by Marco Vassi
Without changing the expression of pleasant attention she had worn for the entire time, she said, “I think you are such an utter fool that if you have acquired, by the age of forty, the courage to kill yourself, it will be the one significant act of which you are capable.”
I stared at her in disbelief. I waited for some indication that she was joking, or offering the line as some sort of gambit. But she looked at me levelly, without malice or judgment. She had simply been making an observation and seemed not to have the slightest interest in how I received it. Very slowly a feeling of horror crept over my body. I began to feel worthless and somehow vile. I felt as though I had committed some kind of nameless sin, and was now being called to task for it. Except that the sin was the sum total of how I had lived my life up to that point. She remained pleasant.
For a long time I waited for something to say, and then collapsed inwardly. I was a punctured balloon, and could do nothing but bow my head to receive whatever punishment she wished to mete out. She stirred. “Nonetheless,” she said, “there are some barely salvageable features about you; you are not an entirely broken machine.” She appraised me with a long look. “Perhaps something can be done,” she added.
I squirmed with pleasure. A wave of gratitude washed over me. Involuntarily, I smiled. She was playing me like a mannequin.
“Begin by getting rid of that foolish grin,” she ordered. “I haven’t decided to take you on as yet. There are some things you will have to understand first. You cannot fool me. Anytime you try to fool me, I shall know about it. You are to speak to no one about what goes on here. And you shall have to obey me utterly. Can you do that?”
I was eager to please. “Yes,” I said, “I think so.”
“Nonsense,” she barked. “You can do nothing.”
“That’s right,” I said, “I can do nothing.”
“Stop parroting me, you idiot,” she yelled.
“Excuse me, I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“Very well. Now, sit up straight in your chair. You might at least act as though you had some pride in yourself.”
With that she showed me a simple exercise for centering the self and gathering a fine grade of psychic energy. I was to do it every morning, simply sitting quietly, letting my body awareness move from my feet, up through my legs, through my torso and arms, and into my head. Nothing fancy. Simple body awareness. She put me through the paces a few times, and it was one of the most astounding experiences of my life. I wasn’t feeling my body; my body was aware of itself, and the “I” which I usually identified with became a kind of shadowy presence. “Try that for a few weeks, every morning, and then call me again,” she said.
When I left, I was having acid flashes, although I hadn’t yet dropped acid and didn’t recognize the experience. It was as though everything I saw was washed clean, as though the entire world had just been formed that day and I was seeing it with newborn eyes. I was filled with hope, exuberance, and a roaring sentimentality. Much like the early Christians who bore the Eucharist through the streets among hostile Romans, I clutched my experience to my breast and walked warily to the subway. I resolved that I would change totally, that I would obey all of Mrs. R.’s directives, that I would do my morning exercise without fail. To paraphrase Orwell, I loved Big Sister.
For the following several months, I was treated to a similar routine. Every three weeks I called the guru and went to her apartment, where she politely asked me about my progress. I dutifully reported my activities, describing the results of my morning awareness exercise. It was an odd period, for I received neither encouragement nor blame from the lady. It was like treading water, and I found myself becoming slightly bored. It seemed to me that I should be learning all sorts of esoterica and being initiated into mind-boggling rites.
During that time, I quit my job at Americana. I had reached a point of near suffocation, and three weeks before Christmas, I handed in my resignation. With their usual lack of grace, they promptly rescinded the Christmas bonus I was to receive in the next paycheck. Infuriated, I wrote a four-page diatribe and left it on the president’s desk, and then went back to my office and gathered up all the correspondence and every back issue of the magazine, leaving nothing for any future editor to work with in continuing to put the book out. I waited until seven o’clock, and then piled everything into four cardboard boxes, took a cab to my pad, and threw the entire lot down the incinerator. I would have preferred dynamiting the building’s foundations but I didn’t have the means to match my fantasy.
My next job was as managing editor for Avant Publications, hearty publishers of Escapade, Caper, and a small library of sex-cartoon books. The editor quit shortly after I got there, and willy-nilly I found myself running a suite of offices and six employees. Suddenly I had a huge office on Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, with two phones on my desk, a receptionist, a secretary, and a salary in five figures.
The work consisted mostly of finding more or less palatable material to fill up the sixty-six pages of each eighty-page issue that weren’t covered with shots of naked women — nipples and buttocks exposed, pubic hair forbidden. During the five months I worked there, I looked at over five thousand sets of photographs of women without clothes.
One afternoon, up to my elbows in editorial confusion, I received a phone call from Joan, whom I hadn’t seen since leaving Americana. She and her husband, Douglas, wanted me over for dinner. This surprised me since Mrs. R. allowed no unauthorized fraternization among her students. But I was glad at a chance to pick up information.
They lived in a perfectly decorated apartment in the West Fifties. Douglas was an industrial designer, almost forty, and wore a great bushy moustache à la Gurdjieff. In keeping with the fact that Gurdjieff loved to drink and Ouspensky was down on drugs, they packed away a lot of booze during the evening and spoke disparagingly about marijuana. “I used to smoke charge,” Douglas said, using a term that hadn’t been current for fifteen years.
They were quite stern in refusing to answer any of my questions about Mrs. R. but spoke quite freely about themselves. “I first read Ouspensky ten years ago,” Douglas said, “and I knew I had to follow that path. So I came to New York and sought out the Foundation. I’ve been with them ever since.”
He was utterly committed, without a doubt concerning the rightness of his way of life. It was simultaneously admirable and infuriating. I noticed with them what has often been noted about people in the Work by those outside of it: that they never seemed totally at ease, they seemed always somehow to be watching, to be acting from some privileged platform. There was the unmistakable aroma of orthodoxy about them. Later, I was to understand that, as Brendan Behan notes about the Irish, the Gurdjieffites “are quite popular among themselves”; and their approach to life, despite its peculiarities, lends itself to a sanity and sobriety which contrasts sharply with the collective insanity of the species.
The evening may have been a screening of some sort, for the next day Mrs. R. told me that I could attend group meetings. “This doesn’t mean I have decided to take you on as a student,” she said, and continued with a lecture that made my back teeth ache. “You must be serious about the Work. It can chew you up. I will tolerate absolutely no nonsense from you. You can fool everyone in the world, but you can’t fool me. Also you’ll be asked to pay a fee.” The fee turned out to be twenty-five dollars a month, about which her comment was, “You’d have to pay twice as much for an hour with a mere psychiatrist and not begin to get what you’ll get here.”
The meetings were held in a renovated brownstone in midtown off Park Avenue. The ambience was that of a Los Angeles funeral parlor. Everyone walked around being terribly aware. Conversations were held in whispered tones. Seriousness seeped from the walls.
The major activity during each group was the reporting of observations each of us had made of ourselves during the week. In Gurdjieff’s regimen the student spent perha
ps several years simply taking mental snapshots of basic behavior: posture, gesture, facial expression, movement, and tone of voice. This is considered necessary to rid the individual of all sorts of preconceptions, misconceptions, and fantasies he may have about himself.
About thirty of us sat in five or six rows of chairs facing the front of the room. Everyone maintained a totally still pose and a zombie-like silence. The point, I imagine, was to re-collect ourselves to be ready for the guru when she entered. But there was something about the enforced behavior which was oppressive; there was no ease or spontaneity, no joy of the moment. The mood was one of psychic constipation.
Usually she had us sit there for over an hour past the appointed time. And when she entered, it was with one or another form of put-down. “Well, what have you been doing while waiting for me? Dreaming? Dozing? What have you been doing this week? Who has some observation to report? Come on, come on. Speak!” And then, when someone would begin with, “As I was observing myself this week . . .” she would interrupt with, “You mean, as you were trying to observe yourself this week. You know as well as I do that you stumble around in sleep most of the time. How often did you remember yourself this week? Two times? Three times?” And the offending victim would bow his or her head and say, quite meekly, “Yes, Mrs. R.”
The first week I said nothing. I spent my time learning the protocol, for it became obvious that any breach of etiquette would be summarily squashed. At the second meeting, I was ready. During the week I had had a stunning experience. I had taken to doing my morning exercise sitting on the john in the office because I couldn’t get it together until I was up at least two hours, had drunk some coffee, and let the dregs of the night’s dreams settle. I was bringing my awareness, as instructed, up from my toes, to my legs and torso, and then to my head, when suddenly my brain felt itself as an organ. Up to that moment I had thought of what happened in my head as “mind,” due mostly to the aberrational training I received at the hands of the Jesuits when I was young. Now, at once, I understood the fact of “brain,” and the realization of its existence staggered me. I became aware that my thoughts were simply the way my brain felt when it exercised itself, in the same way that the sensation of stretching was how my muscles felt when they moved. And further, I realized that there was an awareness within me which transcended thought; that thought was a fairly low-level activity, and not to be at all confused with intelligence.
When she asked, “Does anyone have anything to report?,” I raised my hand and addressed her in the proper self-effacing format. “When I was trying to observe myself this week,” I said, “I experienced my brain as an organ, as a physical entity.” She looked at me through squinted eyes. “I didn’t expect you to report so soon,” she said. “But it appears you may be an adept. Continue.”
An adept! My ego inflated like a blowfish. I was flushed with success and the rest of my report came out distorted. “Well,” I said, “I felt as though I were trapped inside my own skull, and . . .”
“ENOUGH!” she thundered. “That’s pathology. Don’t bring that garbage in here to infect the minds of the other students. There will be no more of that here.”
I felt the collective condemnation of the room. She turned on the others with equal fury. “Take your attention away from him. I have told you countless times you have nothing to learn from one another, you can only confuse yourselves. Turn your attention here.”
I was grateful for having the heat removed from me, but I was smarting as though from a blow. I felt chastised and a slow fury began to grow in me. My anger centered largely on the fact that, despite the inaccuracy of her formulations, she was absolutely correct in her attitude. But I refused to admit this to myself.
So, I began to cheat. In the weeks that followed, I started smoking grass again. I began to tell my friends about the trip. Of course, they couldn’t understand why I found the Work valuable, and they put it down. Being suggestible, I felt the impress of their cynicism on my mind. The only person in the world who could understand exactly where I was at and could help me with it was Mrs. R., but she was an irascible old bitch to whom I had no access. I began to harbor resentments, to play head games with the situation, to take freaky risks with my morning exercise.
After two months of the routine, I began to fall apart. My leg began hurting, and I had to wear a support bandage around my calf. I began an affair with a German model who could come only if I whipped her with her brassiere. I started classes in hatha yoga with one of those benign imbeciles who get tired of holy obscurity in the hills of India and come to seek fame and fortune in New York City. Finally, I was introduced to a Gestalt therapist by the head of the Sexual Freedom League in the city, and spent nine sessions complaining to him about my guru. He was one of those brittle Englishmen whose humor is always at the razor’s edge. His entire therapeutic approach involved reminding me to breathe, and laughing at my woes. He thought my problems with Mrs. R. were uproarious, and one day I exploded and demanded that he take me seriously. He smiled and said, “Look, your precious guru sounds like a silly old lady with a dry cunt. The next time you see her, ask her if she’s good enough for you, and not the other way around.”
I never told her that, but the emotional content of his message burned inside me. Secretly I felt I was as good as she was, that she had no right to treat me like a slave. But she had the Indian sign on me, and there was no way for me to bring my feelings to the surface. True to her word, she saw that something was going on, and she told me not to come back to the group any more. “I’ll see you privately in a week or so,” she said.
The next time I went to her home, she racked me up cold. For the first time, she let the shades off her eyes, and began zapping me with megavolts on the astral plane. The words she flung at me were enough to wipe me out, and they were coupled to a force that had me literally wincing. She seemed to be reaching into my mind and heart and bowels, destroying any last bit of security or strength I thought I had. She catalogued all my weaknesses and sins, she openly mocked every trick of personality I had been using to manipulate my way through society. She forced me to see all the ways in which I lied to myself, cheated myself, fooled myself. At one point, I felt my perceptions go hazy, and her face became a ball of glowing light. I was forced out of my chair and pushed out of the room, simply by her sheer presence. I stumbled backing up, and almost knocked over a lamp. I apologized profusely. I was sweating. The effect of the woman was overwhelming. She was being pure woman, without any of the social artifices and cringing attitudes, without the coyness and seduction, without the strident self-assertion that gets mistaken for strength. She was letting me have it, the frank femaleness of her, and I couldn’t take it. I started to leave, almost literally bowing and scraping, when she barked out, “And you don’t even have the sense to thank me for what I’m giving you.” I looked up bleakly. What else did she want from me? Then she softened and said, “You’re right. There can be no thanks for this kind of Work.”
The following week was hectic. In the last issue of Escapade I had done a story on the East Village Other, and as part of the piece had run a photo of one of their covers, which pictured a bearded man holding a sign which read: fuck hate. The distributors refused to deliver the magazine to the wholesalers. Hypocritically prudish to a man, they were willing to distribute millions of photos of naked women, but balked when the word “fuck” appeared in print. There was panic. Some two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the magazine were stacked in warehouses, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were about to be lost. My job hung in the balance. The publishers wanted my head to roll, until the boss’s son-in-law got a bright idea.
The magazines were owned by a printing firm that had been founded by a shrewd Italian who arrived in America some thirty years ago, with no money and no knowledge of English. Within that time, he became a multimillionaire, and now owned nine tenths of a small Connecticut town, including the printing plant, the supe
rmarkets, the theater, the bowling alley, and the rest. The town was largely Italian, and he ran it like a feudal kingdom. The old man’s son-in-law had every last copy of the issue brought back to the town, marshaled some three or four hundred of the girls who worked in one or another of the old man’s enterprises, and set them to work with magic markers. Within three days, using an assembly-line technique and working with coffee and sandwiches around the clock, every last fuck had been covered over with black ink. And within the week, a quarter of a million copies of Escapade moved once more onto the newsstands of America, with the offending picture bearing the one permissible word: hate.
It was at that time that I began to get the first flashes that I had to leave New York. I didn’t know to where, or how; but things were closing in. And I decided that I had to settle things with Mrs. R. My humiliation had transmogrified into pride, and I squashed all impulses to be honest with myself. I just wanted to attack and destroy, to get the guru monkey off my back. And so, one afternoon, amidst the stacks of photos of naked women and the sign over my desk which read “Help stamp out Fuck,” I called the lady and demanded an appointment. To my surprise, she said, “Very well, come up now.”
I took a cab to her apartment. Some tension had been resolved in me, and I was ready to let it all hang out. I no longer cared whether she threw me out or not, although deep within myself I felt my losing contact with the Foundation might be an error I would regret all my life. Yet, I took all my doubts and hammered them into the point of the warhead I was aiming at the guru’s citadel. I would force her to recognize my worth, to stop treating me like dirt.
I stormed past the doorman with an angry glance, daring him to attempt to stop me. I rode to the fifteenth floor, my anger now having obscured whatever good sense I may have had. It felt very good to be so mad. I rushed to her door, and stopped cold when I saw that it was a few inches open. Deep inside me a warning bell went off as my animal nature instinctively recognized a trap. But fools rush in, etc.