Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Some years later, when my sister Sheppie’s husband Morton Abramowitz was the ambassador to Turkey, Allen Ginsberg came with me and some other friends on a tour of Greek theaters on the Ionian Coast. I was interested in the acoustics and how they worked, so Allen would go on the stage and recite the famous W. B. Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The tourists who were around would sit down in the seats in the amphitheater and listen, because here’s someone with a big head of hair who looked like a professor—I don’t think anyone knew it was Allen Ginsberg—and the guards didn’t stop him. He would walk to the center of the stage and recite, and it was amazing how beautiful and clear the poem would sound in that open environment.

  JoAnne and I left Piraeus in the late afternoon for Turkey. I still remember slipping into Istanbul (Greek Byzantium/Roman Constantinople) two days later as the sun was setting, making the sky glow with a soft orange and red light—a warm, welcoming moment. With Istanbul we felt, for the first time, that our journey to the East had really begun. I was keenly aware that this was the gateway to the East, and it was easy to see how the city and its history, dating back to the Greeks in the seventh century BC, had the power to capture the world’s imagination. Straddling the West and East all this time has given the city its special quality: coming from Europe, it appears as an Asian city; coming back from Asia, it looks like a European city. It’s actually both. It’s a place where everyone can feel at home yet, at the same time, the call to prayer will be heard from minarets all over the city five times a day.

  Leaving the ship, JoAnne and I headed to the area around the Blue Mosque, where, as expected, we were able to find cheap lodgings. This was a lively crossroads for young people going overland to and from India. We picked up all kinds of useful information, for example, how to make the crossing at the Khyber Pass where there were no formal travel arrangements available, or being given details of the bus that left Munich once a week and went straight through with minimum stops to Tehran—which we didn’t actually take, preferring instead to travel by rail, which was not much more expensive. Even with the East so near at hand, we had trouble pulling ourselves away from Istanbul. In the end we spent almost a week there. We visited Topkapi, an extraordinary museum, the steam baths known as hamams, and took a sightseeing trip up the Bosporus to the Black Sea. There was also the food (a vegetarian’s dream), the light, the city, and the people—all things together making it hard to leave.

  We had been strongly advised not to take the short route through Iraq to the city of Basra. From there it would have been much shorter to go by ship through the Persian Gulf and straight to Bombay by way of the Arabian Sea. However, the area was considered even then far too unstable and violent for two young Americans—and one a blond blue-eyed woman at that—to safely travel there. Even so, we had to be careful all the way through Iran and Afghanistan. On the one hand, we had a “hospitality rule,” which meant that whenever we met local people along the way who invited us for tea or coffee or even to their homes, we would accept—that is, providing there were no overt signs to warn us away. It seemed to us that since we were so ignorant of local customs, we should either accept all invitations or none. I’ve followed the “hospitality rule” all over the world since then and, with one exception, have never felt uncomfortable. This was when, while having tea in the home of some military people in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, there was some suggestion that JoAnne and I might be separated from each other. They said, “We’re going to separate you now, but we’ll bring her back.”

  “No, you’re not going do that,” I replied, because I was sure I would never see JoAnne again. We got up quickly and left, without explanation. There was no resistance, they let us go. I think they were not intending to be violent, but I didn’t trust the situation at all.

  Except for that incident, our experience traveling through Central Asia, as well as the extended stay in India, was free of any trouble or conflict. True, everywhere we went, everybody—men and women—stared at JoAnne. It must have been shocking and provocative for them to see a blond woman lightly dressed and with her legs showing. She should have been covered. When a woman wore a burka, she was covered head to toe, and you wouldn’t see anything except the flash of her eyes. Here was a woman, from their point of view, practically undressed, walking around the streets. I don’t think we had any idea how we looked to them. People didn’t actually follow us, but they followed us with their eyes. It shifted once we arrived in India. India had been in the hands of the English for two hundred years by then and they were used to seeing Europeans. That made a difference.

  When we left Istanbul we took the train to Erzurum, the biggest city in the far east of Turkey, and from there we took a bus to Tabriz, the first big town in Iran. We crossed the border without any trouble, and after Tabriz we took buses the rest of the way to Tehran. Here we were surprised to find a fairly modern and newly built city. The Germans had a very strong business connection with Iran in those days, and in many ways had become a conduit of Western European architecture and culture. This was still before the last days of the Shah’s Pahlavi dynasty, and the suspicion of all things Western, and especially American, had not yet taken root throughout the country. The powerful fundamentalist state that we know today would not emerge until after the revolution of 1979, so what we saw then in Tehran was the pro-Western culture of a country that was embracing the West and modernism.

  After leaving Tehran we went to Mashhad, the last big city in the eastern part of Iran, where the same attitude did not prevail. We had been on the road now, counting from when we left Paris, for about five weeks, and our next big goal was to travel through Afghanistan and arrive at the Khyber Pass sometime toward the end of October. It was in Mashhad that we encountered the first sign of a fundamentalist reaction to our presence. In Turkey we had never seen anything of the kind. It had for quite a while been considered a secular country with a strong Muslim majority and we often visited mosques and holy places there without any difficulty. But Mashhad is considered a holy city, where saints are buried. We planned to spend a few days but soon found that whole parts of the city were closed to us. There were no signs or warnings. If we wanted to enter a part of the city that, unknown to us, was closed to foreigners, a crowd of people would quietly but suddenly block access. It was not violent, but it was decisive. We never were able to see any of the religious sites of Iran.

  Apart from that, we found the Iran of 1966 surprisingly modern. Ten years later the Shah was still there when Bob Wilson and I were in the midst of touring Europe with Einstein on the Beach. Bob had performed in Iran in 1972 in KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace—a play Bob described as a “mega-structure” that unfolded over seven days—and we were both very interested in the possibility of taking Einstein there. We had an invitation to perform at a festival in Persepolis, near Shiraz, but by then the Shah and his government were considered too repressive, and our Einstein supporters at home and even some newspapers were dead-set against our going. However, Tony Shafrazi, born in Iran and well known in the New York art world, urged us to go. He insisted that Einstein could be like a window onto the contemporary world of performance, and our presence there would have a powerful effect. But that one voice of support was not enough to make it happen.

  In the end, JoAnne and I liked Iran very much—the people, the sights, and the remaining artifacts of the ancient Persian culture, which were still very much around. We left for Herat, the first big town in Afghanistan, again by bus, and found an almost startling contrast to Iran. Years, even decades, of conflict, both internal and from abroad, had left the country largely poor, undeveloped, and difficult to navigate. There was one major road, a two-lane blacktop, which connected Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. It had been built, we were told, by the Russians. There was a small fleet of school buses that had been supplied, in turn, by Americans, and that was the public transportation between their three major cities. Herat and Kandahar were not big cities, each numbering far fewer than 200,
000. Even Kabul had less than half a million. In between was high desert country, stark and mountainous, with flocks of sheep and shepherds scattered throughout.

  My memories of Herat are of a dark, somber place, a frontier city. We passed only one night there, but Kandahar was another story. Though not much bigger than Herat, it was lively, with a busy central market and many small hotels. We hadn’t come for the hashish, but many others did, and that kept a small, transient population of young Americans, Europeans, and Australians very much present, and the hotels reasonably busy. It was warmer than the northern part of the country, but even so it could be quite chilly at night and in the morning. There was no heating at all in the kind of hotels we knew. The second day, we noticed that there was simply no glass in the windows. The desert breeze just blew right in. With all that, we liked Kandahar best. It was bright and sunny, but I was tiring of the food. For a vegetarian it was challenging. Lamb seemed to show up everywhere—in soup, rice, and always also by itself.

  We went on to Kabul but didn’t stay there long. It had an almost international look to it, with all the UNESCO and U.N. people as well as the embassies. It reminded me a lot of Washington, D.C., which I knew quite well, only this was a more or less frontier version, and quite a bit smaller. There were government buildings and government people and Afghani soldiers around. It looked like the capital of a nomadic state, which I think is what Afghanistan was at that time. But now only the Khyber Pass and Pakistan separated us from India and we were ready to complete this first stage of our journey.

  Our information about the Khyber Pass was sketchy. It was known that no commercial buses passed that way. There was clearly no rail travel and whatever air transportation might have been available was far too expensive for us. The best we could find out was that there were “oilers” (big oil rigs transporting gasoline and heating oil) going through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan all the time. Travelers would wait on the main road out of Kabul until one of them would pull over. The going rate was one British pound per person, two at the most (the drivers preferred English money). It all seemed a little unlikely, but we had no choice but to try. First we changed money in the market and bought about four pounds, and the next morning we were standing on the road outside of Kabul leading to the pass. In only a matter of minutes, a big truck stopped just ahead of us. I suppose he was a Pakistani driver, as he knew a little English. Sure enough, the fare would be two pounds for us both. It was only a few hours to cross the pass, but the trip was extraordinarily beautiful. We had the name of a small town used for the border crossing, but after being dropped off near Peshawar we went on to Lahore, which would be our main stop in Pakistan. Also from here on we would be traveling by rail, where—with a few notable exceptions—travel was much more comfortable than the buses we had used since leaving Erzurum.

  The British colonial regime had left behind a three-gauge rail system that served the whole of India and Pakistan, all of which it had ruled as one country before the disastrous partition of 1947. I would say that the whole governmental infrastructure, including mail and telephone, was then running quite well. Before the British, there had been another well-organized government on the Indian subcontinent, that of the Mughal Empire, which had ruled from the early 1500s until the British East India Company gradually took over some two hundred years later.

  With a history of four hundred years of well-organized government as a legacy, it should be no surprise that India is considered today to be the most populous and successful democracy in the world. However, JoAnne and I were there long before the age of internet communication, and some things were not functioning in a completely modern way by Western standards. Even in a major city, like Bombay, you had to go to a telephone office equipped with rows of wooden benches in order to make an international telephone call. There, you waited for your phone connection. When you placed the call, you were given a choice of “normal,” “fast,” or “lightning.” For an international call, “normal” would mean a wait of six to eight hours, “fast” two hours, and “lightning,” half an hour. Still, everything actually worked and, considering the size of the country and the density of its population, not that badly at all.

  First, though, we had to cross the border between Pakistan and India, and given the deep hostility between the two countries, we were expecting some delay. We began by taking the train from Peshawar to Lahore. Lahore is the second largest city in Pakistan and the capital of its Punjab region. It is laid out as a grand city, with wide boulevards and architecture that looks a lot like what you see in India if you visit the Red Fort in New Delhi or other buildings that have survived from the Mughal dynasties, which lasted into the eighteenth century. We found Lahore picturesque and pleasant but left after a few days for a small town nearby, which was where the actual crossing took place. The Pakistani and Indian border authorities had decided that a small fixed number of crossings both ways would be allowed. It was clear that they both would have been quite happy to shut down the border altogether, but since that was not practical, the crossings were cut down to a bare handful each day. We had to queue up and wait our turn, which in our case was about three days, not nearly as bad as we had feared. While there we were treated to all kinds of horror stories from the local hotel people and restaurant waiters about how horrible India was and how unhappy we would be there. Of course, once in the Indian Punjab we heard the same stories about the Pakistani Punjab, almost identical in sentiment and tone.

  We managed to make the crossing in the morning and headed directly for Amritsar. We were now in the homeland of the Sikhs and were eager to visit the Golden Temple. All of this was quite nearby. Once we arrived at the lodgings provided for pilgrims, we were greeted and asked if we were on a pilgrimage. We replied that we were, which had the virtue of being true. We were then given two beds in a dormitory for married people and were invited to take all our meals in the adjoining dining room. We would soon find that this kind of hospitality was available throughout India. It is a wonderful system that encourages all kinds of people to travel around the country and become familiar with their own heritage. In Amritsar, the hospitality was simple, the meals always adequate and well prepared. The work of maintaining the dormitories, kitchen, and dining room seemed to be mainly volunteers. I spoke with many of them and found that they had usually traveled great distances. Their work was an offering to the temple, which they carried out with a real sense of joy. No one ever questioned our motives or right to be there. Our status as pilgrims was enough.

  The Golden Temple in Amritsar is just that: a gleaming golden pavilion. It’s set in a large pond with a walkway from the shore to its entrance. Services were continuous, day and night. The music part of this service—singers, string instruments (sitars, tamboura, etc.), and percussion—was most appealing to me. This was certainly the best known of the Sikh temples. True to its renown, it was beautiful and impressive, and JoAnne and I spent the better part of four days there.

  After making the trip by rail from Amritsar to New Delhi, my first stop was at American Express to see if there was any mail for me. During our journey we hadn’t been getting any news of the world because we didn’t stay in hotels or places where it would have been available. There was no place from which I could send mail, so I hadn’t been writing postcards or letters. As a result, I was out of touch with any European or American connections for most of the whole journey.

  To my surprise, I found a letter waiting for me, and it was not good news. Satchidananda, whom I expected to meet at his ashram in Kandy, had decided to go from Paris to New York. He had met the artist Peter Max, a friend of Conrad’s, and he had been invited to New York to open a yoga studio that Peter would sponsor. Peter, who was a well-known photographer and designer, had photographed Satchidananda many times (on my return, I saw these photographs of Satchidananda, so handsome in his red robes and long white beard, hanging all over New York). Satchidananda was an absolutely marvelous teacher of hatha yoga and a very kind person, and my
acquaintance with him had partly inspired my visit to India, which I count as having been a momentous event for me.

  At that moment in the American Express office, my first feelings were of deep disappointment. But then, and very quickly, I began to feel released, even liberated. We were in India and I had no plans to go back to New York before spring. I had done a lot of reading about India and Tibet and was in an absolutely ideal state of mind to pursue all the questions that were swirling around inside me.

  RISHIKESH, KATMANDU,

  AND DARJEELING

  IN FUTURE YEARS, I WOULD SPEND WEEKS AT A TIME IN NEW DELHI, BUT most of the things I was interested in at that moment were elsewhere, so we did not stay there for long. I made a survey of places I wanted to visit in the Himalayan regions that were home to Hindu and Buddhist yogis. First on the list was Rishikesh, one of the most famous places for Hindu yoga retreats in northern India. There were supposed to be hundreds of solitary yogis living in the open or in caves in the area and, as well, there were a few well-established ashrams, such as the Sivananda Ashram that served as the headquarters of the Divine Life Society and the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy.

  To get to Rishikesh, north of New Delhi in the foothills of the Himalayas, we went by rail to Hardwar and then took a bus the rest of the way. Until we headed back to Europe, JoAnne and I depended almost entirely on the railways to get around. For quite a while we traveled third class, which could be very rough at times, because the trains were extremely crowded. Somewhere along the way we learned that there was a tourist incentive available. With a foreign passport, you could ask for an automatic upgrade at an office in the train station. It was almost always given. From then on we traveled second class, which was almost completely filled with military or petty government officials. It made a huge difference in comfort and the degree of travel fatigue. India is a very big country, but express trains are not always available.