Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 18

. . . The starry-eyed mists of Avalon: walking now in Topanga Canyon, hearing the coyotes howl at night, the chaparral, the golden hills of California. The respective landscapes change in my mind’s eye to fit the environment. Bingo! It’s been a hot day just outside of L.A., and the ozone is a little muddled with smogsville. This place, gentrified into elite musicians, writers, businessmen, “computer rats” working at home, etc.

I remember sitting next to Mick Jagger at the old Topanga Corral. He was with Bianca then, and Charlie Watts was there too. They were sitting next to us, and all of a sudden they lept into their black limousine and moved on down the road, only to return a few minutes later to see this new English rock group they knew and were checking out. It was an unassumingly hip low-key bar, and so the groupies were not so much in attendance. Anyway, the terrain in these whereabouts doesn’t hold the same number of trees per acre/hectare as in Austria – these are the wide open spaces, with coyotes and deer, foxes and snakes.

The Pacific coast is a few miles away. The Chumash Indians were living down there, and now the rich soak up the rays down the PCC-Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Bobby Zimmerman had, or his ex-wife may still have, the house with the dome, built near Pt. Dune. We used to body surf at Zuma when the waves weren’t too high. In Topanga, I used to do hatha yoga in a room above that health food restaurant, before the siddha yoga-ashram-guru era kicked in, while in Venice I used to do the asanas/postures at Earl Newman’s old art poster studio. The thoughts flicker back and forth.

Where am I, two worlds, one mind, global brain, the terrain is not the same. Am I walking in Europe thinking of California or am I only thinking of Vienna as I walk in California, in America? Two continents, the continuum pushes onward not waiting for the next breath for one pair of lungs to breathe, for the homeostasis to equalize the sound location.

I can tell a bit about myself, as I seem to be rattling on. This, so far, has been words and images and name dropping, but that is who I am. Born on both sides of the screen, the media hardware is not aware of the recorded images in all the photos taken, the mistaken images reminding one of him or her, as it may be. I often confuse myself with my image, the video one, the paper one, the one that society spits out at you, categorizing you for all to see.

The one that is registered on the passport, the social security system, the birth certificate, the credentials, the resume, the impressions of workers, colleagues, the friends gossiping. The ones fostered and tattooed on by family and brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, the least of those being mama and papa, registered and played out over and over in ego impressions, a facsimile of expectations made over into someone else’s world yet out of place in another generation and a half, the ones after the wars and the depression and the immigrations and settling and moving.

The private lives inside the houses, the rooms, the dinners filled with endless chatter about business. No, they never asked about Jesse, only Harris and his magical gift in later years for earning money. I was only interested in flippant things, like going for walks in nature, or painting and listening to music and occasionally singing or even writing some poetry or prose or songs. I was continuously in some sort of therapy, as a patient or as a therapist. I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon or a checkbook, the Dow Jones reports or the daily race track paper. Ours was a middle class American house, set amongst the rich and famous where I was raised. The expectations were given and the blue-bloods carried on, despite sixties’ idealism, all that naive realism invested in change and radical movements and communes, in drugs, mysticism, politics, and ecology. The Native Americans would show us the way, sitting in a tipi all night chanting, beating the drum — the ancient beat would speak through peyote energies, and the all-night vigils would continue, or lead somehow to redemption.

The acid tests would reveal the cosmic consciousness, the perennial philosophy, those states explored by James or Huxley, Lilly or Grof. In a Sierras session on acid, talking directly to my grandmother and grandfather of blessed memory, my guides, as if they were here now, and alive. The Colorado psilocybin mushrooms taken on Mt. Evans, 14,000 feet high, watching the sun rise high in the Rockies, looking down on lakes and a vast panorama, below, or was it the mescaline in the small lit-tle hippie town near Telluride? Was this history all so relevant now in the data banks, somehow supplying me today with enough cosmic star dust to propel me onward to redemption, the eternal transcendence, the promised land?

The feeling that day in Palo Alto on 100 mic’s, of the all-pervading presence of energy, that feeling of oneness, reading that man’s thoughts across the street and being at one, really in cosmic consciousness: Those were not just words, that experience is recorded in the cells (and not the ones often written about that are destroyed by the substances themselves). The meditating with the Sufi dervishes from Turkey dancing zikhr and drinking Turkish coffee and smoking Turkish cigarettes, whirling around past ourselves and looking down at our own bodies moving in a flash.

Or was it the isolation tank facilitating those altered states, being “out of the body”? Straight into floating darkness, with-out the normal body-mind connections. It’s physical movement that often helps us get past the thoughts, the thinking traps of the monkey-mind grabbing on and playing tricks, avoiding “be here and now boys,” as the parrot in Huxley’s book used to scream. The books and the dreams and the real life experiences all combining to make this Jesse what he is, dissolving even as it is written, forgetting while one is remembering. I am surely the product of the environments creating the programs for the life to be lived, the normal road laden with responsibilities and “shoulds”.

Now back here again, discovering what is around the next bend. Will it be a hit or a miss? "The $64,000 Question", from American classical television, spit out answers which looked like contestants’ intelligence in order to fool the American public into being entertained. The news-bites, the advertisers, Madison Avenue, commercial hackers, designer jeans, celebrity fashion perfumes and paraphernalia, Warhol’s pop art — the soup cans on paper — decisions to make in a life and how to walk the line.

Fulfilled? This is the question. I can’t help but weave these scenes in and out as they jump off the memory banks down memory lane: visual images from trailers left snipped and unedited. The Jesse Files. Push the buttons which electrify the bio-rhythms, the biofeedback recordings of heartbeat, the transition of brain waves and emotions and the struggle to achieve and conform and compete to survive.

The losses and grief and sadness lap at the shores. The melancholic circumstantial evidence that convicts the soul, enslaved just ahead of the mantras and the speeding to nowhere. Yes, these walks in the park pushing the baby buggy, this reading and information intake, are all destined to make sense and stop making sense and nonsense. Entropy decides the randomness of these little ant-beings running around, feigning disenchantment.

No, this Jesse is happy for awhile, for the next five minutes, or two hours, or until that elusive state sticks and looks like a smile and a feeling of well-being. Jesse has always been happy, ever since he was born and they pulled him out with those forceps. He thinks he is OK, and that is enough.

The pondering and wondering are all that is needed for Jesse to reflect on the reflection. Just enough for the thinker to think the thoughts and feel and emote and act and move. Everything is Mentalism after all, lived practically and spiritually. Philosophy, according to Paul Brunton.