Alice Hickey:
Between Worlds
Justin Spring
WINNER
John Ringling Towers Award for Literary Arts
Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press
Copyright 2011 Justin Spring
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011905144
ISBN#: Soft Cover 978-0-9717374-9-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press
P.O. Box 5932
Sarasota, Florida 34277
Phone: (941) 306-1119
E-Mail: soulspeakspring@gmail.com
WEB Page: www.soulspeak.org
Printed in the United States of America by Royal Palm Press http://rppress.com Distributed by Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press
http://sptpress.blogspot.com
Spring, Justin, 1939-
Alice Hickey: Between Worlds/by Justin Spring
ISBN 978-0-9717374-9-5
For More Information on the Artistic Activities of Justin Spring: http://justin-soulspeak.blogspot.com
This book is available in three (3) formats from SOULSPEAK: Paperback, Amazon Kindle E-book, or a free, fully featured PDF: http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com
This is a multi-media book. To access multi-media components: http://justinspringbooks.blogspot.com
Here’s what readers are saying about Alice Hickey:
“Few books allow us to really feel what encounters with the psychic world are like. Castaneda comes to mind, of course, and that is his enduring gift to us. Here is a book that has that same power, but it is not set in the austere Sonora desert, but the nutty, everyday world of poet Justin Spring who brings us smack into his humpty-dumpty world of supermarkets, intuitives, treasure hunters, bars, poets, preachers, Starbucks, pawnshops, drunks and dopers as he travels between Florida, Sedona, California, Mexico, Panama, and the Florida Keys trying to make sense of a series of psychic events triggered by a mysterious encounter with psychic Alice Hickey. This is a book you won’t want to put down. It is visionary in its scope and devilish in its pace.”
Scylla Liscombe
Poet, Dancer, Artist, Mystic
“This is a book that masterfully crisscrosses reality and fantasy until they blur into each other completely. I would say the same for the writer and for most of the characters portrayed, including myself. Maybe especially myself. It is a book that shuttles back and forth from head to heart, never missing a beat. Welcome to the world of the mystical. It is no more or less crazy and funny and engaging than the world we call real life.”
Joan Adley
Performance Artist, Author, Intuitive
Acknowledgments
This book would never have been possible without the aid of Jane Washington, Joan Adley, and Diane Randall, not only for their insights as intuitives, but also for advising me on the early manuscripts and, of course, Alice Hickey, without whom this book would still be turning itself over and over in the halls of my mind. My special thanks to Diane for guiding me through the intricacies of psychic dreaming and to Scylla Liscombe for guiding me through the small but formidable forest of Alice’s poetry. I also want to thank Shaw Waltz for her tough-minded criticism on just about everything, writer Barbara Smith for her constant support and encouragement, and finally, Jan Dorsett, my scrupulous editor, for mercilessly slapping my prose whenever it wandered.
For Alice
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: A Visitor from Sedona 5
Chapter 3: The Witnesses Log 9
Chapter 8: The Red Light Bar 35
Chapter 9: Speaking and the Psychic Roots of Poetry 38
Chapter 10: Eve Is the Serpent 41
Chapter 14: Mercedes Noriega 54
Chapter 16: Jane Beats Me with My Own Myth 63
Chapter 17: I Take the Ball From Jane And Run 67
Chapter 18: Fruitville Road 74
Chapter 20: A Measured Retreat 82
Chapter 21: A Distant Retreat 85
Chapter 23: ISLAUGGH and San Blas 94
Chapter 25: I See the Muse in a New Light 104
Chapter 26: Alicia La Verne 110
Chapter 27: The Other World 115
Chapter 28: The Beatles and the Witnesses 126
Chapter 29: Alice and Betty Fill in Some Blanks 132
Chapter 31: Leaning With Fate 145
Chapter 32: Alice in Mexico 148
Chapter 33: Alice in Chains 155
Chapter 34: Alice Explains the Female Spirit 158
Chapter 35: Alice Hands Me a Notebook 166
Chapter 36: Alice Finally Gets Around to ISLAUGGH 173
Chapter 37: I Uncover the Myth’s Hebraic Connection 179
Chapter 38: Jesus, You Got Some Life Alice 186
Chapter 39: I Have Some Doubts about Alice 193
Chapter 40: Jane Pulls Out Smokey Robinson 196
Chapter 41: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on a Soap Box 201
Chapter 42: Alice in Chains Redux 207
Chapter 43: Mr. Fine Hairs Gets on the Soap Box One More Time 209
Chapter 44: Alice Shows Me Some Poems 211
Chapter 45: I Explain Duck-ness 218
Chapter 46: I Visit Graves 223
Chapter 47: Alice Leaps to Her Death 228
Chapter 48: I Become a Chimpanzee 232
Chapter 49: Alice and The First Mother 239
Chapter 50: I Confess My Ignorance 248
Chapter 51: I Face My Primitive Soul 252
Chapter 52: Alice Confesses 255
Chapter 54: Charon, the Ka, and Witnessing 275
Appendix B: Excerpts from the Author’s Journal 289
ALICE HICKEY 1
Author’s Foreword
The psychic world, the Other World, the world of the collective unconscious, the soul’s world, is real. It is continually visiting us whether we want it to or not. The central problem for us, as modern humans, is we’re not quite sure who, or what, is visiting us. Or why. We don’t have the ready answers our forefathers did.
Nor did I. I was totally unprepared for what happened to me in March 2000, when an elderly woman—a complete stranger—approached me and did something so incomprehensible it completely upended my rational worldview.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that incomprehensible event triggered others. Inexplicable things started happening to me that were not of this world. As disturbed and bewildered as I was by these psychic intrusions, the poet in me decided to let what was happening unfold of its own accord—as if it were a poem insinuating itself into the landscape of my mind.
I also decided to record what was happening in somewhat the same way by giving the Muse her head, which accounts for the somewhat serpentine movement of this book. It is movement of which I have become very fond.
If those psychic intrusions had been the end of it, I probably would have gone about my life pretty much as before, but with an increased awareness of how mysterious our lives really are. That was not to be the case, however, because nine months after those events a long, enigmatic poem that was completely beyond my understanding suddenly came to me.
I couldn't get a grip on it until I realized it was a myth, although I was at a loss to say exactly what kind of myth. What’s more, I couldn’t even rightly call it a myth; after all, time is the great arbiter in that. All I can say is that it felt like a myth. As I began to unwind its skein over the years, it indeed seemed to have many of the characteristics of our ancient myths. Here is an excellent summation of those characteristics by author Robert T. Mason in The Divine Serpent in Myth and Legend:
“Myths are stories, usual y, about gods and other supernatural beings. They are often stories of origins, how the world and everything in it came to be in illo tempore [Eliade]. They are usually strongly structured and their meaning is only discerned by linguistic analysis [Levi-Strauss]. Sometimes they are public dreams, which, like private dreams, emerge from the unconscious mind; they more often reveal archetypes of the collective unconscious [Jung]. Myths are symbolic and metaphorical, and they orient people to the metaphysical dimension, explain the 2 ALICE HICKEY
origins and nature of the cosmos, and on a psychological plane, address themselves to the innermost depths of the human psyche.”
The myth, which I called The Witnesses Log, had those same qualities, and spoke of the same things, so it was clear to me it wasn’t just a lot of tasty, unconscious gibberish. Yet we may have a difficult time accepting one of the things The Witnesses Log says—that very early humans had a much different consciousness than ours, one that was in constant interplay with the psychic world.
We see our current rational, self-reflective consciousness as one in which our making sense of the world has become self-powered, needing only the physical world and the application of reason as necessary for knowing.
But that is an illusion. That other, older way of knowing is still there beneath the veneer of our modern consciousness, and it is as strong and as vibrant as ever.
Jung has taught us that, as have many thinkers before and after him. Our greatest poets have taught us its power as well, but in a more fundamental, more intuitive way, as poetry must.
Unfortunately, we have lost our taste for poetry because we have lost sight of the soul, and with it we have also lost sight of the fundamental role of poetry: it is the way that the soul, the unconscious, the unknowable, speaks to us. And here's the really mysterious part—it's the way we speak back.
Poetry holds a special place in the pantheon of arts. It is the primal seed from which all our other arts have come. Poetry, in its initial tribal form, was a full-blooded, communal oral poetry that contained other primal forms (mask, movement, mime, music, song) that eventually developed into the separate arts we have today: It is not only the most human of our arts, it is also the mother of those arts.
It has been my experience, moreover, that when we allow ourselves to surrender to something like that early, primal form of poetry—a form of poetry that was an integral part of our early consciousness—it will speak to us in a way like no other.
In short, it will speak to us the way poetry should.
Poetry gives us a way of knowing that bypasses the traps of the rational mind and strikes “zero at the bone.” It gives us a transcendent way of knowing that allows us to feel truths that are beyond logic: Death is Life. Love is Pain. More than anything, this older way of knowing tells us we are not a cosmic accident.
It is a way of knowing that has nothing to do with logic and facts, but everything to do with the intimations of the soul, with the transcendent feelings that are continually visiting us through poetry, continually whispering: We belong.
ALICE HICKEY 3
There is something else I’d like to say about this book: it wouldn’t have gone anywhere if I hadn’t created it communally. I don’t mean it was written with others; there was no need for that. I knew how to write, and I could sense the story was going to have the energy of a poem—a long extended narrative poem—
and that I was the one who was supposed to write it.
What I needed, though, was psychic guidance. I knew something extraordinary was taking place, something not of this world. As fate would have it, I was able to obtain help initially from three friends who were gifted intuitives: Joan Adley, Jane Washington, and Diane Randall. All it took was a few words and they gathered around me like dancers in a play. And then, some four years later, the stranger reappeared, and as Jung would say, completed the quarternity. She was the fourth, final dancer, and she was just in time. I was in desperate need of the kind of guidance only she could supply.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I often became so lost I had to rely almost entirely on their guidance—which they unfailingly supplied me with all the assurance of sleepwalkers. I can’t tell you how beautiful and unusual those experiences were. You might say I had many Muses this time and not just the one I ordinarily rely on.
4 ALICE HICKEY
Chapter 1: Alice Hickey
March 2000, Sarasota
The first time I saw Alice Hickey I didn’t know she was Alice Hickey. She was just a bony, gray-haired old woman rummaging through the same large bin of tomatoes. You’d remember her though. She was a type. Twenty-five years ago, you’d see women like Alice on a regular basis—women who’d been living here long before the palmetto scrub was paved over with malls. Crackers would be the correct description. They’d drift into town late Friday night from the farms and ranches for groceries, and they were all business. Just like Alice: long, straight hair, weathered face, bony hands, don’t talk to me.
I was about to give up on finding anything that even resembled a ripe tomato when a voice inside my head whispered, “Blood Eggs. ” For some reason, I don’t know why, I looked up at the old woman. I never got past her eyes. They were almost colorless, like high, thin air. I couldn’t stop looking at them. It was like she was looking right through me—or I was looking right through her, I couldn’t tell which, but the effect was unnerving. I tried to look away, but she stepped closer and whispered, “You haven’t found anything, have you?” To which I stammered back something like, “No, I haven’t.”
No sooner had I said it than her face seemed to simplify itself—that’s the best way I can describe it—and then her eyes seemed to get larger, and then I heard a voice inside my head say very clearly, “Not yet. ”
Right then my mind stopped. I instinctively knew the voice was not of this world.
There was no thinking involved in coming to that realization. I simply knew.
Then, suddenly, I was myself again, looking at an old, bony woman who kept asking me, “Are you OK?” as if I had just stumbled, or slipped. I nodded yes, or at least I think I did, but before I could say anything else she strolled out of the market as if nothing had happened. That was the last time I saw her until four years later when Diane Randall called and told me someone by the name of Alice Hickey wanted to see me.
ALICE HICKEY 5
Chapter 2: A Visitor from Sedona
June 2000, Sarasota
I would have liked to dismiss what had happened at the market as some kind of neural short circuit, but I couldn’t. Although I don’t consider myself particularly psychic, I am familiar with psychic voices. My own come to me in times of stress or high creativity. I view them as guides, interior companions. This voice, though, was not a companion’s voice. It was a psychic voice of an entirely different order.
I had immediately felt its authority, its truth, and had instinctively bent to it, Yet I couldn’t help thinking—as crazy as it sounds—that it had somehow come from the old woman, which was impossible. How could she have spoken to me from inside my mind? Supposedly only aliens can do that, and she was anything but that.
The only explanation that made any sense at all was that the old woman had somehow triggered, or caused the voice to erupt in my head, but that was just a stab in the dark. There was nothing in my experience that could explain what had happened.
To add to my mystification, I didn’t have the slightest idea what, “Not yet. ”
meant. I knew it wasn’t about the tomatoes. It had to have been about something else, but what?
I knew if I hoped to get any inkling as to what was going on, it would probably have to be through a state of heightened awareness. Joan Adley, a fellow poet and frequent collaborator, was visiting me from Sedona. She was also extremely psychic, so I asked her if she’d like to join me in a few sessions of heightened awareness and the answer was, of course, yes, when do we start? I’ve always liked working with Joan. We have a friendship that?