Talking Books

pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven...
Jack Kerouac

...my dad had a flirtation with radicalism in the late 60’s...apparently....as far as I can tell, it never went beyond buying the books that, at one time, lined the top level of our living room bookshelf...before I found them, that is, and, deciding they’d be a perfect alternative to whatever crap was being assigned by my teachers in high school, took them: The Autobiography of Malcolm X and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, providing an angry, alternative history badly needed in the days of morning in America...Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems, introducing the notion that reading and writing could be really, really cool, particularly in the midst of endless road trips, cheap wine, tea-smoking, jazz, radical politics, and sex...Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (gotta confess, actually, that, at that point, I didn’t get the nonattachment thing at all...and, actually, I’m still workin’ on that)...and, most insane and influential of all, Woodstock Nation by Abbie Hoffman...We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana weed born from the seeds of the Woodstock Festival...sounded cool to me, never mind that most charter members of the Woodstock Nation had cashed in a decade earlier, roughly around the time the draft ended, and helped create the Reagan Nation I was then so desperate to rebel against....

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot

...more recently, when visiting my mom, I comb through the shelves in my dad’s den...finding, to my surprise, in the midst of countless volumes on psychoanalysis, Quakerism, and the history of Christianity, things like Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels, along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and Jon Kabat Zinn...often featuring copious underlining and notes, which, along with the very presence of the books themselves, feel like a special kind of posthumous communication...with areas of surprising agreement, as well as the same old arguments, which had something to do with why we talked so little during his last years...so, I underline and make notes myself, but always make sure to do it in pencil when he used pen, just so it’s clear who said what....

Ghosts of Christmas Past #1: Acid, Incense, & Abject Terror of Nothingness

In other ways, too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.
Pico Iyer
Christmas 1986, I’d just dropped out of college for the first time and, once the family thing was out of the way, flew out to San Francisco to fulfill a life-long dream of being a real-live hippie...Melinda asked if I we might’ve met, but we probably didn’t...I was one of those 80’s Grateful Dead types who, for the most part, the more punk types couldn’t stand...though, I didn’t fit in with the latter-day hippies too well, either...both too overtly cynical and, ironically enough, too into the Clash and Sex Pistols...who, ultimately, were as out of sync with the Reagan/Rambo/Van Helen/pre-yoga-Madonna present as the Dead....though, at that point, anybody else’s past seemed better than my own....

...acid, incense, and balloons...
the Jefferson Airplane

...no future for you...no future for me....
the Sex Pistols

...everything I owned fit into a backpack on the floor of a tiny unfurnished room with a bare lightbulb and mattress in a college friend’s sister’s apartment on Page St., just a block or two from the corner of Haight & Ashbury...where strung-out derelicts and runaways, well on their way to being derelicts themselves, breathed in two-decades-stale pretensions of creating a new society...$300 a month, which was a lot then, particularly for somebody trying to scrape by as a Greenpeace canvasser...a job at which, it should be mentioned, I was singularly lousy...lived on peanut butter and weed....then, one night in January, seeing the Dead at the San Francisco Civic Center, I got lost in some lonely, dark place between galaxies...unmoored...inconsequential...every body and every thing I might reach for dissipating into white space vapor....afterwards, having landed somewhat uneasily in the park across the street, a friend and I got grabbed by undercover cops who read us our rights before, following a quick search, deciding we weren’t worth their time and effort...and so, for just a moment or two there, I felt good about being inconsequential....

Homophobia Sucks

Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)
Walt Whitman

I can go off on an angry political rant to make even those who agree with me uncomfortable at the drop of a...actually you don’t even need to drop a hat, or anything....I do it spontaneously. And that’s exactly why I don’t bring politics into Yoga for Cynics much—it’d be too easy, and would end up consuming all else. That’s the inherent problem with that great, creative rage...ideals of peace and unity making a person so righteously angry as to end up snarling and barking and putting up walls.

The goal is to be positive, but not in that cheesy New Age pretend-shit-doesn’t-stink kinda way, though it's always a fine line. Yoga, to me, is about opening, and cynicism is about closing, and I’m hoping maybe humor can be a bridge between the two.

But cynicism isn't inherently bad. If people tell you it is, ask for their wallets and keys and credit card numbers. There are things we need to defend ourselves from, things we need to oppose, things we need to speak out against. In a couple of conversations recently, I’ve tried to put as positive a spin as possible on Amendment 8, casting it as a reminder not to be complacent, that there are still battles to be fought, right here and right now, and that anyway, things are steadily moving forward, that we’re still only twenty years away from a storied administration that proclaimed “morning in America” while ignoring the AIDS epidemic and we've sure come a long way since then. But I don’t really expect anybody to be mollified by that. The only thing more hateful than homophobia is trying to hide it behind one's God. I was struck by the thought when the beautiful new First Family walk on stage Tuesday night that my country is better than I imagined, but that doesn't mean we don't still have some serious shit to work on.