The Settlement

Then Ea opened his mouth to the warrior Enlil, "Wisest of gods, hero Enlil, how could you so senselessly bring down the flood?

Lay upon the sinner his sin,
Lay upon the transgressor his transgression,
Punish him a little when he breaks loose,
Do not drive him too hard or he perishes;
Would that the lion had ravaged mankind
Rather than the flood,
Would that a wolf had ravaged mankind
Rather than the flood,
Would that famine had ravished mankind,
Rather than the flood,
Would that pestilence had ravished mankind
Rather than the flood.

It was not I that revealed the secret of the god; the wise man learned it in a dream. Now take your counsel what shall be done with him."
The Epic of Gilgamesh, N. K Sanders; Penguin Books, Middlesex, England; 1976
 

The garden of Nemi

This famous myth is the foundational tale, which is the point of departure for the great essay The Golden Bough. This is a myth inherited from the Latins and the Greeks.

The legend is retold by the great expositor of the Greek and Roman antiquities, Frazer:

" ...A dream like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi - the ancients called "Diana's Mirror," as it. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of the Alban hills... the two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its bank, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly bread the stillness and even solitariness of the scene... Diana herself might still linger by this lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.

...In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood

...In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer: and the man whom he looked for was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier (one than himself).

...The post he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams that his. For year in and year out in summer and in winter, in fair weather and in foul he had to keep his lonely watch, and when ever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation in vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; gray hairs might seal his death warrant.

...To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day..."
The Golden Bough; a study in magic and religion; Frazer, James George, Sir, 1854-1941, 3rd ed.
[London, Toronto, Macmillan, 1966]

=====

Batista served until 1944, then receded into the political background until 1952, when, supported by the army, he seized power, suspended the constitution, and dissolved the congress. However, in 1956 an exiled young lawyer named Fidel Castro, along with about 80 insurgents, invaded Cuba. The force was crushed by the army, but Castro escaped into the mountains, where he organized the 26th of July Movement, so called to commemorate an unsuccessful 1953 uprising. With considerable popular support, Castro called for a general revolt in 1958, and the next year Batista resigned and fled the country. Castro became premier.

Korean War, military struggle fought on the Korean Peninsula from June 1950 to July 1953. Begun as a war between South Korea and North Korea, the conflict developed into a war involving the United States and 19 other nations.

IN 1953 the first Corvettes came out -- I was 8 years old. Harley Earl designs made it with the American automobile industry. The Korean War was just over and the beginning of the cold war was incipient. Ralph Nader writes "Unsafe at any Speed." GM hires a private eye to investigate his private life. In 1957 the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite. Canadian curriculum reflected the cold war.

Nuclear fears start here, and grow bigger everyday - rockets, nukes, and bomb shelters, radiation.
Will it happen that the whole human race will be destroyed? O, my aching heart, man.
"Do you really know it won't happen?"

Of God, I knew next to nothing.
I prayed,

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

Church meant a dreary period on Sunday morning when my very upright parents reported to the local clergy and suffered through a couple of hours of droning and somnambulistic hymn-sings and lectures, for the good of their souls, to meet their friends in the community, and to arrange to play golf afterwards. At first I was given over to the Sunday schools where they read stories of Noah's ark, Adam and Eve, and generally speaking was spoon-fed Christian doctrine, by teachers who as often as not I didn't know and didn't know me either. My mother and father were believers as one will be in the protestant reach of the suburbs of our land. They were good and well meaning people without a doubt and though not very enthusiastic about the proximity of God they did observe the humanist code and in fact though seemingly lacking in religious commitment were better people than the many who claimed to be in the real and in the know, about the Lord. After I had taken my communion at age fourteen I didn't ever want to go back to church, except to hear the Handel's Messiah at Christmas, and the few times just to drop in for the cultural experience.

Yes, born and raised in the suburbs of Montreal, that Northern Metropolis which has been called the second Paris and the spiritual center of North America, my parents taught me to love success, education, health, and fair mindedness. I had been trained to play fairly and to do the dishes when he was told. My father did not love prejudice, and wouldn't allow us to be racist either. I, sighing with the weight of it, could hardly figure it all out any more. We were, my family, my two older brothers and sister, older than all siblings, the mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and the many relatives, altogether pretty much "the establishment", or parts of.

Like so, some early media talk. Sundays were dedicated to Walt Disney and Ed Sullivan and good family entertainment. We had roast or some other big meal on Sunday night and Dad would carve it up and dish it out. We would put on a tie and jacket and generally try to look presentable as Dad put it. My Dad and Mom enjoyed life and along with the serious talk there was a goodly amount of humor and light hearted bantering.

Lord Baden Powel did his best to instill community spirit teamwork and uprightness into our systems, through his organization the Boy Scouts. Mowgli and Tarzan images float before my consciousness, the primordial soup conquered by raw strength and intelligence, man without his machinery among the animals, without fear and armed with native intelligence and a knife.

Very young I instilled myself with hardy boy perspicacity and cleverness but then feeling embarrassed by such boyish things, started looking elsewhere. Again, I proceeded to enculturate myself with various mystery novels like Mike Hammer, and Zane Grey -- got even as far as George Simenon. I was a good all round boy. Just kidding. There was Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Nicholas Monsarrat, Jules Verne and many others. I when I was about fourteen, my sister gave me a copy of The Second Sex by Simon de Beauvoir. She told me at the time what I shouldn't expect to find from it. I read quite a bit of it looking for the parts that would tell me what to say to a woman. But since I was still in mid teens what I needed was something else, how not to be too hasty, and how girls my age don't know either. When I was sixteen it was Havelock Ellis and then Lawrence, D. H., "Lady Chatterly's Lover" that were teaching me about relationship. In those days that was the hot item as it had just been released from the banned books list. It was the beginning of the relaxation of the porn laws and a growing awareness of the end of the Catholic's black books lists. By the time I was eighteen the Berkley free speech movement was rooting out McCarthyism.

"He knew how to make maps, fly kites, build rockets, and airplanes, catch fish, play baseball, hockey and football. He knew how to dance, (and when not to speak.) Dutifully, he went to Sunday school until he was old enough to take communion and then given the option of continuing in the church or not."

Generic Mom says:

"Later in high school he excelled in science, mathematics, along with that he read science fiction voraciously. Then his mentor a friend of the family, introduced to better literature like the Australian magical realist Patrick White or the Mescal space of Malcolm Lawry. . . . In the meantime television had occupied more and more of his mind and at the end of the late fifties, numerous hobbies, like electronics, chemistry, tropical fish and model airplanes. He skied every weekend and swam during the summer, water-skied and snorkeling along the shorelines in the rather clear waters of Lac Oaureau in Northern Quebec. Like his peers approaching graduation from High school he found his parents hopelessly out of touch with the modern world and far too limited in their scope to listen to anymore."

We did not hunt with the family. My father disliked hunting and wouldn't permit it. We had rifles but were really discouraged from using them on animals. Fishing was my dad's limit.

In the early sixty and universities major changes had come over North America which had been sitting on its laurels having congratulated themselves for winning a War which cost us such huge suffering and bewilderment but which generated a huge war industry, or military-industrial complex, which was now converted to making money in earnest; a society which had vaunted the world of science and technology and was ecstatic about its prospect of material prosperity and enlightened civilization unique to the world, but which was now beginning to realize the problem of its own self centeredness and the threat of nuclear catastrophe; the cold war was getting hotter and we were beginning to leak around the edges.

The cold war brought to a rapid boil the long simmering crisis of modern man, his search for a soul. The threat of nuclear annihilation slowly dawned on the Caucasian world and despite numerous attempts by government and military to allay the terror, which mounted in the hearts of its citizens, everywhere in the West the psyches of the masses began to splinter. Psychology had become the new religion and medicine its ritual. I was leaving high school when the Cuban Missile crisis happened.

Since old habits like old soldiers never die but only slowly fade away I managed to be many different philosophies and faiths all at the same time.

At University (universitas) there was a period of desperate readjustment of the worldview just accumulated in the rosé illusions of the fantasy suburbs of problemless post war North American youth culture. Kennedy its major symbol was assassinated. It was the University of the 60's when there was sufficient wealth for everyone to stop and look around them. When they did this there was very loud report from the depths of the consciousness. The cold war had started to loom. Minds were getting open to other cultures and our pompous self-satisfactions were wearing thin. The interior journey was beginning in serious, and the sound of the gun assassinating Kennedy woke a lot of people from their slumber. They seriously began to wonder who was running the country and why it was going in such a direction. Where were we going with it all? Weren't we right on the brink? The blacks were finally in full swing as Martin Luther King galvanized the country with his charismatic power and his sincerity. There were some heavy lumps in our melting pot and some cultures refused to be melted. Despite all our Confucius say jokes the Chinese it became known considered us to be barbarians and refused our categorizing them in the same way. White people were finally learning respect.

Mario Savio is remembered for the words he spoke on Dec. 2, 1964, from Sproul Plaza in front of Berkeley's main administration building, to a large crowd of protesters, many of whom took part in a sit-in inside the building and a campus strike.
 

"There is a time," he said, "when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." (c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997

"People's Park remains a symbol of the free speech and anti-war era. On this small plot of land thousands of people over the years have "thrown their bodies on the gears of the odious military industrial machine". To many, like me, this victory beacons hope to continue the struggle for social justice and to restore our ravaged environment." A Personal Message from Dona Spring -- Berkeley City Councilwoman
 

1963-66 Going to McGill - Women: This was an era of confusion about woman especially for engineers, like me. With the advent of the pill many woman felt very safe and sex was opened to more women. The old values reigned supreme and considerable ambivalence grew up. A woman could think of herself as free from constraint and able to have a relationship herself without terrible burden of an unwanted pregnancy and the high probability of being socially ostracized. The woman had more control of her destiny. The liberated woman was a threat to the old guard. Where he formally had the upper hand there was now a lot of ambivalence. There was also considerable confusion. Who was who? More and more people were going to university so the "free love" movement was the answer to the postponement of marriage, until the age of responsibility. There were of course terrible drawbacks. STD's increased quite a bit. Divorce became easier, was increasing, relationships were betrayed, true love was hard to find.

Engineering and Science: Value free science expressed itself as lets be animal engineering students. The engineering student thought that he was omnipotent as his engineering devices made mankind seam to be. And yet he barely understood the soul that lay beneath his pimply face, which he faced every morning while removing now thickened stubble with his razor. "We are, we are, we are we are the engineers we can we can we can we can demolish forty beers." I, who was at first amused, began to seriously wonder about my culture and myself, and this lack of comfort began to reflect in my lack of work at engineering studies. When in my early teens, I read the classic comic of The Time Machine (H. G. Wells) I had nightmares from it. In my later years and in university the unresolved fears, the conundrum it presented, on the fate of man, became the basis for my existential dilemma -- angst about being happy. For many at the university to be happy was to be ignorant, a fool, because the prospects for the future were quite diminished, and the doomsday clock was creeping ever closer to the midnight hour, when it would all blow up -- abruptly ending the lives of millions of fools; people who were happy with mediocre lives.

April 20, 1969 - People's Park is created. Hundreds of people clear ground, plant trees, grass, flowers, set up playground equipment. Free food is distributed.

May 6, 1969 - Chancellor Heyns meets with members of the People's Park Committee, student politicians, and members of the College of Environmental Design. Gives them three weeks to come up with a plan for the park. Promises no construction will begin without prior warning.

May 15, 1969 - "Bloody Thursday" -- 250 Highway Patrol and Berkeley police offers invade the park at 4:45 a.m. and clear an 8-block area around the site. Construction of perimeter fence begins. After a noontime rally on Sproul Plaza, a crowd of 6000 moves towards the park. Police fire tear gas. Protestors throw rocks and bottles. Sheriff Deputies retaliate with double-0 buckshot, blinding one man (Alan Blanshard), mortally wounding another (James Rector). At least 128 injuries, but no policemen hospitalized. Towards evening, Governor Reagan calls out the National Guard and bans public assembly.

May 16-28, 1969. Protests continue on a daily basis. National Guardsmen block Sather Gate. A helicopter sprays the campus with CS tear gas. Campus referendum massively endorses the Park. People's Park annexes spring up all over Berkeley. 9000 students protest in Sacramento."

Beatles & music: Thanks to God the Beatles came along and began to evolve socially conscious music. the Arlo Guthrie's and the Joan Biaz's and the Bobby Dylan's they were all great, but key crowd the broad masses were reached only by the Beatles.

They brought along Maharishi and meditation and then came the moment in Western history when the image of Yoga was no longer a fakir shown as a man sitting on bed of nails, but a regular interesting movement to renew, to re-enchant and unite us in our cosmos (or so I thought along with many others.)

1966 dropping out of university, I worked on construction site for Expo theater as workman and became very strong. Celts and druids came and went, in the movie of the mind. The English and a few Europeans began to fantasize that they were Druids and formed groups to cluster around the Stone Henge doing the old rites. The mother goddess was at last brought out in the sunlight and given an airing.

And felt I was Billy Budd, Foretopman, though I wanted to be Hemingway. My uncle had died during the war in a Tiger Moth. Another uncle had fought the communist guerillas in Malaysia. My brother's father-in-law had flown the Lancasters over the Mediterranean. I was the gunner hanging off the nose in a gun pod though I wanted to be the pilot. My mother a war nurse. And all around us many had suffered the war. I was going to enter the military college with a friend until my Dad dissuaded me.

Western Civilization: Having conquered and domesticated around the world and colonized most of it the West had become the supreme egotism. After the industrial revolution there was just no talking to us any more. The Caucasian male had gone beyond all propriety and had sacrificed his god in order to build a giant machine. The machine had then started to run itself. This giant complex then tried to wrest power from the inventor. The military industrial complex became a thing-in-itself and no one seemed to be able to stop it. At my university there were many foreign students and so I began to assimilate the views of other culture. And as one may seem egoless in a particular group, while the group seems arrogant to another group, I am afraid my loyalties to North America were likewise arrogant to many others. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth was a stage that would not leave my sympathies, and ever after Chinese landscapes would raise hairs on my arm. Often I wondered why and denied myself. Perhaps it was my grandfather's collection and his lacquered piano from his trip to Hong-kong. I felt bad about my prejudices until I learn how prejudiced other cultures can be and decided to forgive myself.

According to some astute minds the foundation was built by Plato and his writing of The Republic. That document which, some think, was essentially fascist had, of course, been the darling of many a European scholar. Dear old Plato to whom all of western philosophy according to Whitehead was just a footnote, had created within his bosom a misunderstanding which was to last for nearly two thousand years.

1966: went to Vancouver and joined IBM. One day a beautiful soul, a woman I had met while living at University of British Columbia had read to me from T. S. Elliot, The Four Quartets, Burnt Umber

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

Existentialism: Beats, deadbeats, beat-poet and bohemian life. Everything, mulled into wine-dipped and some cigarillo (or maybe just a fag (faggot of tobacco) or cigarette) to hang out of the corner of the mouth, to read a little, to groove on it. "Hey man, take it easy, we might not be here long." Berets to sit jauntily on the head and the latest copy of Ferlingetti (or maybe Ginsburg) and rap a little about the war and the protest. "What is the world coming to?" Existentialist and absurdist now the dying embers of thought and the dying god killed by Nietszchean thinking and Sartre's Genet greased another palm and found reason to blow an ill wind from his decaying jail rap. The nightmare trial of Kafkaesque guilt ridden middle classes trying to usurp aristocratic caste by nouveau wealth and just feeding back the stale crummy barroom smells of beer drying of the floor.

Ohhh, how hip I was...not.

In Kafka's, 'The Trial', faceless masses accuse K. a nameless hero, and then, arrest him. K. doesn't know what is the charge and what is the offense or what the court, he is just under arrest and he cannot protest to anyone because they won't tell him who it is that made the complaint, but he is to appear at the court at such a date and time. He does. It doesn't ever come to a conclusion. He is waiting at the gate of the law and he can never get in. The authority of obscure guilt and anxieties are killing us without ever telling us the reason. Orson Welles made a great film of this. It made me very uncomfortable.

Freud, he seems to have discovered humanity's animal nature. When Freud talks about the soul you get the feeling you're in surgery watching someone's organs being cut into. The sexual and the animal nature, so easy to find in distressed and tortured souls, are exposed as the clockworks of the soul. God becomes a regression in the service of the ego... the pleromic fantasies of someone longing for protection, for escape -- return to the worm. . . his convenient machination degrades mankind to angry Oedipal children and walking adult genital organs. Freud called the mystical experience regression in the service of the ego -- does nothing but give you angst Freud was hung up, but so brilliant that people got caught up in it. Freud gobbled up cocaine and wrote brilliant if misguided books, while the doctors gobbled up freud and gave brilliant if misguided therapy and many years later, patients gobbled up therapy and cocaine and gave brilliant performances on stage. He was innovative for the analysis of the mind, ego, id, superego, neurosis, mental disorder, sickness of the mind, abnormal mind, all became fashionable if somewhat annoying topics. But with Freud you do not hear about the healthy mind, rather he was always dismal, despairing, verging on neurosis. Darwin and he, with Newton, the power of the rational or positivist  paradigm, brought on the existential angst, the misunderstanding of everything human while starting a new era. A new bent in the culture of the west was forming.

A myth about writing from Plato: Thoth invented writing and the gods said it was better before people could write as they lost the capacity for memories. A new weakness entered mankind with writing, and later the Gutenberg galaxy affirmed the dominance of the left brained and the power of the male vision. The machinery was available to any planner and schemer who could read or write.

I started from my sleep, sweating and apprehensive, the interior shadows playing on the ceiling in the dark, and but then fell asleep, to tired to do anything about it.

Something again enters the room.
He starts from his sleep frightened.
There is nothing there but he remains alert.
Gets out of his bed and searches the room.
Some noise,
But nothing.
Sweats in his sleep,
Suffers,
Depressed.

Ayne Rand's objectivist cant fanning the flames of American selfishness and the vision of otherness. The vision of two, We and Them. Alienation through self-interest, like a puffed-up pillow on the Procrustean bed, sweetly scented invites us to rest our weary heads and be forgiven.

After the US involvement with the Vietnam War the Beats began to evolve into the hippie movement (1967 hippies — LIBERTAS?), a truly unique phenomenon. It became a large-scale transcendental drift of the society. Many gurus and Rimpoches both good and bad came from the East.

The former director of the FBI one Anslinger (gunslinger) by name called Ford a drug dealer because the Model T seat cloth was made from jute a close relative of marijuana. Anslinger made the film "reefer madness" which in the seventies became cult entertainment for a generation of Hippies. While astronauts took off for the moon large number of the young tried some intrepid inner exploration. "Better living through chemistry" T-shirts were seen everywhere.

In Montreal during the summer 1968, I was working with IBM as a Customer Engineering Specialist. I lived together with someone who was to be the president of a large dry goods importing firm, for a while. There were quite a few people of various types around.

"Try this", they said.

Chogyam Trungpa and Tibetan Tantricism came around too. He seemed to be very hip and yet was still spiritual. He would drink and smoke and still be a Buddhist, like the best of them, he was creative and overlooked mind the hanky panky, he called it 'working with negativity'. A novel form of religion had come to the West. In a sense it truly suited the western intellectual. It was free like Zen but much groovier. I went to one of his satsangs at Concordia. He had a very strong presence. He was a good writer and well versed in Tibetan Buddhism in which I had a strong interest.

The M. and I had gone also to see Houston Smith talk at McGill he had shown a film about his trip to Tibet. It was incredible. Someone had asked about the nature of time. The question was prefaced with the observation that the West had a natural view, China, a social historic view, and India, a transcendental view. He started to think and then he sat down on the edge of the stage still thinking and then smiled and then meditated while looking off into the space. He was quiet almost five minutes. Finally he said, "that's about right!" We all chuckled.

M. (the wizard) or Mage, was a close friend for a while. He had just about every bone in his body broken while trying to rid himself of fear. Smoking grass with I, listening to music and reading "Memoirs of an Amnesiac", by Oscar Levant. Laughing hysterically. He taught me a lot about the things you shouldn't do but could do if you really wanted. Born blond and blue eyed, at three years old he suddenly changed and becomes brunette. Now looks like an Inca or perhaps from the Mongolian plains. In trouble at school at an early age, he goes to a psychiatrist who tries to seduce him. Betrayed! He escapes the net of socialization and weaves a web of his own. The fringes receive him with applause. The antihero is born. M. knew many powerful people in Royal Ville. A new acquaintance, my Hippie brother, we were a pair to behold for a while. Genius. Batteries not included.

Montreal: One day Myself and two friends from University who were my frat-rat companions for years, were sitting in front of the 'Three Muses' or 'Three Bares' at McGill campus. It was an era when we were slowly losing any interest in such clubs. We had decided we going to 'do some mescaline.' and had obtained the organic mescaline - encapsulated - a dry powder, all dried out and looking very earthy. We needed some Gravol to go along with it because it tends to make one throw up. We had taken it and wandered over to the sunny park on campus in the late afternoon and were sitting in a group marveling about the effects. One of the friends had wandered away by him self. Suddenly we heard a loud crack and whoosh behind us and as we turned we saw our friend was in mid-air leaping over the railings of the next park. Behind him was the still settling branch of a very large tree that had just split off the tree trunk taking about a quarter of the foliage. Brian kept moving the next thirty yards until he reached us when he stopped and turned.
We all looked agog at the tree. The tree akimbo, us agog.
Brian goes, "phew, I was just walking around underneath it when I started to think what would happen if the branch fell down. It was cracked you know. Then just as I was thinking about it fell. It could have crushed me."
Still panting he smiled and wiped his brow and looked at us to see if we understood.
"Sure could have" said Andy.
"Yeah it must weigh about ten tons."
We continued talking as we went over to the branch, which itself was the size of a tree.
"Do you think it was God?" asked Eric.
Laughter. "Maybe."
"What did you eat today, Brian." Everyone laughs.
No that's not it. It's just a coincidence. There was no wind at all. He had gone over, only to escape from the fall. Synchronicity. The doors of perception: The gates of Heaven and Hell, well I was so into Aldus Huxley I had tried to find a pair of glasses from the British Health of same kind that Aldus wore.

Quit IBM went back to McGill and took combined honors philosophy and math. Rejecting Christianity. For many a common target in university days. How happy we were to throw off the shackles of the morally bound priest. Dichotomization became a disease as Jung puts it. The dichotomy between science and religion. The modern university educated crowd scoffed at the church and yet they insisted they marry there. We knew it wasn't right-on and yet we feared the abyss. The kids get baptized there and the funerals continued also.

I had become a mixture of Christian, born again Zen-Buddhist, and agnostic, but who had a proclivity for scientific secular humanism and martial materialist leanings.

There were six or seven thousand people on Brooke Street outside the gates of the university. They wanted to put more French on the curriculum. From where I was standing off to the side of the crowd, I could see the speaker addressing the crowd from a makeshift stand. Suddenly there was a roar of motorcycles. The police came in a solid row from the other side of Brook. They covered the whole street as they swept down toward me. People turned and ran. They ran by silent in the closing darkness, as if animals escaping from a forest fire. Their eyes, Their eyes. It was quiet, strangely quiet only the scuffling of feet marking the passage of time. I didn't know where to turn, watching fascinated by the flow. then I awoke from my daze, My entrancement with the realization that the vision of fear had brought me. Authority and privilege, law and order reduced to basics. I turned to the side of the street and moved to the front of the crowd to see the line of police motorcycles. They came on, from one sidewalk to the other, truncheons ready, behind the moving barricade of motorcycles, called by somebody from on high, to insure the authority of the Have's against the Have Not's. I went into a side street pushed by the flow of protesters. A siren suddenly sounded right behind me. It was an unusual sound the first in the new technology of sound that police wagons were using. To me it sounded like an alien force had just penetrated the world. So strange that sound for a moment anxiety took a hold. Once in, it wouldn't leave me. I couldn't shake it. Like an amoebic infestation it stayed and gnawed into my psyche. I left the area stunned. What is the nature of man? Why did they do this? Where is the protest movement going? Who was I? Answer me, damn it all, somebody answer that now. That sound was the first cut on the album of police brutalities. Kent state was still to come. It was the end of naive idealism/realism.

Ram Dass was the first American Guru of any note. I heard him speak at McGill in 1968. It was an introduction to Yoga, real Yoga, not just the physical exercise, or Hatha yoga. He was a good speaker. Egypt, and the mystery cults were still alive and that and Alistair Crawley could still be found around campus and of few of the good old time Free Mason elements. Ram Dass was doctor in psychology and so he was oriented to mental health. This was a relief from the occult which was aimed at the dark side of psychic power for the most part.

Hippies became more political and started getting very heavy. The yippee (Youth International party) movement with its brassy theatrical Jerry Ruben style of advocacy. Students for a democratic society came on. Violence grew up on the left and right. I read both the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Plato. Once I tried to do an essay comparing the two of them. I had a small nervous breakdown instead. The two worlds did not match. The Book of the Dead describes the journey of the soul after death. Before reading this I had been a confirmed agnostic even atheistic, but after reading I was sure that I had visited death and returned.

I was a Soul on Ice. Blacks were getting angry and "I's sympathies were with them. I read Franz Fanon's, 'the Wretched of the Earth', 'Black Faces, white Masks,' and Eldrige Cleaver's, 'Soul on Ice'. There was rioting in Watts. "I" thinks he can help. Goes to a Black writers conference. Marcus Garvey was on the agenda. They have a closed session and won't let white people in to the conference room. Unfortunately I was still just a white Honkie. I was left out. If you're not part of the solution you must be part of the problem. Therefore "I" blamed myself for being a problem.

1969 [Bergman]

"By the mid-1960s Bergman had assembled a group of actors into a now familiar stock company, among them Max VON SYDOW, Liv ULLMANN, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and Ingrid Thulin. In 1966 he undertook a greater formal experimentation with Persona, an intriguing psychological study of two women that is considered by many one of his most important works. This was followed by a less successful Gothic exercise, Hour of the Wolf (1968); an antiwar allegory, Shame (1968); a more realistic film, The Passion of Anna (1969), and the intense yet dreamlike Cries and Whispers (1972). Grolier's.

"The doctor:
I do understand you know. The hopeless dream of being. Not doing, just being. Aware and watchful every second. And a the same time the abyss between what you are for others and what you are for yourself. The feeling of dizziness and the continual burning need to be unmasked. At last to be seen through, reduced, perhaps extinguished. Every tone of voice a lie, an act of treason. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace. . . . Where did it break? . . . It certainly wasn't the role of Electra. That gave you a rest. She actually gave you an excuse for the more perfunctory performances you gave in your 'real-life roles'. But when Electra was over you had nothing left to hide behind, nothing to keep you going. No excuses."

"Inexorably the ribbon of film rattles through the projector. It travels at considerable speed. 24 frames per second. 27 long meters a minute. The shadows run over the white wall. Magic of course. But unusually sober and merciless magic. Nothing can be changed, undone. It all thunders forth again and again., always with the same cold immutable willingness. Put a red glass in front of a lens, the shadows turn red -- but what does it help? Load the film upside-down or back-to-front, the result will not be very different."

JAN: I was wondering what it said in those letters we wrote to each other during the summer tour. Whether it said, 'My hand in yours' or 'Your hand in mine'.
EVA: It said 'My hand in yours'.
On the seventh day a storm blows up, and there is a heavy rain. The survivors slake their thirst with the poisoned waters.

Turn-on , tune-in drop-out: So we dropped-out, tuned in, turned on, dropped out. Check it out. What is it all about. The family didn't understand and I had a few conflicts with Dad. I would get really depressed, cry, but Dad never understood.

At Woodstock it was Swami Satchitananda that made a speech about the dawning of the new age. It was a symbol of the advent of Eastern philosophies in the West. It portended the restructuring of the world view of man, for many North Americans. "It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius," they sang. Time passes. Lao Tzu. simple Tao. The voice of the ancient spoke to us quietly.

I wake up sweating, sit up, look around. The dawning of the age of Aquarius - are you kidding it is more like the beginning of nuclear winter. There goes Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain. He, with no pay and no retirement fund, toiling to the top only to start again. What was the point? Condemned before you start. How was a man to get any sleep anyway, with using up so much energy on trying to repress the nightmares of getting nuked out of bed by a Commie rocket. The absurdist explanations of why we should aspire to more than what hits us in the gut bounced off the student body like hailstones. The unassimilable idea that power lies in the capacity to face down the barrel of a rifle - the fact that we have no absolutes and we better know it. What for are we commuters in the mill-wheel civilization of faceless job anxieties. We got righteously angry at the previous generation for doing us in with the scientific, Holocaustic rat race and proceeded to express our fury by amping out on over-loud high decibel rock-and-roll. With sure fire escapist mentality, alternating with deadly serious attempts to frustrate the frustrations, we were practically killing ourselves. Digging bomb shelters won't help. It's mass social suicide.

The Buddha waved his rose at Mahakashyapa and the smiled blossomed on his face. That renowned disciple silently understood. He knew.

Herman Hesse moved a generation with his Nobel prize winning stories of the inner life. I knew Steppenwolfe like it was my own soul. Academic goofs, Ah yes, it was hard to raise a flag of human decency without someone like Freud dumping on it. Ludwig Feuerbach for instance, thought that everything in Christianity was a projection. How spirited his text was not. But there was still something. Something unscientific and therefore almost invisible in the west. Theoretically it could exist or couldn't. It lived on, and it showed it's face the Journey to the East.

Nietzsche. "God is dead." The priests have killed him. From Dostoyevsky came Ivan's famous cry (from the bothers Karamazov), "If there is no God everything is permissible" which resounded in my ears. For the Hippies it was "God exists, but don't get so heavy." (no more war).

A venerable Chinese gentleman with yarrow stalks in his hands gave counsel of the I Ching to the hip young generation on North-america. This oracle type text was full of practical wisdom. It worked every time. Now Vedic (soma) Homa was slipped in. It became really hip to talk about the use of mushrooms in the Vedic days and the use of peyote in the modern West during the Peyote Indian rites. primitives & aborigines. We voted for the Aboes over the white guys because the Aboes were organic and could understand the dream time that we were in.

Working for Alcan 1970. Getting very worried about society and the way things were.

M. was getting a bit too rough. Too tough to be with. Still he traveled in high society. Often he would tell me that he had party'ed with Johnny Winter or Janis Joplin. Reform, I thought, stick with the people.

Poesh BR. grandson of on of five founders of IBM and Poesh BB. artist and philanthropist, were friends of mine. We would go to the Tavern and have duck meat and beans. Poesh, Poesh and I went down to Nova Scotia in brother BB's Aerostar 600, a new twin engine plane. At every airport the attendants come out to admire the hardware. On the way back we sailed through some tall evening cumulous clouds. It was a golden canyon to small craft like that. One of the most beautiful moments of my life. I too had 'seen clouds from both sides now'.

Charlie R. and I went out jogging and then went to his place for a sauna. He was at the top of Westmount square. He would cook scampi and we would have a beer or smoke afterwards. A good old man. Charlie was finishing at university and would drop in now and then to join us in the Little Burgundy abode. Charlie swore up and down that he had visions of me gliding past his house in limousine. He was sure that I was going to be rich. Well he was really rich and spent more on his psychiatrist than I did the whole year long. It was worth it for him, because he was inheriting thirty million or so. One day he came over and I was sitting in my armchair in bad mood. I didn't stand up and he got angry. He stayed for a while and then left. I believe he went to three hundred million. Never saw him again.
 

"Kent State University On April 20, 1970, President Nixon, without consulting Congress, ordered American troops into Cambodia where Vietnamese troops were operating. Passions flared up among American college students throughout the country, who were well aware that over 40,000 Americans had already lost their lives and 250,000 wounded in the longest and most unpopular war in our history. The National Guard was called out to face a crowd on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio on April 30, 1970. The guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing four and wounding many." Copyright 1995 by Zane Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Jesse Winchester came over, James Cotton came and smoked with us and played some blues on his old guitar. Frank Marino, lived on the couch for a while. He was an expert in Coca Cola and could tell if it was poured from a bottle or a can. One day Jordan Deitcher came over to visit and he and Frank sat down to play a little guitar. Jordan style was classical and had no great regard for Frankie's, 'Axis Bold as Love' imitation. He played an old classic for him and immediately after Frank picked up his axe and played the whole thing except for a few bars. He got it on the second pass. Jordan never stopped talking about it. One night I drank some Bourbon with Ellen McIlwaine.

"Everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die
Everybody wants to know the reason without even asking why
Everybody wants to be the one to laugh, nobody wants to cry
Everybody wants to hear the truth but people keep on telling lies
Everybody wants to know the reason without even asking why
Everybody wants to go to heaven nobody wants to die"

Sex drugs and rock and roll. We started looking for messages played backwards on the sound track of the Beatle's album. Surely there was something out there that was really it.

GENERIC DAD SAYS: " He couldn't find anything that he could really believe in. He didn't think that it was a good idea to believe in anything anyway. After all he was only part existentialist. It was a strange mixture of transcendentalism, popular music, hippie philosophy, American beat, scientific pragmatism and so on that was making him feel completely victimized by the society."

I was standing on St. Catherine near the forum one day in 1971, waiting for a bus. There was a parade of sorts happening. A float appeared carrying what I thought was an idol. It was covered with flowers and there was some people playing clarinets, chanting and drumming as the float proceeded slowly down the street. As they went by I heard, "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama, Rama Hare Hare." On the float sitting on an impromptu throne was A. C. BhaktiVedanta Swami Pabhupada, the leader of what was going to become the Hare Krishna movement. Some one passed me a handbill inviting me to a free vegetarian meal. One of his people went by kicking up his heals in an ecstatic mood, chanting and clapping. I didn't go. It was very odd.

Swami Shyam and some of his disciples had moved into Montreal this same year. He moved into Westmount from Vancouver and had been asked to speak later in November 1972 on CHOM radio by Geof Stirling his patron. Because of this was asked to appear in Immigration Court. At this court the proceedings went along in the usual fashion, but just as it seemed that the ruling was going against Shyam staying in the country there was a quiet interlude. For almost five minutes there was little talking and the courtroom staff seemed to be examining their papers. Shyam was "putting them all into meditation," and after that, they dismissed the case against him, leaving it to Stirling to insure that he would not try to start work and that he would eventually return to India.

I knew I had to quit my low down ways. Death was creeping up on me fast. I started looking for therapeutic milieus and among them the gurus. I had seen Chogyam Trungpa and Ram Dass in 1968 and 1969 but was only intellectually involved as part of a quest. Now I was run down quite a bit and many people who had been part of the revolution, the hippie movement, had begun to get wasted. The Beetles and the Stones argument as it were. The Stones got heavy and Altimont proved it. The Beatles were divided themselves, George Harrison was very involved with Maharishi. The book "Be Here Now" by Richard Alpert (Raam Dass) came out. I first read it when it came in folio form to a friend who had gone with me to the Ram Daas speech at McGill.