The Healing - Love Note, Two Novels by Steve Caldwell

Three months after graduating from Columbia College in 1963 Steve Caldwell suffered a broken neck in a car accident. His shoulder blades and neck were broken but would heal, as would his spinal cord damage, but because there would now be scar tissue in his spinal cord, his doctors explained, he would be a quadriplegic and not walk again. He had imagined himself a writer since high school and had been expecting to begin newspaper work in the fall. Instead he did rehabilitation and, ten months after being hurt, returned to his parent's home in Ridgewood, N.J.

Fourteen years later he was living in Tucson, Arizona with his teen-aged lover. He had stayed in Ridgewood till 1970 when he had moved to Better Farm, a commune he helped to start in northern New York. He had met the woman with whom he was living in Tucson in 1971 and they had become lovers in 1973, their love-making his first sexual activity in almost ten years. He had written but not finished an autobiographical anti-racist, pro-drug-consciousness, anti-war late-Sixties collage he called a novel; had for several months kept a journal about the commune of which he was a part; had written dozens of poems; and had published nearly one hundred book reviews in a New Jersey newspaper and a handful in The New York Times Sunday Book Review and Saturday Review. The reviews were of no lasting interest, the poems finished but slight, the collage stilted and flat, and the journal vague, unfocused, and short-lived. He was independent, healthy, and surrounded by counter-cultural friends, but as far as he was concerned had, at 35, written nothing.

Caldwell's The Healing is written in the third person and begins a week or two before Arthur Randall attends a séance at which the well-known (in Spiritualist circles) spirit doctor William Lang announces to Arthur and his friends that Arthur will be healed and walking in 90 days. It is a non-fiction novel about the suspension of disbelief, about a skeptic surrounded by well-meaning believers, about the end of his and his young girlfriend Lee Saveta's couplehood, and about Arthur's ongoing struggle to write something finished. Arthur realizes soon after the séance that he has been given a beginning and an end for a novel, and that its natural middle is his life between. He assumes he will not walk in 90 days but accepts that miracles do happen.

Dr. Lang is not the only healer Arthur meets. He is also worked on by Hopi medicine men, a Christian minister who delivers messages from the other side, and innumerable lay healers. He respects them all, and though he expects nothing, as usual he receives a great deal.

Ten years later Caldwell/Arthur, still dissatisfied with his writing (for the past three years he has kept a daily dream journal), finds himself back at the commune, though its communality has yielded to a more typically middle-class arrangement.

Love Note was not written as a sequel to The Healing but some of its characters, in particular Arthur, were introduced in the earlier book. It is written in the first, not the third person, and its focus is Arthur's sexuality. Five years earlier, Arthur has discovered while using marijuana and cocaine that if he accepts what little genital sensation he has without concerning himself with physiological reality--whether, for instance, when he feels he may be erect, he actually is--that he can feel much more than he had thought he ever would. In 1987, separated for good from the lover with whom he had discovered how much he could in fact feel, he learns that by masturbating with the drugs he can feel as much and even more.

He knows very soon that he will be exploring this brave new and somewhat discomfiting world for some time to come, and that if he can, he must write about it. He also knows that those who love him, and there are many, will be moved by his newfound sensation, which he identifies with love; nights, feeling, he feels sure that he will tell them of it and that they will willingly enter in the flesh into his fantasies. As time passes, though, he does not speak and cannot write, and Love Note tells of his struggle to do both and where it takes him.

Paralysis is an obvious and dread possibility and commonly serves as metaphor, but few think much of loss of sensation or its sexual implications. Arthur is aware that his decision to persevere in his use of a dangerous drug to experience genital pleasure is problematic. Too, he does not know if what he feels means his spinal-cord damage is less than complete. He had always assumed it total, and if indeed it is total, he reasons, then others may feel what he has come to feel. But will they? And, especially since others may not respond as he has, should they? He knows how difficult it is to indulge moderately in cocaine. His own control of his drug use is significantly superior to that of many persons whom he knows, but is gravely flawed. Caldwell/Arthur believes that, for himself, he must try to write Love Note. He is less certain, now, that he is wise or kind to seek to have it read, but he is seeking it, even as he knows that should he succeed in attracting much notice there may be casualties. Might there be a safer drug with similar effect? Is research being done in search of it?

These two books, each under 200 typewritten pages, have not been published; The Healing is available in its entirety online and Love Note is now being serialized and will have been completely posted by early fall 2006. There is also a discussion board for the two books.