Richard
Okay. This is our second try at an interview, and the first try, for various technical reasons, didn't record. So you had asked me, this time we're doing the phone instead of Zoom, and you had asked me to make a list kind of what we had talked about the first time. And what's surprising to me is, even though it was only about a month ago, is that most of my notes make no sense to me at all. I can't connect them to anything. But I don't think it matters too much because it doesn't prevent us from doing a different interview. No,
Robert
it does. But let me begin, if I may. Are we recording now? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me begin by saying that I still find myself in admiration of the unparalleled nature of your activity. I don't mean this interview or these interviews, but the way in which at some point in your life, someone, some angel, gave you the impetus to write an account of, to compile an account of your own being, your own life. You have been writing not an autobiography, but an allobiography, the biography of someone else who happens to be you. And the remarkable way in which that has run through interview, historical works, essays, appreciations of various forms of human culture, Even the recently publishing ventures of Europe and this year and Ireland and that year and so on, the way in which the events of your life have been marshaled into, along with the prejudices and interests of your life, the events of them have been gathered into something which is a profound vision of what it means to be not Richard Grossner, but a human honor is in your time. And I find myself admiring that. I, who lived most of my life in hiding, so to speak, I don't mean public hiding, but hiding of my motivations, hiding of my connections, I was brought up that way. I was Irish. One didn't talk about those things. One just beat them. One wrote the book and snuck away. and sat in the cave thinking about this and that. But here you are, able to take this rich and grossing their character and his various friends and connections and turn them into an account of intellectual life in America in the late 20th century and early 21st. This is a remarkable achievement, and I want you to know I appreciate it. However, I may bitch and complain about interviewing with you. I still feel that. Anyway, read me some of the notes that make no sense.
Richard
spiritual couple with a much wider framework of what was possible in a human relationship. And we also arrived as writers with kind of very kitsch ambitions. Lindy, to be a conventional poet, you might remember her godfather was John Chiardi. Oh, I forgot much. And me trying to write novels because I had been encouraged in that. And you put an end to it for both of us. And for a while, we were both kind of avant-garde poets. And eventually, I decided I could do it in prose. So I switched. But I never gave up the poetic sensibility that you transmitted.
Robert
You never did, you never did give that up, nor did she turn away from the Ciardiesque world.
Robert
The world that Lindy grew up in, Ciardi or no Ciardi, was a world which was very, very dominated, completely dominated by that kind of conventional poetics, and that the voices you were beginning to hear from the of our god or from Ginsburg or Sider or Doran those were voices that were just peep squeaks at that moment just hollering crying out a little bit in the wilderness of dullness and so she was as you were very quick to pick up on the pointlessness of going on with that older tradition and so I don't think I have to be thanked for in this. I think it was your natural intelligence and the poetic sensibilities, both of yours, that led you to that instant, almost instantaneous jump into something fresh.
Richard
Well, it takes both. You can't have a student unless the student is willing, and the student can't have a mentor unless the mentor knows how to teach. So in that sense, we met well. What I wrote down... I think we met well.
Robert
But you know, all everyone has to do is ring the doorbell. That's all a mentor does. They're already inside. The dog is ready to bark. The woman ready to give birth. The man ready to build his skyscraper. You just need to press the doorbell and it all jumps into action.
Richard
Well, in your case, the doorbell was that little hut, kind of. I thought of it as like almost a trailer on the Bard campus, and we rang the bell. And you came out from behind the sign that said, Tomorrow possible because it is. Uh-huh. And I wrote down in relationship to our previous conversation, Um, apparently you said, when I said that, you said, well, also tomorrow possible because I am. Um, and neither of us may necessarily be able to decipher what I wrote down. But I one piece that I wrote down that will get lost if I don't say it right now is that we began by you remarking on Lindy's and my relationship, which we weren't really aware of yet. We were we were uncertain as to how long it would last. At this point, it's like over 60 years. But back then, every relationship had like a built-in obsolescence that you assumed. But you remarked in our unrecorded conversation that you saw me as continually articulating and Lindy as being the mystery unspoken. And I remarked to that, that I always felt I was like the magician in the tarot, and she was like the high priestess. And I was putting out all this energy, which was going nowhere until she came along and provided a way for it to be received and shaped. And we spent much of the next 60 years with few people understanding that, almost no one. Most people thought that I was inflating her and she was just following along with me. And then some people thought that she was wasting her time on me. But no one actually saw the depth of that connection, which would be proven by our staying together and continuing to connect. But you did, and you helped make it possible by showing us ourselves, by reflecting us to ourselves.
Robert
Well, that's it, because the two tarot trump you speak of are relatively good indices of what you've just been saying, because, as you know, the high priestess is just sitting there, seemingly doing nothing, while the magician is flying through the air, his hands flying, things going on. Yet, without her, nothing happens to him. And it was clear to me from when I first met you two that there were iron bonds, copper bonds, golden bonds, mianas, vines holding you two together. It was very obvious. It didn't require brilliance on my part. It was there, and I can see it in the way. I've known many other couples where the wife quietly sits there or the husband externalizes in some meaningful way the energy that is her energy. Many husbands, unlike yourself, are unwilling to recognize the extent to which they are, in a sense, going from rather than scribbling into some woman, sitting there with them for year after year. The woman comes first, the mother comes before the child. It's as simple as that, it seems to me. And you two made a brilliant coupling and a brilliant sharing. And you also had a brilliant child along the way, which is another matter altogether, which I know nothing about because I've never had a child of the flesh. I've had hundreds of children of the Spirit the thousands of kids got torn, etc. And I don't mean the connections that I've made, as with you, but the ordinary college students I've dealt with for 60, 65 years. But your connection with Lindy is very powerful and it's something I hope comes visible to everyone. I haven't read the latest interview with Lindy that was published online a few days ago.
Richard
Or a couple of weeks ago. Yeah.
Robert
only came to me a few days ago, Lindy. I don't know where it went. Anyway, but I thought I'm looking forward to reading that. And the idea of the husband interviewing the wife is in itself a remarkable act of courageous humility and pride at the same time. Anyway.
Richard
Well, you know, during the college years, when you were at Bard and I was at Amherst and Lindy was at Smith, we broke up several times, three times altogether. And you were the one who had the terms. You always presented me with the terms for getting back together, Whenever I was sure that we were done, you had something sort of magical to say that was, it wasn't just that it was articulate. It was like an oracle. It was like going to the oracle. And at that time, your partner was Helen. And I remember the very last time when Lindy and I kind of finally stuck going there and the dialogue appears in the various versions of my book New Moon, where I pose all these riddles to you and you answer each of them. And at one point and you say, go back, talk to her. And I say she doesn't want to listen. And then at a certain point, I say, I don't have the book in front of me on purpose. I don't want to just be reading for myself. But I say something like, well, what if she won't listen? And you say, well, what if the door won't open? What if you knock and the door won't open? What if the world ends tomorrow? We all live in terror. And it was lines like that that sort of undercut other meanings. And that was your special gift to communicate sort of the thing that was most significant, most important to communicate, but which often gets lost in homilies that people couch it in. And neither of us knew at that time that my father wasn't the person I thought he was, that by blood I wasn't Richard Grossinger. When you say I work with this character, this character was Richard Towers until he was 12, and then Richard Grossinger thereafter. But from age 30, my father was this guy Bernard Brandt, I mean my blood father. So I went through these different phases, and if I had even wanted to be a given character, the play wouldn't let me be that. Each act I came out, and I was given a new role. And I think that's true for everyone. A different name. A different name. It's true for everyone. You have to let the—
Robert
role feel so. Now what happens if they call me William tomorrow? What do I do then? And you've lived through so much of that. Sometimes I've felt with something, I hope you don't mind by saying that, something almost like pity for the number of convulsions of identity that you've had to go through. Not just the ones we speak of now, but just the whole North Atlantic thing. And before that, the whole census, North Atlantic to California, the convulsions of presence in place, each of them I know must have been involved in a huge amount of turmoil.
Richard
Yeah, that's something that I wrote down from our last interview that you sort of arrived at by a slightly different path. You said, I wrote down, there's no I ever. You had North Atlantic in New England, and then you had North Atlantic in California, and then you came back to the North Atlantic and it didn't come, which was true on two levels. It didn't come because of the torment that you described, that it was stolen. It was stolen by, to be a little kind of ornate, it was stolen by the heathen, to put a sort of Miltonic view on it. Absolutely. Yeah, stolen by me. But also, the angels from that same script were trying to get me out of there. Because there was no more work for me to do. And so I went on to inner traditions and continued that phase of my life, which was always the strange thing that I was commercially not much of a writer commercially, although I completely believe in my writing, but I was a really good acquirer of books. And at North Atlantic, as an acquirer, I was very niche-oriented because we didn't have the outreach that Inner Traditions does. So there I was kind of liberated by the angels.
Robert
Otherwise, you'd still be publishing a guide to the best tortilla restaurant.
Richard
No, not that, but a guide to karate. Or the next cranial sacral therapy book, whether it was needed or not, or better than the previous ones or not.
Robert
No, I think, but the angel has to ask you, and I think the angel has something to do with Lindy too. I think you're both guided and I'm both held. I was so sorry to hear about having some... Did you describe you spoke of arthritic problems?
Richard
Yeah, arthritic and what they call mild cognitive impairment. It's made me realize that you're with a soul. You're not with a person. At a certain point, it becomes a union with a soul, an oversoul even, that transcends lifetimes. That's right. That's right. So I went through a phase. I think of it as my depression. I went through a phase that I counted of 850 days when I just couldn't find her or find myself. And then I came to the awakening, the realization of who we were simultaneously, sort of physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. And it came back together again in the fall of 2020. And the pandemic during that time was one of the, I mean, I think that was a gateway for everyone culturally. I didn't get COVID until last year when it also proved a kind of revelatory experience. But I think you had a milder form of COVID when we tried to talk previously.
Robert
I got it the first time it came in 2020. A friend of ours had come from Africa via Italy when Italy, northern Italy, was full of COVID. And Africa had its own share. And we got it from her. She almost died from it. I had it very severely. So I had it even more severely. But we got over it.
Richard
Yeah, it's amazing because before it mutated, it had a very high kill rate.
Robert
We got by it, and then so the only other time I had it, it came very mild indeed. Charlotte hardly noticed it, just lost her taste for a week or so. I just sniveled and snorted in my usual way, a little more than usual. But listen, do you notice that I have guided this in my own subtle, sneaky, Celtic fashion? I have guided this to talking about you away from talking about me. And I think that's an important part of our interview, that we're talking about you. Because you are the one that matters here.
Richard
I'm the one who initiated this series of interviews as a form of discovery. Of self-discovery, indeed, yes. Well, of self-discovery and of discovery of who the different people have been who have kind of made a place. Well, you can't ever know the place you make in the world because that's right against you and you don't see it. It's like... One
Robert
doesn't want to see it either. One wants to be the same little schoolboy who always was scribbling with pink chalk on the sidewalk and hoping that the scribbles make sense. And the minute you get bigger than that, you're in trouble. Or I would be in trouble.
You've been scribbling like that for years, and it's one of the most, I won't say charming, it is that, but it's one of the most effective features of your work, is that it has the absolute intensity of, oh, what am I doing now? along with the absolute refusal to accord to that, what you're doing now, a high cultural value. You're not putting dollar signs on your achievement. And I find that a brilliant act compared to some people I have watched at work. No names will be mentioned here. Have you interviewed Chuck, by the way?
Richard
Yeah, I interviewed Chuck, and that's, if you don't have that, I'll send you the link to that. I was going, what was I going to say? Well, a number of different things came up, and this wasn't what I was wanting to say, but I would mention that I was conditioned very early by being put in psychoanalysis at age eight. with this student of Freud's from Vienna who had all the flaws of a Freudian, but also was able to communicate the mystery that Freud communicated and so kind of instill it in me. I thought of him as a magician, not knowing he was a magician, giving me the tools of the magician hoping that I would figure it out in time to use it. And he died when I was 13, but I did figure it out. And I did turn it into a different form where you gave me other tools to make it more of a spiritual undertaking. But it was that self-awareness at that time. I don't think it's conferred as often now because what passes as psychoanalysis is really counseling. And it doesn't go at symbols and dream interpretation and free association in the way that he did. He did the whole Viannese shtick.
Richard
Yeah, and that enabled me to kind of, that it was deep enough that I could then take it and abandon his kind of agenda and make a different agenda out of it. And that's something in which both you and Lindy played a big role. And I think that you became less a part of our life after a while because you were already in it and it wasn't necessary to maintain regular contact. You had said when Lindy was eight months pregnant with Robin, you had said, well, we won't be seeing much of each other in the future. And that was sort of true, although it was meant in a different way and at a different level. But it was true in that we chose to continue in that way. And we were in different worlds. But in the larger sense, because the larger sense encompasses mysteries and lifetimes, we had the connection that I'm now drawing on. And at this particularly difficult time, politically and internationally, it's useful to remember that the mystery remains and that the kind of unborn aspect of the reality that's unfolding is still unfolding too.
Robert
Yes, indeed, indeed. Let me make a, if I may, slip in a recommendation that you might think of, what was the name of your analyst when you were eight?
Richard
Dr. Abraham Fabian.
Robert
Fabian?
Richard
Yeah.
Robert
A remarkable man, Abraham. I would suggest, unless this seems to you too frivolous or maybe even too difficult, you write an interview, an imaginary interview with Dr. Fabian. Ask him what he saw in you. Tell him what you saw in him. I would find that fascinating. The notion of a brilliant eight-year-old child that you must have been dealing with an analyst of a basically thought it's fascinating to me
Richard
I’ve done a little bit of that not with that exact intent but when I had trouble in college and had a severe panic attack that lasted like 8 days I conducted a dialogue with him that I wrote down in which I was simultaneously thanking him and berating him for what he taught and what he didn't teach. And then later, after I studied with John Friedlander, did psychic work with John Friedlander, and part of his ritual was at a certain point you inform all the souls in the universe, whether you're aware of who they are, you inform them of the change that you've undergone. So...
Robert
Each of many changes in succession or one basic change?
Richard
No, each... When the time comes, you inform people that you're different, that you've undergone this change. So I would inform Dr. Fabian along and that I needed him to move along too and recognize that we were practicing magic and divination as well as psychoanalysis and that and that I had I had solved the sort of generic dream that we had been interpreting that that it was now a different sort of a different sort of dream and a different sort of interpretation. And
Robert
that, you actually wrote that as a text?
Richard
Yeah, I'm trying to think. I guess I wrote it in the unpublished book, which I do want to publish this year, Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, in which is the book where I describe in most detail my, well, first my cranial sacral training and then my psychic training, which are, I have this list of trainings I feel I've undergone. The first being baseball, and then the set, well, maybe the first being psychoanalysis, then baseball, then writing in high school, and Chuck Stein played a huge role in that. And then you were my initiation into the esoteric world. and then I probably didn't have another major initiation. I wouldn't call anthropology an initiation in the same sense. I probably didn't have another one until I did cranial sacral therapy. Hold on
Robert
just a moment, okay? Hold on. I may have to get off the phone. I'll call you right back, okay?
Richard
Okay. For the people who are listening to this interview, I have learned that when using voice memo on your computer, that you have to keep talking or it will break into two interviews when Robert comes back. And then I'll have to send it out to my tech person. And, well, it's going to happen anyway, I guess. because so I will start it up again and then get the interviews tied together. Hi, Robert.
Robert
Are you recording?
Richard
Yeah, and I'm recording without having to start a second document. So either you or I could pick up from here.
Robert
There's lots to be said about Trump. It's not all negative. That's the important thing. There's something there that is positive. and that is what I think is charming people or keeping him from being fascinated. There's something there and I think we will find out what it is. It may be, as you say, a spirit but I don't know. It's something I've never experienced before I mean, I've lived through McCarthy and those people, you know, he World War II people.
Richard
Yeah, you're about 10 years older than me, so you have a somewhat different...
Robert
I will be 90 this year.
Richard
Yeah, so you're a little less than 10 years older. But it always makes a difference because you have such a different frame on things. I sometimes think about the people I knew. I said this in a previous interview. I think just my last interview, the people I knew who like died before 9-11 or who died before COVID, certainly, but also the various wars that followed 9-11 and COVID and Trump and such a different view of reality that you would have. we who have continued to live and to see that and then when we die there will be remarkable changes in reality that we can't imagine.
Robert
One of the things that haunts me, but it's a related chronological issue, that it seems to me that I was thinking one day about classical music of which I'm very fond of, you know I don't have any other kind. I was thinking about the last opera that I felt was very powerfully done in the steps of traditional opera, and that was Charles' Capriccio, which was first put on in 1949 when I was 14 years old, and you were, what, five or four or so. It seemed to me that things that happen in our lifetime have a different quality, a different meaning. That people who are alive when we are alive are brothers and sisters. That Strauss is my brother. Mahler, who I like even more, is not my brother. He died in 1911. But there's something about being on the earth at the same time as you were too. So that we are brothers, you and I, in that sense.
Richard
Yeah, you remind me of an incident that happened way back when we first knew each other. You had made a reading list for me, and on it was Robert Graves as the white goddess. And I was so taken with his discussion of the alphabet and the origin of the alphabet that I wrote him a letter, and he wrote me back. and I showed it to you and you said, I can't believe we're alive at the same time as Robert Graves. And I said, I can't believe I'm alive at the same time as you.
Robert
Excited, yes. I remember hearing Graves talk at a lecture. A remarkable man who wrote. And he wrote you. Do you still have the letter?
Richard
Probably not.
Robert
I'll have it.
Richard
No,
Robert
that's wonderful. No, that's sort of a similar community. Now, how old is Lindy?
Richard
We both the same age. We were both born in 1944.
Robert
So she's my sister, too, then, okay. My own sister is a bit younger. She would just be 80. Well, no. She is 80, but she is in Florida, and I haven't seen her in years. We're in such different worlds. But back to our interview, it seems to me that what we've just been saying about the simultaneity of perception and spirit on the planet, those are important things and deserve to be examined, and I'm sure you are doing that. You did an interview of Chuck, and you did one with an imaginary dialogue with your psychiatrist. I would pursue that, do you? Those things with Dr. Vienna.
Richard
Dr. Fabian, I'll find what I have written about that and send it to you.
Speaker 3
Well, not so much send it to me, but send it to you. Maybe
Unknown Speaker
you could add to it.
Richard
Well, I'll think about it. I'm trying to stay pretty much within the confines of these three books that I'm trying to get out. I don't have too many slots to put other things in.
Robert
I see.
Richard
Well, these interviews and these travel journals I've been rewriting. But also, this allows me to bring up something else, which is a new kind of enthusiasm for me. Have you heard the term A-ports? A-ports. Yeah, Apports. It usually means its original meaning is a figure who appears during a seance. It's an apport. But I guess a friend of mine back in Berkeley who made a movie about that, a sort of short documentary about apports, gave me the term when I had this strange occurrence, without going into over much detail now, that Lindy's iPod, we lost it in Portland. And after searching widely for it, because we prefer them to the iPhone for music, because they're not connected to the world. We went to our house in Bar Harbor about three weeks later, and it was sitting on the kitchen table. And that was the first time that any such thing had happened in my life. There was no wiggle room on it, as I remarked to people. It was clearly lost in Portland, and it clearly appeared in Bar Harbor next. And that was an A-port. And I am interested in writing about them. I now have an author at Inner Traditions, Keith Thompson, who wrote a very sort of seminal book on UFOs, really the seminal book called The UFO Paradox. He's now writing a book on apports and relating them to UFOs because the phenomenon may be much more widespread. And objects might be more frequently disappearing these days and then reappearing elsewhere. And I've even noted a couple of people who I wouldn't have thought would have noticed have remarked that they've noticed that themselves and that you just don't pay any attention. The object disappears, it reappears, you don't make a fuss about it because what are you going to say or do? Now, I don't know if you've had any such experience.
Robert
The telephone I'm holding in my hand now appeared in the same, similar way before I made my call to you. I hunted all over the house and found it where I would have put it. It may have been warning me that we're right here about apport. Are the apos in the man's book, who was a man, I think, are the apports in his book typically technological items, or can they be anything? I
Richard
think that they can be anything. In his film, this is Dan Draisen, in his film, they often are photographs that come from another time. They're not geographical so much as they're chronological, like a photograph will suddenly drop out of the air. I noticed that when I had COVID, they increased to a great degree. And I lost my iPhone at one point. And it fell out of, I don't know, it fell out of thin air. when one of the cars that we hadn't been using had been sitting a long time, I went and began honking. And I went and got inside and my cell phone fell down next to me. And I thought that that was extraordinary. I mentioned it to John Friedlander. He had a very curious response. I said, I know it's not a dybbuk, but it reminds me of a dybbuk. And he said, it's a result of your pessimism that you're going to survive this COVID experience and that it's a warning to live. And it was one of those communications, you know, like the Oracle of Delphi. It was a sign rather than a direct speaking. It was a sign to be interpreted, but it did have an effect. I did take it exactly as he proposed it. And I realized if I don't decide to live now, I'm going to be, it's almost like I'm going to disappear into these objects. and that's how we die. That's how our death picture forms.
Robert
Do you remember Peter Lambert Wilson, the late Peter? Did you get to know him ever?
Richard
No. I mean, I knew him. I met him once, probably with you, in the context of Pir Zia. Yes,
Robert
That's right, I remember that occasion. And they were very mean to him up there, but he passed away a few months ago, a man I miss tremendously. But he used to speak of the Hylozoic, that matter is a lie, and I used to correct him to the Hylo-Noetic. The matter thinks, matter has intentions, matter is talking. And I think that one of the things that we might conceive on the other side of dybbuk and those issues is that things themselves may be able to move. Listen, you have to forgive me. May we make a brief intermission to our interview? I have to go and do something for a few minutes.
Richard
Well, we could also. I shoot for about an hour, and we're at 54 minutes. Oh, okay. So we could stop, or if you want, I'll see if the voice memo will let me make it.
No, we can stop then. I just didn't mean to cut you off. Okay. But you can always call again at least.
Right. Well, we can let this settle and do another one later.
Robert
Okay, good. Let's do that and give my best wishes to Linda for her recovery, my admiration for her powers, her beauty and her connectivity with the world and how she's been able to control it, throw it into children, throw it into you, throw it into homework and the same to you.
Unknown Speaker
So take care of yourself and we'll talk soon.
Richard
Okay, thanks Robert. Okay, be well. Bye.
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