There was a young woman in the house, Eve, blonde and friendly and pretty. I was attracted to her at first sight. But I was having visions of sorts, or one might call them insights into the deeps of being. During this time the Doors’ album, Crystal Palace, was in the air, the song with the words, “a Roman wilderness of pain, where all the children are insane,” burning into my awareness as if it were the motto of our lives! Another archetypal evening in the wilds of the howling psychedelic heartlands.
An excruciating awareness rose in me to counter the desire I had for Eve: the very act of desiring rippled the still waters of perfect union: the effort of our souls to obtain the object of our desire was incompatible with the perfection of ontologic-erotic union, and thwarted the realization of it. In the realm of spirit whatever we strive to grasp eludes us! It seemed that the souls must each – and together – be in a state of perfection before they could join in a union of perfection. It was beyond me, and I did not know the laws of being so as to attain this.
I’d intuited these things from various experiences and insights: pondering the vision of illumination held forth by Wilhelm Reich, how that the “genital character” – his view of what the optimally healthy human is – contains bodily the universal energies which are the illumination sages mistakenly sought through non-sexual mystical experience; and combining this Reichian “sexual mysticism” with insight I’d had on acid and mescaline: the lively interaction of a man and a woman within each other’s beings, which did not disturb the perfection of their union in love, gave me to envision how pure and exquisite an interaction could be.
Why at this time it came to the fore of my consciousness I don’t know. Somehow I knew I was an alien to Eve’s heart, that if I tried to enter I would defile and disturb it. Our beings could not be united in love, not in that union of hearts and bodies I sought. This was a devastating revelation, for after half a year or so of celibacy, and high for the first time in quite a while as well (getting high was looked down on in the macrobiotic community as propelling the being into an intensely yin – spiritually feminine, ultra-receptive – state), and after a year of Reichian therapy (dismantling “character armor,” not the orgone box route), my longing for the love of a woman was profound!
O for a woman
‘s love
o for the lightninged
o for the Eros ruby-fired
o for the sweet and wondrous lipped
o for the ontologic embracing
o the fierce succoring
love of a woman.
I could see it was not to be, and this impasse between what I wanted with all my heart and my inability to attain it showed me I was broken deep in the springs of my being. I went downstairs to my little room and crashed in a state of terror at the devastation that was now manifest in my consciousness. I had no downs to knock myself out, and would just have to ride it through.
And then horror upon horror! I could hear in the closed room across the hall a woman groaning in pain – I knew it was Eve! – and two men talking. I knew she was being raped! I had the hunting knife in my bag I’d had with me in Mexico, its tip broken but restored on a grinding wheel to a sharp point, the blade honed keen. Having been in the Marines seven years earlier I was still in good shape, and not afraid to fight, and I wanted to get up off my mattress and route those men and stop what was happening, but I was so ravaged with my own terror I couldn’t move; I had no strength to even get up!
In the morning John came by to see how I was. I told him what had happened; he went next door, but they were gone. He asked around, and then came back to me and told me they’d given her heroin, and when she was incapacitated took advantage of her. I asked him if he’d get me some downs as I couldn’t bear my consciousness. He came back with some a while later, but I had a different plan by then. I’d thought of Ginsberg’s Howl, and the lines in it of some in our generation who, in a state as desperate as mine,
“presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with…shaven heads…demanding instantaneous lobotomy…”
That would do it! A lobotomy would fix my inexorable anguish, would remove the guilt, the self-loathing, the awareness of the impossibility of love! So I asked John if he would find a mental institution and drop me off there, as a lobotomy was what I wanted. I declined the downs as I needed to stay in touch with what I was doing. I had my gear with me; I would not have to go back to the pad. We drove and drove, never seeming to find a madhouse. After a while it didn’t seem necessary anymore; the pain had receded; I could live without a lobotomy. John dropped me off somewhere in the “straight” section of town. I’d had enough of the “Roman wilderness of pain, where all the children are insane”!
I think back, writing of this now some thirty-eight years later, and ponder the care, patience and helpfulness of John, to the stranger that I was to him.
Away from the house of my (and Eve’s) woe, the speed having mostly worn off, I managed to call my sister (I forget what state she and her husband were living in then), and told her I’d had a nervous breakdown in St. Louis, MO (how else to explain my condition to her?), and needed some money to get a cheap hotel room, eat, and after a few days catch a bus back to NYC. She came through for me, and I ate pretty much plain oatmeal for a while, and my system stabilized, and the wounding of my heart withdrew into the depths so that I could live again without a mountain of anguish crushing me down.
Back in New York City, I borrowed some money from the mother of an old girlfriend of mine (which I paid back in a few months), and got a 2-room apartment on 95th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, with a brilliant view of the Triboro Bridge, a fifth-floor walk-up for around $48 a month (those were the days!). I had my sleeping bag and a few belongings, and was comfy. I got a job at Schrafft’s Restaurant as a dishwasher, and then got promoted to coffee-boy, which meant I got a large coffee urn on a wheeled cart that was filled up on lower shelves with pastries and coffee cakes, which I took to office buildings in the area (the restaurant was in the 50s on Madison Avenue).
During my off time I would visit friends on the Lower East Side, do some grass and acid (but always had some Thorazine or Vitamin B-12 or downs to counter a bad trip if need be), and kept a low profile. I remember meeting one of my dad’s old friends (both he and mom had been dead some years by then) on the street in midtown – Nate was his name – part of the Jewish business, legal and social community dad belonged to (he in real estate and insurance), and Nate asked me how and what I was doing. I told him I was a coffee boy at Schraffts’, and doing well. He paled when I told him that, evidently embarrassed at my low station in life! But I was a poet, with a paying job, and content with my lot, and marched to the beat of a different drum than my dad and his colleagues. I remember dad once telling me, “I’d rather you earn one honest dollar than write a thousand poems.” I was for years the black sheep of the family, getting kicked out of this school and that, a wild and unprincipled youth. Around age 20 I’d had a vision – while on organic mescaline (my first trip) – of the depth and profundity of life and of people’s beings, and was on a quest to plumb what I could of these, and the counter-culture seemed filled with kindred spirits, and thus I was pretty much “a rolling stone, no direction home,” 25 now, a seeker, a hitch-hiker, two of whose heroes were Kerouac and Dylan.
On my rounds with the coffee cart one stop was at the editorial offices of Seventeen Magazine. Among the people who came to me for coffee was this petite, lovely young woman, an editor there, Sherry. I was quite taken by her, and she responded with great pleasantness. (I had deeply buried the awareness of my ontologic dilemma, and this was not on my mind.)
I wrote her a poem, and the simplicity and beauty of it stunned her; the menial servant whose palm she daily crossed with silver was an accomplished poet, a seeker in the deeps of being, and a seeker also of her love.
She waited till I was alone one day, and told me she had a man, though she was deeply touched by the poem. I accepted her words quietly, though inwardly set my heart to pursue her.
I was occasionally tripping in the days following, and also writing poetry. Writing to / of Sherry the ontologic dilemma surfaced again in my awareness, with a vengeance. This time it was without the anguish of my failure to help Eve in her trouble (though that pain remains in my heart to this day!), yet by itself it was as a light that shone throughout my being, revealing afresh the broken deeps of my self. I had, in line with Reich's view of illumination, and my own sense of spiritual experience from mescaline and acid awareness, come to believe that I would enter into an experience of salvation – perhaps with a small “s” – through the love of a woman.
But it was so clear to me that to desire a woman, to seek to “grasp” her into my being, to exert any effort to this end, would irreparably trouble the still waters of effortless union, and break the perfection I sought. This may not make sense to some, but it hit me like a death-blow. It meant that I was alone, seeing as I could not effect such union as I sought by any effort, and my heart was too needy for love to acquiesce in that state. I was in the Void, absolutely alone, and without the illumination that gives Life.
I went up into the countryside to see Lisa, an old and true love, and she said to me, “Steve, I love you, but I can't help you.” Back on the road again, death hounding me like a nightmare dog, noiseless but steady.
As I was up in Westchester already I went to Croton to pick up a camera I’d left at a camp for disturbed children I had worked at.
The lady and her family who were caretakers of the place were Christians from Estonia (I think they had fled the Communists). This woman, Lea, was an evangelical born-again Christian. Wouldn't you know, she started in on me. I thought she was a real fanatic, and when she began telling me about her version of Jesus I resisted her vigorously. After all, I taught reincarnation and the spirituality I had learned among the Sufis and Theosophists to my friends, and was not interested in what I saw as retrograde primitive religiosity that was ignorant of genuine spiritual consciousness. Notwithstanding my desperate spiritual state at that time, I wanted no part of this lady's Christian stuff, with her “Jesus died for your sins on the cross” as a constant refrain in her incessant raving. I was getting a headache listening to her. I was a very forceful character, but she was as forceful as I. It was a clash! And while she was speaking, and I on the verge of leaving, a light from Heaven shone into my heart, and with my inner sight I saw the glory of a Being whom I knew to be the Lord Jesus, and He looked upon me in His heart-rending love and majesty, and it was as though He had been crucified – for me! – and yet was alive, similar to what I later read in John's vision in Revelation 5:6, “And I beheld, and lo...stood a Lamb as it had been slain...”
I was struck speechless! She kept talking, but I hardly heard her. This spiritual Light and Glory was what I had longed for in all my searching! This was the Life that lifted one above the wheel of birth and death, this was the Love that made one complete and not driven in the seeking of earthly loves. And all this was in a Person! Jesus! I had been sure it was “a state of consciousness” I attained to through effort, or meeting an enlightened Teacher, or my karmic due. But it was an actual Person who was in Himself Deity! I was thoroughly shocked and humbled. I was so proud, so arrogant, so sure of my own way. It was with me as with a seer (I'd later read – Charles Spurgeon), who said, “I looked at Him, and He looked at me, and we were one forever.” From that moment on, I was His. Love at first sight.
I couldn't even say anything to Lea. I told her, “I’ve got to go!” and on the way out she handed me a little Gospel of John (in the old Authorized Version). All the way back to NYC I was aware of the presence of Jesus Christ. Up to this point in my life I'd never read the Bible, save as literature in college, or a book among other “holy books.” During my conversation with Lea, I had said to her, when she talked of worshipping Jesus, “What is a man that I should bow the knee to him? We are all on the path to becoming Christs!” But that evening, when I got to my bare, simple apartment, in the presence of this One who was to me unequivocally God – while in the shower – I bowed the knee to Him, and wept...for love, for joy, for sorrow...and shortly after wrote this poem:
LORD
How You knowin the river of my heart
flowing through these words
what is too deep for the words to say
sorrow too molten
joy too free
thankfulness too profound
Oh Man, You are my Savior!
What a joy to be in the presence of the Light I had so long sought among the world’s sages, and for this Illumination to be in the friendship and love of – heart-union with – a Person! The little Bible tract of John's Gospel, when I read it, was illumined by Him just as was my heart: the words of the Gospel were one with the Spirit of Him whose presence shone so ravishingly within me! They were His words! And this holy Spirit continued to shine in my heart with an ineffable radiance that bespoke infinite wisdom, love, and power – this was the Person of the living God!
It was this I knew, and nothing else. I did not have a Bible at this time. And I did not know the commandments the Lord gave to those who would follow Him.
I entertained in my mind that I would get a girlfriend I liked, and who wanted to be with me, and we would get married by dropping acid together and joining in sexual union. I thought – in my abysmal ignorance – this was proper and holy.
Two weeks later I drove up to see Lea again, and tell her what had happened to me. I figured Christians were supposed to wear crosses, so I bought a silver one with a chain and wore it about my neck. When she saw me, she asked with some disbelief and dismay, pointing to the cross, “What’s that?” I said, “I’m saved.” And she, incredulously, “How did that happen?” And I recounted the events starting with her telling me about Jesus. She asked if I had a Bible, and said I had to get one. And she directed me to go to a church in the City not far from where I lived.
So I went back home to the city and began more properly to live as a believer. As I read through the Bible I saw a passage that said we were to “submit…to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13), and I realized my drug days were over – no more acid or grass, etc, as it was my new Lord’s will. On my wall I wrote with a marker words from Proverbs, to beware falling into sexual sin with “the strange woman…for her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on Hell.” Any visitors saw these words that reflected my new state of mind. All who knew me were fairly shocked.
I continued in my job as coffee boy. How communicate to Sherry my new state of mind, my new love? The people on the various stops I made (in more than one building) continued to be friendly (who wouldn’t welcome the guy with quality coffee and pastries? – this way before Starbucks et al came on the scene), and they’d regularly say, “How ya doin’, Steve?” For me to just answer, “I’m fine, thanks,” did not accord with the blazing new truth and reality of my being. So I started to say, “Thanks to Jesus I’m alright” or “Thanks to Jesus I’m fine.” It was difficult to do that, as I was very proud, and the disdain I often received upon saying that hurt. I could see that the Self I had built up was arrogant and enamored of grandiose conceits, and this did not want to yield to the Lordship of Jesus, and so it was a battle of loyalties, Self versus Jesus. Nor did it help when people asked me, “What do you mean?” when I confessed Jesus. I really didn’t have sufficient knowledge to give a coherent answer. But as I read the Bible, and the few Christian books I found, I was a little more able to give an answer for my faith. I took to writing Scripture verses in a little 5 X 7 picture frame which I hung with string from my coffee urn, such as, “My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. –Psalm 121:2” or “Hear my cry O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I. –Psalm 61:1”
After a month or so I had the confidence to ask Sherry to meet me for a cup of coffee after work and talk about what had happened to me. I had been going to Rock Church, a Pentecostal assembly in the ‘60s on the east side, and I thought I was getting an idea of what the “normal” Christian life was like, although a lot of the Pentecostal stuff was strange to me. I tried to tell Sherry how wonderful Jesus was, and that He was the Savior of the world, and how my life had changed radically. I don’t think she believed. In 2005 I still pray for her, assuming she is still alive on the earth. So many women I have known and loved! Many of you I still pray for.
This was the spring of 1968. Thirty-seven years later I look back, marveling on the skill, wisdom and power of the Shepherd who undertook to save my soul, but more than these, on the longsuffering love and patience He knew beforehand He would need to extend to me to secure my eternal well being.
O, a great and terrible love I sing.
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