The Active Side of Infinity (32 page)

The director of the art department and I became fast friends. He
practically took me under his
wing. His name was Ernest Lipton. I
admired and respected him immensely. He was a fine artist
and
a magnificent craftsman. His flaw was his softness, his incredible consideration
for others,
which bordered on passivity.

For example, one day we were driving out of the parking lot of a
restaurant where we had
eaten lunch. Very politely, he waited
for another car to pull out of the parking space in front of
him.
The driver obviously didn't see us and began to back out at a considerable
speed. Ernest Lipton could easily have blown his horn to attract the man's
attention to watch where he was
going. Instead, he sat, grinning like
an idiot as the guy crashed into his car. Then he turned and
apologized
to me. "Gee, I could have blown my horn," he said, "but it's so
fucking loud, it embarrasses me."

The guy who had backed up into Ernest's car was furious and had to be
placated.

"Don't worry," Ernest said. "There is no damage to your
car. Besides, you only smashed my
headlights; I was going to
replace them anyway."

Another day, in the same restaurant, some Japanese people, clients of
the decal company and
his guests for lunch, were talking
animatedly to us, asking questions. The waiter came with the
food
and cleared the table of some of the salad plates, making room, the best way he
could on the
narrow table, for the huge hot plates of the entree. One
of the Japanese clients needed more space.
He pushed his
plate forward; the push set Ernest's plate in motion and it began to slide off
the table. Again, Ernest could have warned the man, but he didn't. He sat there
grinning until the
plate fell in his lap.

On another occasion, I went to his house to help him put up some
rafters over his patio, where he was going to let a grape vine grow for partial
shade and fruit. We prearranged the rafters into a
huge frame and
then lifted one side and bolted it to some beams. Ernest was a tall, very
strong man, and using a length of two-by-four as a hoisting device, he lifted
the other end for me to fit
the bolts into holes that were already
drilled into the supporting beams. But before I had a chance
to
put in the bolts there was an insistent knock on the door and Ernest asked me
to see who it was
while he held the frame of rafters.

His wife
was at the door with her grocery packages. She engaged me in a lengthy
conversation and I forgot about Ernest. I even
helped her to put her groceries away. In the middle
of arranging her celery bundles, I remembered
that my friend was still holding the frame of
rafters, and knowing him, I knew that he would still be at the job,
expecting everybody else to
have the
consideration that he himself had. I rushed desperately to the backyard, and
there he was
on the ground. He had
collapsed from the exhaustion of holding the heavy wooden frame. He looked like
a rag doll. We had to call his friends to lend a hand and hoist up the frame of
rafters-
he couldn't do it anymore. He
had to go to bed. He thought for sure that he had a hernia.

The classic story about Ernest Lipton was that one day he went hiking
for the weekend in the
San Bernardino Mountains
with some friends. They camped in the mountains for the night. While
everybody
was sleeping, Ernest Lipton went to the bushes, and being such a considerate
man, he
walked some distance from the camp so as not to bother
anybody. He slipped in the darkness and
rolled down the
side of the mountain. He told his friends afterward that he knew for a fact
that he
was falling to his death at the bottom of the valley. He
was lucky in that he grabbed on to a ledge
with the tips
of his fingers; he held on to it for hours, searching in the dark with his feet
for any support, because his arms were about to give in-he was going to hold on
until his death. By
extending his legs as wide as he could, he found
tiny protuberances in the rock that helped him to hold on. He stayed stuck to
the rock, like the decals that he made, until there was enough light for
him
to realize that he was only a foot from the ground.

"Ernest, you could have yelled for help!" his friends
complained.

"Gee, I didn't think there was any use," he replied.
"Who could have heard me? I thought I
had rolled down
at least a mile into the valley. Besides, everyone was asleep."

The final blow came for me when Ernest Lipton, who spent two hours daily
commuting back
and forth from his house to the shop, decided to
buy an economy car, a Volkswagen Beetle, and
began measuring
how many miles he got per gallon of gasoline. I was extremely surprised when
he
announced one morning that he had reached 125 miles per gallon. Being a very
exact man, he
qualified his statement, saying that most of his driving
was not done in the city, but on the
freeway, although at the peak
hour of traffic, he had to slow down and accelerate quite often. A
week
later, he said that he had reached the 250-mile-per-gallon mark.

This marvelous event escalated until he reached an unbelievable figure:
645 miles to a gallon.
His friends told him that he should
enter this figure into the logs of the Volkswagen company.
Ernest
Lipton was as pleased as punch, and gloated, saying that he wouldn't know what
to do if
he reached the thousand-mile mark. His friends told him
that he should claim a miracle.

This extraordinary situation went on until one morning when he caught
one of his friends,
who for months had been playing the oldest gag in
the book on him, adding gasoline to his tank.
Every morning
he had been adding three or four cups so that Ernest's gas gauge was never on
empty.

Ernest Lipton was nearly angry. His harshest comment was, "Gee! Is
this supposed to be
funny?"

I had known for weeks that his friends were playing that gag on him, but
I was unable to
intervene. I felt that it was none of my business.
The people who were playing the gag on Ernest
Lipton were his
lifelong friends. I was a newcomer. When I saw his look of disappointment and
hurt,
and his incapacity to get angry, I felt a wave of guilt and anxiety. I was
facing again an old
enemy of mine. I despised Ernest Lipton, and at the
same time, I liked him immensely. He was
helpless.

The real truth of the matter was that Ernest Lipton looked like my
father. His thick glasses and
his receding hairline, as well as the
stubble of graying beard that he could never quite shave
completely,
brought my father's features to mind. He had the same straight, pointed nose
and pointed chin. But seeing Ernest Lipton's inability to get angry and punch
the jokers in the nose
was what really clinched his likeness
to my father for me and pushed it beyond the threshold of
safety.

I remembered how my father had been madly in love with the sister of his
best friend. I
spotted her one day in a resort town, holding
hands with a young man. Her mother was with her
as a chaperone. The girl seemed so
happy. The two young people looked at each other,
enraptured. As far as I could see, it was young love at its best. When
I saw my father, I told him,
relishing
every instant of my recounting with all the malice of my ten years, that his
girlfriend
had a real boyfriend. He
was taken aback. He didn't believe me.

"But have you said anything at all to the girl?" I asked him
daringly- "Does she know that you
are in love
with her?"

"Don't be stupid, you little creep!" he snapped at me. "I
don't have to tell any woman any shit of that sort!" Like a spoiled child,
he looked at me petulantly, his lips trembling with rage.

"She's mine! She should know that she's my woman without my having
to tell her anything!"
He declared all this with the certainty
of a child who has had everything in life given to him
without having
to fight for it.

At the apex of my form, I delivered my punch line. "Well," I
said, "I think she expected someone to tell her that, and someone has just
beaten you to it."

I was prepared to jump out of his reach and run because I thought he
would slash at me with
all the fury in the world, but instead,
he crumpled down and began to weep. He asked me,
sobbing
uncontrollably, that since I was capable of anything, would I please spy on the
girl for
him and tell him what was going on?

I despised my father beyond anything I could say, and at the same time
I loved him, with a
sadness that was unmatched. I cursed myself for
precipitating that shame on him.

Ernest Lipton reminded me of my father so much that I quit my job,
alleging that I had to go back to school. I didn't want to increase the burden
that I already carried on my shoulders. I had never forgiven myself for causing
my father that anguish, and I had never forgiven him for being
so
cowardly.

I went back to school and began the gigantic task of reintegrating
myself into my studies of
anthropology. What made this re
integration very difficult was the fact that if there was someone
I
could have worked with with ease and delight because of his admirable touch,
his daring
curiosity, and his willingness to expand his knowledge
without getting flustered or defending.
indefensible
points, it was someone outside my department, an archaeologist. It was because
of his influence that I had become interested in fieldwork in the first place.
Perhaps because of the
fact that he actually went into the
field, literally to dig out information, his practicality was an
oasis
of sobriety for me. He was the only one who had encouraged me to go ahead and
do fieldwork because I had nothing to lose.

"Lose it all, and you'll gain it all," he told me once, the
soundest advice that I ever got in
academia. If I followed don
Juan's advice, and worked toward correcting my obsession with self-
reflection,
I veritably had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But this possibility
hadn't been
in the cards for me at that time.

When I told don Juan about the difficulty I encountered in finding a
professor to work with, I
thought that his reaction to what I'd
said was vicious. He called me a petty fart, and worse. He
told
me what I already knew: that if I were not so tense, I could have worked
successfully with anybody in academia, or in business.

"Warrior-travelers
don't
complain," don Juan went on. "They take everything that
infinity
hands
them as a challenge. A challenge is a challenge. It isn't personal. It cannot
be taken as a
curse or a blessing. A warrior-traveler either wins the
challenge or the challenge demolishes him. It's more exciting to win, so
win!"

I told him that it was easy for him or anyone else to say that, but to
carry it out was another matter, and that my tribulations were insoluble
because they originated in the incapacity of my
fellow men to
be consistent.

"It's not the people around you who are at fault," he said.
"They cannot help themselves. The
fault is with
you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep
level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the
worst out of them. All of
us human beings are prisoners, and it
is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way.
Your
challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone."

"You are absolutely wrong this time, don Juan," I said.
"Believe me, I have no interest
whatsoever in judging them, or
entangling myself with them in any way."

"You do understand what I'm talking about," he insisted
doggedly. "If you're not conscious of
your desire to
judge them," he continued, "you are in even worse shape than I
thought. This is the
flaw of warrior-travelers when they
begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand."

I admitted to don Juan that my complaints were petty in the extreme. I
knew that much. I said to him that I was confronted with daily events, events
that had the nefarious quality of wearing
down all my
resolve, and that I was embarrassed to relate to don Juan the incidents that
weighed
heavily on my mind.

"Come on," he urged me. "Out with it! Don't have any
secrets from me. I'm an empty tube.
Whatever you say to me will be
projected out into
infinity."