Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (22 page)
Read Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life Online
Authors: Tom Robbins
Happily, I did not turn out to be one of those people who allowed psychedelics to become the center of their universe, although I certainly could understand and even sympathize with their obsession. In the year following my day down the infinite rabbit hole, the excursion was seldom far from my mind. The reflections were entirely positive, the musings burnished with optimism, yet that year was the most lost and lonely period of my entire life. I was at sea, tossed about almost incessantly between intimacy and isolation.
I say “intimacy” because, operating on daisy consciousness, as it were, I felt connected to the natural world and its myriad manifestations in the most personal, caring, comprehending, and bedazzled way. On the other hand, there was nobody to whom I might explain, let alone with whom I could share, such feelings. Oh sure, the Pacific Northwest was crawling with nature lovers, but they didn’t make the connections between the neurons in their brains and the photosynthesis in their gardens; they climbed rocks but never heard geology humming (humming Earth’s sidereal earth song), it rarely occurred to them that perhaps we really
are
just some butterfly’s dream. They genuinely appreciated the perceived world yet remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds within worlds . . . ad infinitum.
The problem was that I didn’t know a single other soul who’d taken LSD. For propriety reasons, Jim hadn’t introduced me to any of his lab rats, and at that time the public -- in Seattle, even the hip public -- was securely unacquainted with the awe-inspiring, life-changing alkaloid synthesized from a fungus that grows on barley and wheat. To be sure,
Life
magazine (who else?!) had recently run a lengthy article about LSD (maybe unwittingly, maybe not,
Life
’s publisher Henry R. Luce was America’s first Pied Piper of psychedelica), but acid trips were not a subject of discussion at the Blue Moon or anywhere else in town. Lacking confederates, I felt I’d become a minority of one; a nation, a race unto myself.
Thus isolated, I commenced to entertain thoughts of emigration. Secretly, I pined to go in search of my new kin, to mingle somewhere with others similarly mutated. I could sense that they were out there (was I channeling Leary and Alpert?), I just didn’t know where to find them. This reclusion wasn’t all bad, actually. While my acidified self lacked positive reinforcement, it also was not subjected to the enormous negativity that LSD would generate in years to come; the overwhelming hostility, most of it ill-informed if not outright mendacious, from quarters both official and haphazard; from everyone in fact who maintains a vested interest in a suspect status quo.
I’d prefer to deal with this subject more matter-of-factly, as did Apple’s legendary Steve Jobs when he told his biographer, “Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in my life.” The most successful, innovative, influential entrepreneur and businessman of modern times went on to credit LSD with helping to shape his sense of integrated systems and product design, and let it go at that. My mission here, however, has been to try to describe as accurately as possible the state I was in when my path crossed that of the Redheaded Wino.
It was a Friday, payday at the
Seattle
Times
. The
Times
was located at Fairview and John, the same address it occupied until quite recently. After collecting my paycheck at the personnel window, I hoofed a few blocks up Fairview to the nearest bank. Once I’d exchanged check for cash, I headed right back to the newspaper, where my daily duties included a midmorning trip to the composing room to oversee the makeover of the entertainment pages for the second edition. It was nearly eleven, deadline for the makeover (the
Times
was an afternoon paper), and I was practically sprinting down Fairview, both the tail of my tweedy sports coat and my carefully knotted tie flapping crazily in the slipstream, my facial expression doubtlessly a stern mixture of fretfulness and determination. That’s when I became aware of a slowly approaching figure, a man who looked out of place in that quiet, sparsely populated neighborhood.
Despite the mild weather, the guy was buttoned up in a heavy, olive-drab overcoat, the kind assigned to soldiers in the First World War, and although he was tall, the old army-surplus coat was so long on him its hem kissed the pavement. His high-top shoes were battered, as was his face, a countenance wreathed with unkempt red hair and peppered with a heavy red stubble. His was not a cultivated beard, it just appeared he hadn’t shaved in four or five days. Everything about him, in fact, suggested a man -- a derelict, a wino -- who’d been on a bender, although if he were hungover it hadn’t darkened his mood, for he was cheerfully singing, singing out loud.
He wasn’t busking, mind you, not performing, just unself-consciously caroling an unrecognizable tune as he shambled up the street. When we got within about ten paces of one another, he broke off his song. He stopped in his tracks. I could tell he was fixed on me, had been for nearly a block, and I was sure he was about to hit me up for some of my payday cash. Instead, as I passed, he looked me over head to toe with bloodshot but piercing eyes and laughed out loud. Laughed right in my face. It was a mocking laugh, imperious even; spiked with the cheap gin of cruelty, but diluted with a splash of amusement, garnished with a sprig of pity; and he soaked me with it, as if he’d emptied a rotgut punch bowl over my head.
He was looking through me like I was a plate-glass window, reading me like a Las Vegas billboard. His gawk was virtually audible. “You think you’re a special case,” it seemed to say. “You think you’re liberated, enlightened, evolved or something, but just look at you: young man in a hurry, busting his nuts to please a corporate boss; ambitious and uptight, one more teeny replaceable cog in the money machine, dressed like a high school civics teacher, frowning like you lost your smile in a card game you knew was rigged from the start. Get your pathetic ass on down the street, you’re spraying worry and discontent the way a skunk sprays stink.”
Thus spake the Redheaded Wino.
I did keep walking. What else could I do? Just before I reached the
Times,
I pivoted to see if he might be following. And he wasn’t there! Probably he’d only turned the corner, but I had the impression that he’d vanished in a puff of smoke. In fact, to this day I sometimes wonder if he’d ever been there at all, if he hadn’t been an apparition, a manifestation of Mescalito projected by some cactus-juiced, acid-etched circuit in the recesses of my cerebellum; the one area, perhaps, where neither conscience nor delusion has a place to hide.
In any event, I went home later that afternoon and brooded. All weekend, I brooded and stewed, tossing in a clothes dryer of self-examination. The
Seattle
Times
was no sweatshop, no earth-raping multinational combine, no soulless bank. It was in truth a fine place to work, a public service staffed with intelligent reporters, witty columnists, and responsible editors who went out of their way to be fair to readers and subordinates alike. Still . . . still, that carrot-topped wraith, real or imagined, had hit me where it hurt; had with one sulfuric laugh shattered my mask and spoiled my act as a regular guy.
Monday morning I called in well. Three weeks later, I moved to New York. I should have gone to San Francisco.
I should have gone to San Francisco. If my objective had been to connect with like-minded people, to fraternize, perhaps on a regular basis, with other travelers home from the rabbit hole, moving to New York was a mistake.
Granted, there were individuals in Manhattan who’d taken or were taking psychedelics, but few in number, they flew well below the radar; and even though I lived just up the street from the iconic Peace Eye Bookstore, where I mingled with luminaries of the Beat Generation and befriended Allen Ginsberg, I never established contact with my presumed kin; whereas in San Francisco in late 1964 there was an infestation of white rabbits and they were multiplying like . . . well, like rabbits. A radical new music (a mixture of surfer rock, Southern blues, Berlin music hall, and Indian raga), with far-out lyrics was spilling into the streets around Haight and Ashbury, the city’s younger citizens were dressing as if every day was Mardi Gras, and
Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen would soon be coining the term “hippie.” An incandescent acid rain was sprinkling San Francisco, but Tommy Rotten, oblivious, had fled the thin gray rains of Seattle for the dirty snows of New York. He hadn’t heard the California weather report.
As I look back now, I see that my ignorance had been a stroke of luck. In San Francisco I could have been sucked into the developing psychedelic scene (a
scene,
man); could have been caught up in the looming politics of ecstasy, another sixties comet chasing its own bright tail. Aside from my conviction that for maximum benefit, the forbidden fruits of LSD are best savored in solitude, the psychedelic experience, as I said, was emphatically nonverbal, and after more than a year during which I was as suspicious of verbiage as of a bigmouthed car salesman with dyed blond hair and three ex-wives, I was, secluded in my New York tenement, beginning slowly to fall in love again with wood pulp and ink. I don’t think they were reading all that much in the Haight.
At age five I’d hitched my little red wagon to the Language Wheel, that disk of verbiage that came rolling out of the grunting and growling mud of prehistory, accumulating variations and refinements beyond number as it rolled headlong into literacy, and -- when greased with imagination -- into poetry, into theater, ballads, sutras, and rants. LSD’s preliterate/postliterate juggernaut had run me off the road. I’d believed myself stranded there, but now Hermann Hesse had driven up in a vintage Mercedes tow truck, its radio blaring Mozart, and winched my wagon out of the ditch, demonstrating in
Steppenwolf
that modern narrative fiction indeed
could
transcend bourgeois preoccupations, and with both an enlightening and an entertaining panache, as playful as it is deadly serious, bind spirit to matter and insinuate for readers those hidden worlds within our world.
Das ist gut.
I checked my load. The cargo appeared intact. Transformation, liberation, and celebration; exotica and erotica; novelty, beauty, mischief, and mirth: the goods I’d been hauling around for damn near three decades, all present and accounted for. If anything, psychedelics had cleaned them up a bit, given them a shine. This was encouraging, but having yet to find a literary voice of my own, and not wishing to imitate Hesse (or, for that matter, anybody else), I was to bide my time for nearly three more years before I trusted the muse enough to start my first novel.
In the meantime, however, like a lapsed believer returning to the fold, I commenced to reaffirm my devotion to language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.
Whether the Protestant ethic, so called, is a self-imposed affliction, a hobble, a governor, a kind of chastity belt that limits full enjoyment of life; or, instead, is an indicator of trustworthy character, fidelity, and good moral health, well, that may be a subject for debate. In any case, I myself seem to have been tainted -- or blessed -- with that set of values at an early age and to this day have failed to completely outgrow that aspect of it that applies to conscientious work habits. Thus, though I’d landed in New York with enough savings to keep me gainfully unemployed for approximately a year (considering that my rent on East Tenth Street was $51.50 a month and I knew how to eat for a buck or two a day), my ethic demanded that I put my nose to the grindstone, although, naturally, not just any grindstone would do.
The task I set for myself to justify a Manhattan sabbatical was to write a book, specifically (having not yet found my fiction voice) a dual biography of two power-packed maverick painters, Jackson Pollock and Chaim Soutine, comparing their lives and their art. Although no critic had ever made the comparison (and still have not as far as I know), the connection struck me as obvious. Soutine (1893–1943) was a scrawny slum-dog savant from Eastern Europe, Pollock (1912–1956) a brawny cowboyish genius out of Cody, Wyoming, and the two never met; Soutine’s paintings featured representational content, Pollock’s major works were wholly abstract; yet there were striking similarities in their approach to life and art, and I maintain that Soutine, whose paintings we know Pollock saw at a New York gallery in 1936 and ’37, was the American dripmaster’s single biggest influence.
Soutine was arguably the first representational painter to completely reject Renaissance perspective in favor of an overall emphasis that, devoid of a recessed background or central focal point, made each and every square inch of the picture plane as important as any other. Emphasis was uniformly insistent from framing edge to framing edge, as it was soon to be in a Pollock, though Soutine’s dense, dark passages of pigment lurched at the viewer in a kind of visual attack, whereas Pollock’s roiling constellations swirled all about an onlooker like debris in a polychrome tornado.
Almost supernaturally connected to their primal unconscious, operating at a pitch next to madness, both men lived turbulent, Dionysian lives rife with instances of bizarre behavior; tortured by rejection, disoriented by success. But this is neither the time nor place to get into all that. Here it’s sufficient to say I spent my days in New York researching Pollock and Soutine, including numerous interviews with people who’d known them well, and while I never got around to writing that book (the Dionysus in my own unconscious began to demand my attention elsewhere), the experience was worth more than a dozen seminars at any graduate school in the land.
The eminent émigré sculptor Jacques Lipchitz had known Soutine in Paris, when he, Soutine, lived coatless and shoeless in bedbug-bitten squalor. That is, until the morning an American collector dropped by his smelly rooms and bought sixty paintings in a single franc-flinging swoop, whereupon the always idiosyncratic Soutine ran into the street, hailed a taxi, and ordered the driver to take him to the French Riviera, two hundred miles away. From that day on, Soutine never cleaned his brushes. When he’d finished for the moment with a particular color, he’d toss the brush over his shoulder and grab a new one from the basketful he’d purchased.
I interviewed Lipchitz at his large studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, high above the river, where, as he was confirming that Soutine, like Pollock, was more interested in the
activity
of painting (for both it was an act of concentrated frenzy) than in the finished product, I found myself becoming more interested in Lipchitz’s right leg than in his stories.
For working, Lipchitz wore loose-fitting cotton pants, one leg of which had now hitched up to reveal a surprising expanse of bare flesh. The man’s exposed appendage was penguin white, smooth as an egg, and as devoid of hair as a baseball bat. Not a filament, not a whisper of fuzz marred that pristine surface. Neither were there scars, pimples, or evidence of the bulging veins common in men of his age. It was as if he had sculpted his own leg, carving it from a single slab of purest white marble. I couldn’t help but wonder if he might have done something similar with his genitals. What an outbreak of penis envy that could have touched off at the gym!
Then, when he told me that each week Soutine, a Jew, would consult a nun at a convent on the outskirts of Paris regarding her secret remedy for the prevention of baldness, I wondered if Lipchitz had gotten hold of the good sister’s potion and was trying it out on his leg. I mean, he did keep stealing glances at the limb, as if expecting that at any moment a hidden follicle might dilate there and give birth to a perky thread.
Lipchitz was as kind and informative as he was, of course, talented, and even at the time I felt ashamed that I was allowing my imagination to run away with the poor man’s leg.
At the time of his death in a Long Island car crash, Jackson Pollock’s closest friends had been Barnett Newman and Tony Smith. In my several separate interviews with the two artists, I learned that they had a significant connection that preceded their friendship with Pollock. In his twenties, Newman had left his father’s business, intent on becoming a painter, and to that end, he enrolled in an art academy on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. His primary instructor there was Tony Smith.
At one point, Newman, recently married, invited Smith to his apartment to dine with him and his wife. Smith accepted, and they partook of a fine dinner, served on a mammoth old but elegant table. Upon their marriage, the newlywed Newmans’ families had furnished the flat for them, filling it with pieces that had been in their respective well-to-do households for decades. The various tables, chairs, chests, and stands, even the bedstead, were as thick, heavy, dark, and imposing as one of Soutine’s looming canvases.
After dinner, Newman confided to his teacher his ambition to become not merely a successful painter but a painter of consequence. He asked Smith for advice on how to further that goal. Put on the spot, Smith was silent for an uncomfortable minute or two. Then, looking around, he said, “The first thing you need to do is get rid of all this middle-class Jewish furniture.” He turned and left.
Two weeks later, Smith was surprised when Newman once again invited him to dinner. Tony didn’t tell me why he accepted. Maybe he was tired of eating out, maybe he liked Annie Newman’s home cooking. In any case, he returned to the apartment, where his astonishment instantly multiplied by a factor of ten. All of the furniture, every single stick of it, was gone. Dinner was served atop a packing crate. They ate squatting on the floor.
Smith was starting to think this guy was serious. He wasn’t just another dilettante, he meant business. So, when Newman, at the end of the evening, asked again what he could do to make a contribution to the ongoing mainstream of modernism, Smith replied, “Men know a lot about horizontals. They don’t know much at all about verticals.”
He left it at that, but it was all Barnett Newman needed. Newman went on to build a financially and critically successful career exploring the effects on the eye and the mind of strategically (but seldom predictably) placed vertical bars, shafts, or splinters set tantalizingly close to the edges of vast fields of solid color. Far from the autocratic arrangements of traditional painting, in which the viewer’s eye is compelled to focus on one or more images of the painter’s choosing, any of Newman’s giant canvases issues an invitation -- or a challenge -- for the spectator himself to make what he would of a vertical entity in an expanse of
real
-- as opposed to pictorial/illusional -- space. There is no narrative, there is no seduction or pretty plea, there is only a platform from which we can “feel” elementary verticality as it asserts itself convincingly if unexpectedly against a flat ground.
It’s unfortunate that Tony Smith isn’t around and in a position to advise the human race on verticality because as we continue to procreate like adolescent fruit flies, our affection for the horizontal -- for industrial, residential, and even agricultural sprawl -- is destroying the earth and the Earth. Visionary architects contemplate structures so tall their tops would actually be in orbit, a park on one floor, hospitals, public libraries, sports arenas, and department stores on others: an entire city inside a single building. And think of vertical farms: towering hydroponic greenhouses each producing more corn, more tomatoes than a million acres currently devoid of wildlife and trees, poisoned by chemicals and greed. If we don’t go up we may go down.
That’s the value of artists, isn’t it? Even when they aren’t aware of it, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.
All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language.
The painter Morris Graves, for example, verged on nonliterary eloquence when he told me about being awakened before dawn one morning in India by a strange, beautiful, hypnotic sound, a kind of marvelous chanting. At breakfast, he learned that in that village, as in some others in India, the men and boys have gone out each morning since prehistory to chant the sun up. “Cynics scoff,” said Graves with a smile, “but the villagers point out that in all the millennia that they’ve been chanting, the sun has never failed to rise.”
When NASA scientists invited the mystical painter to Cape Kennedy to advise them on matters about which they were becoming increasingly uneasy -- areas where astronomy, theoretical physics, and higher mathematics seemed to be inescapably crossing the line into the province of metaphysics -- Graves told them about the Indian chanters, suggesting that NASA might do well to incorporate a similarly reverential, less brutal attitude toward space exploration. Graves found many scientists receptive, even agreeing when he argued that to truly “conquer” space, men need to travel inward as well as outward, and do so with the same focus, seriousness, effort, courage, and determination they would devote to searching for life on Mars or establishing a colony on the moon.
Graves was a master at turning things inward. In what I’d intended to be a hard-nosed interview on the question of form versus formlessness in modern painting, he eventually had me on the floor of his studio tossing Chinese coins, consulting the
I Ching
. It wasn’t an easy sell. By that time in my life, I’d reached the conclusion that Asian spiritual texts were probably best left to spiritual Asians. The Bible is an Eastern book, pure and simple, and when one considers the many messes, psychological and material, we in the West have made in its name, one shudders to think of what harm might be unleashed from similar misinterpretations (most due to ignorance, others calculated and insidious) of
The
Bhagavad Gita, The Rig Veda,
or
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
.
I knew that the
I Ching
was oracular, a book of divination whose system of hexagrams, refined in China over a period of three thousand years, was centered on the concept of the dynamic balance of opposites throughout the universe, and the notion that all events, personal and cultural, unfold somewhat predictably in a matrix of perpetual change. I was hospitable to that concept and curious about its practical application, but I insisted on keeping the same distance from the
I Ching
that I might keep from a guru’s ashram or an encampment of Gypsies. Morris Graves was, next to Allen Ginsberg, the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met, the sort of man who, if he said, “Come with me,” you’d grab your coat and go because you’d know that wherever he led you, it would be more interesting than where you’d been at the time.
Thus it was that at Graves’s urging I capitulated, posed a question (a rather general one about how to proceed on my life’s journey) and set about tossing the coins (yarrow stalks, the preferred method, being unavailable). I can’t remember the English name of the hexagram I received as my answer, but I’ve never forgotten the explanation of the hexagram, its verbal direction. It was composed in formal prose, stilted, and a little aloof, perhaps as befitting an ancient oracle, but it boiled down to this: “Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.”
The advice was so good -- so simple, wise, and encompassing -- that I’ve never felt the need to consult the
I Ching
again. It was quite likely the best advice I’ve ever received. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I’d actually followed it.
Gray, chilling, pappy, and blah, Manhattan in March of 1965 had resembled a bowl of leftover mush, the one that, if you remember the fairy tale, caused Mama Bear to exclaim, “This porridge is too fucking cold!” Then one Sunday near the end of the month, New Yorkers awoke to a morning as sweet and fine and budding with optimism as Goldilocks’s training bra. Like some silent yet amplified public-address announcement, the sun called people into the streets, where they were so surprised by the absence of snow and snot that they actually smiled at one another. By Southern California standards, not to mention Hawaii’s, the day wasn’t really all that warm, but it was a change, a definite improvement, and the response was widely mobilizing.
