THE PRIVATE POEMS
OF ALLISTER SMITH
The experience was certainly not a novel one. The more gullible members of society have been being fooled by their more charismatic brethren for as long as there has been a society. Cult leaders, political fanatics, religious zealots: many times have their guileless followers fallen prey to such powers of mind control, almost as if we knowingly walk into these situations hoping against hope that those we would believe in have pure motives. We are a race of followers rather than leaders, always searching for the next messiah, the one with the commanding voice, the piercing eyes, the overriding will that we are all too willing to fall thrall to. We sense in such types a predestined greatness, and we would follow whether the outcome be divine or demonic, or entirely worldly for that matter, it matters not. The great mass of humanity strives to believe and to follow, and thus fall again and again under the aura of such types to the total abandonment of all reason and sense of morality.
History is of course rife with examples. Adolph Hitler is of course the seminal political example, though hardly unique. Religion or pseudo-religion is at least the equal of the political arena when it comes to such charismatic powers. Recent examples include the Jonestown tragedy, the Heaven's Gate cult, the Branch Davidians, etc.
Being a psychologist, a student of the mind, I would like to fancy myself too sophisticated to fall prey to such influences. I have been trained to keep a professional distance, to read into the motives of such people. I have been trained to spot the subtle manipulation and to be in control when dealing with such individuals. But in the tale I am about to relate I lost that control, and so came to be duped like the rest of naive humanity. Perhaps that is the greatest danger, that when we regard ourselves immune to such influences that that is when we are most vulnerable. Let me say first that whatever hold Allister Smith held over me caused no great harm to myself nor to anyone else. I committed no greater evil at his behest than to break an administrative rule, and perhaps at most a petty crime. Yet still, the possibilities send shivers down my spine even to this day. Thus I write this memoir only partially as a confession and more to outline a fascinating case study of the undue influence of one individual over another through sheer force of personality. What follows is the story of my encounter with Allister Smith, the world's greatest poet and liar.
"I don't really need to stay here, you know," a disembodied voice floated out through the little observation window of the padded isolation room.
"Pardon?" I responded, only slightly distracted from the self-induced trance of boredom and half sleep. Night duty on the observation ward often had that effect on me. I found those eight hours excruciatingly dull most of the time. Thankfully, the duty fell to each of us only one weekend per month. The man in the cell had been brought in in restraints during the evening shift. I was miffed at missing a concert I really wanted to attend. (I could find no one who would switch weekends with me.) Thus I was in no hurry to finish his processing. They could do that in the morning. I was paging through a mass culture magazine dedicated to the cult of personality, something I would never read anywhere but there or in the dentist's office, much less actually purchase.
"I said, I don't need to stay here," he repeated. "For what are we as human beings after all, but pure consciousness? As such I transcend time, space, and physicality. I only remain here out of deference to your staff. Consider it a professional courtesy."
I smiled to myself, though he could certainly not see me do so through the wall, and returned to my magazine. A brief period of silence ensued.
"I see you have no more desire to be here than I do, and thus your consciousness too, has taken wing," came the voice again after a time.
I said nothing, but continued paging through the magazine.
"I'll prove it to you," he continued. "What were you thinking just now before I interrupted you. Your mind was certainly not on that trashy magazine you're paging through." Could he hear me turning the pages through the wall or was it just a lucky guess?
"Nothing," I replied through the door despite my better judgment to ignore him.
"No, something, I think," he replied, "unless you are a very advanced yogi. The job of consciousness is consciousness. It never rests, nor loses itself if it can help it. So, please, humor a poor lunatic and try to remember. I guarantee you were doing one of two things. You were either remembering something (replaying consciousness) or projecting your consciousness elsewhere, either into the future or into some more desirable universe, in other words, daydreaming."
"I guess I was doing a little of each," I finally replied. "There's a page in this rag advertising hiking boots. It pictures a hiker in the Grand Canyon. It set me to thinking about hiking the north rim. I've hiked it before. I guess I was imagining myself doing it now, and sort of making up the sights as I went along. I didn't even realize it until you called it to my mind."
"A synthesis, daydreaming and remembering! What a remarkable thing is the mind. And no doubt it was completely effortless."
"Yes it was," I agreed putting down the magazine for good, beginning to enjoy the exchange. "I didn't consciously try to create my daydream. It just sort of flowed out of the back of my mind somewhere."
"And probably didn't even interfere with your reading."
"No, but then the reading was hardly challenging,"
"No less remarkable though, to read and comprehend here in this dismal hospital ward, while another level of your consciousness is busy monitoring a trillion simultaneous processes to keep your body functioning, and through it all your mind doesn't even have to be at home! It can go out and hike the canyon trail, even if that trail does not strictly exist in a physical sense. Your mind is free to go anywhere in space, or imagined space, and to move freely backwards and forwards through time. And all you leave behind is that self-monitoring mechanism we call the body, which is nothing more than a collection of potential energy patterns anyway; insignificant compared to the mind which organizes those patterns in a meaningful array. As Shakespeare said, 'Is that all we see or seem? But a dream within a dream?'"
"I'll accept your point for the sake of intellectual argument. However, it takes a body to contain and sustain a mind," I replied.
Having made that point and thinking that the end of that particular line of discussion my curiosity was sufficiently roused to cause me to get up and open the small observation window in the cell and get a look at my fellow conversationalist.
"Hello," offered a sweet voice when its owner espied me. It belonged to a smallish man with a cherub's grin bound by restraints and hunched in a corner of the cell.
"Based on the postulate you just stated," he continued, "if there is no mind save those sustained by bodies, then you deny life after death, gods, angels, saints, anything greater than yourself. That's very ethnocentric."
"I don't deny them, but as a scientist neither do I believe in them. I am just indifferent to them, I guess. I only believe in the provable, anything beyond that, by definition, can be nothing more than pure conjecture."
"Then you and I find ourselves on opposite sides of the proverbial fence, my friend, as well as the opposite sides of this padded door," he said, "for speculation and conjecture is what most motivates me. Think about it, that which is scientifically provable is but the tiniest part of the universe of ideas. I have the whole broad universe and you exist but in a tiny box and deny most of what exists just because you can't prove it. You don't know what you're missing!"
"I hope you'll excuse me for making this observation, but right now you appear to be the one in the box and I the one with access to a wider world." This little bit of sarcasm was as heartless and cruel as it was unprofessional. I regretted it as soon as it slipped out. It was the kind of thing that passed for wit amongst my college buddies when I was younger.
But before I could apologize he laughed most heartily for such a small man. "Very amusing, Doctor, but that just brings us back to square one. Being mind only, I am only confined if I accept that I am confined. As Sir Edward Dyer put it in his poem, My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, 'Content to live, this is my stay, I seek no more than may suffice, I press to bear no haughty sway, Look, what I lack my mind supplies: Lo, thus I triumph like a king, Content with what the mind doth bring.'"
Then there was a pause and he let out a deep sigh. "However that might be, speaking of what would suffice, how about a cigarette, good doctor, for the poor lunatic? Surely you could loosen my fetters long enough for that? And while you're at it, how about a cup of coffee?"
"What?" I replied despite myself. "Where's your...
