Excerpt · A. R. Sayer
The Voice on Ibiza
The Life of Ra Uru Hu and the Making of Human Design
Prologue
He told the story rarely, and never as proof. By his own account, given years afterward in a recorded talk, the thing that happened to him on Ibiza in the first weeks of 1987 was best understood as a story about madness, because it was not normal, not even by the standards of how revelation is supposed to arrive. The history of revelation, he said, is full of a certain sweetness; his own experience had none of it. His natural skepticism had made it easy, for years, to say nothing. There was no evidence, only the telling. He asked that it be taken that way, as a story and nothing more. What follows is that story as he told it, rendered in the third person and reported strictly as his account, not as a verified event.
By the time it began he was, on his own description, already living wild and already, by any ordinary measure, mad. He had walked away from his life in Canada in 1983, the advertising man and his family and his enterprise left behind in a single morning, and had drifted to the island and then to its margins. He was alone in a process he did not try to understand. He had assumed he was simply losing his mind at midlife, and the surprising thing, he said, was that madness was entertaining, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him: a breaking-down, a deconstruction, a stepping-away from everything he had been.
He was living in a ruin. The house was perhaps three hundred years old, built over a cistern, over a well, over the water source, and its main rooms had collapsed long before when the water ran out, because where the water fails no one stays. He had first rented the intact house below, around 1984; above it stood the ruin, and the one part of it that still had a roof and walls had been made into a spare room by the people who owned the land. A great wooden door closed it, opened by a single heavy iron key of the nineteenth-century kind. Years earlier, before he had ever heard of Ibiza, he had doodled that key compulsively, drawing it over and over in the margins of everything, and now he held it in his hand and lived in the room it opened.
It was January the third, and the dark had come early, near half past five. He had walked up from the road along a path his own feet had worn into the hillside, returning from a rare free meal; he was, in those days, mostly muscle and bone, and ate seldom. His dog, a half-wild creature he called Barley, caught his scent and came running down to meet him, and the two of them climbed toward the ruin together. The room was small, a few meters by a few meters: a sleeping platform, a desk that was a board laid over bricks, and one wall of shelves, books on the left and jars of herbs on the right, all of it belonging to the man whose room it was, a poet and herbalist and maker of painted butterflies. A kerosene lantern hung over the platform, but it was bone dry, and there was neither money for fuel nor a way to fetch it; he kept the hours of the sun, and he was climbing the hill to sleep.
There was a light under the door. He had the only key. The room was locked, there was no other way in, and no one he knew would have come; he was the local madman, and people kept their distance. The night was black and full of stars. He called out, “Who’s there?”, which he later remembered as his first taste of irony, and no one answered. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door inward.
The lantern that could not be lit was lit, and it was spinning. At the same instant the dog crossed the threshold and dropped, by his description, like a creature shotgunned at close range, and a voice spoke. It was not a pleasant voice; he imagined it, he said, as belonging to a cigar-smoking woman of a hundred and fifty-five. As the lantern turned and the dog fell and the voice came, his body broke open with water, water running from his head and his arms and his legs until there was a pool of it on the floor, and the fast loss of it was pain. Out of the pain the voice asked a thing that was not really a question. “Are you ready to work?” Then it told him to move the dog out of the way, and he dragged the animal under the desk, where it would lie for eight days without moving and without seeming to breathe, and he closed the door.
He noted the strangeness of his own obedience. He was, in the terms of the system he would later teach, a Manifestor, a man who would ignore anyone who told him what to do; and here he was, doing as he was told, like a frightened and obedient dog. The pain was intense but bearable. His skin had gone numb, as a limb goes when it sleeps. The voice gave instructions and he followed them. He lit the small butane stove, and as the flame caught, the hair rose on his neck and a hovering neon-blue light, about the size of a fist, appeared in the middle of the room. “Follow the light,” it said.
From the opening of the Prologue. The account is Ra Uru Hu’s own, rendered in the third person and reported as his telling, not as a verified event.