaphobia, how can that be in your top five. But his passion reminded me too of my love for film, and film criticism, and I found work writing small articles critical of artists in a small paper, and I was able to work and live while he sneaked around, which somehow didn’t bother me. The screen, flickering in the dark over my eyeballs as I looked for something on screen was my real lover, it had been all my life, the wonderous analog tv of my youth had perished, but there was still this large strange screen. Then it hit me, I was thinking about it so often and so much that I had forgotten about it. Somehow my editor had talked me into a larger piece—a small Sunday piece on mystics and the occult in the city to satisfy our readers that there was still nothing to worry about. I guess he knew me better than I realized, and I wondered if all these places were as I remembered them.
By summer, that winter night after the opera had receded, but the assignment still occupied me. It was going as I expected one encounter after the other of degenerates, nerds, soon to be mental patients, outcasts, outsiders, posers, and all universally hostile and vaguely violent, especially the Buddhists who insisted on a complete lobotomy—and it really did seem like Christians with a metaphysics more palatable to the rational mind. All the same people all the time. All the same everywhere. How the hell do I spin this into something palatable, publishable. These venerable Buddhists are revered here, and better to have some hope than my endless cynicism. I realized I was still mulling over an offer from an old lady, W. a long time buddhist practitioner, who baked the cookies, taken her vows, seemed to be accepting of death while running as hard as she could the other way.
Their head monk had given a heady talk aimed at the rootless and depressed, fresh blood for the humming zendo of hostile forces, and she had been passing out cookies and treats. She reached her wrinkly hand to my shoulder to quietly ask me something. She spoke so softly that I couldn’t hear her. Was she whispering some codex to supreme enlightenment that I was missing. She pressed into my shoulder and asked to speak to me outside after refreshments. She knew I was a journalist, and I figured this would be an opportunity to do some public relations, she must have sensed that I was none too impressed by any of this. That I found the people there spending time doing horrible things in their daily lives—starting and maintaining the wars I once wanted to cover—and then being granted atonement. I could not understand what was happening there, or how I could spin this into a harmless story for people needing an innocuous Sunday read, who may be thinking like myself one day I will find peace in some hall of meditators. But I hadn’t told her my true feelings, was it my pointed questions, I hadn’t broadcast that I was journalist, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. It had been about three months since I had started showing up there. I had no poker face.
W. was a senior practitioner, years of listening to all the reasons Bodhidharma came from the East, or went to the West, or better yet hearing one hand clapping. I had a private teaching with their teacher and I’m not sure, but I think I rolled my eyes as he spoke about peace and oneness and going with that. My experience had shown me that people who end in places of power and seek power over the vulnerable are some of the worst humans on the earth, selling non-violence as they practiced utter violence and material accumulation, preying on the weak. How was I going to spin this? Maybe that’s what she needs to talk to me about.
Outside she asked if I wanted a personal tarot reading at her home. I was a little surprised and intrigued. This was something I would expect from the deranged wizards hollering in dank basements. But this woman was respected in the Buddhist world and the real world, where she was a senior executive for a top pharma company. I agreed, and her home was what you would expect, Buddhist iconography, paintings sculptures of the beetle rising Gautama in nearly every nook and cranny. I tried to contain my nausea. I knew she could see my true feelings. I can’t recall what she spouted about the tarot. I was trying to hold down all the cookies I had stuffed myself with. And wondered if my husband was wondering where I was. Then she bluntly said, we are going to invoke the spirit of a dead man on August 16, one week from tonight, and we want you to record this work. The deadman we are going to invoke is Pier Paolo Pasolini, the legendary film director. I was to think it over.
I was to prepare myself physically and mentally, to watch and record this procedure. They would be too involved to do so themselves. And they needed an objective observer to make sure they were not dreaming.
The participants would be three others, W, and myself. W would lead the operation. I inquired about the laws against necromancy and whether this conflicted with her Buddhist vows. You can’t kill what’s already dead she explained.
This would make for a very good story. Could I sneak it into my piece, was this to be centerpiece of my piece. My journalistic curiosity was racing. This nice old white haired frail lady had invited me to witness the netherworld, and bend, maybe break the laws of nature. I pretended as if I needed to think it over, and maybe I did.
Pasolini, the great one touched by the gods. If you want to understand the Godfather, modern cinema, if you want to understand film, you have to go back to Pasolini. You can disagree but it’s my opinion. Yes of course, the masters DiPalma and Polansky, reveal the elegance, beauty and terror of possible in the visual image. Pasolini shows its soul. (Bresson too shows soul but is too transcendent a figure). He didn’t deserve to be slain, mutilated and murdered. But even in death he was always instructing us.
There is a mystery about who killed Pasolini and this was what this séance, this necromancy I guess was all about. But I know who killed him, it’s always so clear and Infront of our eyes. There are no mysteries, all hidden in plain sight. I wonder why it was so hard to see.
Then there was thing with necromancy. Wasn’t this forbidden even for the most ardent occultists, that resurrecting ghosts, intruding on the spirits of the dead, was one line that shouldn’t be crossed, to let there be peace if there is such a thing. And from these people, this is where they wanted to go. It must be some prank on me. I was wrestling now with dual questions, why these spiritual obsessed peoples, after years of practice, became so bored, what is it at the end of the journey that leaves one so blasé, and then how could I possibly pass up on this fantastic chance to speak with Pasolini, the great. What would I, could I ask him, something about film grammar, something else. The question they have for him seemed quaint and askew, and not really what they intended to do. Again it crept into my head, what is it with these religiose, what could they possibly want with a man dead decades ago, so brutally murdered. What do they always want with the dead?
A week after W.’s invitation, in the early hours of August 16, I snuck out of our penthouse. It was sometime around 1:00 AM. The summer heat lingered as I stepped into the waiting taxi downstairs. I had with me a notepad and a recorder and my phone. It was back to W.’s apartment. I tried the doorknob to her apartment but it was closed. I knocked gently at the grey door, waiting for some sign that someone would peek through the eyehole and let me in. I discovered the doorbell which was in plain sight but I hadn’t seen it. I’m not sure how long I waited and rang and knocked. The suspicion that I was being pranked snuck upon me again. I was looking around the quiet hallway when the door opened, someone I didn’t recognize in the white robes of the white bamboo sangha. He directed me inside, and the apartment of the Buddha was not the same, it was transformed the lighting was low, there were what looked like midnight black and venetian red satin curtains, and drapes. Gone were the buddha statues or hidden somewhere. The living room I was in a week ago was now this spacious ritual space, marked with circles triangles and altar in the center and things written on the ground I could not recognize. I could smell the faint smell of something sage, sulfur, frankincense? I didn’t ask. There were four others there. There was a stool next to the altar, and I watched a woman take her seat there. Everyone was in the white robes. I saw W. who said welcome. I recognized no one else. Although the room had changed, she seemed the same to me. There were some billows of smoke that showed themselves in the candlelight. W. escorted me to her bedroom, where she showed me a white robe with a red stripe spread out across the bed. I had never owned one of these robes that were such a huge part of their ritual practice in the zendo. She asked in a whisper if I wanted to wear it for the ritual and I said yes.
I went to the bathroom and changed into the borrowed robe and came out to see them seated in lotus posture around the circle, with the pale woman, the medium, the vessel in the center. Somehow W. handed me my own notepad and pen, and asked me to record everything I could especially the time. It was 2:22 AM when what I think was the start occurred. There was low chanting, and one of them played a horn instrument gently another a almost inaudible taps on a drum, the others chanting something barbaric or foreign. Nothing happened. Time passed, and I began to worry about her neighbors and what would happen if I did this in our apartment. Apartment living is hell, a progressive way to torture oneself. I was so programmed from so many years in the city, to be concerned and not caring about these neighbors. Apparently, W. did not care.
The medium started moving around her torso in a clockwise circle on the square stool. My mind wandered but I was not bored. This went on for some time and I could make out the name Pasolini. I forgot to mention there were large stills from his movie Decameron also placed around the room. Then I heard her say, “Behold”. Then she mumbled. “Auito”.
W. says, “The spirit has arrived.” Then sternly, “But we must check”. W. approached the medium. The others remained in a trance. I wrote down frantically what I was witnessing.
“Is this Pier Paolo Pasolini?” W. inquired sternly. “Speak if you are him.”
“What do you want?” The medium replied.
W. seemingly shocked, and the others waking from their trance are now transfixed with the proceedings. W. asks, “why create when dreaming the thing is so beautiful so sweet?”
The medium’s brow furrowed and she began speaking in Latin. “Eos qui ab Oriente in novam istam terram adducti sunt, cura. Serva eos. Illi nos trans montes illos caeruleos ducent. Tempus veniet—sacra sine fine, omnia rursus integra. Quidquid amissum est, reddetur. Quae olim sciebamus, iterum sciemus. Astra nostra erunt. Immortalitas quoque.
Sin autem hoc non facimus, tanta clades veniet ut vix credas. Numen magnum plus vult quam caedem caecam et vim sine mente. Tenes? Tenes? Tenes, Teniet—”
W. interrupts, saying I do not know who you are but thou are not Pasolini, “be gone demon” she uttered whipping her hand violently through the air across the body of the vessel. Something came over me, rushing into circle, some intuition, “wait I said, don’t you want to hear who killed him.” Without realizing, I was standing over the vessel and grabbed her by the shoulders, spinning her from the altar towards me, to ask, “tell us finally, who killed—” and then looking into her eyes. And then I said to myself the alien words pouring from my lips unstoppable “Mane… egone ille sum?”