Yes, But What Does It All Mean?

 

Immortal being or empty suit: Which will be Cosmo's fate?

Relax, relax. Our introductory image does not portend some grim vision of horror or despair. From time to time, across the decades during which this story has unfolded, when I've written or told people about parts of it, they've responded with a perfectly understandable question: "Yes, amazing, but what does it all mean?" Truth be told, I've never answered that question to anyone's satisfaction, including my own. As I continue to age (gracefully, of course) and grow more distracted (less gracefully) by the digital flotsam and jetsam that ensnares and fragments us all, the question becomes more urgent. 

I am 66 years old now, still plugging away at a story that itself is almost 40 years old. Chronological and biological inevitabilities loom. What if I don't finish it? Will enough meaning cohere in what is there to make it a worthwhile encounter for someone who stumbles on it years hence in some abandoned, cobwebbed corner of Cyberspace? And what if I do finish it, and share it, say, within a small coterie of friends and family? What might it mean to them? To me?

I used to reply with something like, "Well, what does a beautiful girl mean? A beautiful sunset?" In other words, the question of meaning was purely aesthetic, and couldn't be answered rationally. After all, the first two people I presented it to, orally in person, back in 1988 had said the same thing: "It's all too beautiful."

The aesthetic dimension is primarily subjective, and often transitory. But could there be meaning here that is more stable over time and more communicable? Now we seem to have entered the realm of language, and this is where I intend to stake my claim. 

What we have constructed here, after all these years, I claim, is a private language between two personages—one at least partly corporeal and in the land of the living, the other incorporeal and in the land of the dead. Cosmo and Stanza's private lingo, yes, but as Cosmo's legatee here in the land of the living, it's been my job to make it intelligible to mere mortals.

How to do this? Mostly by setting out examples of how the lingo works.  Which has been, in large part, the task and method of this blog since the beginning. Heuristically, rather than systematically, to be sure. But isn't that how we all begin to learn language?

A recent example presented itself when actress of yesteryear Dodie Heath died at the age of 96. Her most notable role was in Brigadoon, but I knew her as the titular character's fiancé in Long Live Walter Jameson, from the Twilight Zone's first season.

Now, the episode was written by Charles Beaumont, so it's unsettling enough as it is, but the circumstances of my first encounter with it added another, typically Cosmo-esque resonance. Walter Jameson is a college history teacher engaged to the daughter of an older colleague, who, as we open, is sitting in on one of Jameson's lectures about the Civil War. Rod Serling sets the stage, in rather florid terms: 

You're looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours of dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive.

As the camera shifts to the older colleague, Serling continues:

In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldn't come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.

Then we see Jameson bring out a diary of a Union officer, and read from an entry dated September 11, 1864. Noon, you say? September 11, you say? We are intrigued.

Kittredge is intrigued too, so he does some research and finds a book with a civil war photo of  camp officers, one of whom looks an awful lot like our Walter. And his magnifying glass zooms in on a ring on the officer's finger that Jameson is inexplicably but unmistakably still wearing in the present day.  Game, set, match. And when he confronts his prospective son-in-law, Jameson admits he accessed some sinister magic a few thousand years ago and has been living an endless succession of lives. He confesses he's had tremendous luck in avoiding injury and sickness, but also that lately (in the past few centuries, say) has often felt that being able to die might not be such a bad thing after all. 

The incriminating Blow-Up   

In the ensuing discussion, we are perhaps surprised to find Kittredge more upset that Jameson can't or won't share this magic with him than he is by his daughter's impending marriage to a man who will inevitably abandon her to her mortal fate and calmly move on.

But Jameson's luck has run out. One of these abandoned ex-wives (played superbly by then 77-year-old veteran stage actress Estelle Winwood) catches up with him and fatally shoots him. Our story ends with Kittredge and his daughter looking on in horror as Jameson's corpse turns to dust, leaving only his clothing intact. 

So, what have we here, and why am I telling you all this? 

Well, if we want to think of our private lingo as comprising part of the fabric of reality, or at least of our reality, we can spot more than one thread of our story in this well-loved excursion into the Twilight Zone. Or, if we prefer aural terms, we could imagine recognizing a familiar chord progression or snatch of melody. And so on.

First, as mentioned above, we have the juxtaposition in the prologue of noon and September 11, in the context of the beginning of a story of magic—unfortunately, in this case, black magic, but magic nonetheless. For who can deny that some sort of magic was afoot on that day of our story, our capital-S Story? Having placed a bet with Reality that what I had seen in my mind would NOT come to pass at noon at my designated spot, I lost, and thus agreed to introduce myself to a certain girl, and at the same time introduced myself to the experience of precognition.

So, in equation format, NOON + SEPTEMBER 11 = PRECOGNITION

Then we have a hitherto unsuspected layer of truth revealed, or at least suggested, in a photograph from the distant past whose subject turns out to be the twin of someone living in the present. It's also a photo that requires magnification to achieve its effect—a blow-up that explodes ("blows up") Professor Kittredge's conceptions of what is possible and impossible. In other words, it's not a very nice photograph, because, as we all know, Nice Photographs [like Nice Girls] Don't Explode, i.e., they don't blow to smithereens your hitherto comfortable, complacent assumptions about reality. And that instant when we see—and then can never unsee—the uncanny resemblance, lives forever in our memory as a portal between the comfortable and the impossible.

In equation format, let's say PHOTO + TWINS = RECOGNITION 

I think these sorts of equations approximate how these associations work in my head—and maybe yours, too.

PRECOGNITION, RECOGNITION. Hey, I'll be darned, One Letter's Difference.™

As I was scribbling in my notebook to capture these two points, another layer of weirdness took me by surprise. This episode had begun with a reference to September 11, and I had just seen it for the first time that day. 

And that day happened to be (drum roll, please) September 11, 2010.

Don't go away; we're just getting warmed up. 

I recognized Kevin McCarthy, the actor who played Walter Jameson, from his best-known film, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (1956). A few days later I looked him up in case he'd been in anything else I might like to see. I found out not only that he was the younger brother of writer Mary McCarthy, but that he had just recently passed away at the ripe old age of 96. Very recently, in fact. On September 11, 2010.

So we have an improbable coincidence of dates with obvious resonance to our Story.

I was working my way through the first season of TZ at the time, and I realized this episode had been written by Charles Beaumont, who'd also written Perchance to Dream, a mind-bending episode with terrific atmosphere. 

So I looked him up, too. Turns out he was a vital figure in 1950s/60s horror and "strange tales," with numerous short stories, over 20 TZ episodes and several screenplays to his credit (including an old favourite of mine, Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death). Known for his energy and spontaneity, he succumbed in his mid-30s to a rare illness of still-unknown origin that aged him rapidly and prematurely, both mentally and physically. 

When he died at 38 in 1967, his son said he "looked ninety-five and was, in fact, ninety-five by every calendar except the one on your watch." A longtime colleague later said, "Like his character Walter Jameson, Chuck just dusted away."

I couldn't help thinking about McCarthy dying at 96. In fact, considering the relevance of longevity to the story, it's worth noting that of the two supporting actresses, Dodie Heath died at 96 as well, and Estelle Winwood lived to 101. On turning 100, she reportedly said, "I wouldn't mind being dead—it would be something new." She almost could have been quoting Walter Jameson himself.

What a bizarre episode. Not just the Twilight Zone episode on my screen, but the circumstances of my encounter with it, and the resonances they generated. We perceive and pattern such resonances intellectually, but their overtones are felt emotionally and intuitionally, as an epiphenomenon, an extra dimension—suggestive of another world. Paul Eluard thought so: "There is another world, but it is in this one," he famously said and, being a surrealist poet, he was a connoisseur of chance, spontaneity and coincidence.

Because we're unable to grasp this other world with our whole selves—with all our faculties simultaneously—it seems dim and fragmentary to us (as this blog no doubt seems to you sometimes, Patient Reader), and its certainty and coherence are eroded by doubt, inattention and unfamiliarity. 

And here's where our synchronicity and its resonance—our private language—comes in. It gives us a sketch, an outline, a handhold or two to help us keep our balance or keep us focused and reassure us that we do have an idea where we're going after all, that there might be some sort of intelligible order to strive for amid this black sea of randomness and entropy. Thus counteracting all three of the perils listed above.

I'm reminded of trying to decipher Keith Relf's barely audible soliloquies in those bootlegs of "I'm a Man." Sometimes I think I've caught a new word or two; it may not mean much in the grand scheme, but it's encouraging and helps me feel closer to where I've always hoped I was going. 

A few more encouraging pieces to the puzzle, and maybe that sort of encouragement—and courage—is all the meaning we need for now to keep Cosmo in the land of the living.

Which brings us back to our little excursion in the Twilight Zone. About 20 years ago I was jotting ideas in my notebook for new ways to approach the Story, the Whole Gargantuan Thing, in a way that would make it irresistible and give it some legs—some longevity in this world. My aphoristic conclusion was:

 I have to find a way of telling the story that is both truer than fiction and stranger than truth. 

Sounds like something Rod Serling and Charles Beaumont would both approve of.

Long live Cosmo Stone!