[Last part, friends, take heart. Note that this Lifeline
memoir extends beyond the chronological bounds of the residential
course. It does, because the direct consequences did, and do. I'd
certainly be interested in reading the outline of how LL extended
into and changed other people's lives.]

Friday July 21, 1995
         Great sadness.
         It is hard seeing "V" and "F" leave, particularly. And hard
leaving "R". "R2" I will see again, at least, but will we have
essentially changed when we meet later? Oddly, not as hard to say
goodbye to "I" or "J". Affection but not the strong male tie that
this time seems to dominate.
         Sat around with "R" and "J", then with Ed as well and "R2"
briefly, but then centrifugal force sent us our separate ways. I
had HRPC business to attend to in Charlottesville, very difficult
to deal with, my mind being in another place and my mind and body
both being very tired from the intense concentration of the
previous six days. Interestingly, as I was leaving TMI and
getting onto Route 6, just as I started really feeling my deep
sadness at leaving my friends, my car began to overheat, taking
and holding a significant part of my attention for the rest of
the day, first into Charlottesville, then all the way home to
Hampton Roads.
         Friday night I return to F27 to do some tomato transplanting
with my father -- and find myself reliving something that really
happened, so many years ago, that had significance but is too
private to share.

Saturday, July 22, 1995
         Saturday morning and afternoon are taken up by chores and
the little things that make life -- and make it difficult! [This
includes no fewer than 92 stacked-up e-mail messages.] It is not
til 3:15 pm that I get a chance to lie down and return to F27. I
had LB use LL-R, and so was able to reconstruct it in my journal
afterward.
         Up to 27 by train. I decide a lookout point is needed for my
house. Not just a piece of ground, enough to walk around, but a
high pinnacle overlooking the junction of the two rivers before
tree-covered hills. It occurs to me to recreate some of the rooms
in Shangri-la as I had envisioned them in my novel. Some I know
quite well already. And the walk I'd described, along the barren
stony hills that leads to the dead-end promontory -- I decide to
construct that somewhere as a retreat.

         Then, to a retrieval. I had thought to pull back the dead
from American prisons, maybe because I had recently been reading
Jack London's novel "The Star Rover." But I found myself pulled
to Andersonville, instead, among the Union prisoners.
         Some were asking me who I was (thinking I too was a
prisoner). I said I was born in New Jersey, and was now from
Virginia. Realized that this sounded funny. They asked my name,
and I started to say Josiah Smallwood; wondered if he was there;
prospected for him. Was he maybe captured at Gettysburg? But he
wasn't there and I don't think he ever was.
         I could see their suspicion that I was a ["sowbelly?
sawbelly?"] -- which meant either a reb pretending to be a yank,
or a yank who'd gone over. The equivalent to a galvanized Yankee,
I suppose.
         I went to the commandant, who was *not* Kurz, or Kurtz, or
whatever his name was, the one they hanged after the war. That
one was gone, along with a lot of the others (most, I suppose),
both blue and grey.
         In charge was a N.C. major named Major B______ [It was clear
then, not later. Like Bruckner, or Buckner, but it wasn't them.]
I talked to him after internal guards challenged me. Yanks that
got too close could be cut down or shot, I gather. But I came on
anyway.
         At some point somebody tried to kill me with a vertical
saber cut and was dumbfounded to slice right through me without
effect. Can't remember where in the order of things that
happened, though.
         Eventually talked to B_____ and to the ranking prisoner,
Captain Williams of Rhode Island. We three shook and held hands
right to right, left to left, and left to right after I persuaded
them that the war was over, and I took them up (running out of
energy), telling the men they could follow at will by
concentrating on either B_____ or Williams, who would meet them.

Sunday, July 23, 1995
A sense to go to 27,  then I knew somebody wanted me elsewhere --
it wasn't to go hang out at my house, as I'd first thought. I
descended to 26, 25, 24, and was not at all surprised to come to
23. Andersonville. Formed up the men. Now they said it had been
Captain Miller. [Left brain says, oh sure, first Captain Williams
as in Roger Williams of Rhode Island, now Miller as in Roger
Miller! But we agreed that LB would record again, on condition
that RB would consent to examine it all later.]
         Anyway, persuaded blues and greys it was time to close up
the place. Told Union men to strike the tents. Got lost in change
of phasing for a bit. Refocused, persuaded the Johnnies to come,
marched out of there formed up. Told them not to be surprised if
men disappeared around them; those who didn't stay awake, I told
them, would wind up somewhere else, but I didn't know where.
         Somehow seeing the officers disappear with me earlier
conditioned them to believe, this time. I don't think there's
anybody left there now. I asked how many rebs there were and was
told 350, the remnants of 7 companies. Again that seemed unlikely
to me, but who knows?
         Why couldn't I recall the name of the confederate officer?
It was clear enough originally, then lost, now the men themselves
were exchanging blank looks. If I -- or something within me --
made up a name, why not be able to recall it later? And if I
*didn't* make it up, if it was factual, why wouldn't I be able to
recall it later? It doesn't make sense.

[A busy week follows as we begin preparing to pick up HRPC and
move it from Norfolk to Charlottesville.]

Saturday, July 29, 1995
"R" says he has been DECing friends and family each day, a good
idea....
Isn't the common denominator and central value of TMI technique
that it increases personal *control* over mental states and hence
over who and what we become? This seems very clear to me [partly
in F27, by design, as I write this].

Sunday July 30, 1995
3:40 am. LL-Remember continues to work. Last night several hours
ago I went up to F27 and met several of The Gentlemen Upstairs. I
created a room with teleporters a la Star Trek, and sent myself
forward to December, 1995, so it would be cold and I could have a
fire in my living room and still be comfortable. This because it
was hot [we don't have air conditioning] and I wanted relief.
         That worked. Then I remembered TGU's offer to meet, so I
invited Evangeline to come through, which she did.
         Then came Francis -- basically, Saint Francis. Then Anne,
basically a sensuous lusty woman. Finally -- finally for the
evening, because I was getting tired -- a soldier, who appeared
in various uniforms, various centuries and styles.
         Each of them represent or embody an aspect of my character,
I know well. Evangeline asked, did I want to see her naked, which
crystallized (made me aware of) the fact that her essence was
*not* a sexual presence but a woman of wisdom, she choosing an
aspect perhaps in her 40s. not the old woman I had once sculpted,
but a high-cheeked, strong-featured woman in mid-life.
         Anne on the other hand *is* very much a sexual being. Went
into the bedroom to wait for me, in fact, taking off her clothes
there, while I sat in some embarrassment in the living room with
Evangeline and Francis, who smiled at my discomfort, knowing me
well and being well beyond pretense.
         Francis is the aesthetic, the one with no use for material
things -- luxuries and indulgences of any kind. Playful, though,
not serious and gloomy. Puer Aeternis to some degree.
...
         Started to design a conference room, but preferred talking
in the living room before a fire. Built the fire though I didn't
have to; I could have just had a fire there -- and other times I
will. But it's like dad working on a tractor; sometimes you just
want to do the thing yourself. Speaking of dad, isn't it
interesting that my image of him is changing -- readjusting --
after all these years, all of a sudden, in response to meeting
him in 27? Another argument for the reality of the process, if
another were needed.

[The ensuing busy weeks did leave some time for all this. Much
stuff deleted here.]

Monday August 8, 1995
In F27 itself, I felt drawn to the train/plane station/restaurant
where I'd gone first. Realized I could increase the intensity of
my experience by narrowing the *width* of my awareness, as if by
narrowing focus. This from having just read part of *Ultimate
Journey* and suddenly being struck by how much more vivid than
mine his experiences were. *THIS REALIZATION CAME IN THE MIDST OF
F27*, so far as I can recall.
         And equally striking, I was thinking about something -
pondering it -- when I suddenly realized I wasn't in my living
room on the couch at all; that my living room couch did not face
a fireplace. Realized I was in a visualized place, something
between my remembered (transmogrified) house here and my cabin
there.
         Two examples of merging activity? Within F27 I brought
awareness from F1 (or wherever I live these days); thinking I was
in F1, I realized my surroundings could only be F27. A sort of
intrusion of one kind of consciousness overlapping another. Very
interesting. Of course, I've been noticing this right along, as
my consciousness has drifted. A stray noise -- sometimes a
thought -- will snap me out of one state requiring me to count or
intend myself back.
...
         LB does such a good job of storage and retrieval: when I
think of years of wasting effort trying to do without him --
sabotaging his efforts and then suffering his sabotage in return
(in the form of crippling doubts about a process from which he
was excluded) it is to laugh, or cry, or a little of each.

         In 1990, attempting to have an OBE using TMI tapes after
having met Bob Monroe over lunch with my partner and others, I
began envisioning myself in a control booth looking through to an
unconscious body, monitoring and guiding. This image returned to
me the other day with a haunting familiarity. It is an image out
of F27. But the consciously designed image came in 1990. Formed
of what raw materials?

Saturday August 12, 1995
From *A Toltec Path*, by Ken Eagle Feather, which we published
this summer: "At the same time, being onto something doesn't mean
you've found it. You can't manage knowledge by taking a scrap of
evidence, associating it with your interests, then generalizing
the scrap into a broad-base conclusion." (p. 90) That's the
problem. How to progress on our own without skewing the evidence
by our preconceptions. Without help from Over There (whether from
TGU or others) I don't see how we could ever take a sound step.

[That same day, I went to 27 to see if I could contact W.B.
Yeats, who was supposed to be waiting for me prior to moving on.]

                                                        Sentinel
         There are those think the day's a long weariness

         He promises me a poem -- performance anxiety nearly stifles
me. I agree to bring it over. Get so far as a title, then a first
line -- then I'm quarreling with the next lines, trying to make
something coherent and losing it, then the phone rings. I will
try again. I asked him, sitting in my cabin by a fire, this
intense middle-aged man of penetrating eyes and prominent
cheekbones, if I could succeed in translating it. "You can get
it," he said, "but whether you can understand it is another
matter."
         He was looking for "Owen" (David) but I didn't even try for
the name verifications. I will have to try again. Maybe later?
Real anxiety!

                                                        Sentinel
         There are those think the day a long weariness,
         Life a long never-releasing swampland clinging.
         Can they never in their ceaseless counting and reckoning
         Look up to the bird on the wing, or the hour?

         Cease telling your beads of worry and amassing.
         Your prayers are in every breath you take,
         will it or not. The grave's no prison
         to match that spun by blind men building.

         We who know pass you this directive:
         Live your limitations as a blessing bestowed;
         Build your castles but omit the bars;
         pass through the glowing.

         Maybe it's Yeats, though it certainly doesn't sound like
him. And I can't make sense of that title and this content. Nor
does it sound like great poetry to me -- or even competent rhyme.
Would Yeats write something unfinished and crude?

         Ask him, maybe. Can I do that here and in 27? Let's see. Mr.
Yeats-- [writing in the journal, his words and mine]

         Different rules apply in new circumstances. What you value
         may seem child's play or child's distraction to us, sense
         and sound detracting from other attributes. Study the poem
         and see if it has anything to say to you and you may decide
         it's not so bad after all.

         Well, in any case, is this the "indisputable sign" TGU
promised?

         No. This is the sign:
         David Poynter
         *Little Portraits: 1887-1913* (Waterborne Reflections)
         printed 1921 in London.
         Murragh printed it. Limited edition of 500. Available in a
         few places, not so highly valued. Look in Belles Lettres.
         Goodbye and my thanks to you.

         Hardly know whether to *believe* any of it, whether to *try*
to believe any of it. A little unbelievable at best. The poem is
enough strangeness. It scarcely seems a poem to me at all....
Strictly, of course, even if the information on David proves
accurate, and lets me finally get my hands on Waterborne
Reflections, it *proves* nothing about Yeats being here. (Here?
There? Wherever.) But Willie knew Owen, and would have known of
the book and the essentials. It would be proof enough for me.
Oddly, the most convincing thing emotionally was "and my thanks
to you."

         [For several years I've been looking for David's last name,
and the right name of the book he wrote that he always thought of
as "Waterborne Reflections." If anybody knows how to look for the
existence of a privately printed book named "Little Portraits,
I'd be grateful for the help. Was there even a printer named
Murragh? Or a publisher? I have no idea.

         [More continues to happen, but this memoir is plenty long
enough already.]


Frank DeMarco                                demarco@infi.net
Hampton Roads Publishing Company                 804-296-2772
134 Burgess Lane
Charlottesville, VA 22902