The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Instead of learning, I was looking for enlightenment. Instead of security, I was after infinite inner peace. Instead of a job, I was out to save the world, I thought I had taken adequate precautions against the prospect of arrival but something had gone terribly awry. I had arrived.

  Things were still unbearably beautiful. I got this giddiness in my stomach and walked around completely overwhelmed by the incredible loveliness of the trees and the sky and the moss, infinitely delicate worlds within worlds, and people’s faces and the way they moved and my own body and what a perfect machine it was and the stove and the floors and our funky house. And everything fit together so perfectly. It wasn’t just in the way things looked. It was in the sounds of the wind and the stream and the way things felt, the ground gushing ever so slightly under my feet, the way everything smelled. It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. And it keeps getting better and better. And I think to myself, Look Ma, no drugs.

  People are all charming and silly. The idea of purpose cracks me up. The only thing that puzzles me is why it took me so long to catch on. How did I manage to keep a straight face for as long as I did? I vaguely remember pain and struggle but it seems so remote, so unnecessary, so absurd.

  THE FACE. And then one night, after several days of pure Eden, as I was trying to get to sleep, marveling at the fullness of each moment, feeling that I was living whole lifetimes within each moment, I started listening to and feeling my heart beat. Suddenly I became terribly frightened that it would stop.

  And from out of nowhere came an incredibly wrinkled, iridescent face. Starting as a small point infinitely distant, it rushed forward, becoming infinitely huge. I could see nothing else. My heart had stopped. The moment stretched forever. I tried to make the face go away but it mocked me. I had somehow gained control over my heartbeat but I didn’t know how to use it. I was holding my life in my hands and was powerless to stop it from dripping through my fingers. I tried to look the face in the eyes and realized I had left all familiar ground.

  When I first saw the face coming toward me I had thought, “Oh, goody.” What I had in mind was a nice reasonable conversation. I had lots of things I wanted to talk about, lots of questions it must have answers to. God, Jesus, the Bible, the Ching, mescaline, art, music, history, evolution, physics, mathematics. How they all fit together. just a nice bull session, but a bull session with a difference. A bull session with someone who knew.

  My enthusiasm was short-lived. He, she, or whatever didn’t seem much interested in the sort of conversation I had in mind. It also seemed not to like me much. But the worst of it was it didn’t stop coming. It had no respect for my personal space, no inclination to maintain a conversational distance. When I could easily make out all its features; when it and I were more or less on the same scale, when I thought there was maybe a foot or two between us, it had actually been hundreds of miles away, and it kept coming and coming till I was lost somewhere in some pore in its nose and it still kept coming. I was enveloped, dwarfed. No way to get any perspective on the thing at all, and for all I really knew it was still light-years away and coming and coming and coming.

  My own insignificance again? Shit, I sort of wanted to learn something new.

  “So you really want to go on a trip, do you? OK, punk, now you’re really going to fly.” Or words to that effect. Not words exactly, more like thunder.

  The few times I tried to fight back I was left exhausted. It took everything out of me and didn’t seem to improve matters at all. If anything they got worse. So I retreated and retreated and retreated.

  I lay rigid all night listening to the sound of the stream, figuring that somehow by being aware of sounds and rhythms outside myself I could keep my own bodily rhythms going. Losing consciousness of something outside myself meant that I would die. Only by falling into step with rhythms of the outside world could I maintain my existence. I realized that this meant I could never sleep again.

  A few days before, I had asked the I Ching who mescaline was. I guess maybe that was some sort of no-no. It seemed like a logical thing at the time. It seemed that the two should know each other and might have some interesting things to say about each other. I got pretty excited at the idea. I wanted to cast a horoscope of the I Ching, throw the Ching on numerology, meditate on mescaline, throw the Ching on astrology, ask mescaline about the Ching, and so on and so one, matrix and cross-reference the whole show and see what I came up with. But when this face showed up, I figured maybe I had been messing around with something I shouldn’t.

  I tried to think that the face was essentially benign and that the fear I felt was due to fuck-ups in myself rather than any malignancy on the part of the vision. But it was so hideously ugly. But beauty on a physical plane is meaningless superficiality. Isn’t it? But green is such a bad color for a face. Red is a bad color for eyes, and purple glowing wartlike growths tend to detract from one’s looks. Could this be overcome? Could I learn to love the face? Tune in next week for the saga of expanded consciousness and broadened concepts of beauty.

  There was nothing at all unreal about that face. Its concreteness made the Rock of Gibraltar look like so much cotton candy. I hoped I could get enough rest simply by lying motionless. In any event, the prospect of not sleeping frightened me far less than the possibility of losing contact with the world.

  The sun came up as I was lying quietly, listening to the stream. Everything seemed fine. I felt a little strung out but figured I had passed a crisis point and come through all right. I got up and started the morning chores, building the fire, getting water, starting breakfast. As I got water from the stream I paused and listened to it, smiled to myself, said, “Thanks for last night,” and carried the water back to the house.

  Everything seemed just as beautiful as before but somehow the beauty was more solid, less trippy. I felt warm and good. Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

  I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory.

  Jack had told me that according to the Zen Buddhists, after enlightenment you go back to doing whatever it was you did before—selling shoes, farming, whatever. It seemed like pretty good advice, so I tried to keep doing all the usual things I had always done around the place, cutting firewood, pruning the fruit trees, feeding the goats. But things started happening that made it increasingly difficult and finally impossible to keep functioning.

  Small tasks became incredibly intricate and complex. It started with pruning the fruit trees. One saw cut would take forever. I was completely absorbed in the sawdust floating gently to the ground, the feel of the saw in my hand, the incredible patterns in the bark, the muscles in my arm pulling back and then pushing forward. Everything stretched infinitely in all directions. Suddenly it seemed as if everything was slowly down and I would never finish sawing the limb. Then by some miracle that branch would be done and I’d have to rest, completely blown out. The same thing kept happening over and over. Then I found myself being unable to stick with any one tree. I’d take a branch here, a couple there. It seemed I had been working for hours and hours but the sun hadn’t moved at all.

  I began to wonder if I was hurting the trees and found myself apologizing. Each tree began to take on personality. I began to wonder if any of them liked me. I became completely absorbed in looking at each tree and began to notice that they were ever so slightly luminescent, shining with a soft inner light that played around the branches.

  I’ve lost patience. I’ve lost my brakes. I’m willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does. There were lots of things I just plain wasn’t going to put up with any more. A lot of what I decided to chuck was my old
way of doing things, my old way of being, the big part of which seemed to be patience. I was patient with this and patient with that. Patient with Virginia, patient with my parents, patient with the farm. Patient with Nixon, patient with the pulp mill, patient, patient, patient.

  I figured I had taken patience about as far as it could go and it didn’t seem to be working. Nothing good seemed to come out of it. It seemed the more patient I was, the more I had to be patient with.

  Sometime in the next few days I gave up food.

  “Are you sure you’re not hungry, Mark? You haven’t eaten anything for the last three days.” Kathy.

  I remember trying to eat some bread to make her feel better. I really wasn’t hungry. The bread had a sharply bitter taste. The texture was awful, sticking to the top of my mouth, almost suffocating me, sticking to my teeth and gums and making my whole mouth burn and itch. It made awful squishy sounds. I had to spit it out.

  At the urging of others I made a few more attempts at food between then and the hospital, but it never went much better.

  It had now been about a week of Mark acting more and more strangely since the magic of our joint Eden. Simon, Kathy, and Jack were getting more and more alarmed, but there wasn’t much they could do except talk to me a lot and hope things worked out.

  Zeke was more and more my closest companion. No matter how screwy and frustrating things were getting with people, Zeke was always there, always loving, always utterly understanding. He seemed to know that something was up and stuck closely by me, giving up his usual solitary jaunts. He was my guardian angel. His unfathomable wisdom, compassion, and protectiveness were slightly spooky, but they made me feel not half so alone or scared. The third floor, where we usually slept, was accessible only by ladder, which made it impossible for Zeke to get there. I moved my foam pad and sleeping bag down into the little library-sewing room off the kitchen so that I could always be with him. Even though I couldn’t sleep, I lay down from time to time to get a little rest and slow things down a bit.

  What to do while the others slept? I had read War and Peace and Anna Karenina a couple of weeks earlier and had started through Jack London. I had finished The Call of the Wild and a collection of short stories and was working on The Sea Wolf. About halfway through, the whole thing started getting too real. It was dualistic, good vs. evil, and the evil was just too real and the descriptions too moving and…and it had to be more than just a book. The pages and words would twist and blur in the really gruesome spots. I had to stop and catch my breath after every two or three pages. The closer I got to the end the worse it became. I was convinced that I really shouldn’t finish the book, that if I did I would die or the world would end or worse.

  Since reading was out, I got my old Olivetti and started banging out letters to old friends, to Virginia, to various members of the family. I was trying to clue them in about all the wonderful things that had been happening to me and all the wonderful new truths I had found. Unfortunately, the typewriter bit didn’t work too well. I had trouble hitting the right letters and even more trouble seeing what was wrong about the wrong letters I had hit. One key was as good as the next. While there was a lot of truth to that, I felt it was only fair to the people who weren’t quite where I was yet to make an effort to make myself as intelligible as possible. I switched over to longhand. I still had some of the same problems but to a lesser extent.

  Seventeen pages to Pa, twenty-one to Ma, twenty-five to sister Edie, twenty-four to sister Nan, sixteen to an old professor, and so on. I was writing like the wind. The words just came like magic and they were all just right.

  As far as talking with the people who were really there, I kept coming back to my old question. “Is there a struggle going on?”

  “Is there a what?”

  “Is there a struggle going on? I’m not really quite sure what I mean by that. I’m just sort of curious as to what you might feel about it.”

  “I think I know what you mean but I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

  “Oh, well,” said I and tried to get away from the sticky unpleasantness in the pit of my stomach and back to the sheer beauty and glee of it all. But the question haunted me.

  IS THERE A STRUGGLE GOING ON? Why on earth would there be a struggle going on? Struggle means some sort of pain. What sort of sense can there be in pain?

  “Do you remember the other day when I asked if there was a struggle going on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it some and I think there probably is a struggle going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just something I feel within myself.”

  “That there’s a struggle going on?”

  “Yeah. And I think that maybe like it’s important. That it explains a lot of things, that it’s going on inside everyone and that maybe it’s real important to figure out how to get where we really want to be. How to get enlightenment, liberation, salvation, whatever you want to call it.”

  “This struggle, is it in you or the outside world?”

  “Both. There is no outside and inside. It’s all one. Where do I end and you begin? What’s outside and what’s inside? We’re all one. The struggle makes up everything. The struggle is between two opposites, good and evil, positive and negative, yes and no, whatever you want to call it. On and off. Everything is made up of an infinite number of ons and offs. Like computer language, where any piece of information is stored as a series of ons and offs.”

  Simon and I got into a discussion of enlightenment. The talk was going pretty good. There seemed to be an awful lot of yeses going around. And then he said something that struck me very strangely.

  “You know, stuff like this is really great. I really think there’s something here. I really think I might be ready to go somewhere to find a teacher to help me get further. You know, a guru or something?”

  I felt betrayed. “Go some place? A teacher? A guru or something? Why? It’s all right here. What more do you need? You want a guru? Shit, right here you have the woods, the land, the goats, the birds, Zeke, Jack, Kathy, myself, and God knows how many other incredible teachers, right here. You want guru, shit. I’ll be your guru and you can be mine. What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. I just have the feeling that there are higher beings, people who really know about this stuff who could help me out.”

  “I don’t know, Simon. There’s something about the way you say ‘guru’ that brings me down. I guess I’m just reminded of priests, professors, psychiatrists, etc., and professional poets and musicians even. I just keep hoping that we can find a way to do all those things ourselves. You know, ‘get it in the streets’ type thing. If you’re really dense you might need signs to point things out to you and a real official-type guru, but I think a big part of getting there is just realizing that everything you need is right where you are.”

  “Simon, what do you know about hypnosis?”

  “I don’t know. Not too much, I suppose. Why?”

  “Well, it’s something I’ve thought about some before and have just been thinking about more now for the past few days. I think that very possibly it’s a big clue. I’m operating under the assumption that I’m pretty much like other people and that everything I go through, other people go through the same thing to some extent and vice versa. It seems to be the only sensible way to look at things but I guess it could turn out to be a horrible mistake. If I’m sinking I don’t want to drag you along with me, Simon. That’s one of the things I’m afraid of now, that I’m sinking and am going to drag you and others down into the pit with me. Am I making sense? I think this is all somehow tied up with hypnosis and that I’m explaining it the best way it can be explained. Did I ever show you a book I started writing a couple of years back? It was all about stuff like this. It was sort of a manual about how to operate with a blown mind. Well, anyway, what I’m trying to say is that if your mind is in the right space of openn
ess and awareness you can listen to what I’m saying and get a lot out of it, whereas some deadhead would listen and think I was crazy. I think maybe that’s what a lot of craziness is. People just not being creative enough listeners.

  “ ‘Is the tea in the tongue or in the leaves?’ That’s a phrase that’s been popping up into my mind about every fifteen minutes day and night for the last week or so. Maybe some part of me is trying to hypnotize me with it. Sometimes I think I’m being hypnotized by compost. I guess it’s all pretty funny. Really, isn’t it?

  “One of the things I might be doing now or want to do in some ways is to ask you beg you to hypnotize me. I guess I’m afraid of losing control somehow and running amuck and so if you could hypnotize me then you could control me and everything would be all right. It seems ridiculous to worry about losing control. I have no idea about what losing control would look like. I’ve never really thought of myself as being in control. The whole idea of being in control seems silly to me, hysterically funny in fact, but nonetheless I think I’m afraid of losing control. So if you could somehow hypnotize me, I’d be much obliged. I don’t want you to worry. I’m pretty sure everything will be all right. I can’t imagine what really bad could happen.”

  Most of the time I was talking Simon just smiled and nodded and said something like “It’s all right, Mark. Yeah, everything will be fine.”

  “Simon, I feel like something really new is happening. Like I feel more open toward you than I’ve ever felt with anyone else. I guess I’ve just broken through something and have come to some sort of realization about brotherhood and communication or something. It’s fantastically wonderful. I’m really overwhelmed. I’ve really got nothing to hide. Ask me anything. This is what the revolution, yoga, religion, meditation, etc., is all about. We’re reaching for paradise. Hot shit. I had a feeling we’d get somewhere some day and now I feel we’re really on our way.”