To: K-list
Recieved: 2004/03/10 05:25
Subject: [K-list] Hello
From: forrest curo
On 2004/03/10 05:25, forrest curo posted thus to the K-list:
How to introduce me? I've just signed in, hoping this may be an occasion
for waking up further. Waking up who? All of us/me, I do believe...
A woman in a group at my last (Quaker) yearly meeting said my aura was a
kind of blue, "periwinkle," she said. Which seems appropriate.
I'm 59 years old, and that's a lot of life to put in one email. Here's "One
of Many Beginnings" I wrote almost a year ago, for a class at Pendle Hill.
(My wife and I went there after we had to sell our house, when our activist
projects had exhausted us financially and emotionally and it was time to
move the struggle to a new level...)
--------------------------------
In Berkeley, about 1967, I began to realize what had been
happening to me for some time.
The war against Vietnam had driven me to complete alienation from
this nation and its government. I saw some hope in the hippie movement, but
couldn´t feel I entirely belonged in that because acid tended to bring out
intense insecurity and fear in me, and even pot was sometimes illuminating,
sometimes frightening.
I had heard that a commune was recruiting members, preparing to
leave Civilization for someplace less urban. Withdrawing from this
civilization both appealed to me and worried me. I was doubtful how well I
could adjust to Nature, as well as whether I could find enough to read
outside a college town environment. And I was romantically lonesome–shy,
horny, and yearning for an emotional intimacy that I was unlikely to find
in the state of mind I was in. While I had friends I was quite fond of,
that sexual impasse gave my life a tint of sorrow and futility, exacerbated
by a lack of any context where I felt useful or even economically viable.
Before going to the house where the commune was gathering, I
stopped at Moe´s Books for something to read. The only thing I found was a
rather horrific book about a plague from space. I was prepared to devour
this, as I habitually devoured almost anything in the way of science
fiction, but when I arrived at the house and started smoking pot with the
people there I became uncomfortable with it, as one more sign of how little
I belonged with this group. They were sweet, serene, and sure of
themselves, while I was uptight, awkward, and reading a story where much of
humanity was falling into fear, violence, and yucky pestilence.
They were playing this really weird, crazy music on their stereo.
“Isn´t this great?’ the most beautiful young woman of the group asked me.
It just sounded weird. I left in the morning, feeling like an utter failure
as a hippie.
But I´d been smoking a lot of pot, and listening quite intently to
the lyrics, and some of it stuck with me. “Who would lamb, and who would
lion–and who would be the tamer? And who would hear/ directions clear/ from
the Unnamed All-namer?’
Wow? Was that possible? If that was what I wanted, could it happen?
And there was that chanting at the end of the song: “May the
long-time Sun shine on you, all Love surround you, and the pure Light
within you guide your way on.’ Over and over in a rhythm that, like
everything else about that music, seemed perfectly screwy, screwily
perfect. That song: “A Very Cellular Song,’ and that album: “The Hangman´s
Beautiful Daughter,’ and the group who sang it–the Incredible String Band,
became a powerful influence on my life over the next several years.
The refrain, long before I came here, became The Pendle Hill
Goodbye Song. A card on ____´s door here calls it “An old Quaker Song.’ And
so I have long suspected it to be; it goes right to the essence of
Quakerism. Our “Quaker Hymnal,’ gives the wrong tune, but it still credits
Mike Heron (of the Incredible String Band) for the song.
Now and then over those years, I would meet people with String
Band albums and listen intently to their lyrics, particularly the Very
Cellular Song. And whenever I did, whenever I would walk down the street
with those words bouncing in my mind´s ear, the hand of God would become
more visible, would seem to reach deeper into my life than it had before.
That process, of course, had started long before I heard the
String Band, and never stopped. And between those periods of intensified
recognition, there were many times I lost myself back again in the
So-called Real World, sank into habits and fears and faithlessness. That
process too recurs, even for brief moments at Pendle Hill. The alteration
seems almost like breathing, like sleep and awakening, winter and
summer–and yet it has a direction, toward greater, longer lasting periods
of clarity. More and more, as I become accustomed to God´s interventions,
even in the low periods I remember Who is real.
What is the difference, then? When I was moving the right way,
open to possibility, in tune with the world (although this seemed only
marginally a state I could achieve by my own efforts, or maintain longer
than its designated time) I found that world magical. Events occurred in a
meaningful way, connected by what Jung labeled ‘synchronicity´ rather than
by bare mechanistic causation. I knew that God was no more present at these
times than at any other, but these were the times I felt God was at work,
manifesting the invisible order that holds this universe together.
Could I give an example? Many examples. Could they be explained
away as simple coincidence? I have considered them from this standpoint.
But I am a mathematician; I am aware of the many pitfalls and fallacies
that can enter into calculating probabilities, and some of these
coincidences have been extremely unlikely. Was coincidence a possible
explanation? Barely possible. Did I think these things had occurred by
chance, then? No. I could barely imagine the mental contortions I would
have needed to pretend these events were anything but meaningful.
In June 1985, Anne & I started a small used bookstore in San
Diego. As both of us are poets, and had been editing a local poetry
newsletter, we were unusually interested in acquiring small press poetry,
although we realized it would not be a major source of income. Naive and
new to the business, we had bought the depleted inventory of a failed
bookstore, and we desperately needed to acquire more interesting books.
About this time, Professor Robert Jones at San Diego State wins a
poetry prize, and as a result Wild Onions, a collection of his poetry, is
published. We are still producing the newsletter, so I acquire a copy to
review, where I read the poem about the death of a promising young
colleague of his: “...I´m working well when your lady Michelle calls,
hysterical. I go to my class. I don´t know what else to do. I give a class
on the composition of the poems of Jeffrey Miller and on the tiny life I
shared with him. That´s what I thought to do, driving blinded to school,
but finally I give nothing. I enter, smile (the muscles of my face
berserk); I say Read this and Write that and For next week and then no
words come. They stare. I say you died. And they, beautiful and humane to
the last one, each having already lost his Jeffrey, pack up their books and
leave me with mine...’
I write a favorable review, go to Robert Jones´ reading, forget
about it.
I decide to look for books in the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift
Store. Everybody knows that book scouts for Wahrenbrock´s, a large and
successful store that´s been in business forever, routinely go through St.
Vincent´s stock before it reaches the shelf, removing everything of any
commercial interest. I´m new; I don´t know this. I examine shelves and
shelves of trash, finding virtually nothing. And then, when I´m just about
ready to give up I blunder upon a small poetry section, consisting of five
works by Rod McKuen, in poor condition, plus one rather awkward-looking
paperback–It looks like an imitation of a commercial paperback, simulated
by Martians who don´t know quite what a real paperback should look like.
But I, the one book dealer in town who would conceivably do this, pick up
the book and start reading poems. Wow! This guy is good! Jeffrey Miller?
That name starts looking very familiar to me, and when I return home I of
course make a dash for Wild Onions, and there he is.
I call up Robert Jones: “Would you like another copy of your
friend´s book?’ He doesn´t know what I´m talking about. He´d known nothing
about it when Miller´s other friends (in Sonoma, I think) collected
Miller´s poems after his death, and published them. One copy out of this
tiny press run had made its way to Southern California, to San Diego, been
given away, was dumped in the last place anyone would think to look, to be
picked up by the only book dealer in San Diego who would have recognized
it, on its way to the one man who most needed to see it.
Does this kind of thing establish the existence of God? Not to
anyone who doesn´t experience it. But I have met a great many others to
whom such stories are a familiar part of their lives. Are they Quakers?
Some are, some aren´t. Some Quakers don´t know what we´re talking about.
But people from a wide variety of religions and nonreligions live in this
experience. For some unknown reason–perhaps only because of being credulous
enough to be open to it--we have been given a glimpse of the true working
of the world. A remarkable strange thing it is.
Forrest Curo
San Diego
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