Mahler completes Symphony No. 6 in A Minor, and his daughter Anna is born.  She grows up to be a sculptor. 

For a long time I thought it was just this serendipitious thing that only seemed to happen to me, self-induced of course, the way some people collect or keep score of oddities they alone feel compelled to notice: the number of men with facial scars on the Paris Metro (9, on the morning of December 11, 2006); the use of "N" or "LiL" in business names: "Eat N Park," "Chew N Chat," (a real place in Tennessee), "Stop N Go," "Lil Colonel Market," "Lil Betty's Drive-Thru."  It's not about finding meaning or structure, per se, I don't think, but sure, fine, we're all a little compulsive.  Still, there's that occasional faintly nagging suspicion there might be more to it after all.  I had a friend Skip who used to make us play "Pick Out the Serial Killer" or "Find the Messiah -- He's Here!" (they were interchangeable) when we rode the subway in Manhattan.  If you were high -- and we usually were -- your fellow passengers became a lot more significant.  They didn't know it, but as a framing device, the game did more than pass the time.  And once in a while you could even manage to trick yourself into thinking you'd crossed the line, stumbled by accident onto a revelation (oh I know, I know; it sounds so ... Late 70s High) ...but there really was a time when we got off at Penn Station, and right when the doors started closing the One We Picked stood up and yelled, "I am the Resurrection and the LIFE."  I'm not kidding, I swear.

So when I heard about this person in Chatsworth who was psychic and did Regression Hypnosis, I thought, why not check it out?  But with no real intention, of course, scoffing at myself in case anyone overheard me, you know, thinking.  In fact, what actually happened was I told someone I trusted to be a complete and total skeptic, expressing myself as I did in that third person "I-have-a-friend-who-said..." formula for anything you're too embarrassed to claim for your own.  (You can also use the negative, as in "I don't see any people with bright orange clown hair" -- a useful gauge of reality in the days when we did acid.  I mean, you Did see everyone looking like Ronald McDonald, but if you said you didn't, it helped.)  Anyway, I told Tom I'd "heard about" this regression hypnotist, throwing in a little half-snorting heh heh sound, and Tom turns around and says in this matter-of-fact tone, "You mean like 'THE SEARCH FOR A SOUL. Taylor Caldwell's Psychic Lives' by Jess Stearn [Doubleday & Co. Garden City, 1973]?"

Oh yes, he'd read it when he was a kid, and in fact had asked to be hypnotized for his birthday present (he got a bike instead, or something).  Not what I was expecting, needless to say, but it made sense in an unexpected fashion.  Apparently, the novelist Taylor Caldwell had been persuaded to do regression hypnosis by Jess Stearn in 1972 and then he'd written a book about how under hypnosis she'd revealed all these past lives she'd lived from which she'd drawn the material for her historical novels. Do you remember Taylor Caldwell?  She wrote the kinds of books my mother used to read, Book of the Month Club novels, and the kind of books you used to find in second hand bookstores, along with Leon Uris, Irving Stone, James Michener, and Thomas B. Costain ("The Silver Chalice" and you got points whenever you found a copy in a thrift store back in the prehistoric times before abebooks.com.)  Books my mother would read and that -- this is the unexpected part which made sense once I thought about it -- books that a kid like Tom would have read.  I mean, who doesn't enjoy a good old historical novel, right?  I could totally see a young Tom reading "THE EARTH IS THE LORD'S" (the story of Genghis Khan) or even "DEAR AND GLORIOUS PHYSICIAN" (St. Luke's stormy life in the ancient world's ER) but I was the kind of twelve-year-old who sensed that, for instance, "THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY" (Michaelangelo's life by Irving Stone, which Mother and I thoroughly enjoyed) was not the sort of book you talked about with your classmates -- I got beat up enough as it was.  And yes, you can be secure in your masculinity long before puberty, as Tom clearly was, and I even more clearly wasn't, and you could also say that I was infinitely more concerned about the subtleties of taste and fashion than Tom, back in our respective childhoods, that I was aware of taboos he was blithely oblivious of, that I knew somehow I would never "pass" when he didn't even give the idea a first or second thought; that, okay, I threw like a girl.  I rest my case.

So, you'd think with such friendly encouragement, I would have plunged in, wouldn't you?  Go for it, make that call, find out all those interesting past lives of mine I've been dying to dredge up, right?  But old habits die hard.  Oh, I made the call, I could do that much.  And the lady I'll refer to as Aura answered, and she was certainly pleasant enough.  But I could not bring myself to simply come out and tell her why I was calling.  I had to be coy.  "I understand you do hypnosis," I said, like an aside.  Like a non-sequitur.
Yes, she replied.
Oh, well, I continued, as though I'd expected her to deny it.  Well then, I guess I'd like to find out more about the Process, I explained.  I astonish myself at how oblique and indirect I can be sometimes.  It shows a certain lack of character I suppose.  Or that I don't get out much.
"The process," she repeated, understandably uncertain.
"Well," I hedged, "do people come to you for hypnosis to, oh, say" -- here I actually hesitated, like I was suddenly trying to imagine why people would do this, and I am not a very good actor -- "oh, to quit smoking maybe?"
They did sometimes come to her with this in mind, Aura admitted, although she was not herself a hypnotist who promoted treating addiction in that fashion.  You needed to have a profound desire to quit, she said.  
"How about eating disorders," I inquired.  (See what I mean?  Ridiculous.)
"Actually?" she said, but as if she was asking if what she was about to tell me was what I wanted to know, "Actually, mostly the reason people come to me is that I do regression hypnosis and help people get in touch with their spirit guides."
"That'swhatIwant," I said in a really obvious rush, relieved she'd finally said it.
"You have spirit guides?" she asked, like she was wondering if I knew of any allergies I might have to medications.
"I might," I said, now inexplicably coy in the other direction.  I'm that incorrigible.
"I see," she said in the most reassuring and non-judgmental tone, like she was leaving the door open.  Like Mary Ann in high school who invited me over when her parents weren't home and sat next to me on the sofa and took her blouse off and she wasn't wearing a bra and sat there waiting for me to make a move (I didn't) and then asked if I wanted to drive her car and I said I might and she said, I see, the same way.  And she put a sweatshirt on and we went for a drive.  

Back to Aura. The next part went more smoothly.  The hardest part was getting the driving directions.  How much and when were quickly disposed of.
"It may not work on me," I cautioned, at the end of the conversation.
Everyone, she assured me, said the same thing.

Needless to say, I went under like a concrete block.  Sank to the bottom, even as I sat there in her guest house in the back yard of one of those classic Paramount Colonial ranch homes you see all over the nicer parts of the Valley -- lounged there, rather, and said I didn't feel anything.  ("That's what you always say," Skip used to point out. "You don't feel anything, you want more, and then you pass out.  You're no fun on pharmaceuticals."  Except there were no drugs involved in this instance.)

Where are you, Aura prompted.  I have the tapes she made of the session but even with her encouraging words, I was woefully inarticulate.  Mostly when she asked me things I grunted, cooed, snorted, and made other unintelligible replies.  Taylor Caldwell was a good deal more forthcoming, at least from what Jess Stearn reports in his book. Where was I, Aura would ask at various points -- and I do recollect, after the fact, because Aura included the suggestion that I would remember everything afterward and so I did.  Do. -- Where I was changed as we went deeper, but if I'd had any hope of finding myself somewhere irrefutably, vividly, in the Past, I was sorely dissappointed.

Where are you? Aura asked.  And I was in a field, crouched down, like I might have done when I was very young, hiding in the weeds or tall grass.  An ordinary sky, an ordinary, even generic kind of day.  On the tape I grunt with what sounds like a distinct lack of interest or surprise.  Huh.
More prompts which illicit nothing.
Who are you? she asks.  Are you a boy or a girl?
More gutteral sounds which, loosely translated might fall into the category or the vicinity of "How should I know?"
"Look down," she sensibly suggested.
And I did.  

I'm not making this up.  I was very clearly aware of being in Aura's guest house in her back yard in a comfy chair, and my eyes were closed and I was also very clearly seeing a familiar enough looking field full of weeds and grass like pretty much any of those you'd pass on a country road in practically any part of the country or around the world.  I looked down -- or rather, because as I said my eyes were closed so I inclined my head downward, fully expecting to "see" the khakis I was wearing.  And I did, for a second.  Or thought I did, and then I watched quite calmly as they faded away and my legs literally whittled themselves down to sticks.  It was almost sad to watch, as if I were witness to a speeded up vision of some sort of wasting syndrome, but as indicated by the "huh" on the tape, not such a big deal.  I was defnitely not terrified or horrified or stricken.  At least, not until I realized I was not decomposing or watching the flesh rot off my bones, but rather that I was now looking at a pair of dog legs, stretched out in front of me in the dirt.
And that's when I felt, well, let down.

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I was counting on discovering I'd been Horace Walpole in a past life, or Mary Queen of Scots or even anybody at all remotely famous in history, I don't think of myself as delusional in that respect.  I would have more than happily settled for finding out I'd been a lowly peasant or anonymous slave of either sex, canon fodder, some person of no distinction in my past lives.  A chimney sweep, maybe, you know?  A medieval serf.

But a dog?  That hurt.  A mumbled "aw man"  barely serves as an adequate record of the profound sense of loss I experienced.  And yes, yes, I know this human life is a precious thing and the odds of getting to come back even more than once in a human form is not anything to be sneered at.  Ask any fly, any roach, any litter of kittens, you know?  

But I'd had aspirations, I guess.  My past lives were somehow going to hold a key.  I was going to find out perhaps, and at the least, what happened to make the year 1904 so special, so unique, my personal touchstone, time-line talisman, key.  As I've said, I'd already come up with a theory, based on my trip to the Middle East with someone I'd fictionalized into calling Rivka.  What Aura was helping me see didn't come anywhere near close to that.  You could say I was bummed.  I was.

I was (had been? and how long ago?) a mangy skinny mutt in some nondescript and presumably god-forsaken fallow field in the middle of nowhere in the presumably middle of the nowhere timeless past.

How do you die? Aura prompted, which momentarily gave me a start.  They asked Taylor Caldwell this too, in the life where she was a maid to Marian Evans AKA George Eliot (and I was a dog.  Nice, huh?)  Taylor would tell them, that time (in the Poor House, as I recall) and every time afterward.  Dispassionately.  Well, I figured I could be that dispassionate too.  I "looked around" and I saw a wooden barn-like space.  Nothing architecturally significant enough, naturally (I'm seeing with the eyes of a dog, after all, not Frank Gehry, thank you) that I could "see" or tell you, you know, it was Amish, Celtic, feudal, nineteenth century.  I can only see that it's wooden, with a smell of old hay.  And I see a piece of rope.  And something about being cold, and maybe hungry and scared.  Maybe, or I added that part later.  And that was it.  Frankly, it was a relief.  It was enough.

There was a little more, but that's as far as everything I'd be willing to tell anyone.

So if you're interested in finding out about your past lives, maybe you shouldn't.  I'm just sayin'.

Taylor Caldwell, in her Epilogue to Jess Stearn's book?  She said she didn't buy any of it, and she figured there was some other reasonable explanation.  It made no difference to her.  Coming from a writer, I find that a little hard to believe, but there you are.  "One life suffices me," she wrote.  "It is all I want...[because] I am deeply convinced that happiness does not exist in this world, or in any 'life' or 'life hereafter,' and I will be glad to have done with it forever."

Poor Taylor Caldwell.

Next time: the Russo-Japanese War, March 1904, as the Japanese pursue the retreating Russian troops.