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LUNCH
WITH A DEAD MAN: Copyright
© 1994, Aldo Vidali. All Rights Reserved.
Jack London advised me to write this as fiction. He said no one would ever believe it actually happened. He may be right, but I think some will instinctively know this is the truth, so I'm leaving it up to you, kind reader, to decide. Truth or fiction? I had been reading the last chapter of one of Jack's best works, John Barleycorn, on a comfortable rattan armchair in the shade of an ancient oak, spellbound by the intensity of a writer who died in the prime of life almost eighty years ago. He wrote: "Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each other...You are such an appearance composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage...." I closed the book. How true, I thought, recalling my own amazement at the weirdness of quantum physics. The world of particles and forces had recently vanished as scientists observed ghostly events in the behavior of what they had always thought to be but "matter." How could that be? Many asked astounded, "How can consciousness transform the nature of things through observation?" Jack's intuition had preceded science into the multiple dimensions of consciousness now perplexing physicists. I reflected quietly with a pleasant sensory awareness of the present moment. It was a balmy Southern California morning. My isolated home in the High Sierran forest a few miles north of the Mexican border seemed a solid reality, a safe haven from the agitation of urban life below. A warm Santa Ana breeze rose from the Borrego Desert. The sky was a deep blue. Suddenly I felt my body get up and walk toward the house. Still dazzled by London's powerful prose, I reached for the door, and that's when it happened, believe it or not. Please be patient with me. I know it is almost impossible to swallow such a thing, but I repeat, believe it or not, what I am about to reveal to you is not only not fiction, but it draws all its significance from the fact that it actually happened. At that exact moment when I reached for the door handle I stepped into a different world with the same ease as one steps from one room into another. Just like in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the house vanished. An immense sunny space lay before me. A man was standing at the foot of a towering redwood, gazing into the distance. He was wearing a white shirt, leather slacks, and boots. I knew immediately it was Jack, and I was aware that I was experiencing a phenomenon rising from the unfathomable mystery of my own mind. To describe it as an hallucination would not explain its tangible reality nor its continuity. What was truly amazing was not just the happening itself, but the fact that it seemed perfectly natural to me. As if he had been expecting me, Jack motioned me to approach and sit down. Without hesitation I stepped forward through flower strewn grass to join him in the shade of the giant tree. A distant ocean came into view. "This is beyond me," I said after exchanging greetings like old friends meeting again after many years. "How will I ever make what's happening here believable assuming I'll remember any of it?" Then, raising the book I held in my hands, I added: "I was about to put this back." His sun bronzed face smiled, amused. He was at the apex of physical wholeness, just like in the old photos I had seen of him in his thirties. The rugged sailor on horseback, but somehow better, bigger than life. The boy, the youth, the man; all three superimposed in perfect union. "Write it as fiction," he returned after a pensive look at me. "You can say anything you like, as long as it's fiction. Happenings like this are seldom believed without proof. Readers will ridicule a report of a visit with a dead man." "But what makes this event worth telling is precisely the fact that it is really happening," I protested. "Fiction would turn it into another fantasy in a market flooded with fantasies. Dante didn't present his visit beyond as fantasy." He laughed: "Dante wrote in the age of faith. People then intuited this dimension, but today you'll be dismissed as a lunatic. Fiction! Make it fiction. That's where literary power lies. There is no resistance to fiction because it lets everybody off the hook and influences readers without colliding with personal beliefs." "I can't agree with you. John Barleycorn's power came from being a true story. The reader was captivated because it was a true experience of drunken madness. Your 'White Logic' would have lost credibility as fiction. Besides, science today allows for this possibility...." and I went on explaining the ghostly world of quantum mechanics, telling Jack about the debates of the Copenhagen scientists, and the ideas of physicist Von Neumann and his colleagues who proposed the mind-exploding theory that consciousness creates reality.
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