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One does not discover the absurd
without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.
Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
Leonora was 21. Without realizing it, she had extricated herself
from the university, and found herself spending her time instead
in small rooms filled with smoke, Indian hangings, and other
young people waiting for enlightenment. She was living with a
dozen other youth in Berkeley, in the disintegrating brown-shingled
Victorian on Hearst Street. Until it was condemned in 1968, it
was home. She slept on the floor in the living room between the
coffee table and the stereo, which played all night.
Last year, as a freshman at Stanford, she'd had her first LSD
experience. A Jewish boy with a goatee, a business major who
marketed marijuana cookies, took her to the Fillmore to hear
Janis Joplin, and they had swallowed the pink pills in the car
on the way to the city. The Fillmore, which had several floors
and no seating, was jammed with people. Looking for the bathroom,
she got lost in the black holes between the strobe-lit dancers.
The bathroom seemed to be the purple room, where costumed females
were doing inexplicable things into the mirror. Somehow she made
her way back to the boy again. He was gentle and solicitous in
his white shirt and tie. The light show flared, disappointingly
two-dimensional, on a wall. The big room reeled with blinking
bodies.
When they got home he showed her a picture of his fiancee, a
slim girl with long dark hair, waiting for him back in Connecticut.
Suddenly aware that she had made a colossal mistake, she wept,
furious, inside herself. To him she said, "She's pretty."
They had sex, a last ditch hope. As she had expected, it was
nothing. He however, was grateful and amazed. "Really??
It was your first time? That's wonderful, I'm so flattered!" She
asked him why. He said it was something every guy wanted. To
take a virgin.
Free love and LSD. The crumpled bed of her deflowering. Messy.
Nothing more.
Even so, it never occurred to her to try a different lifestyle.
She was on a quest - a quest for certainty that she was a normal
human being, like everyone else, that she belonged here, and
that here was somewhere worth belonging. Sex and LSD were the
formula for ecstasy. She must have been doing something wrong.
-----
In the house on Hearst Street, Rob and Luce were the responsible
ones. Leonora and eight or nine others were just there, taking
space. The rent was paid by mysterious forces, the peanut butter
and bread appeared by slight of hand. Into and out of the black-lit
living room the youth of the world wandered, smoking dope, exchanging
knowing nods, sometimes staying for days or weeks, sometimes
moving on. Rock music played eternally on the radio.
Rob had a contact for Owsleys. "Blue barrels" they
were called - cylindrical purplish pills. LSD was a sacrament,
hopeful and wonderful. And dangerous, a rite of initiation. If
it went wrong, if you were unworthy, it could destroy you. But
Leonora was willing to take the risk. Life was mysterious, and
she wanted to know that the mystery was good. This was supposed
to be the way out of doubt. If she fell, there was always her
parents' home, distasteful refuge.
She liked David, a boy of 16. Perhaps she loved him - which
was embarrassing, because she was already 21, an adult. He was
a smooth and peaceful youngster with long brown hair and wire
rimmed spectacles, like John Lennon. It was his tranquility that
she liked. He believed you could do things with your thoughts.
Like everyone, he smoked dope and took acid - but he knew something
more. Once when everyone in the house was tripping, he brought
her brown rice in a ceramic bowl - a precious gift. It tasted
of the earth.
David talked about meditation. He said anybody could do it.
She assumed that she alone would not be able to master it. Still,
she had nothing to lose. She might try. Anything, as long as
it didn't hurt too much.
Another time, on another trip in the purple night, she saw without
surprise that she and the others were all gods and goddesses,
living in eternity. A mark of light at the third eye designated
them immortal. Life was timeless and blessed...
-----
Then came the final trip.
San Francisco, across the bay, was prophesied to fall into the
sea on April 13. They climbed to the hills, to watch. When nothing
happened, they came down again. Leonora was wearing her brown
felt hat, the one she had bought from a San Francisco street
vendor. It was a favorite possession - it looked good on her,
and shaded her eyes with its wide floppy brim. The day was bright,
yellow and white, the bay shining below as they came down the
mountain into the city.
On the way down, they took some Owsleys.
When the acid came on, you could tell by the rush, the nervous
crawling inside your gut. That was because it was cut with speed.
Owsleys were supposed to be pure, of course, but with really
pure acid, it would have been a smooth ride. They said. She had
never had a smooth ride.
The others had already gone on, somewhere else. No, she was
wrong - there they were, walking beside her - Rob, the father,
muscular with a brown afro and leopard skin vest; Luce, the willowy
sister-girlfriend-mother; Twin, the dark-curled rocker from Marin;
and Billy, a blond boy with a limp, just arrived from Southern
California last night, who had forgotten where he had left his
old VW bug. The sun was hot and white, they walked on, stumbling
down the mountain.
The road became a ribbon of protoplasm, bubbling in the sun.
Houses and storefronts, cars, bushes, clouds, human bodies -
everything was protoplasm, squeezed and mounded into odd shapes.
The hat. She had taken it off, and it was in her hand. Why keep
it? It was only more stuff, without purpose. She dropped it in
the gutter. Her shoulder bag also, a useless object full of useless
objects. She dropped that too.
"What are you doing!? You have to keep your things!" Rob
appeared beside her and put the things back in her hands. OK,
she assented silently. Other people understood the world, what
and why it was, and how to be in it. She hung the purse on her
shoulder, that odd extension of her flesh, and closed her hand
on the hat. She walked on, down the hill, senseless noises burping
and erupting all around her.
Now she was on another asphalt road, in the country. A road
by the ocean. Alone, in a tiny blue sports car like a rickety
space capsule, she was going down the road. The road looked
like Highway 1, a stretch where she sometimes hitchhiked south,
except that this road was a loop. She was going around and
around on it, passing by the sea and then dipping into a valley
of green fields. Then around and up again. She felt carsick.
She had been doing this forever and ever, alone in the car.
But she was not driving, there was no way to stop, no way to
get out, no way to leave the road or the car. This she knew,
with sickening certainty. This was life, which she had been
trying to get out of forever. Helpless, exhausted, beaten,
she knew she could never leave this eternal circuit.
But then, even more maddeningly, she would forget that it
was hopeless. Every time she reached a certain point in the
loop, she would begin to hope - to imagine, just barely, that
she might escape. Weakly, painfully, she would struggle to
focus, intent that this time she might find the way out...
Then, too late, just as she reached the curve, she would remember,
in that circular eternity, that she was stuck here. Stuck and
alone in an absurd world that she alone did not understand,
a world to which she alone did not possess the key.
It did not seem contradictory, in that world where she alone
was real, that others watched from outside - others who knew
the answer, and would not tell her. From outside her lonely,
impenetrable world, faces looked mockingly at her, smiling
and inaccessible, shaking their heads, when would she learn,
what a pity, ha ha ha. Around and around, alone, absolutely
alone, the pointless universe banging and bumping around her,
without escape...
At last, days or centuries later, she was back in Berkeley,
in the house on Hearst Street. She was lying on a couch, drained
and nauseated. Remembering, she stood up, found a tape of a Brandenburg
concerto, and put it on the stereo. Her treasured Bach, whose
music had blessed her, long ago, with the knowing that life was
sublimely OK. Since then, the music of Bach had never failed
to rescue her from the deepest despair.
This time it was just so much kerplunk.
After that, she did not take any more LSD. She moved to Boulder
Creek, to the deep redwoods, to Sarah's house. Sarah, enormous
like a mountain, white-haired, took in waifs. Every evening,
to the young people gathered in her firelight, Sarah would read
the teachings of Krishnamurti and the poems of Kabir. Leonora's
father sent money for food.
-----------
They kept the Anomaly in a castle in the countryside, far
from the city. It was a small castle; around the central courtyard
the gray stone walls rose up to the distant circle of sky,
which rested like a blue roof on the ramparts. Every day the
Anomaly made the rounds, carrying her broom, with which she
swept the stairs, the empty hallways, the courtyard. Every
day she passed the three window slits, spaced parsimoniously
around the circumference of the outer walls, and peered out
through each one at the green slopes creeping away toward the
sky. She did not know what was out there, beyond those hills.
She only knew that she had never found a door out.
Not that she was looking for one. This was her place; she
had been there as long as she could remember. In heat and cold,
wet and dry, she made her rounds, her footsteps echoing, the
wind howling in the passageways. She had been carrying out
this task, this circumscribed wandering, for unnumbered years.
One day, in an underground hallway that passed beneath the
courtyard, she heard something - a scratching, choking sound.
Curious, she stopped and listened. There it came again, from
behind a door. She laid her ear against the wood. Again something
rasped, dry and fitful. Her hand found the latch and pressed.
The door opened into a red dimness.
There, in the center of a small round chamber, a Raven hunched
on a tall wooden perch. It looked at her resentfully and croaked.
Her heart lurched. It was the first living thing she had seen
in the castle, in all her memory.
She looked at the Raven and slowly took in the dank, mossy
walls, the floor littered with fruit rinds and splattered with
excrement. The bird sat, his black feathers fluffed in irritation,
hopping now and then from one foot to the other. When he hopped,
an iron chain jangled on one leg, binding him to the perch.
He cawed again as if clearing his throat, and blinked at her
angrily.
She backed out of the room, pulling the door shut. Then she
continued on her rounds, sweeping and walking.
This bird was something new, and she had a disturbing feeling
that she should do something about it. It seemed to want out.
But it was obviously part of the castle, something that came
with the place. Who was she to change things? In all these
years she had never changed anything.
She continued her work. Up the stairs, down the corridors,
past the closed doors of empty rooms. She made an entire round
of the castle, passing the window slits without stopping. Avoiding
the underground passage, she crossed the cobbled courtyard
instead. It was not absolutely necessary to go into the underground
passage...
--------------
Waiting for her sixteen-year-old son to come out of his therapy session, Leonora
watched a tall young man struggle up the stairs with the third piece of furniture
all by himself. This one was a desk. She had already watched him maneuver
a bookcase and a small table around the turns of the narrow stairway and
through an office door. She smiled at him as he staggered into the office
once more. After a moment he reappeared.
"Is that the last one?" she asked him.
"Actually, yes," he replied.
"I was going to offer to give you a hand; guess I'm too
late."
"Thank you," he smiled. "I would have offered
you a free massage session."
"Oh, too bad." A free massage would have been a treat.
But when she asked him what kind of massage he did, and he said
it was abdominal massage, she was relieved she had said nothing.
Abdominal massage - how weird sounding.
Her son, Michael, was seeing a therapist for anxiety following
a bad experience with marijuana. He had been smoking with friends
at school for a couple of years, and although she remembered
her own marijuana days with antipathy, she had thought marijuana
relatively mild, and had not objected. She told herself she had
been instinctively following the first part of one of the principles
of Universal Humanism, as recently explained to her by the therapist: "Do
not oppose a great force; wait until it weakens, then advance
with resolution." The great force being peer pressure and
the youthful desire to experiment.
She felt her thoughts on the matter flying every which way,
like ragged birds. Her own parents had been against drugs; she
remembered clearly their admonition to "Never, never take
heroin" - that being the only drug they had heard of. And
to be sure, she had never taken heroin. They hadn't said anything
about LSD, since they hadn't known about it. If they had forbidden
LSD, would she have heeded them? She didn't know.
But she had a conviction, which she could no more disobey than
gravity, that you couldn't forbid your children to do things
unless those things were clearly harmful to themselves or others.
Arbitrary parental control would simply prompt them to disconnect
from you. If she had told her son he couldn't smoke marijuana,
he would have pleasantly agreed, and continued to do so; and
later on, he would have been unable to talk to her about anything
he experienced under its influence. This way he was still communicating
with her. She was not sure she would even have opposed his taking
LSD, since, although powerful, it was not addictive or physically
harmful. After all, horrible as her last experience had been,
it had impelled her on the search that had brought her this far.
And that was something she had never regretted.
On the good side of Michael's trauma, the therapist was acquainting
her with some interesting ideas. Refusing to regard his patients
as "sick," he focused instead on helping them use their
best attributes to overcome their problems. He suggested Michael
participate in some kind of volunteer work that he could feel
good about, helping others in some way - that this would do more
than anything to strengthen his self-image. He assured Leonora
she was doing fine with her son, that she should just remain
available, and regard this as an opportunity to "advance
with resolution," now that Michael was receptive to other
options than blindly following the pack.
On her own behalf she had asked the therapist what he recommended
for sleep, since she had been troubled by insomnia for several
years now. He told her that as a fellow insomniac, he had recently
been getting good results with abdominal massage from a young
man named Paul, a new practitioner in the building. He felt Paul
was gifted as a healer, although still young and lacking in life
experience.
Too bad she hadn't helped the young man after all. She called
him and made an appointment.
----------
This form of abdominal massage, as Paul explained over the phone,
was an ancient Taoist technique developed by the monks to increase
their ability to tolerate high levels of energy. She was glad
of that - at least it was something with a spiritual intent,
tested over the ages, not just some visceral health fad.
It was a Saturday afternoon when she climbed the stairs to his
office. Airy with bay windows, it was almost empty. He had arranged
the desk, table and bookcase against the walls, which were hung
with framed Taoist diagrams showing the human body and mysterious
symbols of what might be the flow of energy. In the middle of
the floor was a futon. Paul asked her to lie there, on her back.
Feeling awkward, she lay down. Paul was tall and athletic, with
earnest blue eyes, and was very young, probably in his mid-20s;
she could easily be his mother. He knelt beside her and explained
that this was a deep but gentle massage. Breathing was key -
breathing deep into the belly, as if into the sacrum, the flat,
v-shaped bone at the base of the spine. The chest should not
move - only the abdomen. He had her pull back her shirt and fold
her pants down below the navel - and she felt even more exposed,
her belly bare in the white light of the bay windows. But when
he laid his hands softly on her skin, she relaxed. "Breathe
in through your nose..." She closed her eyes and began to
follow his voice...
Leonora is young, in her wandering days.
She is in Santa Cruz, in a house where she lives with several
friends. It is an old adobe house, a former chicken coop, near
the beach - white walled, with a sloping red-tiled floor. Sitting
at a rough plank table, she and several young people, full
of innocent vitality, are sharing soup and bread. The evening
light lies golden around them. Out the window, the sun is setting
in rose and orange tones over the ocean. Nasturtiums climb
around the open doorway, and you can see out across white sand,
across the dunes toward the sea.
It is a time in her life, she sees with astonishment, that
she has always, until now, remembered with a sad aversion -
a painful time, lived through a veil of anguish, when she believed
herself alone and unloved, with an agonizing future. Now she
is here, as if she never left, living this multifaceted moment
as she was never able to live it before. She knows, with a
quiet recognition, that every living particle of this place,
and every being who shares it, is immortal, that Life is triumphant,
beyond fear. She knows that nothing real is ever lost - that
after all our imaginary constructs of despair pass away, we
are here, washed clean, warm and vital. Time - timeless time
- is unending, full of peace, such as she could never have
imagined before. Intense joy and gratitude suffuse her being.
Reality is sweet like the essence of all summers.
And she was lying on an office floor in San Francisco, on an
afternoon when the world believed itself to be careening in chaos
and discord - receiving a massage.
She heard herself say, "If I don't come back, will they
arrest you for murder?" She heard Paul make a noise, part
gasp, part laugh. He was a little unnerved, and she could not
blame him. It was simply that the two realities did not fit together.
She felt that somehow she must be able to stay in this perfect
reality, where peace surpassed understanding - and at the same
time she was anchored in the ordinary world, where irrational
faith was her fragile lifeline. She could not bridge the gap
between this rich and present world and the shallow one where
her body lay.
At the end of the session, lying there in the regular world,
she knew it was inevitable that she return to that reality. Although
she did not understand it, she was glad to be there - her mind
felt clean. Paul was looking at her uncertainly. "You had
a strong experience," he said. "Every experience is
different; if you do it again, it won't be the same."
"It was incredible," she smiled at him. "I don't
understand it though. Do you? I was in another reality."
"The Taoists say there is another reality you can experience
if you meditate and study for many years," he ventured.
No - he did not understand. As the therapist had suggested, this
boy had a gift with his hands, but did not yet know the realm
to whose gates he had unwittingly escorted her.
-----------
Leonora turned, walked to the underground passage and descended
the stairs into the dark corridor. Half way down the passage
she found the door, opened it and entered. The bird crouched
on its perch, its eyes gleaming. Seeing her, it lunged upward,
and was jerked back by the iron chain. From inside her robe,
she drew the golden key and fitted it into the lock around
his leg. A soft click, and the iron fell away. The Raven spread
his wings, beat them - and the dark chamber exploded into light.
Before her, the road opened toward the sky and the hills.
With a free heart, she set out walking, toward the land beyond.
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