NORTHEAST US 1969
NORTHEAST US, October 5 - 29, 1969
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5: Drive Datsun to Maine 9:10AM-11:10PM.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6: Sit around Bill's, look at stamps, to Harbison's, buy groceries, Stamp Club, Byron.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7: To York's for huge lunch, try Renous Road, up 17 to Atholsville, dinner, bed at 11.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8: To Quebec, Percé, Gaspé, stop at St. Ann du Monts.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9: Around St. Lawrence, eat at York's, home at 10.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10: Look at stamps, driver around town, Bob and Arthur over for fire.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11: Fredrickton and Museum and eat at steak place, Byron Powell over for fire, slides.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12: Church at 11, buffet 12-1:30, auction to 3, driver old road, back to stamps and watch "Fantastic Voyage."
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13: To Woodstock, closed for Columbus Day, to Presque Isle, eat at Au Coin, stamps, TV 8-11.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14: In Chrysler to Bangor, roam town, eat at Sings, back at 9 to stamps.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15: Bill to school, I type some pages, read "Zen and the Art of Archery," Viet Moratorium 2-3, stamps.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16: Read "All and Everything," send cards to Ram Dass, O'Sheas, Dublin Inn, Angela at Dublin; watch Forsytes, type, see "Popi" at Temple Theater.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17: Read "Meetings with Remarkable Men," type, steak at Canada Esso.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18: Storm windows; pay $10 for elk antlers at Vaughn Gallop's, boating and fire to 11:30PM.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19: 11AM to Calais, Campobello, Lubec, Quoddy Head, Machias, back 8:30. Watch "Forsyte III," stamps.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20: Read "Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy (HPA)" all day, watch "Laugh-In," stamps.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21: Finish HPA at noon.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22: Finish "Gurdjieff."
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23: Finish "In Search of the Miraculous."
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24: Dinner at Wandlyn, fire.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25: Phone Thelma Casey, Baba Ram Dass and O'Sheas; bus to Boston 1:30-11:30, with Air Force Mike.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26: To Folk Mass, Eggs Benedict, Children's Museum, "Forsyte."
MONDAY, OCTOBER 27: See Harvard campus; eat horse steak at Faculty Club; Fogg and University Museums; read "Diogenes."
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28: Take Freedom Trail; to Gardner and Fine Arts Museums; eat at Durgin Park, see "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29: Bus Boston to NYC 10AM-2:15PM, to Arnie's all in.
NOTES: After the days of driving around the Gaspé, the sensation of having free time is quite unique, and for the first few days I don't know what to do with it. But on Friday there's the trip to Fredrickton, where I finally get postcards sent off to Joe and Mom, and then on Saturday there's the sudden jaunt to the road to Selden (Bill had never been to Selden, and if he continued driving the way he did, he'd never get to Selden, ever) and to Orient (population 17, I said jokingly, and there couldn't be room for many more in three or four houses centered around the store and the gas station and the dirt-road intersection. But these days must come to an end (though on Sunday we're scheduled for the Sunday buffet at---where?---the church? and then the auction, which I had assumed took place during the evening, but which Bill says takes place starting at 1:30, in the afternoon) and I'll have to settle into a schedule of typing, or let it settle that I'll do no typing at all.
Sitting on the hopper after breakfast of soy bean soup (with an extra concentration of soy bean juice instead of milk which I wasn't able to identify with my startled taste buds) for breakfast, a late lunch of sandwich and soup and a piece of cucumber, and a "snack" of a lovely banana split with a whole halved banana, butter pecan, vanilla-butterscotch, and strawberry ice cream, with just bits of chocolate and cherry sauce and nuts at 4:30, and the shit that rolled from my anus was the same type of shit that did before, and the fittingness of the sameness of the effluvia of various foods hit me as fitting, as if any input to any life made no difference: it all came out the same in the end. (The sound of the electric snap of the keys against the platen is disturbing in the Maine silence, and I can't get used to the reversal of the margin release (which seems awfully touchy on this Smith-Corona Electra 120, and I have to hit it almost every other line for the first page) with the backspace, and I keep hitting the MR with no results when I really want a backspace).
The banality of what I'm now typing overwhelms me, and the words on the page certainly don't seem to be worth the noise of the keys hitting the platen. So I'd better get down to transcribing my notes, before THEY get out of recognition. 981234567890 ------=.....,,/'; (So it seems that the only automatic repeating keys are the space, the underline/dash, and the period.)
Bill's inimitable habits make themselves apparent soon enough, as when he sits listening to me talk and cleaning his teeth with dental floss, picking and clucking between his teeth with wet plucks of waxed thread. (Well, there it goes, I really DON'T feel like typing, fear annoying Bill, would feel more comfortable with the noise when I'm alone, will use the transcription of the notes to get me started later, so I'll quit now and listen to some music. So, there.)
I have a feeling of annoyance when I begin to read "In Search of the Miraculous" (and one of the reasons I'm typing is another annoyance: that I'm reading Bill's copy of the book, and thus can't make notations in it---but that leads to the obvious conclusion: read EVERY book as if it were someone else's, type out my reactions to it, and then I won't feel compelled to underline and comment in the book, and then I'll have only my typing to worry about. This, in turn, leads to two thoughts: 1) that I could treat everything in life: movies, ballet, places of travel, art, experiences, even friends and living itself, as I would treat someone else's book (which leads to a thought I'll go into later) and type everything I think about everything, and then I'll have only my typing to worry about. 2) That the idea of "worrying about" typing is ludicrous, that I have to preserve that above anything (and that repeats the inkling of the idea that I should give up the book, as being attached to it, but that would lead to giving up my rationality, since I'm certainly attached to it---and this circles to the thought I said I'd go into later, that I treat living itself in a sense of detachment, getting what I want out of it and---not even bothering to record it, but merely getting what I want out of it (from a book I want knowledge, from a friend I want affection, sex, and praise, from a movie or ballet I want entertainment and beauty---which of course means I'm attached to all that---so it all boils down to a question of attachment (and I started by attacking "ISOTM" because it rankled my attachment to certain ideas, which I may or may not get down to, since I seem to go into fugue when I sit at the typewriter, but maybe that's good, since my training at the keys is sufficient to type what I want to type, and now the typing is typing me, and I just sit with a vacant mind and type what comes to mind as rapidly as it comes to mind---and even the business of the changing of the pages is handled easily, without too many peripheral thoughts interrupting, and if anything this sort of typing will give an idea of the incredible activity of the mind, leaping from one thought to another, though they could hardly be called leaping, since all the thoughts are quite mundane, and hardly worth noting, as I might judge the book is hardly worth noting, that is, finishing. Just as I have sort of decided that it's hardly worth finishing the parentheses I've gotten into (and why don't they have a lower case key for the capital I which is so common in typing, other than the initial letter of a sentence, that's really from left field), so I've almost overlooked the idea of threading back through the pages I've done and closing all the parenthesis, but maybe that's exactly what I should do. In thinking, there's no need to go back and close parentheses, so in effect thoughts seldom get finished. But due to the rigors of typing, it's possible to step back, thread back through the lines and finish all the thoughts, tie everything up and come to a conclusion. But that's suspiciously like the idea of condensing everything to a book, then the book to a page, then the page to a sentence, then the sentence to a word, and maybe even the word to a sound. That's the clue to the whole thing: the world isn't ever going to be "condensed" into a word, since the world and the word are vastly different, even if it is only by one "l"---and isn't that "ell"?
I indicated the ultimate mandate in a story by that name, when the computer printed out "Live," and in actual fact that does seem to be the ultimate mandate, even from Gurdjieff's point of view. The thing that annoys me (getting back to my reason for typing) is that he says the PLANETS and the SUN and the MOON rule man, and that even kings and parliaments have little to say about wars. Now that's the kind of nonsense I'd like to see stopped. What is a war? A war is a bunch of men fighting. How do you stop the war? Stop the men from fighting. How do you stop a group of men from fighting? You stop each individual man, and repeat that process for each other individual man. That's something which is obvious, but never said when authority, rulers, or planets are accepted as determining man's destiny. ANYONE IN AUTHORITY would prefer those subject to them to believe that NOTHING AN INDIVIDUAL CAN DO CAN CHANGE ANYTHING. In this way Nixon would have us believe that he couldn't stop the war in Vietnam. BUT HE CAN! He is physically capable of stopping the war by giving the order to his generals to order immediate evacuation of all American Army and other service personnel from the country of Vietnam. As Mary McCarthy said, this may be logistically difficult, but the logistics got them there, and the logistics can remove them (as, indeed, the logistics EVENTUALLY will have to, unless the world is blown to smithereens, or we accept the idea of being there forever). But Nixon would like US to believe that he CAN'T do that. What might happen? Then the generals might revolt, and start commanding the armies against Nixon, but again, EACH MAN COULD STOP FIGHTING. The Communists could leer and decide to take over the world, but again, just as each "American" soldier could decide to stop fighting, so each "Communist" soldier could decide to stop fighting, if THEY weren't so indoctrinated with the idea of authority. Indoctrination and authority, that's the same concept, the same word, and how much trouble it causes us. Just as the pistol-shooting experience of Eugene Honigel, the author of "Zen and the Art of Archery," was a liability to his learning Zen, so each individual's upbringing, under the wings of authority, is essentially what stops him from doing what HE wants, rather than what his mother, his wife, his family, his state, his country, his conscience, his willpower have DICTATED; again, my dislike for the idea of predetermination rises up. Man CAN do what he wants to do (in fact, that's one of the seeming delights of yoga, since the Master, once he's attained Samadhi, can do ANYTHING and be blessed. Maybe that just means I'm enlightened already, since I ALREADY have the feeling that I can do anything that I want, and be blessed in the process, too. Blessed seems to mean, here, the permission to do anything and still be applauded and followed, *back to last thought*, if only he's ENLIGHTENED enough to REALIZE that he CAN do what he wants to do.
That's a good thought, let's repeat it:
A MAN IS ENLIGHTENED WHEN HE REALIZES THAT HE CAN DO WHAT HE WANTS TO DO. Let's take it apart. "DO" First of all, contrary to Ouspensky and Ram Dass, but going along with Krishnamurti, it IS possible to act on free will---maybe it would be better phrased: it is possible to act WITHOUT THINKING. But there IS a joker: it seems possible that "without thinking" could be made exactly equivalent to "with feeling," and that "with feeling" can be thought of as "Based on some absolute, inner, faultless feeling of truth and goodness and rightness," but anything that's based on anything ABSOLUTE is bound to be predetermined.
It's true that there's an easy way out: that man is directed to do SO LITTLE by this absolute feeling of truth, that he's still left enormous worlds of choice in such matters of "what do I eat, where do I go, who do I talk to, who do I telephone, where do I stroll when I walk, what movie do I see when someone calls to go out." But I'm tempted to say that these trivial choices make no difference at all, and I'm back to the WDDIM of so long ago. But follow this thought: the only person who experiences this absolute feeling of truth is the enlightened person, so the world is divided into two all-encompassing, mutually exclusive classes: those who are enlightened, and those who are not enlightened. All the actions performed by those who are not enlightened are NOT chosen according to this absolute feeling of truth (but what if he chooses to kill, or to kill an enlightened being? I'll have to come back to this---wouldn't it be nice if writing could be done in three dimensions, so that I could leave that tail of thought sticking out into the air, so that I could realize that it had to be finished off---but that's where I'm trying to get in my Cobol-writing; I should have ended up that sentence with a "see page ___" and then ___ would have come out as an "undefined symbol" when I "compiled" my writing. Well, I can still choose to "go back" over the writing and tie up loose ends later, as I hope I do, adequately summarizing---but AGAIN (and ever, ever, ever again) this leads back to the thought that even TYPING ITSELF is nonsense. But I'm not typing for the sake of typing, I have to tell myself, but for the purpose of getting my ideas and thoughts down on paper so that I can organize them, and go some steps toward understanding them. The thought comes: I speak as though understanding my thoughts would help me to understand myself, but as Ram Dass said, "You are not your thought." Well, maybe that's where I disagree with him, and I'll finish THIS on page ___.
The idea is inescapable that I WOULD like to catalog and organize everything that I think and say and type, and that I really WANT to have everything related (I HAD to drink it all, it was all one piece). My urge now is to go back and number the pages that I've written, so that I have forward and backward-looking references, and then the temptation arises to type in the SYSTEM DESCRIPTION format, with everything outlined, and all sentences referring to one thought will have certain dimensions in common, and so to get all the sentences with a certain thought, I have to apply the pinhole method, sifting through all sentences for a certain dimensional variation, and collecting all my thoughts on one subject at once. How great that would be! That also reminds me of the thought I had last night, that by attempting to analyze how WRITTEN thoughts can best be organized, I might actually come up with a physical algorithm of how things actually DO connect in the brain. Maybe the brain IS a multiply-dimensioned analogue of a set of computer circuits, and given the idea God (AKJFTZBN), you can drift to idea BKJFTZBN, which is God as ALL-IN-ONE-IN-ALL, to AJJFTZBN, which might be "God damn it," through to AKJFTZBM, which is God backwards, to dog, or better, doG. Or instead of changing one dimension by one, forwards or backwards, it can change THROUGH one dimension, as in "Life of Berlioz, Life of Beethoven, Life of Bach, Life of Schopenhauer, Life of Riley, Life of Emerson, etc." Or it can zip forward through one dimension, get hung up at an appealing spot, dash through another dimension, get fixated for a bit, and leap to another dimension. How many elements in a chain of DNA? Is THAT how many dimensions the brain operates in? So, to summarize that paragraph, it's nice to think that my constructing a SYSTEM in writing might give actual or theoretical insight into the working of the brain itself.
But now to start working backward and finishing thoughts I've started earlier here, after numbering the pages.
Went to the moratorium today, October 15, and was appalled at how many of the "town" came out to listen to the protests of the "gown." There were about 250-300 students scattered across the lawn, a small knot of laughing men across the street, and city photographers circling the crowd with cameras, maybe 10 representatives from outside Ricker. I longed to get up and tell them that they would change in ten or fewer years. Would they respond to a meeting when their boss told them they would be fired if they attended? If their wife said she'd leave them? If their in-laws threatened to take away the new home, given as a wedding present? If co-workers seemed inclined to laugh? If they were threatened with jail? It was "the thing to do" now, but it might not be the thing to do when they graduate into the world, which is a far more diverse place than a college campus, where even some of the older people have an open-mindedness which would not be found on the streets of the general town. Keep it up, I wanted to tell them: the battle would get harder, not easier, and they would be discouraged at lack of progress, flattened by opposition and fines and jail sentences, but that was the time to continue what they had started here. I wanted to tell them this, but I was an outsider, and I was too close to tears when I heard that the reading of the list of dead had to stop because the reader had been overcome with tears, and he wanted others to come to the microphone to read the list, but no one volunteered, afraid to show their even-then popular emotions---as they would probably be afraid to show their feelings in later years. Somehow, each idealistic, working, seeking, striving, loving generation grows older, into the practical, graceless, beer-drinking, TV-watching, thoughtless older generation, stepped on once too often to try again, "wise in the ways of the world," which by the younger generation would be called "a cop-out," but they won't understand the NEXT series of generations, either. I guess I believe in change, but never as much change as is necessary, followed by disillusion, followed by misunderstanding of those who come after trying to do the very same things.