Journal for Studies on The Key, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2013 THE EMPTY MAN Michael Talbot A MÔMO IMPRINT and “The Key” CLIFTON STRANGE Taking The Key to be a ‘true encounter’ is possible in view of the originality of its ideas, the elegance with which they are expressed, and their explanatory power (Darger 2003). But since The Key came under renewed scrutiny with Strieber’s 2011 claim that his own 2001 printing of The Key had been ‘censored’, concepts and motifs previously thought unique to The Key have been found in Strieber’s prior work and in the works of others (Hammarskjöld 2011). This article examines the influence of Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe (1991) on The Key, noting points of correspondence in both basic concepts and terminology, the latter ex- tending to the words of the so-called Master of the Key himself. The existence of not only concepts but specific memes from The Holographic Universe in The Key fur- ther problematizes any acceptance of The Key as a straightforwardly transcribed conversation and ‘true encounter’. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dr. G. Trouvé who pointed out Michael Talbot’s importance in Strieber’s Breakthrough and his possible importance in The Key. KEYWORDS: strieber, talbot, holographic universe, holism Something New Strieber begins Breakthrough (1995) by saying he ‘withdrew from public life in 1989’ after the publication of Communion and Transformation intending never to return un- less he ‘had something truly new to say’. At least part of what Strieber had to say that was ‘new’ evidently came out of contact with Michael Talbot during this six-year period. Strieber devotes a Clifton Strange, School of Social Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel • email: [email protected] ISSN 1235-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9913 online/12/020189-23 © 2013 The Empty Man Ltd DOI: 10.1080/135634604212600218069 Clifton Strange chapter to Talbot in Breakthrough (“Michael’s Gift”). In this chapter he describes his relationship with Talbot: Long before we became good friends, we were acquaintances. We had been introduced at a writer’s convention in the early eighties. He was in his twenties then, an intense and deeply humorous man, obviously bril- liant, obviously a little put off by the swirling mass of other writers at the convention. I was intrigued by him and, as I am always eager to see young writers come along, encouraged him to send me his new book. Talbot’s novel, A Delicate Dependency, appeared in paperback in 1982. Like some of Strieber’s own works, it dealt with vampires. According to Strieber it was ‘one of the best that has been written’. Sometime after reading the book, writes Strieber: I got back in touch with Michael, and there followed a friendship that slowly moved from the casual to the more serious. […] As we got to know each other better, I discovered that Michael was fascinated by science and had some experiences that had convinced him that our understanding of the universe and our place in it is very limited. In his brilliant book The Holographic Universe, he wrote, “There is evidence to suggest our world and everything in it—from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons—are only ghostly images, projec- tions from a level of reality so beyond our own that it is literally beyond both space and time.” The above shows that Strieber had read The Holographic Universe by the time of Breakthrough in 1995. In addition, Strieber quotes from The Holographic Universe at least four other times in the course of his chapter, establishing that it was not a passing familiarity. As Strieber writes: The Holographic Universe had been published in 1991, and he hadn’t let me read any of it beforehand, but when I finally got a copy of the book, I had devoured it in a single sitting. Strieber and Talbot evidently had a back-and-forth on a wide array of unusual topics. At around the time of the Communion experiences, Strieber was communi- cating some of these to Talbot, writing: When I’d described the Communion encounter to him in February 1986, his eyes lit up and he said, “You’ve broken through…damn you!” We laughed, and I promised to introduce him to the visitors. 540 Michael Talbot and “The Key” The above is interesting to students of Strieber’s accounts, given that Strieber represents himself in Communion as having been someone to whom otherworldly topics were completely — alien. Talbot’s comment could only have been made, it is clear, in a context fairly rich with understanding. Strieber writes that he and Talbot fell out of touch, until Talbot contacted him to tell him he was dying: Michael and I didn’t see much of each other for some years, so his call in 1992 came as quite a shock. He’d apparently known about his disease for some time at that point, and when I went to see him he was a profoundly altered man. Of course, I feared AIDS. He scoffed. “I wish I had AIDS. This is worse than AIDS.” “Michael’s Gift” is a collection of Strieber’s reminiscences on Talbot combined with details from Talbot’s book. Strieber repeats a number of fascinating histor- ical episodes used in The Holographic Universe and was apparently moved enough by one of them that: In the summer of 1994, I made a personal pilgrimage to the little church of St. Medard in Paris where the abbé is buried. At the church, I found the cemetery still walled up! The abbé’s grave was such a wellspring of the unknown that the Age of Reason simply closed it—and it remains closed. As influential asThe Holographic Universe appears to have been on Strieber, Talbot’s death was at least equally so. “Michael’s Gift” contains a compelling account from Strieber’s perspective of Talbot’s decline and Strieber’s witnessing his mo- ment of death (in a sense). In fact, Strieber situates Talbot’s illness in the context of contact with the visitors: Michael phoned me and asked me to get the visitors to help him with his cancer. Hearing his words, realizing that they meant that the chemo- therapy must be failing, my heart almost broke in two. […] I asked for help for Michael, just sat in the middle of a dark room in the night and asked and asked and asked in my mind and heart—pleaded, begged, demanded, cajoled, promised… and all the while had the certain feeling that this is not about curing the living; that insofar as it is about death, it is about dying well. […] About a month after I pleaded on behalf of Michael’s body, I got a let- ter from him. In it he described an experience of waking up to a pack of wolves in his bedroom. They leaped on him and he thought that they were 541 Clifton Strange death come, that he was finished. But they did not eat him, they seemed to be eating the tumor itself, that wild colony lodged in his blood, licking it, devouring it. He felt a little stronger, perhaps, but was by no means cured. In fact, the tumor was getting worse. I decided to organize a weekend at the cabin on his behalf. I was no longer asking the visitors to come to him and cure him. I asked them to help him face death. […] So I got to feeling pretty sad. For his part, Michael was cheerful. […] Later I got Michael to read to us from The Holographic Universe, and he chose sections about all that is available in the cosmic hologram, access to the future and the past, to other realities, to the hidden world of the soul. Strieber goes on to describe an encounter between Talbot and one of the taller female-like ‘visitors’ in which Talbot at first doesn’t seem aware of her/see her as being a visitor; then as if driven on some deep level Talbot enters into a moment of intimate sharing with her through the glass door. The encounter itself is fascinating. Strieber presents the narrative sequence in such a way as to suggest that he witnessed it in a full waking state, having gotten up out of bed and gone downstairs where it unfolded: I was awakened at about five in the morning, very suddenly. It was the gray hour just before dawn. I’ve long felt an affinity for the dawn, and I thought of walking out into the woods until sunrise. Then I realized that I was in a deliriously light, tingly state, and I began to hope that they’d come. I sat there feeling the state growing, eager for it to develop fully. But it didn’t. Instead, it turned off so abruptly that I gasped from the sudden sense of returning weight. For a moment I was disappointed, but then I heard a voice downstairs. […] The voice was calling quietly. I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I knew that it was Michael. Assuming that he was in some way uncomfort- able, I went to attend to his needs. Halfway down the stairs, I saw him walk across the family room and pause, rather tentatively, before the front door. This was a full-pane dou- ble French door […] However, at the end of the encounter Strieber writes: I don’t remember anything after that. My next clear memory is of wak- ing up. The first thing I thought was, Michael is going to be one hell of an excited guy.