The Seven, by Lucy Terry (1730–1821), the first African-American poet, is the record of her search for the six men and one woman ambushed in a Vermont meadow by Indians on August 25, 1746, whom she wrote about in her poem “Bars Fight.” Ms. Terry’s interviews with the participants in the battle, none of whom knew they had been immortalized in verse, is a fascinating record of the problems colonial Americans had adjusting to the habitat. The only member of the Seven she has yet to locate is Eunice Allen (“And had not her petticoats stopped her, / The awful creatures had not catched her, / Nor tommy hawked her on the head, / And left her on the ground for dead”), but Ms. Terry confidently states, “She’s here somewhere, I know it, and I’ll find her if it’s the last thing I do.”
RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
Myths and Legends of the Hereafter, collected in fifty-six volumes by the renowned Danish theologian, mythologist, and poet Nikolai Grundtvig (1783–1872), is one of the marvels of the Afterlife, a labor requiring more than a century to complete. It’s said that, when he realized that it was at last complete, Grundtvig threw himself from a precipice (but of course failed of the desired object of ending his existence).
Upon arrival in the Afterlife, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), the overly conciliatory successor to Martin Luther, immediately shed his Greek name for his original German one, Schwarzerd, and founded his own (nominal) religion, Black Earth. His Black Earth Credo, a work of great power and obscurity, seems to discover the source of the habitat’s efficacy in the remains of Husks. If there were blood to be shed among the dead, it would have been shed over this strange and difficult work, which is rediscovered, reinterpreted, and battled over anew every twenty years or so.
THE ARTS
Delia Salter Bacon (1811–59) died obsessed with the notion that “the divine William [Shakespeare] is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world”3 and arrived in the Afterlife still obsessed with it. Having failed in life to open Shakespeare’s tomb to obtain proof that the plays were written by a consortium led by Francis Bacon (no relation, though in her later years she began to imagine that he was one) and including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and others, she succeeded in tracking down the shade of the Bard of Avon and began to badger him for a “confession.” After a few years, Shakespeare invoked an enfolding of Adepts, which was maintained for a decade or so, until Miss Bacon finally agreed that “the matter doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.” She tells her story with surprising good humor in Time’s Glory.4
Wovoka (1856?–1932), a Paiute Indian prophet of the Ghost Dance, whose “bulletproof ghost shirt,” decorated with stars, birds, and arrows proved inefficacious to the Indians massacred at Wounded Knee, wrote The Tale of the Shirt, an allegorical tragedy in the form of a children’s story, about a prideful shirt in search of a “good body” to protect, but it turns out that in the country where the shirt lives, there are no human beings. When you encounter a mournful shade endlessly chanting “Wovoka, Wovoka” as he trudges down the road, you can be reasonably sure this is a reader of that story.
Gedichte Auch (Poems, Too), the “sunniest” sonnet cycle you’re ever likely to read, is even more remarkable when you consider that the author is Georg Trakl (1887–1914), the Austrian expressionist, who during his terrestrial existence reveled in despair and decay. On this side, however, one frequently sees him frolicking hand in hand with young women. Also of interest is his charming comedy in verse, The Man Who Knew His Sister.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Revenge isn’t an emotion that lasts long in the Afterlife; those who wronged you in life are not so much forgiven as quickly forgotten, or seen simply as irrelevant. This has not been the case, however, for Yang Kuei-fei (719–756), the concubine of the T’ang emperor Hsüan Tsung and the most famous beauty in Chinese history, who was executed by the emperor at the insistence of his disgruntled soldiers. Her My Death in Life, My Life in Death is, among other things, a remarkably impassioned plea for the rights of women and at the same time a truly warped diatribe against her own people. In the latest edition of her autobiography (she revises it every century), she acknowledges for the first time that Hsüan Tsung has made many attempts to meet her; though he was heartbroken after the deed and soon abdicated his throne, she refuses to see him, stating that his sorrow “holds no truck with me.”
The unfortunate postmortem existence of Georges Méliès (1861–1938), the innovative turn-of-the-century filmmaker, is chronicled in his Let Me Be, wherein he claims that someone named Rosencrans is controlling his mind and sending him on voyages to war-torn areas of the moon, where he is required to invent fantastic machines to help one side or the other, the inhabitants of Mare Humorum, say, or of Lacus Somniorum. Further he would have us believe that this Rosencrans is not a resident of the Afterlife but one of the undead still on earth, a young man, he states, who lives in a central Missouri commune that makes peanut butter. That such an occurrence is without precedent (and likelihood) in the Afterlife does not for a moment lessen the anguish we sense in Méliès’s cri de coeur.
Tesla’s Take on Tachyons by Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the inventor of (among many credited and uncredited inventions) the Tesla coil and the radio and the designer of the power system at Niagara Falls, attempts (unsuccessfully) to make practical application of the “whales on the horizon” phenomenon. If he could convince others to build his designs, which resemble more than anything else the “metamechanic” sculptures of Jean Tinguely, Tesla believes he could “radically transform the habitat,” giving only hints of what this transformation might consist of (“winged particles that will unmask Eternity,” “the nightmare of reason will illuminate the day”). My favorite moment in the book occurs when, in the introduction, Tesla recalls his first Afterlife meeting with his former employer, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), who had treated him shabbily and taken credit for some of his work. Edison, Tesla relates, had been looking for Tesla for decades to apologize to him for his behavior. They spent a pleasant year together studying the “whale” phenomenon, but Tesla finally concluded that Edison’s notions were “childish at best.” He leaves us with the image of Edison working enthusiastically on a miniature version of his Kinetoscope.
A small book appeared in London in 1810, when I was eighteen years old, that prompted me to devote my life to publishing. This book was Illustrations of Madness, by John Haslam, who was at that time the chief administrator at Bethlem Hospital, the lunatic asylum popularly known as Bedlam. The book had a single purpose, to explain why one inmate, James Tilly Matthews, was being detained over his family’s objections, and it achieved that purpose by setting out in luxuriant detail the fullness of Matthews’s bizarre delusions—as described by Matthews himself. Reading this book was an electrifying experience for me and I daresay for thousands of others, for never before (so far as I knew then or know now) had the actual inner workings of madness been set out in this way—not as conjectured by outside observers but as reported and explained (and indeed even skillfully illustrated) by the madman himself.
According to Matthews, his disorders were not the result of any inherent mental derangement within him but rather of the machinations of “a gang of villains profoundly skilled in Pneumatic Chemistry, who assail him by means of an Air Loom,” a large and complex machine that sends out crippling waves and rays from a nearby bunker. The gang, led by Bill the King, consists of Jack the Schoolmaster, who serves as recorder to the gang, Sir Archy, thought to be a woman dressing as a man, Middle Man, middle-aged and of middling stature, who manufactures Air Looms for use all over London, Augusta, who serves as liaison with other gangs in the area, Charlotte, herself a captive member of the gang, kept “nearly naked, and poorly fed,” and finally the nameless and perpetually silent Glove Woman, so named for her cotton mittens, which she wears “because she has got the itch.” The list of catastrophic effects the gang is able to produce with the Air Loom is a long one, including Fluid locking, which con
stricts the fibers at the root of the tongue so as to impede speech, Cutting soul from sense, which dissociates emotions from intellect, Thigh-talking, which relocates the sense of hearing to the thigh, Kiteing, a particularly distressing assailment by which they contrive “to lift into the brain some particular idea, which floats and undulates in the intellect for hours,” Lobster-cracking, which constricts the magnetic atmosphere around the victim to produce instant death, Apoplexy-working with the nutmeg-grater, which violently forces fluids into the head, Lengthening the brain, which distorts one’s thoughts like a fun-house mirror, Thought-making, used to force into the victim’s mind “a train of ideas very different from the real subject of his thoughts,” Laugh-making, a technique for inducing senseless mirth, Bomb-bursting, an electrically produced internal explosion, usually fatal, and many other infamous torments such as Foot-curving, Knee-nailing, Eye-screwing, Sight-stopping, Vital-tearing, and so on.
Matthews’s own “illustrations of madness” confirmed the grounds for his continued incarceration, but Haslam’s triumph was short-lived. Soon after Matthews’s death in 1815, another document he had written came to light, an indictment of Haslam’s administrative malpractices that apparently bore the hallmark of sanity, and a nephew chose this time to come forward with the claim that Haslam had put Matthews in chains for challenging his authority. Although Haslam twice went to print to defend himself, the Bethlem governors decided to minimize the scandal by dismissing him. Although far from crushed, Haslam never completely recovered from this blow, delivered (as it were) from beyond the grave.
In 1841, after nearly three decades as a London publisher (during which time I never realized my dream of producing a work as sensational as Illustrations of Madness), I made my own journey to the Other Side. A few months later, when I “had my head on” at last, I was astonished to receive a visit from James Tilly Matthews himself, who, having somehow learned of my career in publishing, asked for my assistance in a literary project he’d been working on since his arrival in the Afterlife; this was a rebuttal of Haslam’s book and a “definitive proof” of the reality of the Air Loom and all its nefarious operations. Curious and without other occupation, I allowed him to lead me to his “home,” which proved to be nothing less than Bedlam itself, the habitation of tens of thousands of the world’s juiciest lunatics, all projecting their extravagant delusions onto their environment and thereby making them as real as rhubarb.
I examined (through binoculars) the infamous Air Loom, still being operated by the gang of seven, and over the next few days learned what it meant to suffer the humiliations of gas-plucking and pushing up the quicksilver and stomach-skinning and many other torments, but this terrible engine did not account for a tenth part of one percent of all the bizarre machinations at work there. I will not attempt to enrich you with a full appreciation of that place—and need not, as you’ll see. Matthews and his many collaborators had assembled a veritable encyclopedia on the workings of Bedlam, hundreds of thousands of pages, tens of thousands of meticulous diagrams and drawings … and they wondered how in the empyrean they were to turn them into a book! I assured them that, in order to produce anything recognizable as a book, they had to reduce their mountain of paper to at least a small hill, which task, under my direction, they accomplished during the three years that followed.
Toward the end, Matthews began to clamor for a single presentation copy that he needed for “someone who will be arriving in the Afterlife any day now.” I asked who this person was and how Matthews knew of his approaching demise, but he merely shook his head and snapped his fingers angrily (as he usually did when he was agitated). Soon the requisite presentation copy was in hand, and the two of us hurried off down the road. Before long an elderly gentleman came tottering toward us, still beset by the staggers that mark the freshly deceased.
Matthews rushed forward and thrust into the newcomer’s hands the very first copy of The Discovery of Bedlam by Its Own Inhabitants, bound in what passes in the Afterlife as morocco. Ignoring the other’s utter flabbergastation, Matthews turned and graciously introduced him to me. I should have foreseen it. It was Matthews’s ancient enemy, John Haslam, who had outlived us both, surviving to the ripe old age of eighty.
Bedlam: a quiet moment at dusk. “An hour spent among the inmates of this veridical Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll is said to have told a friend, “may persuade you that lunacy is the true ultimate end for which the Almighty shaped our race.” (illustration credits bm1.1)
The Discovery of Bedlam is still “in print” and is one of my proudest achievements.
A few months after its publication, however, feeling at loose ends, I began to cast about for another project. I found it readily enough and was soon hard at work on the first edition of The Little Book. This single enterprise has given me a long and rewarding career—and I heartily wish you its equal.
1 The Diogenes of the title, the same one who took a lantern into the daylit streets of Athens to search for a good man, was said to live in a borrowed tub; so great was his disdain for wealth that when he saw a boy drink from his cupped hands, he discarded his sole possession, his bowl.
2 And somewhat reminiscent of Jubilate equus onager, the Afterlife masterpiece of Christopher Smart (1722–71).
3 A reader of the 48th Edition of The Little Book tells me that, though these words exactly describe Miss Bacon’s belief, they must be attributed to Henry James, whose uncle is said to have been a friend of hers. My informant on this point is, however, unable to tell me whether they should be attributed to the novelist or to his father, the American philosopher of the same name.
4 From a line in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece: “Time’s glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.”
The Road … an endless invitation to wonders beyond enumeration. Here a dusty pilgrim approaches the Valley of Stelae, a region of monuments so ancient that their origins are literally lost in time. (illustration credits bm2.1)
GLOSSARY
Only terms having a special meaning in the Afterlife are included in this Glossary. For those whose meaning is fundamentally the same as in life (like club, greeter, horizon, medium, and so on), consult the Index.
Adept. A member of the second most numerous “human” component of the Afterlife population (after Regulars); Adepts are sweet, tranquil, doll-like beings who speak their own language and keep their own company, exclusively. Many assume they are the never-born or the not-yet-born.
Afterlife religion. A religion having no counterpart or antecedent among the living. See the Index for extensive references to this subject.
Bedlam. A region of uncertain extent populated by the shades of institutionalized lunatics. Although not in any sense institutionalized in the Afterlife, many of these shades (whether actually deranged or not) remain in Bedlam, apparently preferring the company of their own kind.
Blood-draining deities. In the mythology of the Radiant, three very exacting examiners who screen pilgrims at the fifth stage of crossing over and later take possession of those who backslide at the ninth.
Brightness. An infrequent, short-lived aerial phenomenon, cause unknown, resembling “the sun behind clouds” and regarded by some as a divine or angelic manifestation.
Catacombs. Subsurface residences, storage areas, and passages found throughout the Afterlife.
Central Registry. A bureau devoted to the collection of names and locations of the dead.
Crossing religion. A religion founded on the expectation that, individually or collectively, we will someday ascend to a higher plane of being.
The Dark Brother. A mysterious spirit being who, having no corporeal residence of his own in the Afterlife, briefly makes his home in each of us by turns.
Deadhead. A shade who is excessively overwhelmed or fascinated by the fact of his or her death.
Digger. A member of the Guild of Diggers; loosely speaking, any explorer or resident of the catacombs.
Dweller o
n the Threshold. In the mythology of the Radiant, the guardian of the fourth stage of crossing over. He is considered a neutral sentinel, one who will neither help nor hinder the seeker.
Eidolon. A phantom, often conceived as the “projection” of a living being forward or backward into the future or past.
Eidolonism. A somewhat esoteric theory or belief that the Afterlife is a system of eidolonic projections. To summarize briefly and partially, Husks are (according to this theory) projections “forward” from those who die in utero or in infancy to an unrealized adulthood, and Adepts are projections “backward” from the unborn to Platonic Ideals.
Empyrean. The domain of the Afterlife.
Fiery globes. Pulsating red spots that appear aperiodically before the eyes, seemingly just beyond arm’s reach.
Flame-enhaloed Deities. In the mythology of the Radiant, fiery figures that are attracted to pilgrims who hesitate between steps during the Thirteen Stages of Crossing Over. Some identify them as Fiery Globes.
Four Females Who Keep the Door. In the mythology of the Radiant, deities who have the power to enable the pilgrim to cross over at the end of stage thirteen.
Guild of the Dark Brother. Probably the largest of the Afterlife guilds, devoted to the cult of the Dark Brother (q.v.).
Guild religion. A religion practiced by members of an Afterlife guild.
Have your head on. Become reconciled to death and accustomed to the workings of the Afterlife.
He Who Is Truly Small. An epithet for the Dark Brother, used to avoid a direct reference, which is thought by some to be unlucky.
Hiranyagabha. In the mythology of the Radiant, the monster guardian of the jewel that must be presented to the Four Females Who Keep the Door (q.v.).