CRITICAL MASS

Back in the late 1970’s—those ancient days when people still used typewriters, listened to vinyl LPs and most of us didn’t have a VCR let alone a TiVo—I was making my living, such as it was, playing in rock bands and doing record reviews, concert reviews, and interviews for a variety of small papers across the country.  Music journalism was a dream gig:  I’d get mountains of free albums, fantastic seats at concerts (free again!) and they’d even pay me for it.  (Not much, mind you, maybe five bucks a review—but being paid anything for writing was a miracle in those days.)  Really, what more could a strongly opinionated music fanatic ask?  In 1979—by this time, my band had broken up and I was beginning to get work in the comic book business—I sent some of my reviews to Rolling Stone, the Holy Grail of rock criticism.  I was delighted when my samples were received enthusiastically; even more delighted when the magazine started offering me assignments.

I had a few RS pieces under my belt when they asked me to review a Grateful Dead album, Go To Heaven. (You can read the review right here—although, if memory serves, this is a slightly edited version.)  My then-wife was a diehard Dead fanatic, as were several of my close friends, but I was far less sympathetic.  It’s not that I disliked the band (I thought Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were first-rate albums):  my problem was with the sub-culture that surrounded the Dead.  The Deadheads—as they called themselves—were so fanatical, so singularly obsessed, that they made hard-core comic book geeks seem sane and well-adjusted by comparison.  Looking back, I really don’t know what my problem was.  These people had an enthusiasm, a fiery passion, and it brought incredible joy into their lives.  Why was I so annoyed by them, so full of judgment?  Why in the world did I even care?  (Psychological insecurity and emotional immaturity are two answers that come to mind.) 

The Go To Heaven assignment gave me a chance to unload on the entire Deadhead community:  my review was smug, condescending and unkind.  (To be fair to my Younger Self, I generally tried to find something positive to say, even when writing about music I didn’t care for.  The Dead review ended on a constructive note, praising the contributions of keyboard player Brent Mydland. )  Of course, I had, on occasion, been just as smug and judgmental writing for other papers—I remember a review of a Kiss concert at Madison Square Garden that was fairly merciless—but this wasn’t Just Any Music Paper, this was Rolling Stone, a prestigious publication with hundreds of thousands of readers.  What appeared in print in RS had impact, rippling out across the collective pop culture consciousness.  It’s one thing to sit with a buddy, arguing heatedly over music or art or politics—but when that opinion’s in print, especially in a publication like Rolling Stone, the words take on other levels of meaning and readers take it very seriously.

I learned just how seriously when my editor sent me a stack of letters that the magazine received in response to my review.  No other piece I’d written had elicited so much as a mutter of praise or protest, but here was letter after letter from passionate, angry, offended and deeply wounded Deadheads:  they couldn’t have been more agitated if I’d slandered their mothers.  The emotional intensity of the responses shocked and disturbed me.  Idiotic as it sounds—because, well, it was idiotic—I’d never really considered the effect my words would have.  (Which is funny because, as a reader, I always take it personally when I read a review eviscerating some writer or actor, musician or director, that I love.)  Those letters stopped me in my tracks and, more important, forced me to reconsider what I was doing.
I was, as noted, already getting work in comics, beginning my path as a professional storyteller.  Reviewing was a side-path I’d stumbled onto—but my passion, my joy, was in the act of creation:   writing a song and then building an arrangement in collaboration with other musicians; taking a blank page and filling it with ideas and characters and fantastic worlds.  That, more than anything, was what I wanted to do with my life.  Reading the letters from those Deadheads helped me to realize just how much I didn’t want to be the guy sitting in judgment of other people’s work.  No, I wanted to be the guy sailing my creative dreams out into the universe for others to embrace or reject, love or loathe.  So, right then and there, I went cold turkey:  Go To Heaven was the last review I ever wrote.  It’s a decision I’ve never regretted. 

Over the years, I’ve been the object of more than a few negative reviews, some of them far more venomous and malicious than anything I ever wrote (karmic rebound, perhaps?); but I still love reading reviews, especially if the critic is intelligent, insightful and—perhaps the single most important quality—compassionate.  (My son, Cody, is a music journalist and he’s terrific at it:  much better than I ever was.)  I remain wildly opinionated and I still love the sparks that fly when those opinions are shared with others (Cody and I can spend hours discussing  movies, music, books, television shows:  we’re like an intergenerational Ebert & Roper); but I’m grateful—pun very much intended—to those heartfelt Dead fans for helping me to focus on what was truly important in my life.  For giving my boat that extra push into the creative waters that have been a source of joy and magic for the past thirty years.

© copyright 2010 J.M. DeMatteis

GRAPHIC NYC

Here's a link to an especially insightful review of The Life and Times of Savior 28, courtesy of one of the best comics-related websites out there, Graphic NYC.  While you're visiting, you might want to browse their amazing library of profiles of comics creators.  You'll find everyone from Joe Simon to Harvey Pekar, Neal Adams to Dean Haspiel.  It's a genuine treasure trove of comic book history.  Be prepared to spend some time at GNYC—because once you start reading those profiles, you won't want to stop.

THE BENEVOLENT CONSPIRACY

Thought I'd share another Lost Post from the Amazon archives...

When I was a junior in high school, I had a grade advisor (who shall remain nameless):  a woman who loved to complain.  You'd trot down to her office, allegedly to discuss your future, and she'd start babbling:  "I don't know why I took this job. I have kids of my own.  I can't take this."   I’ll never forget one encounter when She Who Must Not Be Named asked me what I wanted to do when I got out of school.  I said I either wanted to go into art or writing. "Look at these English grades," she huffed, dismissive and contemptuous. "Forget being a writer. Go into art.

Inspiring, wasn’t she?   
   
I was never a great student—or even a particularly good one.  By the time I entered Midwood High School, I was sullen, cynical and psychologically damaged.  The guy whose favorite activity was to sit in the back of the class glowering at everyone else.  (I also had a raft of learning disabilities.  In those days most people had never heard of learning disabilities, so there was no one around to say, “Hey—I think I know why you’re struggling.”)  No surprise, then, that I wasn’t exactly the cream of the Midwood crop.  New York City had three types of high school diplomas back then.  There was an academic diploma for the kids heading on to college; a commercial diploma for the kids moving into the business world; and then came the absolute bottom of the barrel:  the general diploma—for the kids riding the express train to obscurity.  Or maybe jail.  Or maybe both.  Over the course of three years I fell, with a total lack of grace and a deafening thud, from academic to commercial to The Dreaded General.
   
Perhaps my supreme frustration, as I tumbled into the high school abyss, was that nobody really saw me. Not their limited perception of me, but my deepest, truest self:  call it the Authentic JMD.  (Our Great Educational Institutions aren’t fond of subtle distinctions, they’re all about generalized type-casting:  “You’re an A student, you’re a moron.  Now get back in line!”  Once you’ve been typed, there’s very little you can do to shatter the mold they’ve squeezed you into.)   For some magical, inexplicable reason (well, maybe not so inexplicable—but I’ll get to that later), I came into this life knowing who I was and what I wanted to do and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stop me from doing it.  But the Powers That Be at Midwood—embodied in She Who Must Not Be Named and many more like her—could have cared less.  Every day became a battle to hold on to that Authentic JMD; and, as time went on, I found myself losing the war.
   
Then an angel descended into my life:  my eleventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Kimmelman.  Perhaps because I was able to express the Authentic JMD through my in-class writing, Mrs. Kimmelman got a glimpse of the kid behind the sullen mask.  She nurtured and encouraged me.  Let me know that I wasn’t a drudge or a drone or an empty-headed dolt.  That I mattered.  And she made sure that, in my senior year, I was put into an honors English class.
  
It was in that senior honors class that I encountered another Guardian Angel, a teacher—Mr. Benowitz was his name—who became a true mentor to me, both creatively and spiritually.  He’d invite me to join him for lunch and I’d spill my guts, ranting and raving about life, the universe and everything for thirty or forty minutes a shot.  He, in turn, would nod and then drop a Pearl of Wisdom that would seep into my confused brain and, occasionally, set off a brilliant flare of awareness.
   
In Mr. Benowitz's class everyone was expected to keep a journal, which he would read and comment on.  Despite my initial reluctance, journaling was one of the single most liberating  things I ever did.  I’d lock myself away in my room and write and write and write and write.  Whatever I was thinking or feeling, I would scrawl down in a mad fever, raging—as only a hormonally-imbalanced seventeen year old male can—against society, the government, religion, my fellow humans and the God (if there even was one) who seemed intent on making my life utterly miserable.  I also wrote short stories.  Well, at that stage of the game I could never actually complete a story, so I would write these utterly bizarre, truncated pieces which usually ended up with somebody killing their parents or turning into a monster and exploding.  My journal was filled with page after page of wonderful, terrible, embarrassing, hate-filled, despair-ridden, illogically hopeful adolescent angst.  It helped me to grow as a writer—in the writing life, there’s nothing more important than being unafraid to expose your naked psyche on the page—and, even more, it helped me as a person.  My journal was my lifeline.  It kept me sane.  (The other things that kept me sane were books, comics and rock and roll.  Writing a song was even more liberating than journaling.  And, when it came to catharsis, nothing could beat being in a band and playing Neil Young’s “Down By The River” really, really loud.)
   
What these two teachers gave me, how their encouragement helped heal my wounded spirit, can’t be underestimated.  They truly were angels in my life (the truth is, She Who Must Not Be Named was an angel, as well:  her opposition to my dreams only fueled my passion to manifest them and that, too, was an incredible blessing).  The fact that I’m writing about them more than thirty-five years later speaks volumes about the extraordinary impact they had on my life.  But equally important—no, more important—was my ability to know myself.  To have faith in myself, in my creativity.  In my dreams most of all.  I've come to understand that this faith in ourselves is one of the greatest gifts we can receive—and that it comes directly from God (which means, of course, that I was never as alone as I often felt.  Something I began to understand by the end of senior year.  But that’s another story—covered, in depth, in my graphic novel, Brooklyn Dreams.)
   
It’s been my experience that our most passionate dreams—the ones that hold tight to us and never let go, no matter what terrifying hurdles we encounter—come not from us, but from the Divine.  It often seemed, in those days of struggle and opposition, that the whole world was conspiring against me.  With time and wisdom I came to see that there was a conspiracy:  a benevolent conspiracy that guided me, sometimes gently and sometimes with a firmer hand, over the hurdles and onto a path that was perfect for me.
   
I know there are people out there who feel the same way I once did (the way I still do on those days when my spirits lag and my faith depletes):  ignored and forgotten, crushed and frustrated.  If you’re one of them, I want you to remember that the universe is much bigger, and far more compassionate, than it sometimes seems.  And that self-knowledge and self-belief trump the Nay Sayers every time.  There really are angels out there, some of them shimmering—winged and golden—just beyond the periphery of our vision and some of them standing—flesh, blood and imperfect—right in front of us.  When they appear in your life, allow them to help you.  Surrender to the Benevolent Conspiracy.  And never relinquish your dreams.  The magnificent dreams that God is dreaming in us, through us and as us.

©copyright 2010  J.M. DeMatteis
        

POURING GOD INTO GOD

“There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.  Don’t you know that?  Don’t you know that goddamn secret yet?  And don’t you know—listen to me now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy.  Ah, buddy.  It’s Christ Himself.  Christ Himself, buddy.”
     J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I was nineteen or twenty when I first read Franny and Zooey.  The book had been sitting on my shelf for months—I don’t recall who’d recommended it—and I’d actually tried to read it a few times, but each attempt was a dismal failure:  a page or two in and my mind would just white out.  Then, one night, I came home late, feeling—for reasons that escape me now—unsettled, anxious, maybe a little depressed, and I looked over at the bookcase.  Without thinking, I grabbed F and Z off the shelf and started reading:  it was as if my previous attempts had never happened.  From the first word I was hooked by Salinger’s rich characters, his flowing language, his extraordinary ear for dialogue (I spent quite a few years after that writing failed short stories stuffed with Salingerspeak), his effortless ability as a storyteller.  His compassion most of all.  Those two interlocking tales of the Glass family settled into my cells, into my soul, and left an imprint that remains just as deep, just as true, more than thirty years later.  Franny and Zooey instantly became one of my Favorite Books of All Time—and it remains so to this day.

I went on to devour the amazing Nine Stories (which includes “Teddy”—as perfect a short story as has ever been written), Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour:  An Introduction  (flawed, yes, but absolutely essential) and, of course, the much-acclaimed The Catcher in the Rye (which, oddly, is my least favorite of JDS’s books.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed it; but Catcher never touched me in the same way Salinger’s other stories did).  Still, Franny and Zooey is the book I kept returning to; and now, with word of J.D. Salinger’s passing, I think I’ll return to it again.  And I think I’ll return to “Teddy,” as well:  a story that—much like the F and Z excerpt I began with—contains as perfect a definition of life, the universe and everything as I’ve ever come across.  This is Teddy himself talking, a Boddhisatva in a ten year old New Yorker’s body: 

“My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God.  I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

I do indeed.

©copyright 2010  J.M. DeMatteis     

CREATING CREATION

Just for fun:  a short excerpt from the fourth—never-published—Abadazad book:  Historcery.  (For the record:  Abadazad is ©copyright 2010 Disney Publishing.) 

Our protagonist, Kate Jameson, is aboard a boat with an old spider named Imaginalia Webster, sailing through Abadazad’s past, in hopes of discovering how the villain of the series, the Lanky Man, came to be.  The following exchange happens just after Kate witnesses the creation of Zad and discovers that Mrs. Webster herself—under the guidance of the mysterious Floating Warlock—was the one who wove the entire kingdom into being. 

*** 

    “You created Inconceivable?” I asked Mrs. Webster.   

    “No,” she corrected me.  “The Warlock created it.  I simply...followed his blueprint.  First for the city...and then for all of Abadazad.”
    It was an incredible thing to see...and  a part of me could have stayed there and watched Mrs. Webster weave every rock, every tree, every river and blade of grass.  I wanted to—but I couldn’t...’cause I hadn’t come all that way to sit around in a boat.  I was there to find out about the Lanky Man.  I was there to help my brother.  “Imaginalia,” I said, “what has all this got to do with—”
    Before the words were out of my mouth, the city in the sky vanished.  The webs dissolved.  The Warlock wavered for a few seconds like he was made of smoke and then just...disappeared.  Now there was just the two of us...sailing across an ocean that had suddenly become covered in thick fog.  I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the boat.  “What happened?” I asked.  “Did I...did I say something wrong?”
    “No,” Mrs. Webster answered—but she sounded so sad I couldn’t help feeling that I had.  “What you said was exactly right.  And to answer your question:  This has everything to do with the Lanky Man.” 
    “How?”
    “You’ve seen,” she said, “how the Floating Warlock dreamed Abadazad to life—but what you don’t know...what you need to know...is that it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. ”
    “Wait a minute,” I said.  “Are you saying that what we just saw wasn’t the real creation of Abadazad?”
    “It was...a creation, Kate.  There were others before this.”
    “What happened to them?  The other Abadazads?”
     “He had to...un-dream them.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Think of the Warlock,” Mrs. W said, while our boat sailed on through the fog, “as an author.  Writing the tale of Abadazad a dozen times—a thousand times—over till it’s as perfect as he can make it.  He creates a draft and then throws it away...keeping the sections he likes...re-writing the parts he doesn’t.”
    “But why would he do that?  I mean, he’s the Floating Warlock!  He should get it right the first time!”
     “It should be that way,” Imaginalia answered, tapping her fingers (and she sure had a lot of them) together, “but it isn’t.  You see, Kate, stories...and the characters in them...have lives of their own—even though they’ve sprung from the writer’s imagination.  And sometimes the story gets away from the author...rears right up like a wild horse and just gallops off in an unexpected direction—and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.”
    “But that can be a good thing, can’t it?”
    “It can,” she  said—and something in the way she said it sent a shiver up my spine.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “Something...terrible.”
    “What?”“
    “It’s not for me to say, Kate—it’s the Warlock’s tale, after all—but he knew that...after the Terrible Thing happened...he had to un-dream the story and start it over again.  The poor man un-dreamed it...and re-dreamed it...over and over.  And every time...no matter how hard he tried to give the story a happy ending...the Terrible Thing happened again.”  She turned away from me, gazed out into the fog. “But...finally...he found a way to make it work.”
    “But then—why did the Warlock look so unhappy when he first came up out of the ocean?”
    Mrs. Webster turned back to face me. “In order to stop the Terrible Thing,” she said, “there were characters that he had to abandon...erase from the story.  Characters that he loved...so very much.”  Her voice was all choked up.  She could hardly talk.  “And that broke his heart.”
    “Then why did he do it?”
    “For the good of the story, Kate.  But even when the changes serve the greater good...well, it can be a painful thing.  A painful thing indeed.”

***

As I read through this segment for the first time in years, I realized that it very much encapsulated my experience of dreaming the Abadazad stories into being—as well as my hopes for re-dreaming them in the future. 

©copyright 2010  J.M. DeMatteis  

THE MIRACLE OF THE COMIC BOOKS

When I was seventeen, it was a very good year.  Well, actually, it was an awful year—filled with angst, agony and a desperate search for Cosmic Answers—but it did lead me to an experience of the Divine—detailed, in slightly-fictionalized form, in Brooklyn Dreams—that profoundly altered my consciousness and forever changed my perception of myself, the universe and...well, everything.  That small taste of the the infinite plunged me into an even deeper exploration of All Things Spiritual, and, two years later,  that exploration led me to an Indian spiritual master named Avatar Meher Baba.  The story of my discovery of Meher Baba, and the soul-exploding impact he had on my life, will have to wait for another time.  What you need to know right now is that, for me, Meher Baba’s path isn't about rites and rituals, meditations and mantras, wearing special clothes, paying dues or attending regular meetings:  it’s about embracing the divinity at the core of all paths.  Most of all, it’s about a deeply personal inner connection to God.  (Which is a good thing, since I’m not very fond of groups.  Even today, when I have cherished Baba-companions all over the world, I generally steer clear of anything vaguely resembling formal meetings.  As Groucho Marx observed:  “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”)  From the night in 1973 when he first made his presence known to me, MB became the embodiment of the answers I’d been seeking:  spiritual guide, best friend, Self of all selves.  It didn’t matter that he’d passed away—or “dropped his body” as the Indians like to say—in 1969.  He was very much a living presence in my life and, more important, in my heart, nudging me along the path and, when nudging didn’t work, aiming an occasional boot at my ass. 

Now let’s jump ahead from 1973 to l985.  That was the year my twelve-issue graphic novel, Moonshadow, was published under Marvel’s Epic imprint.  Done in collaboration with a brilliant artist named Jon J Muth, Moon was, up to that point, the finest piece of creative work I’d ever been involved with.  It was my attempt to tell, with humor and, I hope, a bit of wisdom, the tale of a teenage boy’s spiritual awakening, the first giant step in his soul’s journey.  (You could say it was Brooklyn Dreams recast as intergalactic fantasy—although BD wouldn’t be published for another ten years.)  When a project turns out the way Moonshadow did, when it transcends my own self-imposed belief in what I can (or can’t) accomplish, it becomes clear that “I” have precious little to do with the work.  And that’s one of the reasons I dedicated the first issue of Moonshadow to Meher Baba (and to my father, who’d died six months before its publication):  the first time I’d ever done that. 

A year later Marvel published my graphic novel, Doctor Strange:  Into Shamballa (co-plotted and beautifully illustrated by my old friend Dan Green).  As many of you know, Doctor Strange is a long-standing Marvel character, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko:  a spell-weaving mystic whose departed master was called the Ancient One.  (Strangely, Meher Baba sometimes referred to himself as the Ancient One.  I’ve often wondered if either Lee or Ditko knew something about MB and if my master somehow provided the name for Doc’s.)  Into Shamballa begins with Stephen Strange returning to the Ancient One’s Himalayan ashram on the anniversary of the master's death, where he discovers...well, here’s how the story's narrator put it:  “A gift from the Master, left by him—for you!—years before his passing, with instructions for its presentation on this day alone.”  The opening of that gift, the unlocking of its mysteries, transforms Stephen Strange’s life and, by the end of the story, the entire world.  It seemed fitting that I dedicate a story of cosmic adventure and spiritual transformation to Meher Baba...and so I did.

Now jump ahead to 1987.  It was another very wretched year.  I was in the process of a divorce that pretty much shredded my soul to pieces and, in the process, opened the gates of my unconscious, unleashing some fairly ferocious childhood demons that I’d spent most of my life avoiding.  (If my projects from this period—Kraven’s Last Hunt springs immediately to mind—seem especially dark, now you know why.)  But through it all, a part of me—the deepest part—held tight to Meher Baba:  to light and hope and the knowledge that there was much more to this dream than what it appeared to be.  In fact, after fourteen years with Baba, I was on my way—for the first time—to visit his Tomb-Shrine, on a hilltop in India.  Amazingly, I’d never been out of the country (aside from an afternoon in Tijuana in 1976) and so the upcoming solo journey—from my home in upstate New York to New York City,  NYC to Paris, Frankfurt to Mumbai (it was still called Bombay then), Mumbai to Pune (which was then called Poona), Pune to Meherabad, Meher Baba’s ashram, just outside a small city called Ahmednagar—was both an exciting and unnerving one.

I hadn’t slept much the night before I left—I was too excited—and by the time our New York flight landed in Frankfurt, I was deep-fried and crispy.  Changing planes for the Frankfurt-Bombay leg, I noticed that most of my fellow passengers were Indian.  (This may not sound surprising to you, or to me looking back, but, for some reason, this fact surprised and astounded me at the time.)  There were just a few Westerners on board—I took special notice of one couple, drawn, for some reason, by the woman’s big, floppy hat—but, lost in my own amazed, bewildered and desperately exhausted brain, I didn’t make any contact with them. 

We got into Bombay around two in the morning and I had a connecting flight to Poona six or seven hours later.  Instead of killing time at a recommended hotel, the Centaur (where, I later learned, some of those same Westerners, including the lady with the floppy hat and her husband, were waiting for their morning flight), I took a shuttle through the nearby slums and passed another sleepless night in the sweltering domestic airport, feeling like an insecure and ugly American.  The next morning, I found myself sitting on a small, propeller-driven plane next to Mrs. Floppy Hat’s husband.  Despite the fact that we were, again, among the few Westerners on an otherwise all-Indian Bombay-Poona flight, we didn’t say a single word to each other.  Not even a nod or a muttered hello.  

I noticed that Mr. Floppy Hat was busy taking pictures of the rain storm outside.  “Hmmm,” I decided, “anyone who takes pictures of the rain must be a professional photographer.”  (That’s a huge leap in logic, I know, but the combination of sleep-deprivation, moving through multiple time-zones and, possibly, divine intervention made it seem hugely plausible to me.)  After hearing him mention a previous trip to India to his wife, I assumed that Mr. Photographer was there on assignment—perhaps taking pictures for some travel magazine—and sank back into my state of neurotic, sleepless lunacy.

After we landed, off I went, into the colorful madness that is Poona—it was my first view of India in the daylight and I might as well have landed on Mars—where I found that another recommended hotel, the Blue Diamond, was filled up for a month.  I took this as an indication that I should plunge on, so I hopped a rickshaw to the nearest cab stand and hired a taxi to take me on to Ahmednagar.   (The photographer and his wife, I later learned, spent the night at—where else?—the Hotel Blue Diamond.  They obviously had the sense to make a reservation.)  When, some hours later, I reached the Meher Baba Trust office in ‘Nagar—my consciousness roughly the consistency of broken glass—I found that, since I’d arrived a day earlier than expected, there was no room for me at the nearby Meher Pilgrim Center (where visitors to Meher Baba’s Tomb-Shrine often stay).  I was packed off to a place called Viloo’s Villa, run by an old disciple of Baba’s, where I was well-fed and sent off to bed:  I slept like death.

The next day I threw my bag in a rickshaw and rattled out to Meherabad, where I checked in at the Pilgrim Center.  After walking up the hill to pay my respects at Meher Baba’s Tomb (in my experience, one of the most spiritually powerful—and profoundly magical—places on the planet), I returned to my room to settle in.  (It was a double, which was a relief; some of the rooms slept six and I don’t do well with crowds, especially at bed time.)  A little while later, my roommate walked in the door.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing:  it was Mr. Photographer—whose name, I learned, was Bill Gibson.  Talk about bizarre coincidences:  all that traveling time without talking to each other and it turned out we were headed for the same destination.  Not only that, we ended up in the same room.  (I later learned that, on the plane from Bombay, Bill assumed I was going off to an ashram in Poona—one that had a somewhat controversial reputation—and decided it would be best not to talk to me.  He even noticed a small Meher Baba button on my bag, but, for some reason, assumed I was a devotee of the Poona guru...disguised as a follower of Meher Baba.  Sounds absurd—and it is—but Meher Baba, who has a well-developed sense of humor, clearly didn’t want us talking to each other...yet.)

We had a laugh about our situation as Bill began to unpack.  Out came his shirts, socks, pants and underwear—followed by all twelve issues of Moonshadow and a copy of Doctor Strange:  Into Shamballa.  I saw it, but it simply didn’t register—in fact, it felt as if my brain had imploded, then exploded, then imploded again.  I wouldn’t have been more stunned if Bill had pulled out a framed photo of my mother.  I looked one more time, just to make sure this wasn’t an acid flashback or a hallucination created by my time-warped senses, and then, with all the calm at my command, shrieked like a banshee:  “What are you doing with that?!  Where did you get that?!”  Bill—perhaps thinking he was sharing his room with an escaped maniac (which, in a way, he was)—looked at me blankly.  “I wrote those books!” I wailed.

And that’s when I learned that a friend of Bill and Denise’s (Denise was Bill’s wife, the woman with the arresting hat) back home in Denver had come across Moonshadow and Shamballa and, noting the dedications, wrote to Eruch Jessawalla—one of Meher Baba’s closest disciples—to tell him about it.  Eruch, intrigued, asked the friend if he could collect the comics together and send them off to the Trust office in India.  (No one at Meherazad, where MB’s surviving disciples lived, knew anything about me or my literary career.  I’d been involved with Meher Baba’s path for well over a decade, but I’d kept pretty much to myself.  Despite retreat time spent at the Meher Spiritual Center in South Carolina, I wasn’t plugged-in to the global Meher Baba community.)  So Bill’s friend did as he was asked but, rather than mail the comics, he gave them to Bill, who just “happened” to be traveling to Meherabad at the same time as the author of those comics; just “happened” to be traveling on the same planes with said author; just “happened” to end up in the same room.

Call it cosmic synchronicity or, as I prefer, God’s grace—but it was an astonishing event.  A day or so later, when a group of us staying at the Pilgrim Center took a bus to Meherazad to visit with Eruch and several other of MB’s close companions, the guy who didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member found himself very publicly presenting the comics to Eruch, posing beside him while Bill, of course, stood nearby taking pictures.  Given my somewhat reclusive nature, given the kind of wretched year I was having, I would have spent the next few weeks hanging out on the fringes of Meherabad life.  This “coincidence” brought me right into the middle of things and, for the first time, into the loving embrace of my Baba family.  I was welcomed home in a way that I could never have imagined.  It was as if Meher Baba, with loving attention, had orchestrated every detail.

That would have been enough to sustain me for the rest of my visit, but there was one more comic book miracle to come.  While staying at the Pilgrim Center, I met the lawyer for the Avatar Meher Baba Trust, a guy named Jack Small, and we quickly became buddies.  (It didn’t hurt that Jack was a fellow comic book geek.  He was delighted when, a year or so later, he ended up in the pages of DC’s Doctor Fate as a beleaguered supporting character.)  One day Jack showed up in my room with a treasure:  a small package of prasad (prasad is a gift, often a piece of fruit, given directly by the master to his disciples; said to carry the seed of his love.  Eating prasad is literally eating grace), in the form of crushed orange candies.  But this was very special prasad; put aside, I learned—reading the typewritten sheet that was presented to me—by Meher Baba himself, years before, for his lovers of the future, knowing the precise moment when each heart would need, and receive, it.  Sound familiar?  It was exactly like the mysterious gift that the Ancient One left for Doctor Strange.  “A gift from the master...left by him—for you!—years before his passing, with instructions for its presentation on this day alone.”  (And, before you ask, no—I’d never heard anything about this secret stash of MB’s prasad.  It was news to me.)  

There I was, living out my own version of Strange’s journey, receiving my own predestined gift, walking inside my own story.  I didn’t understand it, but I accepted that gift with incredible gratitude.  

The two weeks that followed—and the seven trips back to India that I’ve taken over the years—were filled with that kind of soul-opening enchantment.  I could write a book about those journeys, and maybe one day I will; but the reason I’m writing about this now isn’t to convince anybody to become a follower of Meher Baba.  In the end, it really doesn’t matter if you call the God-We-All-Are Meher Baba, Jesus, Divine Mother, Krishna, Fred, Ethel or if you believe in God at all.  I’m writing this to remind you, to remind me, that whether you’re on a hill in India or sitting in your own living room, the line between Storyteller and story, between so-called fantasy and so-called reality, is an illusion.  The borders that separate the possible from the impossible are nothing but a dream.  This life we’re all living is magic:  rich with synchronicities, miracles and, most important of all, love beyond imagining.

©copyright 2010  J.M. DeMatteis

HEROES 4 HAITI

A campaign to raise money for the victims of the Haitian earthquake has been launched by a group of artists, including my friend and collaborator Mike Cavallaro.  Click here for details.  As I've said before, the microcosm is the macrocosm and, at a time like this, even the smallest contribution can make a tremendous difference.

And never underestimate the power of one silent, heartfelt prayer.