ELEVEN

THE GUARDIAN AT THE GATE

Since Steve and I could not come together in a meaningful way, we went on with our lives. Steve worked in earnest with Kobun and Woz, and others, too. I went to junior college to work with the best art teacher I have ever had the privilege of studying with.

Gordon Holler was a phenomenon. His talks on the evolution of art were brilliant and he was so cuttingly honest, so awake, that he was actually scary. I remember one lecture in the middle of a semester when the lights went off and a classmate leaned over and whispered, “Buckle up!” It was good advice. And I took it. Gordon Holler was a model for young artists, not just because his work had been bought and hung by the major art museums in New York, but because he and his work were so beautiful, intelligent, and frightening. He taught that Jackson Pollack’s action paintings were about the age of nuclear war, that they themselves contained the energy of the bomb. He taught us to recognize that more often than not the spills on the floor—like skid marks on the road—had more energy than our paintings. He encouraged people to make art, not from what we knew, but from the moment of direct perception. And for better and for worse, he convinced me to stay true to myself as an artist. I have never stopped working, in large part, because of his influence.

In studio drawing classes, where most art teachers try to get their students to simply draw well, Holler talked about the energetic power of visual information itself. He worked like a demon to get us to make images from a nonnarrative level of awareness. We used all sizes and weights of charcoal, along with smudgy rags, sponges, brushes, and sticks we found on the ground, which we dipped in ink solutions, from total black to soft subtle grays. The idea here, he said, was to use materials that would stop the student from getting too precise. Holler liked energy and he liked the energy of mistakes. “If you’re going to make a mistake,” he would say, “make the biggest mistake possible because then at least you’ll learn from it.” Yet in all of his hollering we were expected to create exquisite images. Because even though he bombarded us with a wholly new kind of instruction, good image making was ever the goal.

Beyond the class hours of studio work were several weekends of around-the-clock conceptual art events. People made all kinds of projects for these weekends. I especially remember a guy who let someone give him a haircut on stage, during which he talked continually about what it was like for him to be willing to trust someone with his image in the world, and why that was important to him. We may have been at a small junior college in Los Altos Hills, but we were connected to an important art movement, and to a teacher who was the real thing.

Gordon Holler had weekend-long conceptual art events of his own work, too. He set up rooms where naked, half-lit young men floated in luminous tanks of water or were mummified in plastic wrap. The men were wired with stethoscopes on their beating hearts and their rhythmic, heavy breathing amplified throughout the performance space. People milled around looking at everything as Holler photographed the models: he’d later make the photos into large-format silkscreens. His homoerotic images were brutal and off-the-charts disturbing, and yet they were so sublimely beautiful. You wanted to look and look away at the same time. And this made sense since he always talked about simultaneity.

Gordon Holler was star fire, lighting everyone up. The students who gathered around him were full of whatever it is that makes people remarkable. I got As from him, which he rarely gave out. One day he told the class not to worry about their grades, that he gave only about five As a year and that the people who got them didn’t care. This was true. I didn’t care.

*   *   *

In the mix of all this Greg Calhoun came down from All One Farm and I let myself fall in love with him. He was sexy and smart and cute. We had fun, and as our affections grew, we decided to live together. I moved up to his renovated chicken coop and became a part of the life at All One Farm for about six months.

Greg drew little glyphlike pictures, the first drawings of abbreviated form and light and sound that I had ever seen. They had a brightness that I could feel and sounds I could hear. After so much time rendering complex form in art classes, I marveled at the power of his little line drawings. I still have them. Years later, still inspired, I developed a kind of alphabet to visualize information generated in corporate meetings. I even started a business around it. Like so many things from All One Farm, Greg’s drawings were a nod to the future because this type of graphic facilitation wasn’t widely used until the mid-nineties.

Inevitably, or so it seemed at the time, Greg and I decided to go to India. Almost everyone we knew was either in India, yearning for India, making money for India, or just back and recovering from India. Traveling to the subcontinent was the most exciting possibility anyone could think of. And Greg and I were next in line. So we moved back to the Bay Area because it was the best place to make money for the trip. We were just about to sign a rental agreement for a place to live when Steve stepped in to tell us that he didn’t have a good feeling about the place or the people we were about to commit to. Moreover, he had found us a better place to live, with better people. I imagined him in his hippie van, driving around to housing boards, checking out places on our behalf. It was very like Steve to be vigilant and generous in this way. As it turns out, Steve had been right. Once we moved in, we really liked our house, as well as our roommates. When we threw parties, Steve was always invited.

During the time we worked and saved, Steve warned Greg not to take me to India with him because, as he said, I would interfere with Greg’s spiritual experience and development. I guess he didn’t place any value on my own spiritual development. Steve said, “All the women who go to India just get fat!” Steve could mete out convictions like a blacksmith hammers an anvil. While his thoughts usually had at least some flying sparks of truth, he rarely had it completely right. At the time he offered this unasked-for advice, Greg and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

It took us six months, but we made enough money and left for India. Steve drove us to the airport and handed us a last bit of advice on the way: “Be sure to drink the water as soon as you arrive so that you get sick right away and get it over with. That way you’ll be free to drink the water everywhere you go and not have to worry about getting sick again.” We didn’t ask the obvious questions about parasites. We just thought it was a brilliant piece of advice and said so.

Greg and I landed in Hong Kong after an exhausting twenty-three hours of traveling, which included two hours spent in Anchorage due to engine trouble. We had one night in Hong Kong in which to grab some sleep, stretch our legs, and walk around in the city seaport before we boarded our next flight. I had chosen Frank Herbert’s Dune as my airplane reading and continued with it on the plane to New Delhi. Talk about imaginal disks. Flying over the parched deserts of India while reading about a boy who discovers he’s an avatar on a sand-covered planet was nothing less than surreal. I finished the book exactly upon landing in New Delhi, our home base for the next year.

We’d been warned about the beggars at the airport, men and women who held tiny drugged babies with arms and legs cut off to elicit horror and money from newly arriving tourists. We’d also been warned that the cabbies and rickshaw drivers would take newbies all over the city to plump up their meters before arriving at their hotels, sometimes hours later. Luckily, friends had told us what to expect to pay, so Greg moved into action and negotiated our bill in advance of getting into the car. He was damned well going to make sure that we weren’t going to get ripped off and I was glad for it.

We drove over potholes in a tin can car that zigzagged through the traffic-filled streets. Dazzled by the sun and the heat and the noise, I was glad to arrive at the dingy little hotel that Steve had recommended. Greg checked us in while the porter took our luggage and led me up to our dark and meager room. As I laid down my things to reach in my wallet for a tip, the young Indian man shut the door and grabbed me, exclaiming with the kind of dramatic gesture found in a Bollywood extravaganza, “It is because of your eyes that I am in love with you!”

Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock had warned me that something like that could happen, but nothing could have prepared me for that or the hot spicy food or the twenty-four-hour nonstop noise or the relentless heat. We were barely able to eat or sleep those first days. Still, we had each other and a room. And we were okay.

Two days after we arrived, Sita Ram—aka Robert Friedland—brought us to Vrindavan. Luckily, his current time in India overlapped with ours. Robert was wonderfully convivial on the two-hour bus ride, sharing stories and answering questions before it even occurred to us to ask them. Robert said, “Westerners have been traveling to India en masse for over ten years. The Indians have seen it all, so don’t worry about making mistakes.”

The brightly ornamented bus to Vrindavan was loud and lurched in a top-heavy, big bus way. It had an altar on the dash with lit incense. Heck, the whole bus was like a mobile altar to the gods, with its glittery ribbons and framed pictures of deities like Ganesh displayed upfront. (There’s always a Ganesh, because he’s the remover of obstacles both spiritual and material.) Some of the buses even play devotional songs on loud scratchy speakers—whether you like it or not. Blessedly, not this one. We could, at least, hear each other talk.

Robert sat on the seat behind us and leaned forward. “The thing is,” he said, “you only need about two hundred and fifty words to speak Hindi.” And to prove it, he translated some chatter he heard in the bus. But he stopped translating when the Indians spoke about me, a female traveling with two men. “It is really too terrible to repeat,” he said. I wanted him to tell me what they were saying, but he tactfully moved the conversation on to a young woman he knew, an American around my age who was studying Indian singing with her guru. “She was on one note for an entire a year,” he exclaimed. “After she mastered it, the guru gave her three more notes.” He continued. “She is so beautiful, she could be a model in the United States, but she gave it all up, all the men and all the glamour, to study music with this guru.” He also talked about her diet, which was sattvic, meaning of pure high vibration, and said that if she traveled and ate onions it would take her two weeks to recover her notes again. I was amazed that an American woman would have been given access to this level of sacred Hindu musical instruction. I wondered, too, how she made her way to that decision or if Robert wasn’t fibbing just a little. Mainly I sensed he was working to engage my spiritual imagination.

The commentary continued. “The Indians eat too many sweets,” he told us. “It’s because they’re so bored. Look, there’s a sweetshop every three doors.” He was right, too. Small hole-in-the-wall sweetshops dotted every town we passed. Robert’s comments and insights had a flat realism that made me listen more deeply. I would often find myself asking, What did I just hear? On this day he was as much talking to himself as to us, and his eyes turned deep gray with study and recognition, as if he were someone’s uncle talking about the character flaw of a family member. It was like he was wearing big Paul Bunyan boots while wading all throughout India, collecting a stunning minutiae of detail.

We checked into a hotel as soon as we arrived in Vrindavan. Shortly after, Robert shuttled us off to the Yamuna River for a holy bath. The Yamuna River is one of the holiest rivers in India, and as we walked, Robert filled us in with stories of Krishna’s childhood. Vrindavan is where Krishna is said to have grown up four thousand years ago. You can tell by all the shrines in the village—as plentiful as ATMs in any American city—that Krishna is considered a god in a human form. Devout Hindus have two distinct views on history of the god incarnate. Some feel Krishna was his most perfected self when he was a baby, with all the innocence and pure love that implies. Others believe it was when he was a young man, newly in love with his divine female complement, Radha. That the question of whether a god’s perfection is to be found as a baby or a young lover is tossed around as a part of a cultural dialogue in India just floors me. This definitely engages my spiritual imagination.

We took a circuitous route to the river, trailing through sandy white backstreets that were more like tiny alleys. The Indian people walked very slowly, which made sense in that heat. Robert, however, had a Mad Hatter quality about him, and he walked quickly, with no time to waste, his ivory-colored clothing flowing. His arm encircled Greg, who was shorter, as he ushered us around on speeding legs, offering us advice: what to avoid, where to find proper clothing and the best sweets. I was only half tracking it because I don’t pay enough attention to this kind of detail and also because I was in so much culture shock. The two walked ahead most of the time, leaving me to take in the surroundings as I trailed behind them. I was amazed by the many free-roaming peacocks all over the town—on the ground at our feet, in the trees, and running to get out of the way of the rickshaws—and by the gracefulness of the women’s colorful floating saris. Indian women seemed to have elegant wear for the most mundane activities. I was too tired to talk, but Greg and Robert were chatting away and laughing nonstop. I had two contrary impulses: go back to the hotel room to hide, or keep up with them because I didn’t want to miss a thing.

When we neared the river, Robert told me I was going to have to bathe by myself because there was no way a woman and two men could be seen bathing together at the river, “especially Westerners.” I felt sort of left out and terrified to be by myself, but he gave me instructions about how to bathe in a sacred river, and they moved on. The boys walked around a dune, their voices trailing off, until the only sound I heard was the deafening roar of the river. By myself and not at all comfortable, I looked around and up at the huge, blue sky overhead. I took off way too many clothes—I would later realize this with great alarm—and walked into the river.

Following directions has never been my strong suit, and I couldn’t remember what Robert told me to do, so I made up my own ritual and then dunked myself in an act of self-baptism, feeling too self-conscious to fully give myself over to the experience. When I stood, the water was up to my ribs. I scanned inside myself for any differences, and then looked around. My surroundings were so stark I could have been on the moon.

The Yamuna is broad, maybe a hundred feet across, with a light gray sandy bank. I felt the pull of gravity down in the river’s trough and the force of the water sweeping around my body. It was all just sand, sky, and this wide, thick water. No clutter of voices. I breathed a big sigh, my whole body having finally slowed down to its natural rhythms after days of travel, heat, and terrible sleep patterns. At last I felt at one in my body with my environment.

Standing in this peace for a while I noticed something floating about ten feet away, in the fast moving center of the river. I strained to make it out. With a jolt of recognition, I understood that it was part of a human shoulder attached to a bit of torso. A disconnected hand bobbed after it. Horrified beyond words, I was suddenly terrified that I couldn’t see my feet in the opaque water. Straining to drag myself free of the river, I made it to the shore, naked and panicked and small, like Eve thrown out of the garden.

I dressed as fast as I could, tugging and pulling the clothing over my body, the whole process slowed down by the wetness. The realities of the sacred and the physical were oddly juxtaposed in this one bizarre moment. There was nothing to do but wait for Greg and Robert to return. My skin felt the kind of refreshed well-being that comes after cold water and dry clothes under a beautiful warm sky. Calming, I saw the river was smooth and unending and remembered not just Robert’s words, “the Indians have seen it all,” but the words of others who had told me that “Mother India allows for everything.” On that day, I dearly hoped that included me.

Later I learned that there must have been a funeral ghat upstream where they dumped the body before it had fully burned because the relatives didn’t have the money to buy enough wood to completely cremate their family member. At the time, though, only three days in the country, all I knew was that body parts were floating past. Get out now! was all I could think of.

After bathing, Robert showed us how to smoke bong, which is Indian marijuana that has been ground to a thick paste. Hemp grows in many parts of India, and it was stunning to see hillsides covered with these spiky green hands on undernourished plants. It’s not high quality stuff, and I wondered if the process of grinding it into a paste, which is done between two rocks, somehow extracts the narcotic properties to improve the smoke. It was sticky and wet and amazing that it even caught fire. After we got stoned I was in trouble because marijuana makes me vulnerable to fear, of which there was no end on my third day in India. I fell silent and that night became very sick with a temperature of 106 that lasted for a week. Greg became equally sick just as I got well. After that, we did have some kind of silvery immunity as we traveled through India. Steve had been right. We never got sick again.

*   *   *

When Steve had returned from India, he told me he had gone on retreat with a teacher who sang to his students early every morning. He described it in such beautiful detail that I was beside myself with longing to see this for myself. Completely coincidentally Greg and I ended up at one of this teacher’s retreats—then five or so more after that. But on the morning I first heard S. N. Goenka sing, my memory floated back to Steve’s story. The deep resonance of his voice sounded through the meditation hall and I knew it had to be the same guy. It was his songs that swept through us every morning, that cleared us up and strengthened our resolve for ten days of deep vipassana meditation.

Much later, after my return from India, Daniel Kottke, who had traveled with Steve, told me that it was only he, Daniel, who had meditated with this teacher. Steve hadn’t gone; he had only heard about it from Daniel. I was shocked. Why would Steve lie?

The taking of another’s story as your own is a type of thievery, charming or otherwise, that claims attention under a surface awareness. As an adult I’ve learned to give young people plenty of latitude to experiment with lying because imagination and what we call reality are just a continuum. And because the sixth sense is the most developed and inclusive of all the others, sometimes what we call a lie is actually a sixth sense that cannot be seen or proven—yet.

It may be that, for Steve, deception was a radical form of creating. He once told Howard, a mutual friend from high school, that Bob Dylan had sent his Lear jet to take him to a concert. Steve was seventeen years old at the time of this lie so he was just barely young enough to get by with it, but definitely old enough to be playing beyond the edges of acceptable behavior. “What a liar!” I told Howie. I was incredulous and twenty-one. I’d had no idea Steve was telling people stuff like this back then. However, over the years, I began to think more along the lines of, what an extraordinary lie. At the very least, Steve had the courage to tell a massive one. And later, when he owned his own Lear jet, how could I not appreciate the nonlocal kinds of space and time in which the magician was playing. It was both a lie and a creation.

I believe Steve held multiple purposes in a single act of deception. Creativity, as I’ve said, was one. But it seems to me that he also lied to study people’s responses in order to gather intelligence. Sometimes I think he lied simply to make himself look more interesting because he thought he was too oafish and regular and didn’t think he was enough as he was. And I think he lied to tweak people’s insecurity, and in so doing, take charge of the environment. After he became well-known, Steve was able to manage perceptions to separate people and to discourage communication about things that he wanted to hide. It’s all so fascinating, of course, because the man who went on to be a part of creating technologies that connected people all around the world was himself so effective at keeping those nearby disconnected from each other. I mean this on both a business and a personal level. I’m pretty sure Steve was consciously strategic about the paradox. He was an acomplished trickster who operated outside other people’s awareness. In the end I found it disturbing not because he lied, but because he used a masterful awareness of other people’s blind spots to create and manage perception for personal advantage.

*   *   *

In May or June, Greg and I moved to Dalhousie in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, to get out of the heat. Dalhousie was an English hill station during the time of the English occupation and was used by the British to escape the scorching summer months. From our front yard there was a view of a seven-thousand-foot drop to the plains to where an indistinct arc of the horizon met the seemingly endless sky. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore had lived on the very top of the mountain we were perched on, where there was the most extraordinary view of the Himalayan peaks. Nothing I have ever known has come close to the magnificence of this view.

After helping me to get settled in Dalhousie, Greg bused through Pakistan and Afghanistan to Tehran, Iran, to teach English and make money so that we could stay in India longer. I was way too dyslexic to teach English; likely any Iranian would have had a better grasp of English grammar than I did, so I stayed on the hill.

About twenty Westerners from all over the United States and Europe had moved to the mountain to get out of the heat that season, and a month after most of us had arrived, Larry Brilliant came with his wife, Girija. From 1973 to 1976, Brilliant had worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox from India. While he was doing this, Girija was writing her Ph.D. dissertation on women’s studies. We were all excited to meet them, then one day word spread that everyone on the hill had been invited to their house for dinner.

The only thing I remember about that evening’s festivities was Girija’s talking about her research. She said that the highest suicide rate in India was among young Hindu wives in new marriages. Seriousness sets the memory like nothing else, and I remember studying her closely because the fact of this was so horrendous. Girija was very present and had a plucky graciousness that was impressive. Her colors were pretty and light: a gossamer shirt and a wide-patterned skirt that brushed the floor as she stood, walked, cooked, and talked. It swished in a way that reminded me of a waltz in a Disney cartoon. This was a happy woman and I wondered at her marriage—it seemed like a good one.

As Girija spoke, hers were the words of a careful reporter who had seen behind the scenes and into what I now consider to be a crime against humanity. She was careful and articulate as she spoke; the whites of her eyes widened to convey the full impact of what she knew beyond her words. She shared all this with us as a group but I wanted to know more. She told me that when young women are married in India, they move into their husband’s huge family homes. The young Indian wife has no status and no power. She is the least valued, least cared for, and least understood in the new family. If the family is cruel, which they often could be, she is in trouble; the mothers-in-law may take over raising her children and her sisters-in-law might put stones in her food so that she will break her teeth or worse. If the emotional environment is intolerable, the young wives will often see suicide as the only way out. But Girija went on to explain, “If she survives the ordeal, this woman might well grow old enough to take over the raising of her own daughters-in-laws’ children.” I remember thinking, What a terrible cycle. It may be that the goddesses are on equal footing with the gods in India and Hinduism, but the real women were suffering terribly. You can tell a lot about a culture’s values by how they treat particular segments of their populations. In this case, it was how they treated the young women who carried and gave birth to the babies and the future of the whole nation.

After Greg returned from Iran, there was a day when, unexpectedly, two friends we had met in New Delhi told us that the 16th Karmapa was in town at the ritzy Ashoka Hotel, and that we could have private darshan with him. The Karmapa lineage is Tibetan and predates the lineage of the Dalai Lama by two centuries. Catching the spirit like a cowgirl and a cowboy, Greg and I freshened up and took a rickshaw to the Ashoka where we met our friends in the lobby. We would be seen immediately. It was such a straight passage through, it felt like a free fall into the sky.

Before entering the inner sanctuary where the Karmapa sat, high-level monks worked with the four of us in an anterior room to show us how to conduct ourselves in the presence of a Karmapa. We were instructed to stand upright while holding our hands together in prayer over the tops of our heads. Next we were to bring our hands down to the level of our third eye, and then to our hearts. After that we were to stick our tongues out pointing downward toward our chins and force our eye-balls up into the top of our heads and bow. Each bow, and there were to be three of them, was a full body prostration on the floor before the station of this man. I was utterly embarrassed, but jumped in ready to do whatever it took to be in his presence.

We were led into the room and His Holiness sat watching us perform the dizzying routine until at last we lined up like Four Musketeers catching our breath for what would be next. From a Western perspective the following won’t necessarily make sense, but I will say it anyway. It is true that we were all four standing together, but it was also true that each of us was having a private audience with His Holiness. Brilliant and glittery-eyed cartwheels of light turned in his eyes, as he looked into our eyes, individually and simultaneously. From this I knew I was in the presence of a fully awakened, multidimensional human being. I felt vastly expanded and lit up under his gaze. I would later look at his picture hanging in a Palo Alto spiritual bookstore and feel the same thing.

The Karmapa asked questions through a translator and seemed to be laughing at us in the most marvelous way the whole time. Part of the deal of receiving a blessing from him was that he would give us each a Tibetan name. In the East, teachers and gurus often give you a god name. I had been given other names, Paravati and Sharda, by two different teachers, and this would be my third. I had not intended to collect sacred names for myself, it is just what happened. The Karmapa was about to receive his lunch so we were told to come back the next day for the naming. When we returned at the appointed hour we went through the round of bows and, once again, felt the exhilaration that we were all being seen individually, as if he had four heads and eight eyes. He had the monks reach into a hat and pull out slips of paper one at a time. Each name was typewritten in Tibetan script and read aloud, then handed to the translator, who explained the meanings in English and then handed it to each of us. I do not remember my Tibetan name but I do remember its translation: “The Guardian of the Gate.” The Karmapa encouraged us to ask questions, and after a short Q and A, we were sent on our way out into the super-crowded, sun-blasted, noisy streets of downtown New Delhi.

I had gone to India because I wanted to be touched and changed by something as huge as the force that had touched and changed Steve. Seeing the Karmapa lit a fire in me that can hardly be overstated. The name that he gave me was a very powerful riddle that would take more than thirty years for me to understand.

Steve would later criticize me by saying that my trip to India was more of a vacation than a pilgrimage. But he missed it entirely. And only now after so much time has passed, and I have the depth of insight that a lot of work and a long life have afforded me, I am completely certain that India could never be a “vacation” for anyone who was there for over three weeks—it is too profound a place. That Steve couldn’t or wouldn’t see this, that he couldn’t allow me to have my own sacred experience without his distorting interpretations, is something that took me way too long to understand.

Before I left to go on my trip to India, the Zen teacher, Kobun, had told me, “If you feel like coming home, first wait two weeks and then if you still feel like coming home, come home!” I had been in India for a year when I finally knew I was done. I also knew that my relationship with Greg was over. Our approach to living was so different that we were a constant aggravation to one another. It did not seem like a life partnership would be possible, and so I returned to the United States by myself.