Life to Life Read online

  If life is a dynamic force that collects inert matter and molds it into an image of itself, and if a certain kind of life always works from the same mold generation after generation to construct an edifice of expression which only it may inhabit, then those molds can only be the memories of past successful expressions or incarnations because no other definition makes any sense at all.

  Take a note. Write this down. Better sketch that. Make a map. Record it.

  Jottings. Genes are jottings, cryptic notes, recipes for successful forays into the space-time dimension. It is a kind of memory. And a book of memories, pal, is more or less what you and I really are. Of course we have the advantage over slugs and snails because we are a much more complex organism and so our book is much thicker and probably carries a lot more footnotes. We are so complex indeed that our memory-pak includes a kit for great masses of nerve tissue put together in a very special way that allows the development of a whole new kind of memory—and this nerve-tissue memory in turn produces something called personality or, as my dictionary defines the term, "that which constitutes a person; personal existence."

  So you and I have genetic memory and personal memory. The genetic memory has much to say about how tall you are, the color of your hair and eyes, susceptibility to certain diseases, special affinities and talents, and it even has something to say about the way you handle personal memory.

  Personal memory becomes a way that we regard ourselves, our relation to nature and to one another. We are really talking about experience now but the experience has to be remembered if it is to have an effect upon our personalities. Indeed it is the memory of the experience more so than the experience itself that builds personality so we are still talking about memory. If you show the kid every morning how to tie his shoes but you are still tying them for him when he's in high school, then the experience has helped him not a bit. Only when he remembers does the experience take on meaning.

  The important thing to remember there is that you never had to show the kid how to circulate blood through his body. His little heart began beating quite ahead of any direct influence from you because he remembered genetically how to start it up and keep it regulated, the same as he remembered how to build it and the blood too along with everything else he brought here with him.

  The genetic memory establishes species and space-time orientation. In other words, a man and a woman cannot pool their mems to provide a space-time envelope for a pig memory. Only pigs can do that. But the pig memory cannot work with the highly complex construction kit for humans—only human memory can do that—so pigs will never tie shoes, no matter how many times you show them how.

  Nerve memory produces unique personalities within a species. The more complex the kit, the more complex and unique the personality. Pigs have nerve memory but their construction kits are simpler than ours; they have not remembered as much nor do they even have the capacity required for a critical-mass rollover into a higher state of genetic complexity. Keep pigs in the classroom from now till doomsday and they will still oink and roll in slime because pig memory is fixed in space and time and they are what genetic memory has molded for them.

  You and I, though, have something very special going for us. The genetic memory that produces the human species came into the game at critical mass. It was a change of state that produced the first human. Genetic memory had reached an evolutionary barrier beyond which it could not travel, so it established a new baseline beyond the barrier, deposited its endowment over there with something new in terrestrial existence, an entirely new mold: the planetary experience of the ages became distilled in a new genetic system—a new packaging, like "hot dogs"—with a vast reservoir for nerve memory and self-conscious expression. Memory thus becomes more than a record of mere experience; it is now enriched by reflection upon and interpretation of experience. Thus, understanding enters memory and influences the interpretation of future experience.

  For the first time on this planet, then, with the advent of man, nerve memory became more; important than genetic memory. That is because genetic memory produces species which interact only with their environment. Nerve memory produces a unique individual who interacts with existence itself, questions it, examines it, interprets it. Put another way, you could say that nerve memory at a certain state is the awakening of cosmos; it is the universe becoming aware of itself.

  I appreciate your patience if you are still with me, not left back there somewhere among the hot dogs and flaming poodles. I have brought you through all this because we are shortly going to get into some really wild stuff in this case so I think It best that you have some preparation for that which is to follow.

  What I am asking you to consider, if you are to enjoy this case as much as I did, is that there is more to man than meets the eye, that we occupy a really special parcel of existence, that there is virtually no inherent limit to the degree with which we may interact with cosmos. It is important that you have this understanding because I will be introducing you to men and women whom you may otherwise find difficult to understand.

  Clara Boone could be one of these.

  She has gone through quite a transformation from the befuddled old lady I met at the police station. I am beginning to revise my presumption as to how old seventy-five really is. She has let her hair down, literally, and it falls in beautifully shimmering silver waves almost to the waist. We stroll with bare feet through the cold Pacific surf; her eyes glisten with excitement and she leaps with a squeal to avoid the rollers. We tarry beside the tidal pools and she gives me a wondering look of sheer delight when an anemone sucks her fingertip.

  Later she is quietly reflective but no less transformed as we toast marshmallows on the open deck and watch a spectacular Pacific sunset. When the sun goes down in California, so does the temperature, abruptly; Clara shivers slightly and leans against me for warmth and it is good.

  We go inside and build a fire. It is our only light and as we toast the night with red wine I no longer am aware of the wrinkled and sagging skin. I am experiencing the person, not her spatial envelope; there is a sense of timelessness and timeless memories hovering at the lip of awareness but we do not speak of these. I am man and she is woman but we cannot split the years between us, not in this envelope of time, and indeed neither of us wish to do so. It is enough that we are there at the same moment, to watch the flames consume the darkness and to shiver together with the knowledge that unrevealed memories tremble together between us.

  If this sounds perverse to some then so be it, but we made a sort of love there without a touch and without a look, without a word between us. She arose as the final embers were flaring, touched my face lightly with the fingertips of both hands, and told me goodnight.

  "Tomorrow I will tell you what you need to know," she said to me from the doorway to her bedroom.

  "Clara," I replied, "God himself could not tell me what I need to know."

  "God herself," she corrected me, and closed the door.

  "Whatever," I said to the fireplace.

  But I had just had one hell of a religious experience. And I knew that the best was yet to come.

  Chapter Seven: A Long and Distant Journey

  Clara awakened me at seven o'clock with breakfast on the table. I sat down to mouth-watering scratch biscuits and scrambled eggs and thoroughly enjoyed the meal. But Clara was seventy-five again. She was absentminded, sometimes confused, and did not seem to exactly understand where she was or why. Her legs ached and she was terribly worried about her birds and who was going to feed them. So I asked if she wanted me to take her home and it was obviously the right thing to say; it made her day.

  I first told her that David Carver had died in the accident and I warned her that it could be awhile before the police released her car and/or continued her driving privileges. I also warned her about the press. She exhibited only a momentary sadness over Carver's death but was really upset about the car. I promised to look into the problem for her but this did little
to allay her distress.

  "I could walk to my birds," she said tremulously, "but how would I ever get to my sittings without my car?"

  "What sittings?" I wanted to know.

  "I have life sittings every Tuesday and Friday," she replied. "And I simply must have my car."

  So I called Paul Stewart and asked him to massage the bureaucracy and get the car delivered to Clara without delay. He almost grudgingly agreed to do that. He also wondered if I was onto anything yet. I told him yeah, that I'd picked up a promising tremor or two and that I would keep him informed.

  Enroute to Eagle Rock with Clara, I wanted to pursue that business about the life sittings.

  Didn't bother her a bit. Apparently she had no secrets. "It's like memoirs," she told me. "Life to life."

  "Life to life?"

  "Yes. At my age, you see, this is very important. I am preparing for the next one."

  "The next what, Clara?'

  "The next life, of course. Isn't that what we are talking about?"

  Okay. Sure. "How do you go about preparing for that?"

  "We review. That will speed things up later."

  "What things?"

  "The selection of the next life. You are a grown man, my dear. Isn't it time you started thinking about your true self?"

  I always thought I did. But maybe not. I told her, "Guess I've always been too enmeshed in the present life, Clara."

  "Well that's the problem, you see. We all do that. And then we never really know where we are or who we are."

  I said, "I'm Ashton Ford, Planet Earth, Citizen First Class. Who are you?"

  That tickled her. She replied, "I was born this time as Clara Boone. But you must understand, this was not the first borning. And I certainly hope it shall not be the last."

  We were talking reincarnation. I have always had an open mind on the subject but very mixed feelings about the aesthetics of the idea.

  I said, "So this review is uh..."

  "An attempt to see the present life in its proper relation to previous lives. Have I continued the growth plan or have I veered away? What must I do in the next life to stay on the track or to get back on it?"

  "Uh huh. And you think that by doing this now..."

  "My dear Mr. Ford, you must recognize that I am a very old woman. How much longer could I have? And if I die confused...well, I shall very probably take that confusion with me. It could take me eons to find my way back to the proper life."

  I am aware that the idea of recurring lives in this same system sounds crack-brained to many people. But it is an idea that has been with us since prehistory, and it has been entertained or embraced by some of our greatest minds. Virtually every primitive culture has some version of reincarnation at the center of its religious thinking. It is a global idea, existing wherever mankind is, throughout Africa and Asia, Europe and America, in all the island nations, wherever man has paused to wonder about his origins and his fate, seeping into his art and literature, his sciences and philosophies. Longfellow's famous Song of Hiawatha embraces the idea in the farewell speech:

  I am going, O my people,

  On a long and distant journey;

  Many moons and many winters

  Will have come, and will have vanished,

  Ere I come again to see you.

  Hiawatha was an actual figure. He was also known as Manabhozho and was a messianic figure for the Indians who expected him to return to life at some time with great power over the final fate of humankind. The speech quoted is a dying farewell, in almost the same spirit as Jesus at the Last Supper and Kahlil Gibran's Prophet.

  Though once thought to be an idea peculiar to certain Asian religions, modern scholars have discovered that the idea had wide currency throughout early America, both north and south, and even the Eskimos have a reincarnation tradition. Similarly, the ancients of Europe—from Scandinavia to Italy—believed in reincarnation and the idea persisted into the Christian era. Indeed, scholars can point to many examples of early Christian and Jewish thought centering on rebirth, also among the Greeks and Romans—most notably Heraclitus, Herodotus, Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Lucretius, Ovid and Vergil, even the Emperor Julian.

  But that's all primitive shit, you say—enlightened people of this modem age cannot be expected to swallow that stuff.

  Well maybe not, but here are a few Who have tasted it: Joseph Addison, Louisa May Alcott, Hervey Allen, Honoré de Balzac, James M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, William Blake, Johann Ehlert Bode, Napoleon Bonaparte, Bernard Bosanquet, Francis Bowen, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Browning, Pearl S. Buck, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Luther Burbank, Samuel Butler, Tomasso Campanella, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Carpenter, Edgar Cayce, Gina Cerminara, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel T. Coleridge, Sir Humphrey Davy, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Feodor Dostoevsky, Lord Hugh Dowding, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Dryden, Thomas Edison, T. S. Eliot, Queen Elizabeth of Austria, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick the Great, Robert Frost, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Paul Gauguin, David Lloyd George, J.W. von Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Herman Hesse, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Victor Hugo, David Hume, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Thomas H. Huxley, Henrik Ibsen, William James, Mary Johnston, James Jones, James Joyce, Carl G. Jung, Imman- uel Kant, S0ren Kierkegaard, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Wood Krutch, G. W. Leibniz, D.H. Lawrence, Pierre Leroux, G.E. Lessing, John Leyden, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jack London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gustav Mahler, Norman Mailer, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eugene O'Neill, Edgar Allan Poe, J.B. Priestley, Ernest Renan, Jean Paul Richter, Rainer Maria Rilke, J. D. Salinger, George Sand, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich von Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sir Walter Scott, Ernest Thompson Seton (founder of Boy Scouts of America), William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Benedict Spinoza, Robert Stroud (Birdman of Alcatraz), Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats...

  I go to all this trouble for Clara's sake, to put her in good company in your mind. She is really a sweet and sincere lady and does not appear at all kooky except in this single respect. Thomas Carlyle once wrote, "Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one." That "minority of one" may always seem kooky to the rest of us. But 'taint necessarily so. As with Clara. She complains again of her legs then asks me, "Did she walk me a lot yesterday or something?"

  I said, a bit startled by the question, "What?"

  "What did you and Selma do while I was gone?"

  "Selma?"

  "Yes. My cosmic self. Didn't you know she was here?"

  I had not known that, no—or had I? I told Clara, "We walked on the beach. Don't you remember? Later we toasted marshmallows above the breakers then relaxed in front of the fireplace. Don't you remember any of that?"

  Clara replied in all sobriety, "No, I wasn't here for any of that. That's why my legs hurt. Selma always walks them off."

  I thought about that for a couple of minutes, then asked her, "Exactly what is a cosmic self?"

  "Selma is the real me," is the way she put it.

  "And where is Selma when she is not here?"

  "Oh she's always here but—you know—just sort of looking and listening."

  "Have you ever talked directly with her, Clara?"

  "Well yes, of course, that is what the life sittings are all about."

  I said, "Uh huh. Is there a medium involved? Is this like a stance?"

  "No no." She giggled. "Heavens, I don't commune with spirits. We just all sort of get together and start talking. You see, my circle is composed of fellow pilgrims."

  "What does that mean?" I asked warily.

  "Cosmic clusters. We began together, you see. Long ago. And we always manage to stick close together on earth. Will, t
hat is, we try to." She made a sorrowful face. "Sometimes it takes most of a lifetime to get all the pilgrims together in recognition of one another."

  I said, "I see," but I did not see.

  I did, though, get an idea.

  "Was Maybelle one of your pilgrims?"

  "Yes indeed."

  "A man named McSweeney?"

  "Yes. Poor George suffered a terrible regression this time. He'll do better next time."

  "Milhaul?"

  "How did you know this?"

  "Maybe I got it from Selma," I replied grimly. "Was Milhaul one of your group?"

  She said with a quiet sigh, "That's right, that's right. Poor soul. I had forgotten. That is what your Mr. Carver came to talk to me about yesterday. Poor Esther."

  I was getting very confused. "Who is Esther, Clara?"

  "Well you see, that is—you see...Herman Milhaul was in a terrible pickle. Esther is Herman's cosmic self. And Esther was very uncomfortable with Herman's present body."

  I said, "Damn."

  "Nobody is ever really damned," Clara gently advised me. "It may seem that way sometimes but... well, we just need to look to the next horizon."

  We were approaching her house and I had the strongest feeling that I would not be talking with Clara again, ever. I pulled into her drive and went around to open the door for her; our gazes clashed and I had that shivery feeling again and I heard myself saying, "Thank you for last night, Selma."