GOD'S DNA: INTRODUCTION

Are you my guardian angel?" I thought. An untidy mess of tangled hair shook from side to side. Negative. A dirty hand gestured back and forth between herself and me. Hey? A past life? "Your name! What's your name?" I asked. The child lifted a filthy tunic, mooned at me, and disappeared.

An artist never knows what's imagination, and what might be something else--data picked up from uncharted air waves for instance--but my thinking of a witch was not unnatural. I was born the day of the Salem Fire (June 25, 1914) a few miles from a conflagration that consumed a third of the town. The fire was carried from house to house by a flaming cat, screaming in agony, his fur scorched black. Superstitious folk, reminded of Salem's legend, called the fire the witches' revenge. When asked about my birthday, I used to say, "You know Salem where they burned the witches? Well, the day I was born, they burned Salem."

I'm often mistaken for a witch myself. My eyes tend to stare with a disconcerting intensity. It used to bother me until I came to realize it's just an artist's way of looking at things. I am not a witch. But then, neither were the women whom, we later learned, were hanged; not burned as we had always believed.

On a whim, I later took a brief course in hypnotic regression in which I had several more encounters with my vision. Asked when she had lived, she gave me four meaningless dates; 1786 - 1876 - 1678 - 1687. Asked how she happened to have chosen to be me, she said "Rebecca." She never spoke. She pulled words out of my head and highlighted them as with a computer. "Rebecca your mother?" I asked. "No--Grandmother--Rebecca-- Nurse." My Newburyport grandmother's name was Rebecca, and grandmothers are famous for nurturing. My head was clearly playing games with me. I didn't take it seriously.

Later, however, I picked up a book called "The Devil in Massachusetts." It turned out to be about the witch trials based on some WPA research of 1936. Realizing what the book was about, I quickly flipped the pages looking for any witches who might have had children. I found a child named Dorcas, (giving me the little toochas as a sounds like?) born to William and Sarah Good in 1687, one of the four dates she had given me. I then noticed that the four dates were rearrangements of the same numbers. The child in the book was called "the littlest witch," having been convicted of witchcraft and held in the dungeon with the other witches for almost nine months. Her mother, Sarah Good, was hanged on July 19, along with a Rebecca Nurse, a grandmother of many, thus leaving the 5-year-old alone in her chains for the next 4 months. Could this be the child of my vision?

In 1931, in the middle of the depression, I had left a good job welding tubes for a newly invented contraption called radio. I wanted to be an artist. Obviously it was not going to happen in the radio tube factory so I left home and went to New York. By 1936 I was busy with a whole new life. By 1938 I was married and had an exciting new career. I was totally unaware of the research going on back home. Before the WPA, none of this witch history was known to the residents of the 20th century immigrant town in which I had grown up. There's no way I could have dredged any of it out of memory. In 1991, Salem began planning a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the witch trials. Knowing they now had records, I wrote to the Chamber of Commerce, and to the Public Library. They sent me records confirming the fact that--yes--the child had indeed existed. Convicted of witchcraft as she was turning five, she was incarcerated for almost 9 months, finally released to Council Samuel Ray for bail of fifty pounds "current money." Her examination had interrupted the trial of Rebecca Nurse who had joined her in the dungeon the following day. I was right in guessing that their paths must have crossed.

A letter written by her father found in the records of 1712 sought restitution for the fact that, 20 years later, she still suffered mental problems as a result of the wrongful confinement. It occurred to me that being confined during the age when we learn words may have arrested the process. She could have had an extremely limited vocabulary for the rest of her life--why they may have thought her retarded. This might also explain why her afterlife had no voice; why she would have had to pull her words from my brain.

Once I found her identity in the book, I never again saw her as a vision. I did, however, become aware of her integration with me and with the soul we shared. This awareness has vastly expanded my understanding of our place in the universe, and the mystery of how the System works. My experience proves, for me at least, that the immortal soul must be the backup for everything that happens in the physical mode. Apparently, the finite body is a limited memory processor on which an operator enjoys itself, writing, producing and acting out a creative experience. Eternity, after all, can only perpetuate itself by recycling. Feeling compelled to share my enlightenment (such as it is) while I'm still among you, I am now writing (or perhaps Dorcas is writing) this theory called GOD's DNA.

I can't ask anyone to believe what I have trouble believing myself, but an artist does have sensitivity. I have come to realize this living echo of an individual who lived 300 years ago has been in my head, having fun, playing with my relatively healthy brain for as far back as I can remember. I believe it was her choice to be a cartoonist in this life, humor being the best medicine for a recovering soul. In retrospect I found she had even injected herself as one of the characters in my comic strip.

Of particular interest is this forgotten episode, published in 1950 when the discovery of DNA was announced. I am convinced Dorcas, who was writing my stuff for me, used this opportunity to call my attention to the significance. It took some time to sink in, but I am using this opportunity to belatedly add her name in the credit box. Click on the "Teena" picture to see the whole comic
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