Life - Part Three
Chapter 1: Back to Eden
I go jogging in the forest, after fresh snow: only two inches, enough to frost the trees and show deer prints ahead of me on the path. I flush a herd of white-tails out; they go bounding up the draw. I keep to my path. The freshness of the air renews me. I feel lucky to have this area to run in, still unspoiled. Energized by the exercise, I affirm my determination to protect it from development, from logging. This is my spirit, my body.
Lots comes through my mind when I run. It's cheaper than counseling or psychotherapy, and keeps me healthy to boot. Today I go through my usual mill of frustrations and longings: as if I'm still drawn, at this late stage in my life, having accomplished everything I really wanted, to something better. To perfect my guitar work and play in a band, a rock and roll band: the eternal dream of my generation. Now getting gray, it's a lot more difficult to picture. Still . . .
Then I recall the last game on the volleyball court: smashing a ball from high over the net - how I crashed to the floor, hard on the side of the knee, and found it so difficult to get up and shake it off. . . .
In bed with Sharon, I still visualize other women. What are you supposed to do with that lingering kind of fantasy? Let it be, let it go, hold onto it . . . act on it in the real world somehow? Now we're talking danger zone.
And maybe I should try to advance myself to some more satisfying line of work, more intellectually challenging, something connected with art . . . or even, Christ, back to real estate or something in the business world, sales, something more lucrative?
. . . To spend more time with my kid, our kids, who're growing so fast - I'll only have them once. They'll only have me once, and so I've got to make it good the first time. If I've done wrong by them in any way so far it's going to haunt them until their therapy phase somewhere down the road, and if I do wrong by them from here on they're just going to resent me consciously, rebelliously, like any surly teenager. But what can I do with Eddie? Toss a football around, go fishing? It's all so much like me and my dad; and that didn't accomplish much. Eddie's not even really my son, anyway. On the other hand, it's better than no son at all. . . . It's all too late, really; I've made my choices, lived my life already.
I stop at my favorite spot to look up at the trees in reverence, paying silent homage to them, here in their realm. It's comforting somehow to admire their stately forms, so aloof from my own concerns. And then I hear, faintly echoing through the snow-freshened air, soft guitar notes.
I follow, as if on a scent: a bear after berries, or a child to an oven of fresh-baked bread. The notes grow louder: still soft, sensitively plucked. Up the ridge to the cave, an oriental landscape all around me in white filigree. The notes are coming from the cave. Dare I interrupt?
This is my neighborhood. I have a right to see who's come here. I enter the clammy darkness. The guitar stops. A person suddenly appears standing next to me: clad in moccasins, bell-bottoms, a light cotton shirt with Indian print. He has short blond hair, a wispy long beard. "Howdy," I say to him, feeling suddenly defensive and shy, for my intrusion. It's his eyes: they make him appear so superior, so far advanced in spiritual perfection and purification. Isn't he cold, with no coat up here, no sweater. Where did he come from?
"A kindred soul," he says.
"Who, do you mean me?"
"It's not by accident that we meet."
He talks like my guru; looks my junior by fifteen years. Fifteen years - have I been wasting my life, frittering away the years in domestic activity, futile careers, anxiety?
"I was out jogging. I heard the sound of your guitar."
"Yeah. You want a toke?"
Ah, so he's not so pure after all.
"Uh, no thanks. You go ahead."
He's already lighting up. "Have a seat?" He offers a stone at the entrance to the cave. I sit down while he takes the stone on the other side, puffing reflectively. We look out at the vista of mountain and sky filtered through trees, a framed scene full of graceful beauty. He offers me the last of the joint and on impulse I accept, thinking of it as a kind of sacrament. So as to better communicate on his wavelength. The door opens. He looks at me, smiles.
"You live around here?"
I answer that I do, pointing in the general direction. "And you? I haven't seen you before."
"I've been here almost a month," he said, gesturing inside the cave. Got my bedroll set up, a little fireplace, it's cozy."
I thought of Jason, the Co-op evangelist and man of nature. Only this character seemed more genial, less self-righteous about his trip.
"Good for acoustics, too," I observed.
"You play guitar?"
"Oh, a little."
"Go ahead, you can play mine if you like."
"Oh, no thanks, not right now."
"Music is the language of nature," he pronounced. "I learned that from my teacher, a holy man and a great musician from India."
I looked at the young man with more respect. And I thought I'd done everything worth doing. I was fifteen years behind.
He went on: "Music teaches non-attachment. You play the notes, and they're gone. You can think you can record them, but it's not them. It's like photographs. It's just images, shadows of the real thing: not the real thing. The reality just flows on, undisturbed by our efforts to capture it, in words or tape or pictures. To play the notes is just that: to play with them, and let them go again. To dance with them in their passing." He smiled that subtle smile again.
What could I add? He'd said it better than I could. I knew the truth of what he said, though I hadn't made a habit of thinking in that way. Somehow it didn't seem to go with the practical necessities of being a handyman, a family man. What was it all worth, my paltry life? No more than a few guitar notes, strummed on the wind. Suddenly I wished for more of that joint.
And my host pulled another out of his pocket; he lit it and passed it to me without a word. I accepted. Sharon would not be happy with me when I arrived home stoned, I guessed. But what the hell - it was my life. And where was my life going, anyway? I would drift with the wind.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Starbird."
"Nice name."
"It's a name I took after the time I spent with my teacher. Starbird Harbinger."
"Has a nice ring to it."
"It's only a name. But it reminds me of what needs to be done." His face had a serious cast to it now. The air seemed heavier, thicker as we passed the joint back and forth. I sensed the conversation was becoming momentous. I waited for him to continue, which he did.
"We need to become aware of our complacency; to uproot it and throw it into the compost bin; to rot there awhile and become, through time and contact with the elements, new soil. We need to throw everything out with it. To be unafraid, to lose everything. And thereby to gain all that there is to be gained in this life."
I waited. When he continued pausing I pressed: "Which is?"
"Union with the spirit of the all and everything. With the natural world. With the animals and plants and stones, the wind and sea and sun. It has to do with consciousness: because all is consciousness, or consciousness of all is the same as the all. To center on this fact at this or any moment is to get closer to the truth, from the morass of socio-psychic-psychological-cultural-historical verbiage expended on the subject. What it comes down to, is, What do you have to add? Or, how does it manifest in your daily life?"
Did he mean me? I handed the last of the joint to him. He ignored me and kept speaking, his words flowing out of the cave mouth into the world.
"If I choose to add no more words of an expressly philosophic nature, I am left then with the final option, the concrete particulars of the present. And what is the present, if not the expanded sense of all past and future? We feel that we live in an important time, in the history of the world. And we are right. Our time is the temper of the whole time, the culmination of the inward movement of all of history. But are we in touch with the inner movement?"
He droned on and I spaced out, recalling how, at twenty, I had had transcendent glimpses such as these, of an evolving all-tribal culture. But not since then. How old was this Starbird Harbinger, really; where did he read this stuff; and what was his real name: Bernard Bremminger? Michael Fischlin? Stanley Nagel?
Again he seemed to read my mind, and brought it back to present attention by commenting, "Is that prescience left to the twenty-year-old-always-punks, searching with all their hearts and souls, as they must to be a part of the new, of which they are a co-creating part . . . while those like you who have successfully or not ridden their own generation's wave into the future, then held onto that vision they helped create, but which is later in turn supercecded by yet onrushing waves of change . . .
"All right, all right," I finally interrupted him. "For the sake of communication let's get down to brass tacks. How do we (for I instinctively allied myself with his fundamental way of seeing the world, even if he did have an overblown way of expressing it) get this across to the masses?"
"Masses?" He looked at me with immeasurably calm eyes. Ageless eyes. The eyes of his teacher, somewhere in a cave in India. "We are the masses. Look out there and see the masses of trees, of clouds, of molecules, of currents of air. In here" (he tapped his skull) "are the masses - masses of thoughts, of intentions, of conceptions and dreams. All that we can be aware of . . . listen, are you hungry?"
I was startled by the sudden shift of his focus. But again he was right on. My stomach was growling. Sharon would be at home thinking about lunch soon . . . Maybe I should get going, I thought. I stood up, thinking I would say good-bye. But with a quick gesture Starbird, standing up beside me, motioned me deeper inside the cave. And lulled by some power in this strange being, I followed. The chamber fifty feet back had been swept free of bat dung and squirrel caches. My host lit a candle and a magic scene appeared: a neat stone fire circle; beside it a teapot of hand-formed earthenware glazed in brown with vertical sky-striping; a bone-colored mug signed on the bottom "Bess, '60"; a wood bowl half eaten of walnut meats; a card showing a circular cameo, in shades of blue, of a lake under a full moon; another picturing a carved-wood Buddha with lacquer and gilding, which, as I sat sipping miso tea with honey and ginger, I discovered was the creation of Dainichi Nyorai, Japanese, 12th century, Fujiwara period. Against the wall of the cave, resting on a bed of wool blankets, was a book called How to Make Drums, Tomtoms and Rattles - and once again I thought about the notion of intertribal fusion, now right at hand. We took handfuls of walnuts and nibbled at them, one by one, without speaking. Starbird played a composition I'd never heard, an instrumental piece I presumed was improvised in the spirit of the moment. Four assorted small stones shone in the candlelight from their perch on a small ledge above the bedroll.
Did this scene, I wondered, somehow purport to represent the heralded "inward movement of our time"? Perhaps only, I considered, insofar as "inward" could be taken to mean the subjective and personal world of one person unconnected to the mass: the billions, for instance, living quite a different existence in the workaday cities of the world. Was this alternative, as some upstanding apologists for civilization would claim, evil, insignificant, or merely self-indulgent? Everyone, the line goes, needs a boss - even if it gets confused with the inner voice. Is there no such thing, then, as that chimera that every working stiff dreams of, to be his own boss?
Even this independent man, I had to concede, spoke with the voice of "his teacher". . . .
Starbird stopped his playing abruptly, took another handful of nuts, stood up and announced, "It's a new day."
He followed me out of the cave.
"And where to, now?" he asked me in a friendly manner.
"I have things to do," I said.
"Look, fall is approaching in the color of the cloud cover over that mountain, all summer long. The ritual continues, bringing us to the end of time, within time's fond embrace. All our needs are foreseen and forestalled in the fullness of time. We have only to bring into earthly clothing the body of light, to bring its fruition forward. And then to send it back skyward again, the earth illuminated."
"If you say so." I couldn't help my flippancy. He didn't seem to mind, but took my words as genuine. I walked home through the woods.
I heard the rocks in the nearby stream, murmuring gently. I smelled roses, drying somewhere in the dusty "fullness of time," their perfume intact forever.
These, and Starbird, and I were all dancers in the ritual, choruses in the final form. The break would come soon, I now knew, and we'd have to be ready on the beat . . . I'd have to come and talk more with this headstrong young prophet, who'd chosen the path I'd long ago forsaken. So that I could help him bring the change through collectively, to the new transcendent music, the wild yet unitive abandon of everything that went before.
Everything now needed to be reevaluated, in the tempering spirit of the present movement. What would remain as relevant, still burning for the now and the next to come? What long-unfulfilled potentials lay smoldering toward new flame? What tendrils ardently reached from underground for new soil to break through? What sudden mushrooms of revelation? What was the moving shape of the overall timewave of my life, the self-similar form amid the chaos of the outer world, the random wreckage of mine and everyone's failed utopias?
Within me I felt a new awakening, a long snake unfurling: its collection of old skins tangling behind, its new one ripening, twisting toward Eden.
The pair of ancient larches towered overhead. I was almost home. Suddenly I came back to myself, in the fullness of single focus, walking. Just as quickly I was struck with the wrongness of it all: the alien presence of a human being in nature, however simply walking: with the modern equipment of our literal clothing, and all our intellectual baggage. We may have been unitary citizens of nature once, too long ago even for genetic memory. But no longer. We are tourists in nature, now. Our minds, desires, tools and agendas have gone too far beyond, ever to co-exist again in simple harmony. It's too late, you can never go back to Eden. The vision, the idyllic dream can still claim you, as can the ever-fertile and living dangers: the grizzlies of the more-than-virtual reality, the snowstorms of the wintry reality this side of imagination; but in the meantime it's only a program, a packaged vacation, a backdrop, a scenario. A context of our choosing; a route on a map.
Still, we are part of a larger life-ritual. Our path does wear deeper into the forest floor. This is time not simply passing, as wind over water, but footsteps imprinting. The earth-tide senses it, registers every step, every beat. Digitalized if we like, it's all the same to her. Our interpretation; her viscera.
The waves of new meaning mount in me as I approach the clearing of our house; they mount and roll on. The new beat rages through the skies, the mountaintops, the trees, the animal homes. Pulsing, it's the blood of our time.
Dreams of a domestic heaven with Sharon: do they come true, little by little, in the days we spend awake, or the nights together touching, side by side? I long to hold her with me in this, to spend our closeness together, together holding into the present.
"You're a little late for lunch," she said, washing dishes. There were crumbs on the table. "What happened to you?"
Suddenly it all seemed so childish, so irresponsible. How could I relate the visions Starbird had opened for me, of a world-attitude able to cut through all my yuppieistic achievements, toward harmony and . . . well, I would have to try.
"I met this guy, on the trail. Or actually, off the trail, a little ways. He's camped out in that cave up there. I heard him playing guitar, and went up and had a chat with him."
She eyed me, kept washing. "There's soup in the pantry; bread and cheese if you want."
"Sure," I said meekly, and went to fetch it. I sat down to eat. Sharon eyed me curiously.
"So this guy must have been pretty interesting."
"Oh, yeah. He was into some kind spiritual trip. Pretty interesting, all right." Still I didn't know how to begin to explain.
"What kind of spiritual trip?"
"He didn't give it a name. The usual sort of all-embracing vision, talking about 'composting' the stuff of our usual daily rounds, purifying ourselves to be more in tune with the oneness of everyone and everything, of nature . . ."
"Sounds like something I've heard before," Sharon said with a smirk. "So he's what, planning on staying the winter in this cave, with his fellow bears?"
"He didn't say."
"Anyway, can you take care of Constance today? She needs to be picked up at the Reynolds and I've got a massage to do in Carston."
"Uh, sure."
We talked again, or at least I tried to, in bed that night. I'd been mulling things over all afternoon while coloring with Constance, the mind-tracks onrolling with their own momentum even while reading her "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin" and other favorites. "Daddy, are you bored?" she asked me at one point. "No, dear," I lied. "What would you like to do next?"
"Sometimes," I told Sharon, "I wonder if I've really reached my utopia in external terms after all. Or if it's worth anything to reach it in external terms. Maybe my dreams, ambitions, even the ones I've accomplished, have all been shallow, empty, deluded, conditioned, unreal and meaningless."
She looked so serious, so sad. She was taking it personally, I could tell. "What about me?" she finally blurted out, on the verge of tears. "Are you saying you made the wrong choice to live with me, to live this kind of life? What would you rather be doing? Do you want to go out and live on your own again like a twenty-year old, like this new-age freak you met?"
"No, Sharon. I love you. I appreciate the comforts of this life we have together. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's not that I actually want to change anything."
"Well, what, then? You sound so dissatisfied all of a sudden."
"It's not really all of a sudden. These feelings I've kind of been carrying with me, and not recognizing until now. That talk with Starbird kind of crystalized it for me, made me realize some things."
"But what things? I've only heard vague platitudes. What does it really mean for your life? Anything? If so I want to hear about it, before it's too late."
"Too late? What do you mean?"
"Before you change so much that I'm suddenly left out of your plans. Because I no longer fit the spiritual vision. Because I'm too domestic or whatever. I don't know. I'm just not sure where all this is leading." Her eyes were large, dark, imploring.
I had no ready answer. I wasn't sure, either. And it was dangerous even talking about change with Sharon, that much was clear.
She turned away from me and faced the wall, clutching her pillow.
"I don't know if it's leading anywhere," I told her. "I think it's mostly a matter of just examining what's happening in my life, instead of living it blindly."
I could hear Sharon's unvoiced reply to that: What's the use of examining it, if you're not prepared to change? Either things stay the same, or they change, right?
Quickly I continued the silent dialogue, before saying anything more that Sharon would take as a threat. Where did I stand? Was it indeed too late to change course now, at this point in my life? What would I do, give it all up? Walk out on the wife and kids, burn the books and papers, exile myself to the forest and live like the hermits of India?
Except that this wasn't India - especially in the winter. Nothing grows here except fir and bear. The bear lives okay - on insects and berries and garbage. Then sleeps all winter. I'm not a bear, I'm human. What does it mean to be human? Especially a human at middle-age?
But this was still conventional thinking. Who knows whether middle-age is middle, young or old? I might die tomorrow: then where would my late-inning resolutions get me? Or, having given up in the face of a narrowing field of choice, I might live for another sixty years, by far more than I've lived already. Do I piss it away because I've given up hope for change?
Shit, now Sharon was crying.
She turned to me. "I know what it is now, with you. It's this habit you developed before you met me, of always looking for something better. All those failed relationships - if you could even call them that. The moving, the trying out different careers. Now how can I expect you to stay put? It's in your blood, I guess."
"Or my conditioning," I said somewhat more hopefully. That I could conceivably change, to come around to a place of greater contentment.
She went on oblivious to my amendment. She had me down. "You've done it all. The political thing, or anti-politics, however you want to label it. The straight thing as a teacher. The counterculture, the sports trip, spiritual stuff - you've told me all this, Charlie, but only now do I clue in. You're a hopeless romantic. Nothing in this world is good enough to hold your attention for very long. Not even a real flesh and blood woman who loves you." At this the tears streamed down her face.
"So what can I do for an encore," I concluded for her. "Is that it?"
"That's it." And somehow she managed a smile for me just before I kissed her.
True, I'd dabbled in everything under the sun, every diversion and walk of life. But not having stuck to anything, I'd drifted along, a jack of all trades and none, an uncommitted wimp of a middle-class joe. Sure, I'd carved out a cozy little niche for myself in the great wilderness of the so-called real world, and survived to a ripe middle age. But what good had my existence brought to the wider world?
All the heady promise of my earlier years, for making a dent against the machinery of destruction, for improving the way people lived together, seemed fouled by compromised and abandoned causes, and dissipated by neglect.
At least I was not alone. I was of the Woodstock generation.
