one of the most important minds of the twentieth century.’ He rises from his chair and lifts a paperback from a pile under the coffee table. ‘This is an original signed copy,’ he says, holding the book out to me, then thinking better of it, he replaces the volume under the table, lining up the spine against a magazine beneath.
‘You get many clients?’ I ask, changing the subject.
Pete considers the question, which has taken him a little by surprise. Finally he says ‘The thing with clients is that a lot of the work is just caring for them, which, you know, doesn’t appeal to me. But I have to fund my research so we …,’ gesturing towards his wife, ‘take on a few clients. There are funding sources for fringe technology like this, of course, but they all want something for it. Nothing, for free, man.’
‘Pow pow pow,’ says Carl, knocking out the funding sources with his finger.
‘This thing, you know, called my reality, is based purely on my own experience.’ Pete clicks on the mouse and brings up a screen with a pattern of stars upon it. ‘Expand my experience, and, man, you really turn me on.’
There is a bookstall in the foyer of the Sweeny Center selling guides to enlightenment, with a list of all the great teachers who have ever attained nirvana, and how they did it. Gautama sat under a Bodhi tree and waited, and, after seven days without food and water, he saw the morning star and was enlightened into formless bliss. Ming travelled for years looking for enlightenment and eventually found nirvana when Hui-neng asked him ‘What is your original face, which you had even before your birth?’ Neither of them had access to a computer. The process of their enlightenments was tortuous and thoroughly unscientific. We leave it to science, these days, to reveal the mystery of the everyday. Perhaps Gautama and Ming would have done better with Pete the Technoshaman’s Mayan program.
Science, they say, is the Moses of the twentieth century and heaven knows, we need one.
There are, incidentally, no enlightened women on the list. There are books on women who run with wolves, women who love too much, women who love men who love other women, universal mother-women, crone-women, angels, goddesses, all sorts of women doing all sorts of things, in fact, but no enlightened ones. Why is that? The sales assistant suggests I listen to Joni Mitchell, whom she regards as highly advanced. I promise to think it over and buy a little beginner’s guide to Zen containing this fragment, by Tung-shan:
The man of wood sings,
The woman of stone Gets up and dances, This cannot be done By passion or learning, It cannot be done By reasoning.
A man with a beard the colour of baked beans walks across my field of vision carrying a child in a turban, smiles at someone ahead and is devoured by the crowd. Here they all are, the success stories of late twentieth-century capitalism – sophisticated consumers, moneyed but not dangerously moneyed, educated, but not threateningly so – passing the hours irrigating their colons, birthing their drums and squeezing their higher consciousnesses. Fergus once remarked ‘there’s the work ethic and the self ethic and those two together made America what it is. If you have any criticisms I suggest you take them elsewhere. We’re very protective of our ethics.’
Five minutes before Timothy Leary is due to come on stage the man with the beard the colour of baked beans sits down next to me and produces a yellowing copy of Life magazine with Leary’s signature on it. Seeing me trying to catch the full inscription he leans over and whispers:
‘Grew up with Tim.’
‘Really?’
‘Man, he’s like, my hero. He’s like taken the principle of questioning authority and moved with that in a positive way. Like, I don’t even read the newspapers anymore on account of all the negativity. I’ve learned the hard way that everything you do has a purpose, it’s there to teach you something and it’s all OK … But we couldn’t have evolved this far without people like Tim.’
‘I missed the sixties.’
‘The sixties was really all about, personal growth, being anything you want to be, the power of positive thinking. I mean, I get some negative thoughts, and I think, hey, these don’t belong to me. That’s what the sixties was so … by the way, what’s your ascendant?’
In my mind’s eye there are petals back on the rose outside my room and there is a hummingbird feeding on the waxy spike of the agave flower.
Baked Bean spends the remaining hour of Leary’s talk in a state of intolerable suspense awaiting exactly the right moment to produce his faded copy of Life and ask Leary for an autograph. Meanwhile one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century fumbles around unrehearsed, contradicts himself, pauses, begins again, delivers a few lost eulogies to technology and digitalia, finally succumbs to his own boredom and produces a rave tape. A series of psychedelic images spirals round the room to a techno backbeat. During each lull, and there are many, Baked Bean puts his hand up, and then retreats rapidly, like a polyp feeling for its prey. Poor Baked Bean, I’m sure he’s not so bad, it’s just that I’ve had enough of him.
‘The only way it’s gonna happen is through science, right?’ he whispers. A strobe hits the copy of Life. The music, techno, bam da da boom. ‘I was at Woodstock, right?’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. And what did that do, right?’
‘Well, it was only a rock concert.’ The music stops.
‘People working on themselves,’ he nods his head in the direction of the crowd now filing out of the door.
‘Uh huh.’
He says; ‘From a scientific perspective you can’t do anything for anyone without healing the inner person. Start with yourself.’
‘Is that so?’
‘In my experience,’ he says, and leaves without the autograph. Ten minutes later he appears around a corner and hands me a leaflet about the spiritual implications of digitalizing dolphin song.
Here is the inconsistency of my position. I am envious of New Age certainties, but jealous of my own, which in general contradict them. Yet, if I am to make anything of the New Age I shall have to file those little prejudices away, for they will ensure that I fail in my attempt to comprehend the world I have chosen, temporarily, to inhabit. I admit to a tendency within myself to maintain a rather dismal inflexibility as shield against the clamour of contradiction. But at the same time I can see that the belief that there are no extra-terrestrials and the belief that there are coexist and have equal authority. It’s insoluble.
I fall asleep with the TV tinting blue the web of nerves behind my eyes, like moonlight on some electronic planet, and I wake up sometime before dawn, chilled to the soul. Above the parking lot of the King’s Rest Motel the sky is black and still as a darkroom, trapping in its invisible fibres the blossoms of a million stars.
‘Where the earth is dry the soul is wisest and best.’
HERACLITUS
Memorial Day, driving into afternoon sun on what was once Route 66. On the opposite side of the highway two lanes bumper-to-bumper trudge towards the Continental Divide like a train of metal mules. Bowling beside me is a line of Recreational Vehicles also heading west. Now and then the aluminium pod of an old-style trailer passes by, cutting the air with reflections.
To an American, and more particularly to a westerner, the Recreational Vehicle must be an almost invisible part of the mobile landscape, but a European can only stare as the hulking trucks, passing themselves off as miniature moving idylls, lumber gracelessly along the freeway. We don’t have sufficient wide roads to accommodate them, our cities are too close together, the gas they require is too expensive, we are not