http://www.ralph-abraham.org/1960s/drpa ... desire.rtfOceans of DesireSanta Cruz in the '60's "
How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? ---and I tell my life to myself."
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo
by Paul A. Lee Bumping into a friend at the Harvard Coop who told me he had applied for a position at Santa Cruz but had changed his mind, I said, "Well, maybe I'll apply." He looked at me askance and said: "Do you know anything about the California University sssssystem?" I didn't, but I registered the hiss in the way he pronounced the word system. I thought: snake in the grass? I was teaching at M.I.T. and my term was about to expire and I needed a job. Soon after an article appeared in the New York Times that Kenneth Thimann had been appointed Provost of Crown College, UCSC. I went to the phone. I was a Fellow of a Radcliffe House where Thimann was Provost and I knew him. He was a very distinguished professor of botany at Harvard. We went over for tea and he hired me. Richard Baker, the eventual Zentatsu Myoyu and Zen Roshi, called, looking for Tillich and Erikson to invite to a conference he was organizing at Asilomar. I had been Tillich's Teaching Assistant and Erikson was my thesis advisor. They weren't available so I offered myself and he bought it, including my wife, so we flew out and got a look at Santa Cruz before moving there.
Driving down Pacific Ave. in l965 was like driving down the main street in Paducah, in l937, although I had never been there. It looked impossibly dull and old-fashioned. There was a men's clothing store that looked like used Sears. Definitely unhip. And then--stop the car!--the Hip Pocket Bookstore and over the door a Ron Boise sculpting from the kama sutra, a couple in a position, flagrant and delectio. Definitely hip! I double-parked and ran in to take a look and picked up a copy of the Black Mountain something or other, an underground newspaper, edited by Claire somebody. It was an island in the forthcoming "ocean of desire".
We met the Bakers at Asilomar and over drinks found out they were practising Zen Buddhists. I didn't know any up to then, although I had attended a seminar given by Tillich and Hisamatsu, at Harvard. Hisamatsu, a famous Zen Master, was in residence at Harvard. I hardly understood a word, but he was interesting to observe and made a pronounced impression. I was intrigued by the challenge of an American taking on an Asian religion--an experiment in the cross-fertilization of cultures, or mind and migration, the title of an essay Tillich had written about the affinity of the mind for the migratory impulse. Here was a living instance, my new-found friends. I decided to appoint myself as Baker's protestant theological witness.
As I was a member of the Leary Group at Harvard and a founding editor of the Psychedelic Review, I told Baker, who was organizing conferences and symposia for the University Extension, he should do one on LSD, as it was going to become a big deal. He did. Berkeley tried to cancel it after they woke up to the hot potato and Baker had to compromise by moving the venue to the San Francisco campus and disinviting Allen Ginsberg, who showed up anyhow but did not appear on the program.
So a month or so before we moved to Santa Cruz, in l966, I gave the opening address at the notorious LSD Conference in San Francisco. The conference was scheduled for a week which meant lots of time for parties and lots of fun. I thought of it as my reception to taking up residence for a new life in California. The first stop was the Psychedelic Bookstore in the Haight. Then on to the party thrown by the Grateful Dead in Marin with Owsley handing out his homemade acid to everyone who wanted it. It was a hoot. Hundreds of people on a big estate, almost all of them naked, swimming and passing joints rolled in newspapers. I had never seen anything like that before. I was there with Nina Graboi whom we picked up at Alan Watts' houseboat in Sausalito and she wrote up the event in her book on the '60's. I wasn't clear about what I was going to speak about so I decided to describe the party as the wave of the future and called my talk: "Psychedelic Style". I had never seen freaks before and there were a lot of them. We wore button down shirts and Brooks Brothers suits and thought we were running the show from Harvard. We were wrong and stood corrected. At one point a guy came out and announced that everyone had to move their cars as the neighbor had complained and they didn't want the cops to come. There were a lot of cars and everyone was stoned. An elephant seal like groan went up from the group. I thought, o.k., this is a test. If it happens without mishap it bodes well for the movement. It did. I felt hopeful. The Dead came out and played. A guy stood with his head inside one of the huge speakers and I asked: "Who is that?" Neil Cassady, I was told.
The week long conference was great--Rolf and Elsa Von Eckartsberg, Ralph Metzner, Leary, Huston Smith, our gang from Harvard, and Gerd Stern, and a host of others working in the psychedelic vineyard, took their turn. We had a party every night and Owsley hung around because someone had taken his dealer customer list by mistake in a purse exchange. He finally recovered it. When we met he was wearing a powder blue jump suit and looked up at me and said in a slightly blurred drawl: "My you have a friendly and familiar face!"
Someone fresh from down south gave me a joint of Panama Red as a present and the Von Eckartsbergs and my wife and I drove down to Santa Cruz, rented the wedding suite at the then Dream Inn, lit up and watched Herman and the Hermits on Ed Sullivan. After I scraped myself off the wall, we went out and rode the roller coaster and thought we were goners, pitched out over Monterey Bay, although we landed instead at Manuel's Restaurant at Seacliff Beach. Oh boy! Chicken mole and red snapper. We talked about the Conference and there was Clair from the Hip Pocket Bookstore with John Lingemann at the next table and he was straining every nerve to hear every word and finally unable to restrain himself came over and introduced himself and could hardly believe his good fortune at meeting a psychedelic philosopher and a psychedelic existential phenomenological psychologist who had taken acid at Harvard and were founding editors of the Psychedelic Review. John was a psychedelic well digger and a witcher, given his ability to locate water. Of German ancestry, he was a rude force. He eventually bulldozed his house from which his wife fled and ended up living in a cave on the property with a young woman. He offered to take us around and show us Santa Cruz the next day and we took him up on it. Some intro.
We had to go back to our summer home in Northern Wisconsin to collect our things and our daughter and drive back, so we did. After a week in motels, a different one every night, as I had some kind of phobic reaction to the smell, we finally landed in Rio del Mar, at Hidden Beach, just off the ocean. It was paradise. I stood on the deck and listened to the roar of the surf and wondered how long it would take to get used to it.
We met some of the early Heads in the area: Zoo, who was a wild Irish mover and had Superman painted on his truck, aka Gary Dunne, Tox, without the vobiscum, and Charlie Nothing, whose wedding to Carol Cole, one of Nat's daughters, my sister-in-law had attended in Los Angeles. They were complete nuts and had formed a group called Eternity, partly because it seemed like that long before they stopped playing. They had Ron Boise's Thunder Machine as their lead instrument and they performed at an ice cream store next to Shoppers' Corner. They always took acid and so they played for at least eight hours. I neglected to take it in. I never went to the Barn, either, the main psychedelic venue in the area.
They went down to Esalen as often as they could where they acted like the house band for the employees who liked getting stoned at night after work and going crazy until the wee hours, jumping across bonfires in an orgy of psychedelic bravado. I had occasion to witness this when I gave a seminar with Alan Watts on the future of consciousness. It didn't look good, but it was lots of fun. One night in the baths two mountain men hippies who had gone native living in the woods for some years stumbled in on their first night out and wanted to know who was President and what had happened in the world in their absence. Everyone in the baths laughed out loud.
The Eternity boys ended up living at Lingemann's in the trees. They came down one night and tracked mud into my house and laughed derisively and poked fun at my Buddha, a Siamese Walking Buddha, a beautiful bronze sculpting. I never liked them after that.
I assumed my teaching duties. Santa Cruz was a hotbed for psychedelics and the university was thought of as a country club retreat in the redwoods where students could turn on. Dealers, so I was told, went up and down the corridors of the dormitories, on Saturday, hawking their wares. Like Alice's Restaurant, you could get anything you want. I thought of an apt metaphor for the students: oceans of desire. The place had a way of releasing this particular longing, this surplus desire, a Marxist concept I should look up on google, but one that seemed to fit as there was definitely a lot of it. I remember going to Berkeley where there was even a greater buzz in the air than Santa Cruz and noticing a phenomenon I called the psychedelic eye. When you made eye contact with someone passing in the street there was an unspoken helllooooo and a goodbyeeeeee....as if time had stopped and the eternal now had had its moment. Ships in the night in broadest daylight. The ache of longing, the desire to get it on, the interest in chance encounters and willingness to risk it, seize the moment, all in a glance--it was that kind of a time.
We had arrived in Santa Cruz just after the demise of the Sticky Wicket, a local watering hole where everyone hung out. We found out that Manuel Santana, who was a remarkably talented artist as well as a restranteur and Al Johnsen, a local potter, had organized the art scene in town. I bought a piece by Tony Magee and a construction piece by Joe Lysowski, a chair, a table, a pair of skis and a painting, in a fabulous psychedelic style. I still have the group minus the painting.
We started making pilgrimages to San Francisco at least once a month to visit the Bakers and catch the action. Quicksilver Messenger Service was my favorite group. The first Be-in took place. Leary was there, the guest of honor, and so was Suzuki-roshi. We had a picnic on the grass and everyone was mellow on grass. The tribe had gathered. I took slides. Afterward we went to Margot Doss' for dinner with Leary who was flushed with excitement over the day. Margot wrote a popular column on walking in the Bay area for the San Francisco Chronicle. She fixed up Tim with a lovely young thing who was in a trance state over the encounter. Margot had a mound of crab on a buffet that was eye boggling. A mountain of fresh crab, the delicacy of the area; more than anyone could possibly eat.
I was invited to give a talk on the Be-in by my first Santa Cruz friend, the Rev. Herb Schmidt, whom my wife and I had met on our Asilomar trip. He met us at the front door wearing a black bikini and holding a martini. I thought this is my kind of Lutheran. He set it up as a debate with the Assistant Chief of Police, Officer Overton, a big mistake. I showed my slides thinking they would educate the group to the new style of life and what to expect from the younger generation. They were appalled. They thought Overton should cuff me and take me away before I was lynched. Fortunately, I lived a block away and figured I could make a run for it if I could only get out the door. A young Sunday school teacher stood up and berated the group for their ill will toward me and started to weep which further alerted me to my peril. That settled things down a bit and I got home safely. The experience didn't make me any more cautious and I continued to speak publicly about psychedelics thinking I was carrying on my duties as an educator. I went to Rice University and spoke and met Rusty Schweikert, the astronaut, who was on his way into outer space without the use of drugs. I met Danny Lyon, the photographer, who was doing a shoot on the Texas penitentiary system and had met one of the symbolic prisoners in the country, Billy McKuen, who had cut his penis off in prison; we carried on a correspondence.
I was critical of the psychedelic movement after it became clear that there were casualties to take into account. Students who never recovered from a bad trip became a new type of social welfare recipient--crippled for life, they went on the dole. I talked about the tyranny of being hip and the pressure to take drugs although it deterred no one. I was worried about deformation, about the de-structuring of consciousness that occurred under the influence of the drug, often associated with a death experience. from which some experimenters never recovered. They were permanently de-structured and found it impossible to return to what they had been if you want to call that normal. They became wards of the State. I met one of the casualties out on the road in front of Stevenson College. I remember the moment vividly--a former student, Tom somebody, who, for a year or more had been living on the beaches and probably in a cave and whose eyes flashed like a movie projector gone haywire, you could almost hear the sound of the film flapping off the reel.
I understood the yearning of the spirit and the desire to form an opposition movement against the socially dominant estrangement--Leary summed it up in the slogan of the time: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. "She's leaving home......" the Beatles sang. This inner emigration swept through the younger generation like a wave and they disengaged psychically from the collective insanity that was going on around them, learning how to hide in public view. I was fascinated by this covert ethic, as I called it, exemplified by watching students in a circle, say, at a wedding, or some social gathering, passing a joint and taking a toke as if no one noticed. An invisible line separated the straights from the hip. It was clear that this freedom of the spirit was indistinguishable from arbitrary willfulness.
It became apparent to me that there were certain users who lived to light up. They were constantly looking for the moment when they could get stoned, all other experience, including time spent with one another was subordinate to their central and all-consuming obsession; they were addicts. It was a matter of observation to watch them bide their time and to give off the impression that at any given moment they could repeat the ritual they lived for: to light up! They seemed to be entirely oblivious that this was the case and that an observer such as myself could call them to account. The reason for doing so was because one had the feeling of being used--manipulated-- for the purpose of collusion in the assumed mutually shared interest in getting stoned. There was a perceived psychic drumming of fingers and an imperceptible hum to mark the time.
It reminded me of visiting relatives in Norway who put on a Sunday afternoon spread for a prince. Plums in clotted cream and aquavit, the national drink, which entailed a ritual. Everyone raises their glass and says skol, looks one another in the eye, clinks glasses and bottoms up. Refill. Wait. Small talk. Some quiet drumming of fingers and a little humming. And then someone breaks the suspense when the appropriate time has passed and says skol and the ritual is repeated. Needless to say, as this goes on, the intervals get shorter and shorter and the sham of waiting becomes more and more transparent and provokes great hilarity. It was the Norwegian version of stoned.
I taught at Cowell College the first year before I moved to Crown. Page Smith had hired me accomodating me until Crown opened. We became great friends, as well as his wife, Eloise. They were the spirit of the place and imbued Cowell with a charm and culture that was stunning and unforgettable. I met Mary Holmes and we fell in love on the spot, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. And then came Chadwick.
I have had a few clairvoyant experiences in my life but this was one of the best. Maybe clairvoyant isn't the word. It was more like being guided. I thought a student garden project would be a good thing for the campus, even though I wasn't interested in gardening and didn't know where the idea came from, although, after all, the campus was on a splendid ranch landscape, the weather was perfect, and "Flower Power" was in the air, another slogan of the times, wafting down on a cloud of smoke from the Haight. We all got a whiff of that. So I asked the Chancellor to lead a walk to look for a prospective site. He thought it was a good idea. Quite a few people showed up and I carried my daughter on my shoulders and we looked around up behind Crown where there were running streams and gorgeous stands of redwoods, eucalyptus and oak.
Two weeks later, Chadwick arrived. I was told of his coming by Countess Freya von Moltke, who was visiting the campus and had heard of my project. She said she had my gardener for me. I met Chadwick at the Cowell Fountain and asked him if he would take on the task and he said he would. The next day he went out and bought a spade and picked out the slope below Merrill College and started to dig. I remember driving up to school and catching him out of the corner of my eye and thinking oh boy here we go! I think it was the first organic garden at a university in the country. l967.
We were right in line for Earth Day, three years later, as if the garden had been planned as a place to celebrate it. The garden jeopardized my career, although not publishing was another factor. I thought the garden would count as a bad book but I was wrong. And it didn't help that I was the founding chair of religious studies and my field was the philosophy of religion. My colleagues at Crown gave me the thumbs down. The handwriting on the wall appeared fairly early. After the suicide of a colleague, I thought the message was clear. I was finished. So I dreamt up a nonprofit corporation as a pipe dream that might afford me a place to work--I called it U.S.A., University Services Agency. Three days after the new year--l970--I ran into my pal, Herb Schmidt, who was campus chaplain, as he was about to get the franchise for the only public restaurant on the campus and I proposed my idea. The non-profit took off like a rocket. We started the Whole Earth Restaurant and Sharon Cadwallader took on the task and her cookbook sold a million copies. Eventually we had something like thirty affiliates and millions in cashflow. I thought of writing it up as: How To Become A Spiritual Millionaire When Money Is No Object. It anticipated Page Smith and me starting the William James Association, after I was bounced. When Page retired in protest over the issue, he said: "any place that doesn't have room for Paul Lee doesn't have room for me." Even today it has a nice ring.
The Loyalty Oath was an attempt to break the spirit of American intellectuals and one was practically forced to sign it in order to get paid. University professors were suspect in principle. It was a test of one's mettle--what I call thymic juice or the ability to say No! (Thymos is the ancient Greek word for courage.) It takes courage to resist and the willingness to accept the penalty for noncompliance with evil which is Gandhi's definition of satyagraha, his term for the moral equivalent of war. There was a penalty to pay either way: might as well come out with one's integrity intact. I witnessed the courage of colleagues at M.I.T., when I saw them take a stand and refuse to sign. I didn't have to sign because I was on my way to Santa Cruz. I knew Erik Erikson at Harvard and I knew he had refused to sign at Berkeley and was forced to leave his position. He told me they had an office for the purpose that was open 24 hours a day so faculty could sneak in at three in the morning undetected. I admired him for his courage but I signed. I was ashamed of myself because I transgressed a scruple against swearing my true faith and allegiance to the constitution of the State of California. Allegiance, sure, but true faith? That was reserved for more transcendent swearing. I went to Santa Barbara to be on a panel. The lady in charge offered me a piece of paper to sign after I finished speaking. I asked what it was and she said the Loyalty Oath. I told her I had signed it. She said it didn't matter. I had to sign every time I spoke at another campus in order for them to pay me. I handed the paper back. No thanks. Keep your honorarium. Years later, the Loyalty Oath was overturned and I called Santa Barbara and they sent the check. No interest. I realized I had lost and won a round with myself. How many rounds does one get?
I remember the first time I saw Ralph Abraham. It was at a Faculty meeting in the fall of l968. He was sitting in the front row. I did a doubletake as I walked by. I thought holy shit, they hired Abbie Hoffman; now they've gone too far! We were asked to lead a student protest against the regents who were making a visit to the campus. Reagan was governor. The Democratic convention police riot in Chicago had happened a few months before and the campus was a tinder box ready to explode. Ronnie and the regents were the match.
I arrived for the march wearing my Harvard PhD robe, red silk with black bands, a representative of lawful order and adult circumspection; Ralph showed up wearing an American flag shirt. We both had beards and Ralph had an afro out to there.
The students for the most part behaved but there were some outside agitators from Berkeley who acted as provocateurs and wanted to foment trouble. I invited the biggest loudmouth out into the parking lot but he declined.
Bill Moore, who was to become a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Program, had called for a Black Studies College in honor of Malcolm X and the Chancellor, McHenry, had laughed derisively at the suggestion. Bill was considered an inside agitator and was persona non grata for making speeches on the campus. In the middle of the ruckus he was removed from the campus by the police. I found out about it and picked him up at the bottom of the campus where he had been deposited and brought him back where we were met by student supporters with whom we locked arms and marched into the Crown College courtyard where we were met by Rich Townsend, a student sympathetic to Moore's proposal, who told us that Jesse Unruh and a number of regents were waiting to talk to Bill. In we went to the Crown Library and Bill sat down to repeat his proposal, this time to sympathetic ears. Eventually, the X in Malcolm X was transposed to Oakes and a college devoted to Black Studies was instituted.
Ralph's and my picture appeared in many of the state newspapers in articles about the demonstration. Hate mail poured in. People didn't like professors with beards and they really didn't like their flag worn as a shirt. McHenry dutifully sent copies to us with a little red check on a tab on the side of the document. One of them suggested we fill our pockets with shit and lie down in front of a bus and become instantly embalmed. I thought that was an example of a rare imagination. Ralph had tenure and I didn't. I thought the jig was up for me and it turned out to be true even though the Crown faculty gave me a vote of confidence at the time which was really a veiled kiss of death.
A Vietnam Teach-in was organized and many of us spoke, including John Kroyer, my colleague in philosophy, who recommended that students hand back their draft cards; after all it was government property, let the government take care of it. The Chancellor took umbrage at the event and especially Kroyer's remarks and proceeded to censure him which meant his advancement was jeopardized. It precipitated a nervous breakdown not helped by a bad mescaline trip and I had to have him institutionalized. He was eventually released after shock treatment and bought a gun and shot himself. I thought it was a message sent to me that I was dead as far as my teaching career was concerned. I had to conduct his funeral service. I quoted Dylan Thomas: oh you who could not cry on to the ground, now break a giant tear, for this little known fall.
McHenry eventually went after Ralph Abraham. McHenry was an ex-marine, which explains something. Steno pool wastepaper baskets were raided for incriminating evidence. Are you kidding? Charges were trumped up. Ralph decided to write to all the major mathematicians in the world to complain. He was fed up. The day after they got the letters McHenry called it off. Chalk up one round for the good guys.
I started to get critical of the institution, remembering the hissed 's' and appalled at McHenry's repressive behavior. I thought of three things haunting higher education: the triumph of the obtuse, the bureaucratization of the learning process and the principle of anonymity, where students would never find roots or a place to nurture them. And I could tell that the first five years, from l965 to 1970, when the humanities counted, would soon be swept away or at least under the carpet by the triumph of the sciences. We were enjoying what was only a brief grace period. Short but sweet. It always surprised me that for Page Smith this was enough. That it had had it's time at all seemed to be a matter of unassailable affirmation for him. Sometimes brief flowerings of the spirit are better than no flowerings at all.
Page did have second thoughts about it, though. Late in life he wrote a blistering indictment of the university system entitled: Killing the Spirit, his critique of the deadening force of reductionism that had descended on higher education like a pall with the message that only the sciences counted for knowledge and all the rest was a waste of time to be reluctantly tolerated. To pay homage to the book and the critique I wanted to install a spiritual cloakroom at the entrance to the campus in front of the sign bearing the school slogan: Fiat lux. Incoming students would check their spirits for safekeeping and I would give them a number and when they graduated it would be returned to them if we could find it. It didn't surprise me at all when the former chancellor, M.R.C. Greenwood consistently referred to the university as a major research institution and not a university.
I decided to teach a course that would critically examine the university. I called it "Organizational Climate", a term developed by a former colleague at Harvard Business School. I thought the students should study the institution they were enrolled in and not take it for granted. I organized the class as a non-profit corporation, as I was enamored of the form, and issued stock. We took on some interesting projects, the first having to do with a seasonal erosion of a hillside at the entrance to the campus where the soil spilled down onto the road every winter in the rainy season. There was a dispute between the County and the University over jurisdiction and responsibility. The class met in the only geodesic dome on the campus and we called in the appropriate authorities and interrogated them and the dispute was resolved. Then we decided to build a retaining wall in front of the Chadwick Garden as it was also eroding in the rains. We got the stone from the quarry on the campus and a crew turned out and we did a nice job. I got a nasty letter sent to me with a copy to the chancellor from Building and Grounds disavowing any responsibility with the wall and its tumbling down in the first rain. It's still there.
One student said she wanted to make bread and give it away. I said ok. She wanted some money so I gave her some and she obtained the kitchen at the Congregational Church on High Street. Her name was Bonny. She was famous for taking acid in high school and taking her clothes off before she was arrested. I forget how many loaves she baked. That summer, while we were in Wisconsin, I got a letter from her saying this guy is hitchhiking out to see me and borrow some money to start a bakery. He had the ovens but he needed money for flour. I winced. Days later I get a call from Eagle River, a town ten miles away. He's here.
I drove in to pick him up. He doesn't talk. We sit on the back porch steps for a few days enjoying the quiet and I finally mention I will take him back to the phone booth in Eagle River and he can hitchhike back. He didn't say a word. Shortly after, I get word that my colleague, John Kroyer, had shot himself and I was asked to return to perform his funeral service. I was so down I looked up the baker and there he was in a little hole in the wall on Seabright and Murray, sitting on his oven. I gave him the rent I was collecting on our home so he could buy flour. He got started and eventually sold it and it became the Staff of Life Bakery. I never got my money back, just like my rent for the Bookshop Santa Cruz. I should have gone to Harvard Business School instead of Harvard Divinity School. But I developed a pained appreciation for an economy of gift and the application of Erik Erikson's definition of identity: you have it to give it away!
One day after an Organizational Climate class, a coed came up and said she was going home to visit her grandmother. I was a little perplexed but I said say hello to her for me. She came back after the break and handed me a check for ten grand. I said who's your grandmother? Mrs. J. C. Penney. So we designed a project for the summer. A group from the class would spend the summer with Hassler, a former Merry Prankster, who lived on Last Chance Road. They had a ball. I was a little concerned about accountability so I asked Hassler to write up the project. He handed in a very nice document of about 25 pages entltled: "No Holes Barred Finishing School, The Same Eastern Polish at a Fraction of the Cost."
A student got caught in an elevator malfunction with Ken Kesey in San Francisco. For some hours. I guess it was a life-transforming experience. She came into my office and wanted me to agree that she should drop out of school. I agreed. Then she fell in love with Hassler and wanted me to marry them. I agreed and we performed the ceremony at the Sacred Oak in the middle of Pogonip. My daughter, Jessica, was the bridesmaid.
I had a horse that I kept on campus. His name was Charley when I bought him and I renamed him Xanthos, the horse of Achilles, who prophesied Achilles' death. I thought it was a good name for a philosopher's horse. I had gone riding with Mary Holmes and she said why don't I get a horse. I almost fell off. I had wanted to be a cowboy in the summer and a fireman in the winter when I was a boy. I never thought I would fulfill one of them. She found a quarter horse gelding, a magnificent specimen. I was in seventh heaven, another name for the saddle. I had to move him eventually and found a stable up on Spring Street at Windy Hill Farm with a lady who had run polo ponies at Pogonip.
I could get on to the Pogonip across the road and it afforded me 614 acres of prime riding space. One day while doing a turn in a meadow I looked up at the solitary oak standing in the middle and saw the Crucified. The oak tree was in the form of the Crucified, a major limb had broken off leaving a head. The outstretched limbs below looked like arms. It was the place name--Santa Cruz, Holy Cross--in an oak. I started having services there on Thanksgiving, Christmans and Easter. The year was l977. Pogonip was threatened with development by the Cowell Foundation and I thought: over my dead body. I started the Save Pogonip Greenbelt Group with Mark Primack and he drew the oak for the poster and we passed an initiative that lead to the city acquiring the property as a park. I continue to do services there with my colleague, Herb Schmidt.
In l970, I met Jack Stauffacher, of the Greenwood Press, in San Francisco, one of the great fine press typographers in the world. He was a devotee of Goethe and when he found out we had a Goethean Gardener in Alan Chadwick, he wanted to meet him.
Alan practised biodynamics, a form of horticulture developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early part of the last century. Steiner was a Goethean and took much of his inspiration from Goethe and particularly Goethe's botany. We had adopted the slogan of Goethe's Italian Journey: Et in Arcadia Ego, for our garden. Arcadia is the garden theme of Greek letters, comparable to Eden. Virgil's Georgics is the classic text. Jack did a broadside devoted to the theme, commemorating the garden. We formed a lifelong friendship and eventually he did a fine press edition of Plato's Phaedrus and dedicated it to me.
I nominated Jack for a Regents' Professorship and he came to Cowell College and started the Cowell Press. He had a distinguished group of students some of whom went into fine printing and have had great careers. I gave a talk at Holy Cross Church on Goethe's Italian Journey on the occasion of the 200th anniversary and Jack did an exquisite broadside for the occasion.
When Page Smith and I left the university in l972, we started the William James Association. Page wanted to start the Civilian Conservation Corps over again as he had been in a leadership training camp in Norwich, Vermont, in l940, inspired by William James' address at Stanford in l906: "A Moral Equivalent of War." It involved his beloved teacher--Rosenstock Huessy--to whom he was devoted for the rest of his life and it was an experience he never got over. It was something like an unpaid debt as the camp was shortlived due to the war and Page was drafted. So we went to Washington, D. C. , but we didn't get anywhere. Then Eloise asked me to ask Baker-roshi to ask Gov. Brown to nominate her as the Chair of the State Arts Council, about to be newly formed. She knew I was friends with Baker-roshi and he was a friend of Brown and so I did. When she and Page were in Brown's office in Sacramento to be named he gave the State of the State Address and announced the forthcoming California Conservation Corps. Page jumped in his seat and told Brown about our work to that end at the national level. Brown said be my guest and so we got to do the early planning for the corps. That was a coincidence of an unusual sort. Makes one wonder.
After some months, this guy appears in our office in Santa Cruz, and introduces himself as the new director of the Corps--Boyd Horner. I ask him what he had done before. He had studied for the Rudolf Steiner Priesthood in England. I said oh go on your'e just shitting me. In fact, I looked up my sleeve thinking something strange and weird had crawled out. He proceeded to make the Corps a Rudolf Steiner Corps. God wot! He was the moonbeam in the Governor's office. I was sent to England to the Steiner School there--Emerson College. He wanted Steiner gymnasts, Steiner dieticians, Steiner dancers (Eurythmy), and probably Steiner geometers. Anything Steiner I could get. I went into a pub in Forest Row and they could tell I was from California. When I told them I was visitng Emerson, they ducked, and I thought a bat had flown in thru the window. The Steiner group was pretty weird. I had fun going into London on weekends and hanging out with Harrison Ford, my brother-in-law, who was acting in Star Wars. We drank single malt scotch. McCallums. I got to go to the set and watch him being made up and thought his uniform was the dickiest thing I had ever seen, like they had made it out of old handkerchiefs. I thought this thing is never going to fly.
Horner didn't last long and that was the end of that as far as our relation to the Corps was concerned.
I thought land reform was going to be the next big thing after civil rights. I organized a conference at the Civic Auditorium. There was a guy running for the presidency on a land reform plank, his name escapes me. I was his local campaign manager. Harris. His name was Harris. There was Riis Tijerina, who was a Southwestern radical and had staged a demonstration in favor of minority rights. And there was Cesar Chavez.
I thought they were continuing the tradition of a moral equivalent of war.
No one came. Fortunately, I had invited about forty speakers. They made for a small audience and talked to themselves. Stauffacher did a broadside. I was not only ahead of my time, I was out of my time. But it did lead to my starting the Northern California Land Trust, with Erich Hansch and Warren Webber, an organic farmer in Marin, who just hosted the Prince of Wales. The idea of a land trust had just come to me as the vehicle for land reform and land conservation and someone said there was a guy who had just moved to Santa Cruz and had written a book on how to do it. Take me to him. It was Erich. He was living in a garage with Don Newey. I remember the shirts and pants on hangers on a pole.
Erich was a follower of Steiner. He was an Anthroposophist. Really, the coincidences were piling up. I thought this makes up for a lot. Erich was wonderful and I loved him dearly. He reminded me of my grandfather in Milwaukee who was into the occult.
Migrating hippies wandering through Santa Cruz became known as the Undesirable Transient Element or "Ute's". Some inspired local bureaucrat must have made up that one. One of the first things Page and I did in the William James Association was to organize the Work Company so that the transients could find short term, part time, employment. We found 30,000 jobs during the life of the project. Not bad. We started a Community Garden project with Rock Pfotenhauer. Page and Eloise started the Prison Arts Project which had a remarkable success and became a national model. And then we got involved with the homeless in l985 and opened the first public shelter in Santa Cruz, and then the homeless church program, with churches taking in the overflow, and then the Homeless Garden Project and then then the Page Smith Community House. But that takes us out of the 60's and 70's.
I almost forgot about the Wild Thyme Restaurant. That was in the '70's. Max Walden had developed Cooper House from the old County Court House and made it into the center of downtown life. Bob Page and Ed Gaines and I opened the first shop in the Cooper House--The Wilderness Store. The first one in Santa Cruz. We even got the first Levi Franchise. Max had a series of failed restaurants in the basement and so I offered to start one. I was enamoured of the herb thyme because of the Greek root--thymos--my favorite word and the herb was thymus vulgaris in the Latin, derived from the Greek. So was the thymus gland, the master organ of the immune system. So we served sweetbreads which are calve thymus glands, the supreme achievement of French cuisine--Joanne LeBoeuf was the chef and had a knack with the glands, and hamburgers with thyme, which made people protest because they thought it was pork, so I got laughed at. I went around and lectured people on their thymus glands, remember this was early, so almost no one knew they had one, and once I had their attention, on the physicalist/vitalist conflict in the system of the sciences as a rap on the late stage of the self-destruction of industrial society. I had a cue card that gave the bullets so you could get the main points at a glance.
Buckminster Fuller came in one night with a student from the University. He said hello, Paul, which knocked me out as I had met him with a hundred other people at a reception in Los Gatos, months before. I was having a meeting in the back room of a group that was going to publish a journal as part of our Bicentennial Grant which Page and I had received for art projects for Santa Cruz. Page was the Bicentennial Historian as the first two volumes of his History of the U.S. were to coincide with the Bicentennial. I asked Bucky if he would say a few words to the group and he was glad to oblige and charmed everyone with his remarks. He invited me to his table and I sat down. I thought this was my chance to ask him what he thought about Kurt Godel and the incompleteness theorems and the undecidability problem. He never heard of Godel. I was stunned but I proceeded to tell him what I knew as the kid with him grew more and more agitated and kept saying, Bucky, do you realize the importance of what this man is saying. I enjoyed the response but he seemed a little over-heated. Finally, he ran out and I asked Bucky what was the deal and he said the kid had been raised at Synanon, the ex-drugger group, where his mother was in residence and he was rather hyper-active. Maybe I should check on him. I went to the front of the restaurant and there he was on the phone booking a plane for Princeton to see Godel. He said he had a document in his pocket that was fraught with the greatest importance for mankind and he wanted to show it to Godel. I asked him what it was and he wouldn't show it to me. Only Godel. I was sorry I had told him.
I met Bucky once again at a conference where Chadwick was in residence. He came out of a portable potty standing in a field. It looked like he had just landed. He didn't remember me.
Jay Greenberg, a mathematician colleague at UCSC, had told me about Godel around l970. He told me that Godel had written a proof for the existence of God. I saw stars. I thought if I could get the proof and publish it in a journal I was promoting for the History of Consciousness Program in order to fulfill the publish or perish demand that I knew they were going to get me on, I would be safe. I would get tenure on Godel's Proof. Moreover, a proof by the world's leading mathematical logician would be irrefutable. I wrote to Godel. He wrote back and said the proof was incomplete. Everyone laughed. I was waiting for Godel. And, he asked, what did theology have to do with consciousness. That threw me for awhile. I had occasion to call him at Princeton when I told a friend of mine, Adelaide de Menil, to take a picture of him, as she was going to Princeton to visit her brother. Adelaide is a fine photographer. She said I had to set it up. Hello, Prof. Godel. This is Prof. Lee. Remember me? Yes. I wrote to you about your proof. Is it complete? No. Oh, too bad. And when you asked about the relation of theology to consciousness, oh, never mind. Could I have a friend of mine come and take your picture. No. Why not? I have two perfectly good pictures of myself.
I had occasion to have coffee with Octavio Paz shortly after that and I told him the story about Godel. He spilled his coffee in his lap. I thought that's how startled and excited a world renowned poet gets when he hears that existence has become a predicate again. Kant said existence is not a predicate because it doesn't add anything conceptual to a thought. Existence is always assumed in the thinking of anything. At least conceptual existence. If you say that you have the thought of a hundred dollars and then that the hundred dollars exists you can't find it in your pocket. So with that Kant undermined arguments for the existence of God. He thought it was like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Since Kant, such arguments, which constitute a major theme in the history of philosophy have suffered in validity. Not after Godel. Ha ha. And the proof is now complete and is to be found in the third volume of his collected papers. The only problem is it is completely unintelligible, at least to me and anyone else who is not a technically proficient mathematical logician. But I don't care. I still like the way it looks and am proud of having corresponded with Godel and spoken to him on the phone even if it didn't save my ass.
So much for the '60's and 70's. They were fine while they lasted and I got my kicks on Route 66. Psychedelics were certainly the defining feature, and even though in many ways the 60's were a disappointment, psychedelics were terrific as a defining style. But it was thought to be more than that. It was hoped to be more than that. What happened to the longing that was released? The utopianism? It was nowhere, literally. And then it ended. They had a ceremony for it in the Haight. It was the death of the hippie. It had been co-opted by commercialism. Industrial society had absorbed it more than it was transformed by it or undermined by it. The opening of the doors of perception, the inter-modal sense quality experience, synesthesia, mystical flights, seeing the world in a flower, listening to Leary read from James Joyce, walking through a doorway, the revelatory power of a painting like when I discovered Cezanne at the Museum of Fine Arts in Chicago and my eyes were opened to his brush stroke and use of color, the symbiotic rapport and the sense of clairvoyance, Don Juan and Castaneda and the renewed appreciation of shamans, and all the gurus who filed through, many of them bogus and frauds, and then came that evil creep, Manson, and the Hells Angels beating to death an innocent bystander at a Rolling Stones concert.
Well, after all, what is marijuana, but an herb that burns.
by American Dream » Fri Oct 25, 2013 5:54 pm 
