May 2024
I have waited for a while to update my home page. I was hoping that things would improve–the country, the civilization, this reality. It will, I believe, in unimaginable and wonderful ways, but I can’t cite their harbingers.
Since October 2020, Lindy and I have lived in Bar Harbor and Portland, Maine, travelling between houses in each place. We have rarely left Maine in that time. Aging has exacted its own price. Since this is my website as an author and publisher, I will focus on that aspect.
As a publisher I have acquired around 200 titles for Inner Traditions, most of them under Sacred Planet Books. Not all of them have been published yet, but you can see the list of published and announced titles here: https://www.innertraditions.com/imprints/sacred-planet-books. Many of my former North Atlantic authors have joined me, but I have published mostly new writers, as the imprint has drawn a very contemporary set of themes, including runes, 12-stranded DNA, various approaches to the spirit world and afterlife, synchronicities, ghosts, and the latest phases of bodywork (somatics). My April 2022 screed sounds a bit wild and over the top to me now, though all of it is accurate to what I feel and what I believe happened. The pain of the loss has mellowed over time, and I see it more in terms of the gradual loss of all worldly objects and identities. In a way, I was fortunate to see my work vandalized and pulped while still alive; it gave me a chance to do something about it, and it would have surely happened when I was no longer here. Trumpism is a symptom of the chaos, disrespect, and destruction that have spread worldwide. I consider the current North Atlantic Books a relic of Trumpian revisions, though that is all hearsay and aggrieved complaints of authors and readers. I have kept a discipline of not looking at the website or offerings for more than four years. Identity theft is painful, so it helps to look away at creative possibilities instead.
Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs was published in 2022, giving me two books in print, Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (Inner Traditions, 2020) is the author. A third, Homeopathy as Energy Medicine: Information in the Microdose will be out this summer; it is a revised edition of my book Homeopathy the Great Riddle. I published The Return of the Tower of Babel: Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World on substack under Jovian Bricolage, an imprint I share with Ruslana Remennikova, author of the book on 12-stranded DNA. I have also published Guide to Cinema on substack. It is also on this website, but the cleaner version under Jovian Bricolage. I don’t think of these as actual book publications, but changeable texts in the current shift away from formal book publishing. I don’t like it, but it gives me a quick audience and a chance to make some of my informal work more public. In addition, Jovian Bricolage has my travel journals from 1993 (Europe), 1998 (England), 2003 (Mexico), and 2006 (Europe). I hope to put later ones on the site. These also appear on this site in less clean version.
Jovian Bricolage is also called Opera Jupiter, but that name was claimed by someone else after we used it, so we made the change. Substack keeps both versions for entry. It takes some digging but you can find all three writings (Babel, Guide to Cinema, and Travel journals there) somewhat scrambled together depending on the format you receive.
I am mainly working on New Moon, Out of Babylon, and Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, as described below. I think of this trilogy as my most significant work, as it is intended to be psychically as well as literarily interactive. I guess all the books are, but these have the additional challenging novelistic quality. They are nonfiction novels, but also a new genre combining essays, literary writing, and the occult, all within a memoir-like story,
I can’t say how these three books will be published. Fools that we were, Lindy and I donated ten times the amount of money needed to publish them and Lindy’s novel to the North Atlantic Books only to have the new crew say in just those words, “Finders keepers, losers weepers.” The same thing happens to people’s bank accounts with identity theft.
They are too literary and gnomic for Inner Traditions. I don’t want to do GoFundMe. I want them to pay their own way or have me pay it. I have started an imprint with a college classmate, Dusty Dowse, called Lammastide, and I may use that to get the books out. They won’t be widely distributed, but they will be available. There are a couple of other options that might pan out. Publishing is in such turmoil these days, with far more self-publishing of various sorts than old-fashioned conventional commercial publishing, that it is hard to predict what the best outlet might be.
Lindy and I are also in the process of creating a trust with Ruslana Remmenikova in charge and other readers of my work as part of her team. They will inherit what we were unable to finish in our lifetimes and the trust will help support healers if the books make money. It seems unlikely, but who can guess what’s like anymore. In any case, we know several psychic healers, medical intuitives, and biodynamic alchemists (to attempt names for what they do), and they could use funding to continue their work, some of which is pro bono.
I have just started my May 2022 update. I will continue to work on it as the month goes along. One other note for now: I am not using Instagram, just this website, substack, and Facebook
April 2022
I have been slow to update the home page of my website. Truth is, I don’t focus that much on my online identity, so I forget, somewhat like not looking in the mirror. It took someone calling my attention.
I was recently musing about tens in one’s life. Age one to ten was a huge shift for me that needs no elaboration. At ten I was in grade school (1954). By twenty (1964), I had been through all six years of a NYC prep school (Horace Mann) and two years of college (Amherst), had met my wife-to-be (Lindy Hough), and had started writing. My name had changed from Richard Towers to Richard Grossinger, and I learned about my supposed “real” father, then split my time between two families, one in Manhattan, NYC, and the other at Grossinger’s Hotel in Liberty, New York.
By my birthday in November 1974, I was married with two children (son Robin, daughter Miranda). I had published two books with Black Sparrow and one with Mudra, had almost completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan, had done fieldwork with fishermen in Downeast Maine. I had taught for two years at the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham and two more at Goddard College in Vermont. I had read with Robin Duncan and Allen Ginsberg at Kent State, started Io with Lindy and gotten out sixteen issues.
In 1984, I was living on Blake Street in Berkeley, California. Our kids were young teenagers, Lindy and I had started North Atlantic Books in 1975 in Vermont and folded Io into it. I had published Planet Medicine with Doubleday and The Night Sky with Sierra Club Books. I had learned that neither Bob Towers nor Paul Grossinger was my father; it was Bernard Brandt (my mother had a brief WWII affair). I would never meet him.
By 1994, both kids had grown up and left home, Lindy and I were living on Woolsey Street in Berkeley and had just spent nine months apart (1991-1992). After we came back together, we went overseas for the first time: Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, France. Then Lindy left her job teaching technical writing in the engineering school at Cal. and joined me doing North Atlantic Books which had grown into a full-fledged business. We moved it out of our house and hired staff. Approaching my fiftieth birthday, I did a three-year training in craniosacral therapy (1989-1992).
In 2004, Lindy and I were living on Yale Avenue in suburban Berkeley (Kensington) and had developed North Atlantic Books together as an indy press. We were publishing eighty new titles a year. Our kids were launched into marriages and careers. We had also bought a house in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and were splitting each year, a third to forty percent in Maine and the rest in the East Bay (Kensington/Berkeley). I had written two embryology books (Embryogenesis and Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings) and had rewritten and divided Planet Medicine into two volumes and a book on homeopathy. We had travelled in England and Scotland.
In 2014, Lindy and I entered our seventies together. We moved from Kensington to Portland, Maine, keeping our house in Southwest Harbor. I began a clairsentient training at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, then (after a year there) with John Friedlander, an initiation I am still deep in a phase of—it’s larger than one lifetime. Lindy and I made trips to Mexico, Europe, and Hawaii (see the travel journals under “Posts” on this site for blogs). Lindy retired from North Atlantic Books, and I moved from publisher to founding publisher. I began writing on consciousness (Dark Pool of Light, three volumes).
I am now in my seventh round of tens, and this decem has been radical and transformative.
My sister Debby committed suicide in 2016. That meant that she, my brother Jon (2005), and my mother (1975) had all taken their lives. Lindy and I brought Debby’s ashes to the grave of her Nanny, Bridget McCann, in Belfast while travelling in both the Republic and Ulster.
From June 2018 into October 2020, I experienced an 850-day depression, a journey through the abyss . It was a parallel dark time for Lindy. We sold our Southwest Harbor house and returned to the Bay Area (2019-2020), thinking maybe for good to be on the West Coast where our kids were.
While we were there, North Atlantic Books was hostilely taken over by a cabal that continued a façade of our Mind Body Spirit publishing without any of the transformative soul that Lindy and I had invested in it. One former employee said that it was turned from an initiatory vessel into a counter-initiatory one. Despite our fifty-five years developing it from a sixties college journal (Io) through phases of growth, revival, and transformation into a successful indy mind-body-spirit imprint, it was stolen, I tend to say, by a criminal syndicateof race zealots, thieves, punks, opportunists, and language police, though there were only five or six of them, so they overlap in the above categories. They were straight out of a Gen X punk-immaculacy, TMI (“too much information”) anti-intellectual wrecking crew though, like everyone on earth, they had an alt-narrative in which they were good guys and liberators. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. . . .” pretty much describes the silent majority of staff, board members, and fellow Berkeley publishers. After all, Lindy and I had white privilege—felony enough.
They destroyed a legacy that took us a lifetime and a lot of our own money and donated time to create—a nonprofit organization based on a coalition of indigenous and avant-garde arts and sciences—turning it into a politicized boutique, vandalizing the archive with self-righteous race-and-gender baiting and censorship while meretriciously waving fake tomahawks and Black Lives Matter marquees of their own—most of them are white.
Their do-goodism was meant to mask and privilege a crime: old-fashioned extortion and robbery—taking what isn’t yours. They were never after social justice, nor did they mean to be. Virtue-signalling was to cover identity theft and home invasion. It was the archetypal murder of a goose for its golden eggs. We see its equivalents throughout the former world of liberal arts, liberal politics, and progressive culture. Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger were nothing special. We met as Smith and Amherst students three weeks before the JFK assassination, and our collaboration that began soon after was mid-to-late roadside carrion fifty-six years later.
Through the coup, I came to recognize a tactic to which my progressive roots and habits had inured me and left me vulnerable: elitist white accusers pretending to renounce their racial privileges as a strategy for extending their power—white power—using Stockholm syndrome solidarity, clique bullying, and gaslighting. It’s a sociopath’s paradise. All you have to do is say “MAGA” or “Black Lives Matter,” and your diagnosis is erased and you get to be lord of the flies.
Removal or marginalization of long-functional members from organizations and universities by social-justice inquisitions has become commonplace. The methods are generally the same: they are accused of racism or sexual misconduct. If they haven’t committed anything overtly—no problem, everyone has some baggage; just do a deep dive and find it.
Fools don’t even have to have committed the likeness of a crime or gotten a legal warning. All someone, ideally black, has to do is point a finger and say, “He or she triggered me,” and bang they’re dead! Who needs a gun? But if they could have held a gun, they would have used it. The dead are easier and cheaper to dispose of than the living.
For a while, I regretted my mistakes, which were legion, like don’t hire people who don’t support your mission. I have since taken in the bigger picture, that we are in a new time when energy is fiercely drawing its antipode—the more radical and Christic the energy, the more radical and scathing the counterforce.
At the time, our daughter Miranda wrote me:
“It really is just boggling to me how this entire company that you and mommy made could be suddenly not yours anymore. I guess it has to do with the structure, that the board essentially owns it. And I guess you knew it wasn’t “yours” in the way that I, your child, would think it was. But I really am just stunned. You actually seem to be taking it well, I guess with something this awful various survival strategies come to the fore. Of course it’s not piercing like it is for you, but because I literally grew up inside the company, lived with it my whole childhood, have never not known it to be my parent’s company and proud of it—it is a loss for me too.
I am so sorry.
love,
mj”
Almost immediately after this, Ehud Sperling, the publisher of Inner Traditions International, hired me to bring my authors there and start a new imprint, which I named Sacred Planet Books. I knew its name at once because this is when the planet has to become sacred again, that blue-green water disk under its six-dimensional star. It wasn’t going to happen at North Atlantic Books; that had been plundered and was now scorched earth.
Ehud said, “The only reason I can think of for this terrible thing happening to you is that you and I were meant to work together in our seventies.” Since then (February 2020), I have acquired—I like to say curated—about 80 books, which represent the fruition and pinnacle of my publishing career. I am still actively acquiring. Her is a partial list from the draft of Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage: machine consciousness and the reanimation of matter, spirit marriage, cyborg phantoms and dream cartoons, the Madonna secret, death nesting, synchronicity as a law of nature, a First Nations history of Turtle Island, UFOs crossing cosmoses, Norse runes, the origin of alphabets, a golden tarot cycle, giants who walked the earth, activating our 12-stranded DNA a, the philosopher’s stone, other dimensional entities, Tanzanian-Brazilian family constellations, 5-D ascension and the God code (Bob Frissell’s encore), elemental witchcraft, the luminous landscape of the afterlife, lost goddesses of the Mediterranean world, time loops, dragon oracles, mindstreams and heart beams, the holographic unity of heaven and earth, coma’s kiss of rain, geoengineered transhumanism, speaking to quartz and tourmaline stones, precognition and the long self, locutions from saints and martyrs, the Chaldean Oracles, how to become a mermaid, meteoric moldavite, the Yezidi peacock angel, aetheric alignments, the extracellular matrix, feline keepers of the spiritual world, sacred menstruation, the escape of Bon monks from Tibet, the sacred masculine’s flowering wand, Egyptian astrology, the Universal Christ, and the spiritual evolution of animals: how when an ant reincarnates as a mineral it is usually rose quartz, as a plant it is usually a rose.
In June 2020, Lindy and I returned to our Portland house and, a few months later, bought a house and land in Bar Harbor, Maine, and are now splitting our time between the two (a 3 1/2 hour coastal drive). Both places are our community.
I have re-started my Mount Desert Psychic Group (2009-2015) with new people in 2021. As days chilled and shortened, native Maine girl Brittany Atwater moved our meeting site to Zoom where the synod turned nonlocal. After she strolled in one eve and read everyone’s aura like blueberry ice cream, I called her “the LeBron James of young psychics,” but I came to see her as Downeast’s nascent Madame Blavatsky. Her giggle was like the surf of a thousand souls.
John Friedlander helped summon the oversoul of Lindy’s and my first cat Frodo (1965-1971) to “share” a new cat (I count fifteen in between, none in the last seven years and none holding a candle to Frodo).John had said there would be a signal. In early November 2021, to my surprise, I awoke in the middle of the night before we were going to go look at shelters in Trenton and Bangor with the word “Cherryfield” in my mind. We hadn’t been in that town since 1969 and back then only once. We changed our plan and drove fifty miles east into Washington County There we both had the same first choice: a ginger-colored two-year-old female that we named Tawny. I did not consider that she shared Frodo’s oversoul until she began flipping between personae, occasionally doing about as good an imitation as I can imagine of a long-ago friend (though memory can deceive over so many years). For instance, after being afraid to go outdoors probably because of a lifetime in a shelter, then trying to hide under the house or car every time we put her out, she suddenly burst out the door, climbed a tree and began jumping from roof to roof and roof tops to trees like Frodo once. She was out for an hour, and we’d occasionally glimpse her down the block or on top of roofs. After that, she reverted to her shyness. My niece Franny asked me if I thought it was really Frodo. I said, “You’d first have to know what an oversoul is, then what a cat is, and then what reincarnation and being born are.”
I need to update my auto-bibliography–I guess you’d call it my “opus.” The people who took over North Atlantic Books put all my books out of print and pulped the inventory. My only book in print is Bottoming Out the Universe, published by Inner Traditions (see “June 2020” below), but most of my old titles are still available online (Amazon for a start). I am working with Inner Traditions on reissue of what I consider key ones: the two embryology books mentioned above, Planet Medicine: Origins, Planet Medicines: Modalities; Dark Pool of Light (three volumes), On the Integration of Nature, The Bardo of Waking Life, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, Homeopathy: The Great Riddle, Migraine Auras, New Moon, and The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos (the rewritten 2014 version). This is not going to happen soon or fast, maybe not even in my lifetime, so anyone who wants copies of these books, get them online while there are still used copies or leftover inventory. After that, you can try writing me to see if I have any left. I have some extra copies of earlier books like The Continents, The Provinces, and The Long Body of the Dream. For those who want to track down anything like the full batch, it’s a bit over 40 books by now counting the early experimental prose volumes.
I have a new book coming out from Inner Traditions in July: Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs. It directly follows Bottoming Out the Universe in my new gathering of lifelong themes.
I have just completed a political-cultural book The Return of the Tower of Babel: Trumpism, QAnon, Cancel Culture, COVID, Chaos Magic, and Ukraine. It is posted on substack under Jovian Bricolage.
I am committed to publication of my nonfiction trilogy: New Moon, Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, and Out of Babylon. I am currently doing what I hope are final rewrites on the latter two. New Moon is done; it was published originally in a hardcover in 1995. That was premature and I rewrote it entirely with a subtitle A Coming of Age Tale to distinguish. A very small edition (200 copies) was published in 2016. This is my story of growing up through the beginning of senior year of college and, to a large degree, is drawn from my high-school and college writing. Out of Babylon was also prematurely published with a subtitle Ghosts of Grossinger’s, in 1996. It is my story of three fathers, the suicides in my family, the history of Grossinger’s, Lindy’s and my kids, and North Atlantic Books, but it is also the story of ancestral trauma and the Jewish mystery. For now, I have divided it into four self-contained books. Part of the length is that I have let my brother and sister tell their stories in their letters, journals, and transcribed narratives. That alone is a 300-page book.
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage had never been published. I consider it my best and most daring book and have been scared of publishing it and living with the blowback. Getting all three of these out, meaning New Moon back out, is, as noted, my current imperative. As long as my older books are still in some secondary market, people can get them from there.
I have come over time to consider the entire body (the opus) a partly channeled enterprise. By that, I don’t mean that anyone dictated it to me from another dimension. I mean what any literary writer does: it has its own style, signature, and message, which is different from my personal style, signature, and message. The textual demand to be told, to be brought into the world, is transpersonal. It’s not my role to judge it. I consider it is a unique opus, meaning there is nothing else like its mix of science, mythology, the occult, pop culture, and literary narrative. It is my imprint onto time. But I don’t spend as much time writing as one might think. A few committed hours a day does it. Once I got the voice unimpeded, it was mostly downhill. There’s no writer’s block when you’re listening to a dedicated signal—a clear channel—that’s wiser and funnier than you are.
When I began this updated home page, I thought it was necessary for one main reason. Many people do not seem to know that Lindy and I have nothing to do with North Atlantic Books, and we haven’t for more than two years. I didn’t retire. I was removed. I stand by the authors we published during our 55 years of Io and North Atlantic Books, but I disavow the books, rhetoric, politics, and vandalism of the occupiers using our name. I said at the time of the 2020 coup that the only reason they didn’t execute rather than merely exile me is that they didn’t have the authority. Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, and ISIS, in their own jihads, did. I am classifying the energy in the room, not the gentrified and postured tactics. My friend, “Astrology for the Now Age” host Robert Phoenix Morris, put it best. I am not as political as him, but he captures the spirit. RPM wrote: “It seems more than just random and the result of some social trend. You were targeted and marked in true revolutionary fashion . . . wrapped in racial theory and identity politics. . . . It’s not about race, or being woke. It’s about the wholesale dismantling of the West. . . .”
June 2020
My website is now back online, en route to a new version, after being inaccessible to me since January 2020. I won’t go into the details of how it got shut down, but I had to go through many phases to regain access to it, get the codes and relationships necessary to have it re-hosted and restored, and then to update it. Much of it hadn’t been touched for ten years. It will take me many months to restore and update it, but I hope to have it done before the end of 2020.
During the period that my website was frozen, I moved from being a consultant and acquisitions editor at North Atlantic books, the press I founded with Lindy Hough in 1974, to curating my own imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions. My own Inner Traditions book also came out (April 7, 2020), and I have done a number of podcasts based on it, which will be URL-ed on this site.
The world has changed since this website last peeked at Earth. We moved, unprepared, into the time of COVID-19. Though nothing can come close to touching the reality it has introduced at every level of planetary life, I reached out to healers, scientists, and visionaries and helped compile an anthology with Sherri Mitchell and Kathy Glass, entitled:
The Coronavirus Transmissions:Alternative methods for engagement with COVID-19.
New Book, Inner Traditions, Park Street Press, April 9, 2020
Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
- Table of Contents (from final ITI manuscript)
- <TOC CT>Foreword by Brian Swimme
- Introduction: An Unbottomable Void
- <TOC PN>Part One: Worlds and Lives
- <OC CT>Chapter One: The Hole in the Materialists’ Universe
- Chapter Two: Reincarnation and Past Lives
- Chapter Three: Transdimensional Physics and Biology
- Chapter Four: James Leininger or James Huston?
- Chapter Five: Karma, Nonduality, and Meaning
- Chapter Six: The Universal Basis of Past-Life Memories
- <TOC PN>Part Two: Transmutations
- <TOC CT>Chapter Seven: Cosmic Chicanery
- Chapter Eight: Trauma and Redemption
- Chapter Nine: Worshipping the Algorithm
- <TOC PN>Part Three: Simulations
- <TOC CT>Chapter Ten: Personal Identity
- Chapter Eleven: Multipersonhood
- Chapter Twelve: The Superconscious Source
- Chapter Thirteen: Undumbing the Universe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
No one can bottom out the universe, but I dig as deep as I can, which gets me to uncertainty states of meaning and language and avoids the bottomings-out of neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism. I totally agree with Buddhist ontology but I have to arrive there by a different route because I am not writing a Buddhist book. It is more Sethian but not even finally that. It’s its own crisis of faith. Here is a link to quotes from the book, reviews of it, and questions for discussion:
https://richardgrossinger.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3245&action=edit
My main other literary project has been periodically rewriting Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage. I have been working on it since the 1970s. Yet times and meanings are changing so fast that I have had to completely rewrite it some thirty or forty times.
I have simultaneously been working on a revised edition of Out of Babylon. I will try to put my opening notes from both books on this website under writings. With New Moon: A Coming of Age Tale, they make up a nonfiction novel trilogy.
12/19 No great ideas. I wish there were a community where people of our generation and persuasion decided to live. No other ambition but people to talk to. Real talk beyond the present polarized ideology and apocalypticism. Not that all that isn’t true enough, but we still have to live and die in our time.
The Trilogy
In an era of global displacement, institutionalized violence, and sexual flagrance, I wonder about the relevance of a narrative set in the nuanced and quixotic fifties and sixties. Yet when I go back to the mysteries and wonderments of this text, I realize that our stories, innocence, and intimacies are all we have. Our willingness, our enthusiasm even, to live what we are born into is what heals us and gives us hope.
A good story is a prayer that feeds the gods. Its message back to them is thank you, this world is a magical and redemptive place, despite its many enigmatic appearances and atrocities to the contrary, for our yearnings are universal and speak to a covenant we share. Somewhere amid déjà vus, riddles, oracles, intimations, and elusive nostalgias are the alchemical ingredients of life on Earth.
This is my own telling of a myth at the level of a campfire story, or a science-fiction overlay, parable, or rock ballad. Its possibility is its melody, hauntingness, and sincerity, what those tell of an enigma that can’t be solved, can only be lived.
New Moon’s landscapes feature 1950s New York City (P. S. 6 and Bill-Dave Group among the venues), Camp Chipinaw (also Camp Swago, Camp Wakonda, and Camp Kenmont), the Nevele and Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Horace Mann School, Arista Teen Tours (across the US and Canada in 1962), Amherst College, the Sullivan County Democrat, Robert Kelly’s salon near Bard College, Stan Brakhage’s Rollinsville cabin, and Aspen, Colorado, circa 1965. Its themes include games, comics, and teen detective series of the 1950s; coercions of Hebrew School and Color War; a parallel search for sacredness and meaning in baseball, rock ’n’ roll, science fiction, and tarot; a transition through Freudian psychoanalysis to Jungian symbols and literary and shamanic magic; survival in a family in which both my mother and brother later committed suicide; the shadow of atomic war from Los Alamos through the Cuban crisis; adolescent alienation and fear; teen romance and courtship in a changing era.
There are numerous smaller venues: the Wizard of Oz and Dragons of Blueland; Central Park; clouds, stones, and planets in high-school science; speedskating and ice hockey; experimental films; Teilhardian and Gurdjieffian cosmology; the search for Bridey Murphy; interpretation of dreams; political and spiritual awakening; going on my first date to the game in which Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run in 1961, and so on
Among my writings New Moon differs from books like Planet Medicine, The Night Sky, Embryogenesis, and Dark Pool of Light in that it is purely novelistic and anecdotal and relies on aesthetics of voice and view without a backup subject matter. As my attempt to write a literary nonfiction novel using the material of my life, it rests solely on its story-telling and narrative drive, yet it gives rise to the constructs and themes of my later topic-oriented books. It is also the cornerstone of my larger novelistic trilogy in which all three books are ambitiously literary while also psychospiritual and visionary.
New Moon pays homage to the novelists and poets of my adolescence: Robert Penn Warren, T. H. White, James Baldwin, Robert Lindner, D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, as well as to Bobby Darin, Dion & the Belmonts, Paul Anka, P. D. Ouspensky, Carl Jung, A. E. Waite, Stan Brakhage, Arthur Clarke, and without my knowing it, J. D. Salinger, whom I somehow imitated without reading. I wrote lyricisms, epiphanies, and dirges akin to the ones that sustained me during those years.
This edition is distinguished from the original by having a subtitle A Coming-of-Age Tale, a cover by my old Goddard College student, painter James Rauchman (in place of the Jungian mandala on a black background), and a paperback format. Ignore the snipey reviews of the old edition; I have taken their relevant criticisms into account in rewriting.
Out of Babylon pays homage to William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charles Olson, and Herman Melville.
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage pays homage to Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Annie Proulx, Nadine Gordimer, Anita Shreve, William Blake, Pat Conroy, Orhan Pamuk, Vladimir Nabokov and, embarrassingly, Erica Jong insofar as I tried to write a more sincere and nuanced version of Fear of Flying.
In all three books I am shooting for a complex, seamless literary epic in which changes of tone and voice reflect shifts of consciousness. New Moon is the entry point and, for now, the only available book (other than earlier versions of itself and Out of Babylon).