The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (66 page)

But for a small number of people, the gate to ecstatic retreat remains ajar for a while. Because, for this fortunate few, access to the state that is the ultimate goal of all meditative systems is simple and spontaneous, they are said to achieve mystic transport through the Higher Path, while others are obliged to toil their long and difficult ways along the Lower (less noble) Path of meditative exercise, fasting, chanting, and all the other body/mind/spirit disciplines that are believed to point the way to peace and to oneness with all things.

You might wonder why, if these retreats to The Other Place were so important a part of my emotional life, I haven't mentioned them before now. The reason is simple: they were such normal and unremarkable experiences to me that they went unnoticed until I suddenly realized that I had lost the ability to take those brief moments of spiritual recuperation. I might offer the analogy of breathing. One wouldn't bother to mention that he was in the habit of breathing unless something happened to make it difficult or impossible.

I have always felt uncomfortable with applying the technical term 'meditative ecstasy' to my simple, natural glides into The Other Place. With my logic-bound Hellenic/European limitations, I cannot avoid associating 'ecstasy' with the disturbing and sometimes distasteful quasi-sexual transports of martyrs. I once stood before Bernini's powerful and disturbing medley of sculpture, painting, and light, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa of Avila, and I gazed with engrossed malaise upon that suffering martyr, half rising from her bed of sumptuous torment, her eyes turned up in what every man recognizes to be an expression of orgasmic transport, as winds of religious rapture flutter through the delicate marble fabric of her clothing. I had the impression that if I were to lean over and sniff the statue's open mouth, I would perceive the delicious, faintly acrid fragrance of climax on her breath. Saint Theresa's kind of ecstasy has nothing in common with my gentle respites in The Other Place. One is passion, the other peace; one is turbulence, the other calm. 'Transport' would perhaps be a better name than 'ecstasy' for the phenomenon of The Other Place, both because it avoids orgiastic implications, and because visiting The Other Place is as much spatial in feeling as it is spiritual, although the voyage occurs within one's being. In addition, the word 'transport' comes close in the idiomatic usage: 'She was transported with joy,' although if applied to mystic ecstasy the preposition 'with' would be misleading: one is transported by joy, and to joy.

I lost my ability to slip into The Other Place when I was eleven... I don't know exactly when, but there was a moment when I realized that I hadn't been there in a long time, and I closed my eyes and let go of everything... but nothing happened, and I knew with a chill in my heart that I would never be able to go there again. (This isn't exactly true, because I did go to The Other Place one further time, when I needed its peace and comfort terribly, but that isn't told in this book.)

Those who have lost access and feel a need to regain it must commit themselves to years of meditative exercise, and even then it is not sure that they will find their way along the uncertain and difficult Lower Path to the state they achieved so naturally and casually as babies gliding down the Higher Path. But even those who fail to reach meditative ecstasy along the stony Lower Path have the consolation that the voyage itself can be of benefit. Sadly, some seek the Higher Path through chemicals. This is always an error; it never works, and the danger of damage is great.

It was no accident that my loss of access to The Other Place coincided with my romantic fantasies about Sister Mary-Theresa. Most writers on mystic ecstasy claim that there is a fundamental incompatibility between it and sexual release (perhaps because they are, to some degree, functionally redundant), and this is why even those children who are lucky enough to retain the key to the Higher Path after infancy, loose it as they enter puberty. This would also explain why all the mystics and saints who have found ecstasy through the Lower Path have been celibates. If it is in the nature of things that the advent of sexual maturity banish a child's mystic ecstasy, that would explain why I didn't even notice the loss for a long time. It wasn't until after Thanksgiving, that least treacherous and burdensome of holidays, that the realization of my loss came to me one night as I was sitting on the edge of my bed, worrying about what would happen to Mother and Ben when their plans for a tourist camp in the West turned out to be nothing but dream-fluff, as I was sure they would. I am a born worrier with a gift for conceiving the worst outcome for any situation, and in this case I imagined scenes in which their failure led to recriminations, arguments, and separation, and I ended up once again responsible for dragging Mother's dream ship into the loading dock. After fretting myself into the kind of self-inflicted panic that used to send me searching for the balm of The Other Place, it occurred to me that I hadn't been to The Other Place for a long time. A very long time. I tried to relax and gently nudge my worries to one side as I let my mind slide into transport... but nothing happened. No lift of the spirit, no slight tingle in the blood, no up-tilted alpine meadow, no sense of ever-unfolding peace as I became one with the grass and the rustle of the wind. At first I was puzzled; then, as the realization grew that The Other Place might be forever closed to me, I went through all the stages of panic and despair that others who have experienced withdrawal from meditative ecstasy report experiencing. I could not imagine life without those moments of refuge and refreshment. Well... I could imagine it, because I have a fertile imagination for all that is dark and painful, but I couldn't see much point to living so psychically crippled as that.

But life goes on. Experiences comes, and love; work comes, and responsibilities; and one somehow gets on with it, hobbling a little at first, but ultimately healthy enough to make it through the day. Those who are blessed with access to the Other Place throughout their childhood years inevitably have to pay a price in emotional withdrawal when, finally, the gift leaves them and they are obliged to face life's assaults and erosions without their spiritual opiate. They experience anger and resentment because something has been stolen from them, and these emotions serve only to drive The Other Place yet farther away because, as every trudger along the Lower Path knows, mystic peace recoils in the face of the destructive lower emotions such as hate, envy, resentment, and greed.

Since a time so far back in my memory that my glimpses of recall are more like snapshots than narratives, slipping off to The Other Place was as natural as the heartbeat I could sometimes feel in my ears late at night, and I gave the one no more thought than the other. Throughout those early years of effortless refuge, I never applied the name 'The Other Place' to either the experience or the destination. Only later did I have to come up with a name for these inward voyages so I could ponder the significance of their loss.

I have described the physical aspects of The Other Place as a small up-tilted mountain meadow. Of course, I didn't use those words at the time, for I had never seen a mountain meadow. It wasn't until years later when hiking alone in the mountains of central Hokkaido that I came upon a small alpine meadow that I recognized with surprise as the setting for my Other Place... not the specific, identical setting, but one that had all its suddenly remembered elements. Since that déjâ connu experience, I have spent as much time in the mountains as I could. That is why I came to the Pyrenees and shall see my life out here.

Years after I lost the ability to recover from the abrasions of life by passing a healing moment in The Other Place, I discovered that students of meditation and mysticism have long been familiar with the phenomenon, even down to the detail of the up-tilted mountain meadow. Access to what I call The Other Place is, in fact, the ultimate goal of most Eastern meditative and spiritual exercise.

I wrote about this mystic phenomenon in two novels (Shibumi, Incident at 20-Mile –ed.), where I introduced characters who were able to retreat into the Other Place. One of these characters eventually lost the ability, as I lost mine, and he was obliged to pass through a gethsemene of withdrawal before he could live without excessive longing for what was lost. The other had a ghastly experience: psychologically weakened by traumatic events, he ended up marooned in a grotesque imitation of the Other Place he had known as a child, and he never found his way back to reality. He lived out the rest of his life, not in the soul-spa of the Other Place, but in the personal hell of Someplace Else.

By coincidence, for there is nothing genetic involved, my oldest daughter was also able to take the Higher Path to the Other Place until she reached sexual maturity, and she knows the calm, restorative security of that state as well as the depression and anguish occasioned by losing access to it.

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42. '...electrical things that didn't work' (p. 248)

As a result of Ben's theory-plus-practice-plus-generalization style of teaching and his jocular demystification of the jargon and methods of the 'experts', I was no longer in awe of the mysteries of technology.

To this day, technology and science intrigue me. I am, for instance, exhilarated by the oxymoronic leaps involved in Big Bang theory: like that place/moment when space/time merge so that 'when?' and 'where?' are the same question; or like that space/moment when all the matter of the universe was just a bit less than infinitely dense, and occupied just a bit more than zero space. Splendid stuff with which to exercise the imagination! Almost as challenging as following Browning through the complexities of Sordello. All my interest in science and technology I owe to Ben's patient, humorous explanations of such concepts as leverage, the mechanical advantage of the pulley, and the inclined plane.

This brings to mind an example of Ben's humor: Why is a blotter like a lazy dog? Because a blotter is an ink-lined plane, and an inclined plane is a slope up, and a slow pup is a lazy dog... well, I guess you had to be there. And be an admiring boy of eleven.

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43. '...The Ink Spots' (p. 254)

The Ink Spots (a name that would be considered a PC affront today) did for Negro musicians what Jackie Robinson would later do for Black athletes: they pioneered their followers' acceptance by the mass of White America. The Ink Spots' arrangements of popular ballads were led by the preciously-articulated falsetto of their top tenor (a sound that would become an idiom of Motown male groups) and this lead line was contrasted with the slack, 'Kingfisher' recitative of their deep, moist bass. So characteristic (and, yes, sometimes so hokey) were their arrangements that Spike Jones' comic 'City Slickers' did a madcap parody of their 'You Always Hurt the One You Love'.

The names of the original members of this beloved and groundbreaking quartet reflected the Black American's gift for original if quixotic nomenclature: Deek Watson, Hoppy Jones, Charlie Fuqua, and Slim Green. God bless 'em.

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44. '...Monday, December 8' (p. 274)

The attack occurred on the 7th for us, but on the 8th for the Japanese, on the other side of the international date line. (The strange timing of announcements can be explored here ? HYPERLINK “http://www.otr.com/r-a-i-new_pearl.shtml” ?http://www.otr.com/r-a-i-new_pearl.shtml?)

Note: Through the kindness of Bill Daly, a long-time friend with a nostalgic appreciation and an extraordinary knowledge of cultural minutiae of the era, I have received much guidance and correction, among which was a scratchy transcription of the first radio announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which I quote in this passage.

* A good place to begin an exploration of this event is ? HYPERLINK “http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/” ?www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/?

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45. '...out-shout the competition' (p. 275)

The attack on Pearl Harbor was one of the last times that newspaper 'extras!' would be the public's principal access to breaking news. Radio carried the news more immediately than print, if more shallowly. But not so shallowly as commercial television, which was medium-bound to the visual, so the 'news' became limited to that which made juicy pictures. Television's natural 'news' was of multiple car pile-ups, mass murders, fires, wars, all multiples of the ambulance-chasing news that is at the core of television journalism, which has comment but no real discussion or analysis, evoking only basic emotions like wonder, surprise and pity. Not the least objectionable element of television news and evidence of the celebrity-chasing madness of our time are those interviews with bereaved parents desperate for their chance to emote on national television.

The best I ever did hawking extras was when Roosevelt defeated Wendell L. Willkie to win an unprecedented third term in office. Willkie, a shaggy, gruff-voiced, likable man whose international vision of America's role and responsibilities was at variance with the isolationist core of his Republican party, had been a Democrat until his conviction that, while those elements of the New Deal that had to do with social justice should be kept, many of the bureaucratic restraints on business were damaging to the nation. After breaking through the business-is-America chant of the old Republican party to become the dark horse candidate for the 1940 election, Willkie feared that a blend of Roosevelt's Groten-elitist anglophilia and Hollywood's fraternal concern for the fate of Jews in Europe might drag America into a European war caused by ill-considered, vindictive (but strangely unmonitored) restrictions placed on post-World War Germany's feeble democracy, leading to the economic chaos and resentment that facilitated Hitler's rise. Willkie's sympathies were thoroughly anti-Nazi, but he thought America should fight Hitler with economic and industrial aid only, in part because Germany's limited resources made America invulnerable to invasion, and in part because he considered it inevitable that Germany would attack the Soviet Union, the vast manpower potential of which would sound the knell for Nazism. Despite his late start in the electoral race, the vast popularity of Roosevelt among the common people, and the merely token support he got from the hard-line Republican establishment, Willkie's balance of social justice and sound finances and his message to “...spend American financial and industrial resources in aid of England and France, not American blood” touched a deep cord in the American heartland, and thousands of grass-roots “Willkie for President” clubs sprang up, mostly in small towns and minor cities, while Roosevelt held the big cities and the farms. In the end, although Willkie carried only ten states he received the largest popular vote that any Republican candidate for president (including the successful ones) had ever received up to that time*, and his threat had been palpable enough to oblige Roosevelt, who was looking for a justifiable opportunity to enter the war on the side of England, to assure the nation in a Fire-side Chat radio message ? HYPERLINK “http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA02/audio/volpe_audio/fdr.html” ?(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA02/audio/volpe_audio/fDrhtml?) that he would never send American boys to fight in Europe.