I had only one lie, one secret, and that was my serial infidelity, and even that I kept secret only from my family. My friends knew all about that side of me, I made no secret of it, indeed I told them stories of my desires, my conquests, and my failures, and for that attitude of mine more than one friend had praised me and called me honest. Many of my male friends and colleagues behaved just as I did or they confessed that they wanted to and wished that somehow they could. It was the way of our world, it appeared to me, and among my circle of men friends John was the only exception. Never had John been unfaithful to his wife, he told me, not ever. It was not necessarily the sex to which he objected, he explained, but to the lies and secrets that illicit sex required. In the twelve years of our friendship John had never expressed any disapproval of my sexual conduct but now for the first time he did. John still considered me his good friend, he explained, but it was important now, he said, that I know he disapproved.
Reprimand.
Rebuke.
I call this poem "Riddle."
Compelled to be a good son, I am a cruel brother.
I am a cruel friend.
Compelled to be a good father, I am a cruel husband.
In mid-July of 1972 I returned to Friend in Reunion where I taught English and was appointed chairman of the department. For the next two years I visited John in Ames several times a year and we corresponded frequently by mail. As best he could, John was practicing the principles of Gaskin and The Farm. John's letters were filled with speculation about world religion, philosophy, and enlightenment. To me the word "enlightenment" meant only the period of European intellectual history between Isaac Newton and Maximilien Robespierre.
That's all I knew.
I had only a dim understanding and no more of the psychomystical event called "enlightenment" in eastern religion. I considered it an oriental superstition. It meant nothing to me. Nirvana I thought was another word for heaven and—like heaven—available only after death. But now enlightenment seemed to be all that John was interested in. His letters were full of it. Gaskin, I was told, had experienced enlightenment.
He was in fact "enlightened."
Yes.
Gaskin himself had said so.
Hm.
In his calls and letters John related the event as he said Gaskin described it.
In the version I remember best Gaskin had been wandering lost in total darkness, John said, until he noticed two tiny pinpoints of bright light like distant stars and warily approached them. Up close they were holes that matched and fit perfectly his own eyes and as if trying on a mask he peered into them. From inside a vast sphere a thousand eyes met his own in one instant of simultaneity:
Awake!
This piqued my curiosity.
"Enlightenment is all I want," John wrote me. "I don't want anything else."
John was no fool.
John was one of the most intelligent persons I had ever met and one of the wittiest and funniest. His was a sharp, quick, brilliant mind, and invariably his speculations on enlightenment and truth John balanced with both ingratiating self-effacement and a sharp and amusing irony. Yet, nevertheless, about enlightenment he was absolutely serious. Truth was all. John was committed still to telling the truth all the time. He also sent me news of The Farm. At a visit to his tiny hovel in Ames in the fall of 1974 I read Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin from cover to cover in a single sitting, unable to put it down until I had finished.
"Telling the truth is not easy," Gaskin wrote. "It's easier than the alternative, but it's not easy."
For many people the commitment to truth and their practice of it, Gaskin explained in his book, started or stopped depending on what he called the social difficulty of the truth. You had to become unattached to the whole universe, Gaskin said, so that you really did not care, and at that point you would be unattached even to yourself so that one mind at a time you could change the universe.
"But it means you have got to let go of everything," he explained. "You have got to let go of caring who you are."
This, Gaskin more than implied, he himself had accomplished.
He had let go.
"I am not going to hide anything," Gaskin promised.
Nothing.
"You can look into my head and see everything there is to see."
Everything.
All.
Gaskin would look into you that way, too, he explained, and when both you and he were open and unattached then the two of you would become as one. When you did that, really did it, then—bang—you experienced mystic fusion, the mind's connection to all minds, to big mind, and, yes, if you preferred, to god, and this awakening to awareness and consciousness was enlightenment and realization.
Illumination.
"It comes down absolutely convincing to you, in your terms, answering the questions that you have asked all your life, and giving you every wish that you have ever had, you see, and that is how you know when you see it," Gaskin explained, "you know it because it is your childhood dreams."
But he had nothing to boast about, Gaskin said.
Nothing.
"What came on to me came from God," he wrote, "and I'm just really happy that it came on to me. It answered all my wishes, all my childhood dreams, it gave me everything I wanted."
Everything.
"I lack for nothing," he said. "I lack for nothing at all."
Nothing.
This experience, it seemed, Gaskin credited mainly to telling the truth. Though there were many doors to enlightenment and to god, he explained, he himself had one day simply decided to try to tell the truth always and to aspire always to be honest, and it had been that aspiration, vow, and practice that had opened for him the door to god. Others, too, could pass through, he insisted, and all that was necessary was for them to decide that in fact they did indeed want to do it and for them to start working at it.
"You can change your mind and decide right now to tell the truth," Gaskin wrote.
Less than a year later John requested a special meeting with his boss and, accompanied by his wife and two children, John informed his employer that because of his commitment to the truth and to something he called "right livelihood" he could no longer serve the firm—a consulting company called Western Operations—as its main computer programmer. John thanked his boss, he said goodbye to his associates, and he resigned. He bought and restored a 1948 International Harvester school bus, transformed its interior into living quarters for his family, and joined the caravan of other used school buses, old trucks, and Volkswagen vans that Stephen Gaskin led on a tour—a pilgrimage—around the country. When John's vehicle stalled, he was flat broke, and he called me to ask if I would lend him two hundred dollars so he and his family could return to California and start over.
John was my best friend.
I did.
No questions asked.
Not more than a year later John spent two nights with me and my family in Tempe as he hitchhiked his way to and from Summertown, Tennessee, where he said Gaskin and his disciples in the caravan had just returned, bought farmland, and founded a monastic collective and commune they called The Farm.
When he stopped overnight with me on his way back home, John told me a story of one of the nights he had spent at the commune. The community had gathered wood and built a huge bonfire, and members of the The Farm sat or stood in a wide circle around it. Gaskin, with a full beard and shoulder-length hair like every other man at The Farm, had sprained his ankle earlier in the day and on the night in question he had leaned on a staff, looking like an Old Testament prophet, John told me, as Gaskin addressed his hundred and fifty or so disciples. They were still living in their buses, vans, and trucks, or in tents, and Gaskin had been trying to rally and inspire his weary and discouraged followers. He sensed something, he had told the group, bad vibes he said he couldn't quite put his finger on.
"What is it?" he asked.
No one knew.
"I feel it," Gaskin said frowning. "What is it?"
No one knew.
"What is it?" Gaskin asked again.
John told me that his paranoia ratcheted up another notch each time Gaskin had inquired. John was certain it was his own lack of faith in the idealistic enterprise that his teacher felt. It was his own doubt, his own failure of belief, that was the source of the negativity.
John was sure.
John said he felt like Judas must have felt at the Last Supper.
"What is it?"
"It's me, it's me!" John told me he was just about to shout. "It's my doubt that you feel! It's me!"
But then only a split second before he confessed his doubt and embarrassed himself, John said, someone on the other side of the circle had called out and suggested that everyone was just worried and tired. The spell that bound John was broken and the speech and actions that followed were ordinary.
We laughed about it.
Joked.
Unable at that time to join them, in 1972 John moved his family back to Ames, Iowa, where eleven years earlier he and I had first met as classmates in freshman English, and now in Ames John had been employed in a variety of jobs, the last as a rodman on a survey crew for the state highway commission.
The war continued.
A million dead.
Two.
Here's what just a hundred look like—
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
The prayer of Robert Bly, "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," written in 1970, I did not know until decades had passed. But it has helped me more than I can say. Here is part of it:
But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
you would drive over your own child's wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild.
If a child came by burning, you would dance on your lawn,
trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long in his moody pen.
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
in the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal chords would turn blue; so would yours,
it would be two days before I could play with one of my own children again.
On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut photographed Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old girl in Vietnam, screaming, crying, naked, running up the road from her village toward the camera in agony, terror, and pain, the adhesive jellied gasoline called napalm burning hellish holes through the skin and muscle of her flesh to the bone. It haunted me, it haunts me still, I think it will haunt me forever.
Though ultimately I failed to finish my dissertation and thus failed also to earn my degree, it was during those two years in the desert that I made my first real contact with what I learned only later had been a form of Buddhism.
John Ward, now a computer programmer and part-time hippy in San Francisco and my best friend since we'd both been freshmen in an honors English class at Iowa State in Ames, had been attending something he called Monday Night Class, a weekly assembly of students, hippies, drug addicts, potheads, draft evaders, pacifists, truants, runaways, and street people, odd seekers of all kinds, the discussion moderated by a man named Stephen Gaskin.
When I visited John and his wife Susan and their two children for a week in San Francisco, John clearly had fallen under Gaskin's spell. His teaching was all John talked about.
It was all about doing what was right and only what was right.
Being good.
The mission, John informed me without a trace of irony, was to save the world. As I understood the teaching, this meant, first, nonviolence; second, honesty; and, third, compassion.
Since by now I was already committed personally to pacifism and nonviolence—though I had so far been not especially public or vocal about it—and had been so committed for eight years, it was the intensity of John's commitment to the principle of honesty that most impressed me.
There was to be no exception.
None.
"We believe we should tell the truth all the time," John told me.
John looked straight into my eyes as we talked; and this gesture, I quickly learned, always accompanied the teaching. A wavering gaze—to blink or to look away—either in others or in oneself was considered an indication of weakness, avoidance, evasion, insincerity, or dishonesty. In our conversations and debates this meeting and locking of our eyes reminded me of the stare down contests I held with my little brother when we were children.
It was true—for me at least—that someone staring continuously into my eyes as we talked pulled up or seemed to pull up from deep within me insecurities and vague anxieties and fears. It did indeed make me feel as if John and his acquaintances—all students of the teacher they called simply Stephen—were able to see the real me through the windows of my soul.
I felt vulnerable and exposed.
Naked.
Though I had always looked people in the eye when I spoke with them, now, connected to this assessment of truth and untruth, looking people in the eye seemed to possess a profound and mysterious new power of which I had been previously unaware. By nature an open, unafraid, and honest individual among my many male friends, I adjusted quickly to this new convention and expectation of the local social environment and, though it continued to make once normal conversation unusually intense, in a few hours I no longer experienced any serious discomfort. John introduced me to his friends, and my meeting several more students and disciples of Stephen, themselves equally committed to this policy and practice of complete honesty, soon transformed what I had formerly understood and had enjoyed merely as honest, candid, casual conversation into religion.
Inquiry resembled inquisition, reply confession.
Mysticism.
I was a professor of English working toward my third college degree and I had never in my life experienced language and reason used together like this. Sometimes stated explicitly but at other times not, at the base of every conversation there lay like its fundamental moral premise the sole question to be answered. It seemed to possess an occult power.
"What are we supposed to do?"
This question answered, one was expected to do it. The question had invariably a moral and ethical intent though the specific doing might refer to a deed in the immediate present, the next day, in the next week, in the next ten years, or every day for the rest of one's life. Only years later would I learn that the question was in one sense rhetorical since Gaskin and my friend John and his friends had already committed themselves to what Buddhists call the three pure precepts.
What are we supposed to do?
We are supposed to—
Do no harm.
Do good.
Save all beings.
I had planned to visit for a week but I stayed only three days. For ten years I had smoked a pack of cigarettes every day and—thanks to the influence of Stephen and Monday Night Class—John had recently quit. For several weeks now, I learned, he had demanded that his wife quit, too. Each day of my visit I witnessed lengthy debates on the subject, arguments and quarrels, and on several occasions when John seemed to me to bully his wife eventually I had joined in her defense. On the third day I, too, had been issued an ultimatum. I could stay with him, John told me, for the remaining four days of my visit only if I did not smoke. At that time this was all way too much for me—total honesty, stare down contests, and now I was forbidden to smoke. John and I parted still friends, but I flew back to Phoenix on the next available flight. Back at home I wrote John a long letter in which I described what I had observed during my visit and I criticized what I considered his dictatorial and unjust treatment of his wife.
"You demand that she obey you!" I said.
No.
"Not true," John responded.
No.
In nineteen single-spaced handwritten pages of stationery John replied point by point by point to each of my allegations and as a part of each rebuttal John also explained its larger moral and philosophical context. His argument was articulate, logical, calm. Legal testimony, personal observation, religious zeal, academic argument, and even friendly effort to explain, it was both a fantastic manifestation of John's patient commitment to truth and—it also appeared to me at the time—insane. I had been a student and teacher of language and literature for eight years and I had never read anything like it.
"My wife is not required to stop smoking only because I demand that she obey me," John wrote. "She is required to stop smoking because the two of us together have agreed that we will always try to do only what is honest and right and good and that what is honest and right and good not just for the both for us but also for the world is that we not smoke."
I won a leave of absence from Friend at full pay to work towards my doctorate in English and in the fall of 1970 I returned to school, this time at Arizona State University in Tempe, where I met and studied for two wonderful years with the respected Melville scholar Marvin Fisher, my generous advisor and mentor, and with the brilliant teacher, scholar, and professor Glenn O'Malley and his student Billy Boyd.
O'Malley was the smartest man I had ever met. He deserves a book all his own. His intelligence was piercing, profound, his irony infinite, ruthless. O'Malley was the first teacher I experienced who understood the power of silence. There were forty students in his class in contemporary British and American poetry. O'Malley read aloud the assigned poem and then stared at the text, thinking, his head bowed, his hands folded as in prayer, and simply waited for response.
The silences seemed interminable.
They stretched on and on.
Longer still.
On.
Though I had been a teacher myself for three years I could not bear such silence for more than a few seconds even in my own classroom. Neither could my students. It frustrated expectation. Our collective silence filled us with anxiety. It made us doubt and wonder about education, learning, school, purpose, meaning. It forced our confrontation with meaninglessness, absurdity, the void. We had all been conditioned to expect authority, the teacher, to tell us why we were here and what we were doing—to rescue us from unknowing. This was the teacher's responsibility, his duty, his job. If no one spoke in twenty seconds I would begin to sweat. If my students wouldn't talk then I'd talk—if only to ease my own discomfort.
Not O'Malley.
He waited and waited and waited. He seemed never uncomfortable with silence. He just silently continued, it seemed, to reread the poem and to think about it and to reflect.
Some students thought him not just odd but incompetent.
Students whispered.
"Why isn't he saying anything?"
Some squirmed.
"What's going on?"
Some giggled.
"What are we supposed to be doing?"
Eventually one would find enough courage to raise a hand.
"What are we doing, Dr. O'Malley?"
"We're reading this poem," he might say, "and thinking about it."
"Oh."
Students rolled their eyes.
Whispered.
From O'Malley I learned how the discomfort of collective silence in a classroom evoked fundamental questions not just about a poem but about education itself and about life in the mystery of the universe.
My first year of teaching at little Friend College was torture. Winter mornings three times a week I met English Composition at 7:40. Reunion, Iowa, at that hour is icy, dark, and cold. One morning I missed class and lay in bed too frightened and tired by my failure even to call in before 10:00, making myself sick. At our next class meeting, my students were justifiably surly and sullen when I ordered a pop theme, too insecure to confess my guilt and too defensive and proud to understand and acknowledge my shame. Composition, half my academic load, I hardly cared about. My mistress was world literature. With her I was confident, demanding, daring, and innocent, a bad combination.
In Literary Masterpieces, the senior level English course required of all graduates, I lectured for thirty minutes, read aloud from the assigned text, answered questions, class dismissed. In general I swaggered, postured, and bluffed—from a point of view I called existential—in front of forty students only two years younger than I. Only twenty-four years old I was the youngest teacher by far in a department of eight, the next youngest more than twice my age. I loved literature. I had the vigor of inexperience. I gave four tests—each a mixture of identification, short answer, and essay. Before I returned them I listed the scores on the board, highest to lowest, and assigned grades according to a bell curve. To this crude scheme I sometimes added a short paper, a formalist critique in the genre I had been taught and mastered. In the spring my best student, Wayne Kramer, died in a parachuting accident.
I loved him.
His life and death were a seed.
Ex-Catholic, an anti-war activist studying political science, Wayne was intelligent, witty, hyperverbal, articulate, keen, clever, and intent. His test answers were invariably cogent and succinct. He was literate, well-read, well-informed. He had intelligent, passionately committed, political, articulate friends. Their questions and remarks in class often took issue—with the war, with the establishment, with the curriculum, with the college, and with me. Wayne loved school—he loved studying, reading, talking, discussing, debating, interpreting, theorizing, figuring in, figuring out, proving right, proving wrong, winning the argument.
We all did.
Alert, with a quick sense of humor, ironic, liberal, caring, kind, a freethinker like myself, he liked me, respected me, admired me, and he made me his friend. He made me feel like a good teacher, like a good man, like someone important. My last words to him were a joke he heard with a laugh and a smile and a wave of his hand the night before he died. Wayne was going skydiving the next day and I was afraid for him so I was trying to play it off.
"You'll be dead tomorrow," I taunted.
Three of us spent the evening drinking beer at my home, talking about objective tests, essay tests, and grades. His friend Richard and I struggled to win our contest for Wayne's vote of approval, practicing our big words, our newly acquired academic syntax, thinking and learning. We three were each one good part of a true school. There was no need to debate the war.
We all three opposed it.
It seemed we and our circle of teachers, professors, and students were a sixteen hour a day debating society. Like the Remmes circle in Shenandoah and Larry Reed's in Ames we were practicing for an as yet unknown but better adversary, one more skillful yet, one more cunning still. We were young, smart, unsure of sides but absolutely certain of our cause and supremely confident of our intellectual powers. Wayne observed us, measuring and evaluating. Our conversation that evening had been pure argument, a test of intellect, teasingly mental. There had been no reason to raise our voices—and no one did except to laugh. Neither sex nor survival involved, it had been pure words, and we had liked it, enjoyed it, we had had fun. These were the grim days of the War in Vietnam, the draft, the days of reading, the days and years of Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News.
Everything mattered, everything mattered a lot.
It was dark on my porch, a dim weak yellow light bulb. I squinted and said goodbye.
A second time I called out my last words to Wayne.
"You'll be dead tomorrow!"
I shut the door and peered out through the sheer curtains as Wayne and his classmate Richard got in their car and drove off into the late Friday night. The next afternoon brought Richard and another close friend, Nelson, to the porch and to my door knocking with the shocking bad news.
"Wayne's dead."
I heard how he had tumbled on his second jump, tangling his gangly legs in the cords of his parachute. Falling, falling, he untangled and freed himself, but by then his second chute had opened and wound around his first. He lived two hours after he hit the ground, though he did not float down, though he did hit hard.
I didn't see it, I've only been told. But I have imagined it time after time, the forgetting to jump, instead leaping forward to flatten out and sail, legs and arms extended like wings in an x.
Like the skydivers we have all seen on TV, Wayne went over. Unlike the skydivers, he dove—head first. Thinking about that makes me so scared for him, so scared for his hurt.
I write this for Wayne, the first of my students I loved. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so very much.
Many many times I went over it and over it in my mind—again and again and again.
I was not remembering, I had not seen it.
I am falling, falling shocked, falling, realizing, horrified, falling, accelerating, untangling in un relief, falling, I am falling, shocked, falling, untangling, falling, realizing, falling, I am falling, I am panic, I am shock, I am falling untangling beautiful student, beautiful mind, beautiful soul Wayne, meeting Spring, Iowa, Earth, Death, Pain.
I am Earth, Iowa, Spring, meeting my dear falling friend Wayne.
On February 1, 1968, Eddie Adams photographed the execution of Nguyen Van Lam, a Viet Cong prisoner, his wrists tied behind his back, by Nguyen Ngoc Loam, Chief of Police for South Vietnam, on a street in Saigon—the bullet from the revolver to the temple of the prisoner at point blank range pulling his eyes shut in a squint of shock and warping the lips of his mouth in a grimace.
Enemy.
Fifteen minutes before Robert Kennedy was shot in the head, I had gone to bed, glad that he had won the California primary and cautiously hopeful that he could somehow begin to unite black and white and also soon negotiate an end to the terrible war. I was still groggy and had not yet begun to dress for work when Mr. Good called early the next morning.
"Have you heard about Kennedy?" he demanded.
"Yes," I said, thinking my friend referred to the victory over McCarthy in the presidential primary.
"What do you think?" he insisted.
"I think he'll win."
"Win?" my friend exclaimed. "He's not even expected to live!"
"Oh."
Without asking I knew then what must have happened. I clicked on the television and saw him, unconscious, lying helpless on his back on the floor, his eyes rolled back into his head from the hot bullet to his brain.
My heart turned to lead.
To me it felt like everybody was getting shot. At almost every class meeting, it seemed, students demanded that at least a few minutes be devoted to discussion of the war and the draft and the disproportionate toll it took on the young, the poor, and the black.
Late one afternoon at the end of the spring semester one year later I had posted on the wall outside my office the final grades in my course in American literature and then joined a colleague of mine in the English department and his wife at their upstairs apartment for drinks and dinner and for brandy and marijuana after. It was almost midnight when his doorbell rang. David walked downstairs to see who it was and then came back up and said a student of mine wanted to see me. It was Philip, a boy to whom I had given a D, mainly because he had written so few words—hardly a paragraph in his tiny, tidy feminine script—in answer to each of the essay questions I had asked on not just the final but on all of the tests I had given in the course. I hadn't known how to grade Philip. He was neither lazy nor stupid. His essay answers were simply just not long enough. Philip was a big young man, six two two thirty I'd say, but chubby and soft. He stood in the dim light and dark, I just inside the aluminum storm door, and we spoke through the screen.
"Yes?" I inquired.
"If I really got a D," he said nervously, "I am either going to kill you or kill myself."
Though Philip seemed serious and solemn, he did not appear menacing, and I did not feel frightened. His final grade had been one of several that I had stewed over. Based mainly upon short papers and essay answers on tests, grades were almost entirely my subjective opinion.
The war was constantly in my thoughts.
"I'll raise your grade," I told him.
"Thank you."
I didn't see Philip again until the following Christmas. He called to me one day as I was walking on campus and I stopped and waited. Philip said that he had failed all of his other classes that spring and that in spite of my generosity he had indeed flunked out and been drafted. But Philip had failed his physical and he was back on campus now only to visit old friends. He apologized for having threatened me as he had and he insisted that he had not really meant it.
"I still appreciate what you did for me," Philip said.
