As you will note while reading this journal segment, I no longer have the photographs. If just one person of many receiving this post in substack received and saved my 2014 mailing wit the photograps and could send it to me, I will add them in and let people know at the next Driving the Labyrinth posting.
Patagonia (July 2-4)
On July 2 we left Scottsdale and drove to Patagonia. It was 197.8 miles door to door from Mark Ireland’s to the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, though it should have been a bit less. We probably added five miles worth of wrong turns between 101 and 10 outside Phoenix and then a few more off 82 in southern Arizona. The main thing that stood out during the drive was the border patrol once we left 10 for 83 (and then 82) south of Tucson. The drama of “undocumented workers” or the more revealing and symptomatic “illegal aliens” ceased being an abstraction and became immediate and real theater. Not that we saw any “intruders.” All we saw was their shadows and political blowback: the guard stations, the all-terrain vehicles with telescopes, the highway back-ups at checkpoints for northbound traffic, the white border-patrol SUVs almost as common as blue Priuses (like ours) are in Berkeley (and this was 2014 under Obama).
Patagonia, Arizona, is the last town on 82 before Nogales, Sonora. My only suggestion regarding that is to recommend A Wicked War by Amy Greenberg. This land, terrain, country is really all Mexico, still, and all of it. The US annexed it, and James Polk, in the spirit and measure of his day, provoked a war by a staged incident much as George W. fabricated the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out Shock and Awe—something both politicos planned from the day they took office; they just needed a way to make it look legitimate and stir up patriotic fervor. Polk did such a good job that he even got Walt Whitman beating the annexation drums in Brooklyn. It was quite possibly only when the Southern states realized that Mexico would not join them in the pro-slavery contingent but actually undermine their power base that the consensus in Congress swung away from Polk. Poor communications, by modern standards, also helped. General Zachary Taylor, a future president, was so dismayed at the unnecessary brutality of his army and the unjustness of the unprovoked invasion of another country, that he signed a peace treaty in Mexico City, taking California, Texas, et al. but not the whole country. By the time that word slowly traveled back to DC, the truce was a fait accompli. We are still living out the karma of that act of nineteenth-century imperialism, as it synergizes into the karma of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine, etc., and transnational corporations. The world’s become an international plutocracy, and border issues are merely the forerunners of the corporate state’s security apparatus feeding a Prison Industrial Complex.
On the ground: the border patrol. But in the real centers of power: the bankers, Monsanto, Nestle, Exxon, Citigroup, and evangelical White Supremacy.
The Tree of Life is a wonderful place. As a spiritual and healing center, it is not a pristine tucked-away joint like Esalen, Omega, or Abode of the Message (nothing against those places). It is wrapped around both sides of Harshaw Road with other local residences, even an auto repair shop (“We Fix Anything on 4 Wheels”). It was at a different auto repair establishment that we got directions when mapquest ran out of ideas once we were in Patagonia. The instructions just stopped, telling us we had arrived at our destination when we clearly hadn’t. That one was called PIGS (Politically Incorrect Gas Station).
The main thing about being at a spiritual/healing center is that you receives the vibration naturally and unconsciously as well as consciously and with intention. The part of yourself that is already at that vibration harmonizes with it what is happening (yourself and the place transceiving each other synchronously) and you continue in sync for the duration of your spell.
That’s how it has been for us for the few days here. It is a very different bardo than our other stops or where we came from, though it is also an exaggeration to suggest that it’s a full bardo.
I am deepening into this strange interlude in my life when I am no longer living in Berkeley and not yet living in Maine. This is the labyrinth to walk (and mainly drive) in between, and it is filled with parables and narratives of the unseen real and hidden grail. I remember my past(s) so vividly, and the future(s) seem to me delicate and crystal, no longer a rut or living out a string by dictum and habit. I am balancing between worlds, and even the future is nostalgic in a curious way as it finds our past in northern New England like a nut a squirrel buried forty years earlier, a time capsule in the virtual realm of the mind.
The meals here are all vegan and raw and, in principle, great, though I clearly like some more than others. I enjoyed Neatballs more than Chia oatmeal, the latter tasting like unset, unflavored Jello. I particularly liked the varieties of sprouts that I doused in tahini. In fact, there is a whole sprout house by the cafeteria supplying the Tree of Life by oodles every meal. I also liked shredded beet and carrot heaps, the coconut “VLT,” and lemon-grass/burdock/lavender lemonade.
Visiting on “labyrinth” with those on more usual states of pilgrimage was poignant, people seriously fasting, changing their bodies (and their minds), from all over the US. We spent a fair amount of mealtime with two regulars, a retired Delta pilot and a retired businessman, the latter a former varsity, semi-pro USC jock. Gabriel himself was a football star, all-New-England at Amherst, where we became friends in 1963, the same year I met Lindy. After he and I ate shared a last meal together at Valentine Hall, he graduated a year ahead of me. Thirty years passed without contact before we rediscovered each other in the great post-collegiate diaspora passing for a secular world these days, that is, for small but influential percentage of educated folks—discovered that we were quite different than those nineteen-year-old kids who talked literature and politics in the 60s.
We became Gabriel’s publisher—he was Ken Cousins at Amherst in the New England football Hall of Fame—and have stayed so since, though this week was the first time I am spending concerted time with Ken since college.
Gabriel went from Amherst to medical school to India to Sonoma to Patagonia, along the way getting credentials as a psychiatrist, an energy healer, a dietician, a pundit, and a rabbi. I refer those of you curious about this to a back story on my website.
Lindy and I got a lot of thoughtful attention from him and his relatively recent wife Shanti during our visit. We received medicines for our present life phases and vulnerabilities, clarity about such diverse matters as the Fukushima radiation, insomnia, uprooting the zero-point source of trauma, etc., and maybe most poignant and sentimental (in the best way), a birthday and birthday cake (July 4th) for Lindy, on her 70th, the four of us sitting in their private house.
I learned in a dream last night that Gabriel has been a sort of undeclared spiritual brother all along in the greater source-consciousness realm, though this visit was the first time since college we renewed our heart connection. For almost twenty years it had been a hundred-percent-publishing business. This was in the spirit in which I discovered him as Ken in 1963.
I will state categorically here that dreams carry the personal, symbolic, and archetypal information that they have been said to inculcate by philosophers, psychologists, poets, priests, and scientists for millennia, but they are also visitations to other worlds and probability states of oneself. They are real too; that is, in a universe of energy patterns, electrons, space-time curvature, and the like, they are not as concrete as this physical vibration, but they fall somewhere along the same spectrum of reality and apparition. Where nothing is quite “real,” everything is somewhat real. So it is often difficult, and occasionally troubling and anxiety-provoking, to wake up fully in the morning, to get out of a competing reality and its narrative arc and back into this one.
A few years earlier, I had told my psychic teacher John Friedlander that I sometimes flipped between “this is real” and “this is not real,” viewing the world successively as either. John then said, “It’s both and neither. None of this is real, but it is meaningful.”
Years later I would write my belated response in Bottoming Out the Universe:
It is finally more real to be meaningful than it is to be real—for to
be “only” real in a realm of molecular objectivity is to be circumstantially
configured and then expunged. To be meaningful is to explore the
open-ended possibility of each conditional or ephemeral reality while it
is arising.
The soul is curious about its own nature—the contradictions and
paradoxes that lie within its unconsciousness, without which it does not
have a full sense of itself. It has questions it cannot answer otherwise:
What am I? What will happen if . . . ? How can I be in both loving unity
and deadly disparity? How is the profundity of my experience joined to
the profundity of existence itself?7
Existence plunges the soul into extrinsic reality, opening a pathway
to its own actual depth. Illusory or not, reality is profound and valid.
The richness of creatures’ lives is its warp and woof. Feelings of bliss and
despair are as elemental as molecules of hydrogen or tungsten. Each combines
and converts energy to resolve innate tensions. Difficult conversations
are tantamount to bodies of water or geologies elsewhere.
It is materialism’s bias to think that subjectivity is not as real or
veridical as objectivity; in fact, it is realer. This universe goes as far as its
greatest epiphany and most excruciating agony. It has the texture of its
sprightliest mirth and dizziest nausea. Beingness is, in fact, the fiercest
situation in Creation, fiercer than sun-stars and black holes, for it provides
their ferocity.
When novelist William Faulkner wrote, “Between grief and nothing,
I’ll take grief,” he meant it literally, and the truth is even more literal
than that. We are, as Elena Ferrante proposed in The Story of a New
Name—and she is hardly a metaphysical author—“[an] infinitesimal particle
through which the fear of everything becomes conscious of itself.”
The love of everything too.
Lindy and I went to the local July 4th parade off sacred ground and in Patagonia itself. You have to readapt to the tonal qualities, our species vulgarity, its cigarette smoke, the semi-repressed and suffering noises our culture makes in celebration. Coming from Tree of Life, I saw the parade as a Tibetan dharma wheel of activity in samsara, not judgmentally, in fact more in the sense of having been attuned to the subtlety of the universe and the way in which it is all numinous, for manifesting at all. The Patagonia parade was beautiful, colorful, bumptious, erotic, Venus in blue jeans, martial and, most of all, Holy. As Gabriel said in his teaching at the Pyramid temple the night before, it’s all the Divine, and it’s all pregnant with possibility. Plus we have just enough free will to grow spiritually anywhere, to make it work (for us and for the universe). The local Patagonians, like Tree of Life pilgrims, were working on their particular phases—that’s all. That’s all there is at large and on the horizon: phases, trajectories, evolution, All That Is getting us to pay attention to what is and what it is by letting us display what we are.
The signature activity at Patagonia’s July 4th parade was water-balloon fights between the kids in the procession and folks along the side—both had come well armed for the event, not only with balloons of various capacities but water pistols, canons, and machine guns.
What also stood out was the oppositional politics, which were sharply (and peaceably) represented on dueling vehicles and horses: Hispanic pride versus border patrol and its kindred unbonded flavors among the citizenry.
People at Tree of Life refer to the cities up north as concrete jungles, unconsciously imposed asphalt prisons, constructed as if to contain the heat, hence to provide arenas for a particular sort of mall- and country-club-based ecology. On our second day at the Tree of Life at 4000 feet at lunchtime, a monsoon arrived over the mountains from Mexico in something like 5 minutes from a transparent blue sky; then it poured for an hour, bringing high winds, lightning, and Mahler-like thunder, as it blew the raw crackers, napkins, and some of the food out of the cafeteria tent, but most people stayed and got refreshingly wet. I heard variously that it was the first rain of any kind since February, the first real storm since September, and the biggest rain in two years. It has continued to downpour intermittently and with similar out-of-the-blue sudden-ness since, the two most notable after-effects being the rich smells of plant and stone life, especially the sage, and the agitation of ants who are digging out their villages like mad. Oh, and the double rainbow that immediately followed one storm.
Another high point here is the saltwater swimming pool. I’ve been in it three times—no chlorine!—but one of those times I went running when the clouds and lightning came in, because I believe you’re not supposed to be around water when that’s happening, and I didn’t want to test the maxim—that and the gigantic Tree of Life labyrinth in which Lindy and I walked as a facsimilia and microcosm of the labyrinth we were driving from California to Maine. I have yet to get to the center of the Tree of Life one, but in the process of not, I have walked through at least one lifetime with hints of others.
We left Tree of Life mid-day on July 5th, walking the nearby Mesa Trail before brunch for a view of the whole valley with its house and ranch lots, cattle and horses sprinkled among sparse trees. Sometimes one is an acquisitive tourist, not wanting to miss what everyone else is raving about: the particular trail and view being poster child in this instance. Lizards certainly love the Mesa Trail and dash along ahead, almost flying just off the ground in haste to avoid the approaching Brobdingnagians.
The buzzing insects about our heads were so phonemic that they reminded me of Castaneda’s insect familiars. It would take years of meditation to attune to their esoteric vocal level, but I do sense it here, closer to Yaqui country.
Since Tree of Life is an active commercial healing center, some people people were at their final meal before checking out and others at their first meal after checking in. The day’s spread featured nutburgers and coconut and cherry cream desserts, a pleasant surprise at a fasting spa.
[A subsequent correction here from Gabriel Cousens (in his own words): “One important point....the Tree of Life does fasting in a spiritual and sophisticated way, but is not a fasting spa as you write. It is a holistic organic live-food spiritual healing center, retreat, and learning center.” Sorry for my quip. Sometimes one just tries to vary the language and condense descriptions and, like any hasty (m)adman, lose or corrupt the central point. (A central point viewed from now, Tree of Life no longer exists, for Gabriel left the U.S. for Israel, I think in 2020 during the pandemic).
The turnover-day lunch mix and cross-table conversations held us for an extra hour. There are usually less than six degrees of separation everywhere and plenty of synchronicities in any situation, but that is especially the case at a healing center, as it runs a kind of unconscious energy that draws kindred people toward together. Sometimes it seems as though this whole drama is rigged at a higher dimension, and everyone is implicated with everyone else, no matter how incidental the connection. We are all at multiple phases simultaneously, even the animals, and scripted to intersect each other’s paths in the Great Dance.
El Paso (July 5-7)
It was 330.8 miles door to door from the cafeteria at Tree of Life to Bobby and Lee Byrd’s house on Louisville Street in El Paso. After leaving Patagonia and passing through a border inspection on 290 North, we eventually rejoined Highway 10; then we spent the better part of an entire day, as the sun rounded the heavens, crossing Arizona east of Tucson followed by a good-sized chunk of New Mexico before turning south into Texas via the hills of Las Cruces.
Entering the controversially annexed republic (just as controversial and secessionist today as before the Civil War) was epic in itself. Texas is a metaphorical, ideological, hyperobjective domain as well as an indigenous landscape joining the American South to the American Southwest. A state-line road sign showed El Paso to be a handful of miles away with Beaumount at something like 849. That’s not a state; that’s a country like France or Holland.
Two singular images stand out from the day’s drive itself: (1) cumulus clouds growing above the far-off mountains in exquisite cauliflower fractals, tinier replica clouds forming within larger ones and extending the pile higher and higher; (2) rocks in giant, exotic, mutely hieroglyphic arrays like modular petrified dinosaurs in their millennial zazen poses inhabiting the semi-desert.
Then there was pure space itself: space like mind, like emptiness. I have no idea how far we could see in all directions, but I would not be surprised if it was a hundred miles.
In most places between Patagonia and El Paso, there was not just nothing human but not even the possibility of anything human: no soil worth fertilizing or sowing, just dry scrub getting drier by the hour, and lots of it: whole unbuilt cities, unfarmed farms, uninhabited streets—planet Earth as a prehuman baseline local response to the universe.
It was also endemically New Mexico, how one from away might picture it: jagged-toothed mountains, eroded hills, red and orange rocks, tabletop-like mesas, and little dust devils swirling around in the distance, providing ironic, tranquil validity to traffic signs warning motorists to “pull off the road and wait till the dust storm has passed.” In fact, we were warned repeatedly that blinding dust was “possible.” But it was a placid sunny day all the way from Patagonia to El Paso with only occasional moments of heart-in-one’s-throat wind shear, over and done with before any driver overreaction.
Las Cruces was more habitation than we had seen since traversing the outskirts of Tucson. Then as we passed from New Mexico into Texas and came down out of the Las Cruces hills, El Paso presented a gigantic, sprawling-in-all-directions metropolis, a worthy challenge to any city on the continent. On entry it resembled San Francisco or Denver, though some of its urban expanse viewed while entering high from the west was actually an undifferentiated zone of El Paso, Texas (USA) and Juarez, Sonora (Mexico) clustered around the Rio Grande’s snake—a geographical unity fractured politically and culturally but resisting fracture as a fact on the ground.
Earlier in the day while using the iPod in the car speaker, I had selected the two kitschy but moving cowboy ballads of Marty Robbins that had colored this place before I ever got there in person: “El Paso” and “El Paso City.” In the sequel, with its chorus of “El Paso City…by the Rio Grande”—the singer of the song, as he looks down from an airplane at thirty thousand feet above the desert floor, suspects himself to be the reincarnated cowboy bandit and forsaken lover of the first ballad: “The singer sang about a jealous cowboy / And the way he used a gun
To kill another cowboy / Then he had to leave El Paso on the run….” Now, in a different time, exploiting a technology that allows good old boys to fly: “I can’t explain how I would know / the very trail he rode back to El Paso.” You have to wonder if Marty Robbins is speaking his own truth or merely spinning a good ballad as in “Old Red” or “Mr. Shorty,” but it always had a special resonance for me, so I will provide it as the prelude soundtrack to El Paso. You can also check out YouTube for your own performance:
“Can it be that man can disappear
From life and live another time
And does the mystery deepen 'cause you think
That you yourself lived in that other time.
Somewhere in my deepest thoughts
Familiar scenes and memories unfold
These wild and unexplained emotions
That I've had so long but I have never told.
Like every time I fly up through the heavens
And I see you there below
I get the feeling sometime
In another world I lived in El Paso.
El Paso City by the Rio Grande
Could it be that I could be
The cowboy in this mystery
That died there in that desert sand so long ago.”
Yes, El Paso city, by the Rio Grande. It was exhilarating to hit its actual urban freeways and count exits till our one (North Piedras). We were suddenly out of 80-MPH-posted spaciousness back in Los Angeles freeway consciousness with its dare-devil, lane-switching bravado cowboys and cowgirls. Epiphany and terror both—that’s modernity in a nutshell, and I’m not sure that cowboys are necessarily happier in, as cowboy singer, Don Edwards, put it, “no place for an hombre like I am / In this new world of asphalt and steel.”
I have come to recognize more and more the ways that our road trip is truly a labyrinth and a ritual for departing California after thirty-eight years. In fact, the two aspects converge. Our meandering itinerary is an actual labyrinth leading us through the Old West and Midwest to Maine while it reenacts a microcosm of Lindy’s and mt life together. Every stop seems to hold in its loop a special, indelible meaning. We saw our daughter, son-in-law, and grandson in L.A.—an indispensable offshoot of our life ritual. Then we stayed with Mark and Susie Ireland in the spiffy Scottsdalean suburbs of everyone’s alternative upscale tropical-vacation reality, at least every gringo’s. We had a few days immersion including Lindy’s 70th birthday cake at a retreat center run by my college friend Gabriel Cousens whom I probably met within months if not days of meeting Lindy in 1963. Fifty-plus years later we conducted the second phase of shared ritual (the virtual publishing collaboration sealing a bond in between). Fifty years in this universe is not much, not even a blink of an eye—Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick plastered metaphors for a human-cosmic conjunction neither believed in across Space Odyssey 2001, beginning to end.
During the summer that Lindy and I lived together in Aspen, Colorado (1965, after our junior years of college at Amherst and Smith), Bobby was our buddy, one of the three or four best poets (to our sensibility) at the Aspen Writers’ Workshop. That was the summer when my father had insisted that I work for him (again) at his resort hotel; meanwhile Lindy’s parents refused to let her leave the state of Colorado. So we met in Aspen, a scary and ambitious odyssey for me then—to drive further west than the Eastern Pennsylvania boundary of my youth, through Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska—and a big toss of the dice and act of faith for both of us, to throw in together, that didn’t come easily, especially while that young.
After the summer, Bobby and we stayed in poetic touch. He appeared in early issues of our journal Io; then his book Here become one of the first titles of our new press, North Atlantic Books. He met his wife Lee the summer after the Aspen one in ’65, when he returned to the Aspen Writers’ Work, while Lindy and I got married and headed to graduate school in Michigan.
Between 1965 and 2014 we had only one in-depth visit together, sometime in the mid-eighties when both of our two kids were still kids and Lindy and I lived on Blake Street in Berkeley. Bobby, Lee, and their daughter and two boys came to town. He did a reading in our backyard. It was attended by celebrity polio victim Mark O’Brien, wheeled down our driveway in his iron lung and commanding the scene, as played decades later by John Hawkes, our daughter’s first male lead in her screenwriting, acting, and directing career.
Bobby and Lee took a look at our fledgling North Atlantic Books that day and decided on the spot, as they reminded us again that night in El Paso, to start their own literary press—it was how they knew they wanted to earn a living. They knew it after seeing our set-up—and North Atlantic was in its bare infancy then, without even an employee.
What Bobby recognized was that we had succeeded by departing from the territory of the Aspen Writers’ Workshop and Here and publishing alternative medicine, martial arts, bodywork, and psychospiritual esoterica. He was a literary man, though a Buddhist (but Buddhist publishing was well handled by a formidable contingent of potential competitors). He chose a different path.
Cinco Puntos, based in El Paso, became one of the premier American independent presses, specializing in border literature and meta-politics and featuring educational children’s titles, also books of Choctaw Indian storytelling, drug-lord biographies, and bilingual fiction. Check out Bobby’s own book On the Transmigration of Souls in El Paso. He pretty much says it all about the place and his long tenure there; for instance:
"El Paso is a desert city rooted like a thicket of salt cedar, cottonwoods and mesquite on the banks of the Rio Grande. The Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo. This shallow ribbon of muddy water becomes, within the city limits of El Paso, the border between Mexico and the United States. On the other side is Juárez in the state of Chihuahua. Many different people, whether they like it or not, have to come through El Paso. That’s what el paso means, the pass, a place to go through. Some, like myself and my family, end up staying a long time." (Bobby would cross from El Paso during COVID.)
So El Paso became Bobby’s place, his “site” in the Castaneda sense, his life, his mission, his spirit-body compass. He raised a family in El Paso; he wove his body and soul into the town’s political and cultural interstices. He rooted in El Paso’s desert mycelia.
The West Texas station on our California-to-Maine labyrinth came to mark our third karmic phase with Bobby Byrd, the one in which each of our four lives as actually lived came under joint recognition, nonjudgmental comparison, and review, like reading each other’s akashic record of one incarnation.
It was a big adjustment from place to place. The Tree of Life was a spiritual purification zone, both explicitly and implicitly; it spoke to emptying ourselves and focusing more incisively and inwardly. The food, the landscape, the banter were honed to the same radical healing edge—the shamanism of inner-body adornment. Without fully realizing it, we were carrying that vibration with us like our heart on our sleeve. The adjustment to the Byrds’ home in El Paso was thus an awkward one: from the monastic sanctuary into all the complications and messiness of a household, a life in a divided city (mostly Hispanic but generally non-Anglo), a family’s empty nest (though with the Byrds’ three children, in-laws, and grandchildren all nearby—in fact their daughter and son-in-law were one house and one yard over—plus the relatively realized and unrealized archives of ourselves as parallel artists, poets, publishers, and revolutionaries.
Bobby and Lee fed two outdoor cats whose owners, neighbors on the other side, had been killed in a car accident a few years prior. The cats had simply shifted feeding zones and lived on the porch, ruling and defending it. They were not allowed in the house, where the Byrds’ own cat lived, but they seemed quite happy greeting visitors and accepting the mocking birds’ dives with the strategy of rolling over, playing dumb, and getting one. Bobby says it happens, more often than you’d expect.
There’s a touch of many other, familiar writers in Bobby, at least from Lindy’s and my view, as three of us grew up in the same general sensibility, a bond that transcends a host of other cultural and personal differences cultivated and reinforced during a lifetime; we share native American story-telling, Black Mountain, Robert Kelly, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Ed Dorn, Gary Snyder, the Beats, etc. There’s snippets of all of them in Bobby and in us, and it makes for a commonality hard to explain to outsiders, even writers. What is a literary tradition? It’s more intimate than family in some ways.
Bobby’s wilder, grungier, tougher, and more committed on the ground politically than we are, but if you were to drift into thinking that, in going from Patagonia to El Paso, we had moved from sacred ground to secular territory, then you’d be dead wrong. We had driven all day merely to a different vibration of the same karmic note and sacred realm, a different ring of the same cosmic bell—that is, the next zone in the cross-country labyrinth. We had gone from sacred ground to different sacred ground. Bobby had become a Zen master with his own sangha.
I did have trouble adjusting to the pasta and eggplant dinner with salad that Lee Byrd had generously prepared for us (and ate little of it in keeping with my ongoing food vows)—for the meal in itself represented a sharp departure from raw-food purity.
While Bobby may still be the old-fashioned roustabout, hard drinker, and pool player from Arkansas we met at twenty, he picks up loose paper, plastic, and bottles on our walks through the streets and into the hills, and deposits them in recycling, and is not just a Zen master but a certified Soto Zen teacher. His El Paso sangha meets every Sunday (happily our one full day there) in the remodeled garage in his backyard, so we attended.
The session was essential and crisp, especially for existing not at a secured retreat center but in the very heart of a working-class district (not even middle-class or UTEP—University of Texas at El Paso—suburban; this was a six-pack, auto-repair, and barbecue-smoke block).
Six local supplicants arrived at 10 AM for the start and at once committed themselves with evident sincerity in the midst of urban racket, both conceptual and explicit, as well as the high automotive and alcohol backdrop (plus a low-level background cacophony suggesting domestic violence, or at least friendly friction, in the streets) to regain clarity: clear heart and clear mind. That added a uniquely El Paso note of Keatsian negative capability to the local sangha.
For an hour or so, with bowing, chanting, walking meditation, sitting meditation, bells, clapped sticks, and tea ceremony, our shared experience was purifying and deepening, maybe at a different vibration from the Tree of Life, but an incomparably and equally profound one that was as indubitably part of our life and of America’s spiritual landscape. It touched us in a different part of ourselves from the events at Tree of Life, as a couple who had been poets and artists together with the teacher, a member of our greater clan. I offer the following selection from what we chanted at Bobby’s direction. It cuts to the bone of our human situation:
“Let me respectfully remind you
Life and death are of supreme importance
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost
Each of us should strive to awaken
Awaken. Take heed.
This night your days are diminished by one.
Do not squander your life.”
And then the more renowned:
“Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to extinguish them.
The Dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way in unattainable. I vow to attain it.”
Yes, souls in El Paso, passing and transmigrating amid all the hubbub and the rest.
Later Bobby wrote me about what became of the zendo fund to which we donated seven bills that morning: “Lee and I just went to the store and bought $140 of underwear, bras, t-shirts, socks. Big bags of stuff for kids waiting deportation. Oh, what a sad world. But the shopping trip was fun.”
For those who got the original version of this blog, I provided a snapshot from outside and inside the zendo, the inside one showing one of the members (tattooed arm) next to me and the Zen leader, Polly, seated in the corner, about to ring the opening gong. {I don’t know how to find these; they are no longer on my computer, and I didn’t know how to include photographs in WordPress then. If anyone got this blog back then and save it, please forward to me. I don’t think that the Wayback Machine would work on emails, but I am open to all speculation and ideas.)
Both before and after the session Bobby, Lee, and Lindy, and I did a lot of walking and driving around neighborhoods and in the barren mountains above El Paso, while the two of them filled us with plenty of local history and politics, particularly around the US government’s concrete trough for the Rio Grande, ostensibly to stabilize—actually gerrymander—the border via the Chamizal Treaty signed back in JFK days.
This outing was one of the times when Bobby put a small dent in human detritus left in these old Pueblo hills. (This sentence is in the travel journal, but I no longer know what it means.”
I will mention one other curious detail from our drive: the UTEP campus is Bhutanese architecture, a style that extends to the immediate neighborhood and highway structures around it, as if Texas could facilely digest and incorporate anything, even all of Bhutan.
Interestingly Laura Bush attended a number of Bobby’s readings while her husband was governor (and despite his presentation of poems quite inimical to her husband and father-in-law), and Bobby even led a river-rafting trip as part of a fund-raiser for the border, on which the first lady of Texas tipped over and several of the officers attending her rushed to her aid, guns raised to keep the powder (as it were) dry, but she wasn’t really in any trouble.
The overall West Texas landscape is even drier and more arid than New Mesico, former riverbeds filled with grass. What passes for a park with its indigenous roadrunners and foxes would be an empty lot in New England. You have to look for the local aesthetic of drought-tolerant and native desert plants amid sand and litter.
I finally got a number. El Paso is 85% Hispanic—think about that for more than a second. Bobby and Lee’s social and family world has been located pretty much their whole lives in a Hispanic town. They have committed to being part of its community, to raising their children there, to building a literary and spiritual core, a dynamic press. They have been in one house in a delightfully musical, downscale Hispanic neighborhood for thirty-six years. Their daughter Susie (living next door) has been on the El Paso City Council. Her husband and, I think, her brother-in-law, participate with her in a local Irish band.
The whole meaning of “illegal” and “undocumented” with their inflamed partisan politics loses meaning and frame of reference in El Paso. Though the US has re-routed rivers in tunnels and built fences and manned border stations and placed as many legal, quasi-legal, and bureaucratic barriers as it could afford, it is all meaningless, and will prove meaningless in another hundred or so years. The land will all go back to Mexico; it has to. Texans have merely inconvenienced the flow of water and creatures for a century or two; they have not halted the cultural equivalent of continental drift. The rhetoric of rabid anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, Tea Party affiliates—gringos all—is absurd. There is no White Supremacy or White Entitlement on a planet or in this nation. The ultimate multi-racial flood will wash all residual White purity into greater cultural and biological planet. It will vitiate in its own consumerist, xenophobic, fundamentalist sand. It doesn’t recognize itself, a rivulet in a desert.
Bobby led us into Juarez on the El Paso Street/La Avenida Juarez pedestrian bridge over the dry Rio Grande riverbed. Of all the things he and Lee suggested that we might want to do at the end of the afternoon, this is the one we chose. We couldn’t imagine coming here, this close, and not being in Mexico.
From the mountains around El Paso as we entered, it was hard to see the line separating an American metropolis from Sonoran Juarez; the separation is provisional, yet of course quite real. I have seen Juarez listed with Mogadishu, Barcelona, Lagos, Baghdad, and Kabul as among the world’s ten most dangerous cities, which wouldn’t be possible if it were in the US. I feared going there almost to the degree that I was compelled. But I was not going to let fear win out, not this time this late in the game.
Lee dropped the three of us off at a park near the border. The Mexican barrio of El Paso there is similar to Juarez on the other side, of which it used to be part before the US figured out how to move the border and grab a bit more acreage. Many of the people and, of course, most of the buildings stayed, resisting the aspects of the political change. Bobby thought it a particularly lovely part of town, not fully either American or Mexican, and an assertedly different aesthetic from the American dream, in fact the diametric opposite of ambition for cleanliness and easy-access commerciality though clearly part of the local transmigration of souls. Crossing the pedestrian bridge would lead to a very different culture and energy that we would soon experience.
You pay fifty cents to enter the span on the American side, thirty-five to get back on the Mexican end. The bridge itself is like the zone between universes in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, a place of wandering souls in direness and confusion. In the World War II movie, glass salesmen continue to hawk their wares, though there are no people to buy their panes and no rationale except habit. In fact, the glass is not really glass, though it is represented by real glass in the movie. All are ghosts, thoughtforms—meaningful but not real.
On the footbridge joining El Paso and Juarez, there are other sorts of itinerant salespeople in their own bardos: beggars selling doodads, pottery, candy, gum, booklets, amulets, jewelry, clothing, indescribables, just about anything not mobile and nailed down. I am not sure if these men and women in their avid if indolent actions strayed across the Mexican-American border into the bridge’s center, but they became much more numerous and bedraggled as we passed through the irrevocable if invisible barrier into Mexico over the exhausted river. In fact, these souls virtually blocked the way for foot traffic, hindering any ease of passage without bumping into them.
It was heady crossing into Mexico, a sense of anticipation, a sensation of dread, plus a light-headedness rising from the overall feeling of unreality.
We spent about ninety minutes all told in Juarez. We walked the main drag for about six blocks, then turned right to the park and cathedral. We stood for ten minutes among the parishioners, listening to music and prayers. An incredibly lifelike statue of dead Jesus just lifted from the Cross sat in a glass “coffin” in the alcove. After our visit to the pews, we circled the perimeter and walked back to the bridge exactly the same way we came. Lindy asked if we could take a different route. Bobby said, “No,” then added (understatement of the day), “It’s not a good neighborhood.” Later he described a Mexican friend of Cinco Puntos living down one of those side streets; he had seen people murdered in his backyard. In fact, his young son had watching killing from birth.
During our slow trek I couldn’t find any satisfactory way to exist as who I was. I tried to be alert yet low-key, invisible but empathic, and I don’t think I did a very good job of any of it.
I was not proud of myself that day, and I am not being disingenuously humble either—I didn’t have the goods in me. I didn’t like being one of “us,” but I was. I was uncomfortable every minute, on red alert, yet fascinated and drawn in a horrific sort of way.
This was the Earth, the real Earth, the way most of my species lives, dies, and transmigrates.
I took about twenty snapshots with my cell phone, but I felt inappropriate while doing it, hurriedly putting the object away after each shot; it was as though I was advertising my American-ness and practically inviting disapproval or retaliation. I aimed away from people, except in the crowded park, and none of the pictures look like anything at all. (Again, anyone who received and saved my old journal, please send, so I can share these.)
In order to capture what Juarez was like, I would have had to aim the lens at actual people and take pictures in a blatant way, as of animals on safari, but that would have only accentuated my privilege and stance of entitlement as well as my separation from them, my role as one more insensitive, gawking gringo tourists from across the Rio Grande. They know all about us; they know more about us than we knows about ourselves. That is why we are the anglos and barbies. We have everything and are dissatisfied and don’t know what life is or what to do with it. They see that and pity us and do not feel like victims. We are the ghosts who blow through; they are the ones alive. (The rhythm of these lines and the flow of thought into language comes from Ed Dorn’s Recollections of the Gran Apacheria:
the Apache are prodded out into the light
remember, there are still dark places then
even in the solar monopoly of Arizona and Tejas
we are with the man with the camera
they step off the train and wait among the weeds
they never take their eyes off of us, wise practice
we motioned the way with our shotguns
they are almost incredibly beautiful
We are struck and thrilled
With the completeness of their smell
To them we are weird while to us
they are not weird, to them we are undeniable
and they stop only before that, they are like us
yet we are not like them
And this is an important terminal moment
In the Rush Hour begun in this hemisphere
This is the moment before the leg irons
They look Good. They look better than we do.
They will look better than we look forever
We will never really look very good
We are too far gone on thought, and its rejections
The two actions of a Nous.
I had the abiding regret during our brief somber stroll that I had done nothing, ever—that is, that all the things I had done didn’t count on a planet that was operating at this raw and sheer a survival level. The stuff we passed on Juarez’s streets did count, was life on Earth in its protean psychospiritual guise. I had passed from birth in a wealthy hospital to protected mall after protected mall, some as large as whole villages or counties, all within the greater protectorate of the Empire and its corporate affiliates. Everything in my life including actions that I had once considered important or profound or even lasting (like founding a publishing company or writing weighty books) was just more commodity aggregation, of goods or personae. Even my bleats against the Empire were just imperial grist and fodder All that I really had to give back now on the street was my tacit acknowledgment of that fact, and an attempt to apologize silently, to sustain humility in keeping with the reality.
I don’t think that I carried even that off, though I put most of my effort and attention into cultivating the right attitude and trying to match Bobby’s vibration, knowing that even my attempt was arrant affectation. Not that they even cared or that most of them would have cared if they had known. It would have been a waste of their awareness, let alone their time, a gift I hadn’t earned. Bobby had; he brought plenty of coins to distribute along the way. He was prepared to cross the Rio Grande Styx that day.
What didn’t show up in my snapshots were people lying on the sidewalk sleeping or begging, amputees and old women, children, dogs, sick and mutilated people in states well beyond what is permitted in our culture, some of them moaning or making sounds that you never hear in America (or don’t hear for long). In any of our fine cities the gendarmerie would come and peel them off the streets, take them god knows where.
You also need the sounds and the smells of Juarez to get it: a constant stream of mariachi and mariachi-like music coming from bars and other establishments, as if some sort of carnival were transpiring, only a dark, surreal funereal one. Beneath that were a variable murmur and din, many more voices and more complicated sounds and interactions than on most North American concourses. As we approached the park, a preacher’s voice added its layer to the symphony. Nearby him were Aztec dancers and two young male and female models dressed in phosphorescent, clown-like, faux-Aztec costumes, doing a frenetic dance of their own that seemed a mockery of the old men on benches in their vicinity—they were selling phones for Telecom.
Yes, there were prospering, stylish Mexican families and hip entrepreneurial-looking youth too, distributed unequivocally with the rest, folks who could have passed in any American hamlet.
But then there were those who had matriculated beyond the level of ordinary beggars; they were begging too but in an irrefutable visceral fashion from their sunken stations with a weird assortment of cries and moans, like a movie of Dante’s Inferno.
If I closed my eyes and just listened to all the sounds, they had an astonishingly rhythmic, anti-rhythmic melody, flowing into and out of harmonies, bridges, and intricate cacophonies like something composed by John Cage. Collectively it was more joyful, celebratory, and I AM HERE than a pure dirge or collective expression of sorrow.
The smells were of whiskey (from the open doors of bars), sewage, incense, perfume, ripe fruit, bitter herbs, baking, and life in flesh. As they blended, they engulfed us.
There was minimal ritualistic maintenance of infrastructure here, certainly compared to El Paso. Things were falling apart everywhere—the sidewalk, the walls, the buildings, but people operated undaunted and unfazed around the disrepair.
Mostly Juarez was beyond sight, smell, or sound; it was truly an energy field and aura, a distinct vibration. Rarely have I felt such a extrinsic presence so powerfully: everything had changed from El Paso on both a subtle and gross level, and that transubstantiation consumed and heightened everything, psychic and otherwise.
Plus, everyone was engaged in life as it was given here, so that was where most of my flights of fancy went, into trying to find my own alternate life down these orphic streets, a thought experiment based on the notion of having I been born and grown up here—what the surroundings felt like to those for whom they were home and who had no other place to go day and night, day and night; what it might feel for some future being on my karmic thread, either here or elsewhere or on some other world, to get born in such a place. That is what Juarez opened in me. That and the sense that my humanity was measured by the amount of compassion I could muster, amidst my knee-jerk self-protectiveness, the desire to be separate and get back to America as soon as possible and not be this, the wish not even to look too seriously at what taking place nakedly on the ground, living and dying.
Juarez disclosed the baseline denominator, where all things eventually end up.
As we approached the bridge for our return, I felt remorse for leaving it behind without fully absorbing it or testing myself and my limits against its limits, tasting its actual grime and surviving, but I never would, not in this life if I could help it.
In the end I was taken with the beauty of the place, and by that I mean how its chaos, human misery, and warlord exploitation settled at the level of a complex ceremony that overrode each of them and served a greater cosmic esprit. If the infrastructure of the United States collapsed to the same degree, it would not be nearly as beautiful, not beautiful at all. It would be quite ugly, and things would get far uglier very fast (Dorn’s rhythm again). That’s what all those anti-immigrant ideologues don’t grok: the real poverty, vacuity, and degradation is in their immediate mall-epiphany midst, represented by their gunnism (that blue-collar version of French existentialism), their rabble-rousing and sloganeering, because they are all bravado and, as Yeats had it, “passionate intensity,” supported by hot air. They are flimsy to the point of meaningless by comparison with what is on the border or in Mexico. All that is holding up the thin veneer of these folks’ avidly-sought and held upscale living, civility, and the civil order around them are banks, temporary permission of Wall Street, the various Wal-Marts and Amazons frenzy-feeding off their consumer line of cash and ersatz productivity, and the temporary largesse of so-called Citizens United corporations with their bought judges and pyramid schemes of mercenaries. Take all that away, and Juarez would look like the acme of human civilization on the Rio Grande. That is, Mexico’s preferred aesthetic of survival: a state of creative chaos and dynamic disequilibrium that is the true art and civilization of the third planet from Sol—more so than all the technologies of the West. That is what the jihadists are trying to tell us from their own states of anti-consumerism, for they are in the same cabal of renunciation. Juarez, though, gets a free pass. After all, they keep the basic peace, the joy, even with the drug lords testing daily how much God will permit, will let them get away with, how much mayhem and blasphemy, how many times over they can drown the ceremony of innocence, without His striking them dead (if He even exists there).
In the circumstance of Juarez, those anti-immigrant folks would kill and eat each other faster than the participants of a Survival Reality TV show, which is what most of America is sans the producers and funding. But Juarez is Reality.
Still it is a complicated, multi-level issue because, after all, with gangs thriving and drug wars presently raging, the mayor and police chief of Juarez choose to live in El Paso, out of reach. With apologies to Yeats, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Mexico City to be born?” Or Washington D.C., or Damascus, or Lhasa, or Paris.
On re-entry to the US, I watched the woman immediately in front of us get led away by an agent, who looked about sixteen. He returned from an inner room; she didn’t. And this from was the privileged short line for US citizens only. The non-US-citizen line stretched well back into Juarez.
On the way into the purgatorial building, I took one snapshot of the line of cars (El Paso in the background) before Bobby told me to put my cell away because they didn’t need much of an excuse—and they hold all the power.
When my turn came, I showed my passport to the youth in uniform. Our dialogue went:
“What were you doing there?”
“We just went to walk around for a couple of hours.”
“What did you think of it?”
“Intense.”
No response, he just looked at me.
“It was the real world,” I tried.
He looked at me a bit longer, then said, “Did you buy anything?”
“No. Just looked.”
This journey to Juarez was a high point of Bobby’s and our long association. Lindy and I couldn’t have gone there ourselves, and we couldn’t have asked for a better guide through the town. We had Kerouac qua a Soto Zen Master as Beatrice, leading the way, keeping us safe, telling us stories of current events, political watersheds, crimes, pool games, incidents involving his sons, stuff that took place at different bars and other establishments, including Kerouac’s own adventures here too, including Bobby’s escapade of taking a photograph for a Cinco Puntos cover at the Kentucky Club (where everything begins and ends, like the book says) or (as Bobby says): words to live by. He made it both educational and initiatory, and all along we felt in impeccable hands, as though he was prepared and at harmony with the people and place, as though he was leading us on a walking meditation through the circle of the damned, though it was unclear (again) whether that meant us or them. That was the key to the walk: Gate gate, paragate, for sure: “Gone gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond; O what an awakening, all fulfilled!”
. Thanks, Bobby, for being a true poet and warrior and for striking the right chord, human and political, all the way. Thanks all the way from Aspen (age twenty) to El Paso (age seventy). Thanks for holding the station on the fort.
The next morning Lindy and I set out, planning to leave Highway 10 and head south to Marfa for the day but, as soon as we got on the road, Lindy said, “We need time to think and absorb all this. And I don’t want to go out of our way; we don’t need a whole irrelevant stop.”
I agreed. I was not in the frame of mind to sight-see in Marfa, and the so-called organic bed-and-breakfast in Marathon at which we planned to stay turned out (by phone) to serve supermarket bacon and white-flour-and sugar pancakes with fruit syrup, so it was organic only by the standards of West Texas metaphor.
After I complained, the woman said that she would change their website to Organic When Available. Isn’t America great? Compassionate when convenient. Good guys when we want to be (and wheere we get to wear our guns publicly). Bad guys when the President is black, I mean socialist. Why there’s even a new device to alter your engine to give off more carbon and lots of black smoke, just to say fuck you to Obama and the EPA.
So we committed ourselves to Highway 10 all the way, planning to get as far as we could in one day. Ambition to reach Austin was immediately catapulted by a spectacular, chilling accident just ahead on the road. We saw the smoke and heard the initial explosion: an SUV had caught fire. A border-patrol officer who happened to be on the job stopped all traffic and kept it stopped until the fire died down—the explosions from the vehicle were too powerful and unpredictable to allow anyone to pass in range of flying metal and glass. That delay took about 45 minutes while people left their cars and gathered on the highway in an improvised social event. Folks from these anonymous cars and trucks turned out to be quite agreeable, knowledgeable, and authentically empathic for what was happening up ahead. No one knew if the people in the SUV had been killed, but there was concerned speculation.
A few of us edged closer, but I stopped at a certain point while the rest of the group, all younger then me and all men, continued forward. The smoke was toxic, and I had a real disincentive to breathe more of it. I did see the car explode several times and flames shoot higher, smoke turn blacker. It was macabre as well as tragic, but that’s about it. We were on the yuppie side of the Rio Grande and waiting for traffic to move again, which it eventually did.
We drove past our comfort level to get to Fredericksburg, 502.8 miles on the day.
A full day of driving changes both consciousness and physical capacity. Everything in memory and being that comes to the surface is examined and re-assimilated. What is added is simply the slowly shifting landscape. We were always in Texas but had covered the equivalent of Denver to Wichita in the central US. The progress showed when we exited for gas; it looked less Arizona and more like Indiana or even the South. At our age, the spine resisted set driving posture and, by the last stretches near sundown, we were alternating at every rest stop, stints of about forty-minutes minutes each.
We picked Fredericksburg off the map as a large enough town like to have decent food and a pleasant enough motel in the last stretch of 290 before Austin. It was a relief to find greenery, a town, a classic “Main Street.” We parked and walked around a bit like ghosts, instinctively spurning noisy, smoky pubs but seeing little else but those kinds of establishments and fast food or what we had long ago come to refer to as “generic Dennies.” Then we wandered, as it turned out, the wrong way off the main drag and found a park, a library, and public offices, deserted except for homeless males. These folks weren’t threatening as such, but we didn’t belong there, certainly not dazed and confused from 500 miles of driving; it was a caution that one can’t just wander naïvely in an unknown town.
We got back in the car and cut a wider swathe. At a Christian mission house on the other side of the strip, we were directed to a different nearby part of town where we chose the cheap but spiffy Inn at Baron’s Creek from among several. The woman at the desk thought that we might still get service at the Navajo Grill. We called their number and were told that we had ten minutes get there to place an order. It was only two miles out the other side of town. We made it in time for some Native American dishes after which (and dessert) we stood under the stars of a warm Fredericksburg night. Looking back over our trail, we were now clearly launched. This was all new territory, and Berkeley felt far away and long ago. That had been the point: get buried in the labyrinth and reemerge in Maine only after unwinding its depths.