by Marco Vassi
And it was a busy day. I found myself behind the desk, selling books, rapping with people, and ducking in to the back every now and then for a hit on the peyote bottle. I got extraordinarily high, but it was the sort of high that builds very slowly and gradually, so that I felt more like I was sitting on a high mountain peak than balanced at the tip of a flagpole. It was in the organic nature of the peyote, and the slow crescendo of the day, that I lifted slowly to a point where it was difficult to estimate just how high I was.
As the hour for the concert approached, the tempo increased. And finally, about seven o’clock, ten or twelve of us finished off the rest of the tea and strolled over to the campus auditorium. As soon as I walked into the place, I got a complete flash on the true scene in Arizona. For it was filled with thousands of the most beautiful people I had ever seen.
The city heads were only the tip of the iceberg. Out in the hills, in the desert, in the ghost towns, on farms and ranches, lived the members of the larger community, the dropouts who had dropped so far out that they were invisible. And so invisible were they that they could live in the heart of right-wing America, staying pleasantly stoned, living simply off sunshine and fresh air and good food, and never be noticed; for they had become one with their environment. And now they were massed together, and while there was little in the way of freaky dress or hippie insignia, I could see in the eyes and the smiles, the gestures and voices, the true gentleness which had been the hallmark of the early Haight. America’s love generation had been seeded back into the soil and was quietly living the good life in the last unspoiled areas of the continent.
I became the total impacted experience of the moment and zoomed immediately to the highest level of intensity of which I am capable. I went down front to find my seat, but found that the bookstore and food store family had all gathered in the space between the front row and the stage. Everyone was in costume. I was wearing my venerable red robe, a white cotton tunic underneath, a velvet cowboy hat, and shades. John looked like a wizard. The others were clearly from Oz.
The local head of the Peace and Freedom Party came out and gave a small talk, getting into the cat who was now in jail, and then introduced the Dead. As the curtains parted I looked around the auditorium. There were no police, no signs of control. And yet, there was a deeply felt order. There wasn’t the slightest vibration to indicate that things would get out of hand that night.
The group began its thing, and we listened through the first piece. But by the second, it was impossible to keep still, and we started moving. By the third, we were dancing openly, and by the fourth we were going wild in the aisles. Now, when this happens, the group on stage pays very little attention and keeps on playing as though it were in a studio. But the Dead were sensitive and responsive, and they did that thing which is most gratifying in the world to a dancer, they began to make our movements part of the music, playing to us and with us, responding to our responses, working to reach climactic points with ours. In short, we became a dance-and-music ensemble. And the audience was totally sympathetic. Within an hour, the place was rocking. Perhaps fifty people walked out, unable to absorb the heavy vibrations which were beginning to saturate the walls.
And by the second hour, all distinctions had been broken down. The scene was all sound and movement. And then, Shiva descended.
Shiva is perhaps the grandest conception that the mind of man has ever created. Coomaraswamy, in his Dance of Shiva, spells it out in detail. To understand, to really understand the scope and depth of the Shiva concept, is to have a world-view which blends the artistic, religious, and scientific modes at their highest synthesis, and to clothe the resultant metaphor in some of the world’s most sublime poetry. The entire history of the solar system is but a twinkling in the eye of Shiva, and it is his dance which destroys the cosmos in a grand conflagration which precedes the night of Brahma and the ensuing creation of a new universe. The dance itself is but metaphorical language for what science is recently reformulating in terms of its subatomic schema of existence.
Shiva dances and All is One. The male and female principles join, and in their union is born the entire manifest universe. All phenomena are but the flashing colors of the movements of Shiva’s dress. All dualities are but the striving for opposites to drop their illusory aspects of either/or and merge into a glorious both/and.
That night, the group of us began to move as a single organism, losing all sense of distinction, forgetting time and place while remaining in time and place. And we discovered again the crushing joy of the dance, that highest and most perfect of all man’s expressions, when the I and the Other become the One, and the One moves in an eternal round of ringing pain and pleasure, realization and sleep, creation and destruction.
The last piece played was “Let It Shine on Me,” and I felt borne aloft by the waves of the music. The electricity sent my body into rapid minute spasms each time the electric guitar bent a note; the molecular level of my body felt its quick panting rhythm each time the harmonica shuddered down the scale; and the beat of the drum sent the vegetative flow thudding up and down my limbs and spine. I went through all the historical forms, played all the sexual roles, visited all the halls of the deities, arid all in the pantomimic dancing exuberance of this thing called “I.” The body was the vehicle that night; it was the rapture of the body which informed the mind. It was the yearning of the heart which stormed the heavens and conquered the hells.
Then, the music died down and Pig Pen began a rap. We settled down to a jogging swaying rhythm. At one point he said, “Do you ever wake up in the morning and don’t know who you are?” Something in his voice caught my ear and I looked up at the stage. And found him staring down into my eyes. He pointed one finger and said, into the microphone so five thousand people could hear, “I’m talking to you.” I almost fell back two feet, and felt the eyes of the crowd on me. The question circled through my mind. “Yes,” I shouted. “You want to know what I do when that happens?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Well,” he said, “I always have a woman lying there next to me and the first thing I do is tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, baby, come on over and tell me what my name is.’ “
And then the group hit a mighty chord and rocked on toward the end of the piece. There was total pandemonium, and I remember the bunch of us leaping high into the air, throwing ourselves over the railing, and screaming and screaming as loud as I had ever heard people scream, until the music came to a crashing halt, and the curtains abruptly closed.
Then, suddenly, it was all over. I stood there, stunned, as all the people in the auditorium began to file out. I waited for some return, some feedback, but there was only the empty stage. I felt as though I had suffered some monumental ripoff, letting all my energy and perceptions and vibrations be sucked into the air, to feed the crowd, to feed the band, and received nothing back. There were just a bunch of whacked-out musicians making a few thousand dollars in an uptight town, for a group of teen-age would-be politicos. Shiva hadn’t descended at all. There was no Shiva, that was merely an idea. I had let myself be used, I had used myself, as psychic cannon fodder.
I looked around and saw that the family had also left. Of course, for them, this was just a wild night out. None of them would have taken the intense metaphysical journey which had wrung me dry. A great crashing took place, but I remained high in spite of it. The resultant state was dread. I left the campus and walked toward the bookstore. Everything had become alien. All the people were strange. There was no one there who even knew my name, who cared what I was feeling, who could comprehend what I had just experienced. I was free, and I was frightened.
There were people at the Mandalia and they were preparing to drive home. Half a dozen of the family were there, plus some others who were acquaintances. I got in the car and rode back in silence. I felt bitter and superior. I needed the people around me and yet I despised them. Worse, there was no way to make contact with them,
for we inhabitated different universes. A dozen times I wanted to speak, and realized the inadequacy of words.
And then the idea hit me. I would not speak. I would not speak again. I thought of the boy in prison for five years. I would not speak for five years. I would write him a note telling him that I had taken a vow of silence for the duration of his imprisonment, and that by this vow he would know that he wasn’t forgotten. Once again I stepped out of despair by the expedient of adorning myself with a myth of impossible proportions. Yet, it served the purpose, as would have any less baroque and grandiose neurotic defense. In these, as in most other matters, it is the style of the gesture which separates the artist from the run-of-the-mill psychopath.
The scene at the house was turgid. John and Ginny, Don and his old lady, and Connie, the tiny grain-fanatic, sat on one side of the room drinking tea and smoking grass. The other group of about five people sat on the other side, talking almost secretly among themselves. I went into the bedroom and wrote the note to the man in jail, and put it away for mailing in the morning. I felt elated once more, but didn’t have the presence of mind to realize that I was simply following the waves of the drug and the environment, as helpless as a cork on a stream.
I sat midway between the two groups, and got heavy. I sank deep into my resolve and absorbed from it all the benefit which would have accrued had I actually carried out my plan. I got high on my self-delusion. It took perhaps some ten minutes for some of the people to notice that I was sitting there, very loudly being silent. Don called over to me and asked if I wanted a joint. I waved my hand. “What’s the matter, man?” he asked. “Ain’t you talking?” I shook my head. Again I got up and went into the next room and wrote a note which I pinned to my chest. It read, “I do not speak, but I can hear everything you say, and will do my best to help you.” And returned to my post.
The reaction that the note caused ranged from the feeling that I was stoned and on some kind of strange trip, to the kind of revulsion people often feel in the face of massively irrational behavior. But I did not flinch. Once again, I was forgotten by the others, and then a strange thing began to happen.
I could hear, not only every individual conversation in each group, but the thoughts and intents of all the people there. In effect, I was doing no more than paying attention to the total ensemble of relationships and communications in the room. This is no more than what a person ought to do all the time anyway, but it took that massive amount of peyote and the wild trip of the night to bring me to that point which the mass of mankind does not attain, and views with a suspicion of witchcraft. So low has our species sunk that we cannot stay tuned to all the levels of intercourse which take place, and we laughingly call the blind shouting we do at one another human speech. From my vantage point, I could literally see the shapes of energy as they shifted with the changes in focus and emphasis.
Don, who was generally thought to be inarticulate, turned out to be a brilliant talker. All that was required was to be silent and let him come to the end of his rap. He talked the way a musician plays, and to listen to him for content was as silly as trying to understand what a musical phrase “means.” I was able not only to sit in my own silence, but to pervade the room with silence, so that the words each person spoke stood out sharp and clear and it was possible to actually hear what that person was saying, stripped of all punctuation marks and projections and social-theatrical roles. It was a chilling experience to listen to the naked human voice in that way, and to realize that we are all always so exposed, all the time, in our voices and eyes and gestures and body postures and intentions. It is only necessary to pay attention and stop one’s inner clatter, to silence the thought machine in the brain.
Then, although the two groups weren’t talking to each other, I saw the subtle signals which passed back and forth. The people from the family were blind to that, but the other group gradually fell silent and began watching me listening to the other group talk, amplifying my perceptions with minute facial expressions. In short, they began tuning in on my wavelength. At one point, Don’s rap filled up like a balloon over a cartoon character’s head, and began floating across the room. I looked up and watched it sail overhead. One of the people in the second group saw me looking at it, and then saw it. He grabbed the person next to him and said, referring to me, “Do you see what he’s doing!”
I smiled to myself. At last, I was being recognized. But just then, the balloon burst, and the room filled with confusion. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once and sharp-edged waves of paranoia filled the space. My mind, very vulnerable and sensitive, screamed in pain. I ran into the kitchen, found an iron pot, and returned with it on my head. The thing helped. Whatever the relationship between the metal in that pot and the vibrations in the room, it had the effect of blocking out all the jagged energy singing through the room. I added a signature to the note on my chest. It said, iron head. What a perfect name for a Zen master, I thought.
After a few minutes, things calmed down, and I heard Connie’s thin voice in a clear whisper to John: “Do you think he’s really crazy?” she said.
I saw the photograph of myself. Wild-eyed, red-robed, sitting in the middle of a house of crazies in Tucson, having made a vow of silence and now crowned with an iron pot on my head. The immense confidence I had just felt crashed, and emerged as its opposite. Suddenly, I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Fear flooded my veins. But there was nothing for it and I continued to sit there, keeping up the front.
Several new people came in, and looked at me with raised eyebrows. One sat next to Ginny and asked, “What’s the note on his robe say?” She looked up at me and said, “Oh, nothing at all.” And everyone laughed.
Now the mockery began. The weakness I was feeling egged them on, and the room lit up with evil grins and condescending glances. I felt myself collapse, and lay down on the floor.
Then Don put on a recording of electronic sounds based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was an attempt to record the sounds of breath and blood and heartbeat and fading consciousness that are heard in the ears of a dying man. I entered fully into the experience, and in my state of high suggestibility, I slipped into the state of expiration. I sank below the molecular level of consciousness and existed as a mass of electrons. I understood the universe, not intellectually, but experientially, as an electric phenomenon, and in a flash, the entire world of appearances melted like a rubber mask and was seen for the shadow show that it is.
And in the midst of this, a loud metallic laugh crashed across the room, and I sat up with a sob. I leapt through giant levels of consciousness in an instant, and it freaked me. Suddenly, I was convinced that I was actually, physiologically dying. The usual thoughts went through my head. “I took too much peyote, I have strychnine poisoning,” and so forth.
I jumped up and ran into the back yard, to be among the stars and trees and grass. If I was to die, it would at least be in the bosom of nature. I knelt down under the fig tree, and for the first time in years, attempted to pray. There are no atheists on bad trips. I felt hypocritical, for I had long ago discarded any belief in a personal God who listens to the words we think when we think we’re praying. But I was desperate.
“Just let me make it through this time,” I said, “and I’ll never take dope again. I’ll never pretend I’m a Zen monk again.”
And as I prayed, a small thin voice in me said, “You liar. You know that if you make it through this one, you’ll be back at the same old stand tomorrow.”
The voice freaked me out. “Sshhh,” I said to it. “He’ll hear you.”
And with that, a great ten-foot bookcase which had been brought out of the house and was standing solidly and in total stability by the side of the house, for no known physical reason, toppled over and fell onto the hard ground with a great resounding crash.
My hair stood on end. “All right,” I said, “I lied. I’ll be smoking grass again tomorrow. But j
ust get me out of this one.”
Then my spirit lightened, and the worst of it passed. I sat under the stars for over an hour, and then went back inside. The guests had left. I went past the alcove where John and Ginny were sleeping. John looked up. “Ginny can’t sleep,” he said. “Will you help me massage her?” It was clearly an invitation to a threesome. But Ginny was the one who had led the mockery of me earlier, and John had been no help at all. I was pissed off. I leaned over, drew their heads together with my hands, and leaned my forehead to touch the spot where their heads met. And then I took every bit of heaviness that was wracking my being, spewed it out of my third eye, and laid it right on them. They passed out immediately, and were depressed for three days afterward.
I walked into the kitchen. My vow of silence was growing unbearably oppressive. I got a flash on what it would be like to be locked inside my head for five years, never to let my voice out. I began to sweat, and went into the living room.
Don was still up. “Hey, man, want a joint?” he said. And in his eyes I saw actual concern, and remembered that he was the only one who hadn’t turned against me, was the one who tried to communicate with me earlier in the evening. “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” The words came out without thinking.