Pulse

June 11, 1967
Plainfield

Pulse

The Summer season is at hand. Our formal Sunday activities will not resume until September 10. As my seasonal sign-off, I want to share with you some pages from my journal. While admittedly personal, certainly subjective, I have an objective reason for revealing the pulse of myself as this may be sensed through what I say and the way I say.

“Experience precedes interpretation.” You have heard me quote these three words before, and I do again, because I believe that they represent an essential understanding of religious experience. There must be a pulse before one can touch, count, and scrawl numbers on a chart. In these autobiographical notes I am reporting my pulse recorded on certain occasions.

Many of you will experience change, adventure, vacation. Perhaps some will travel to far places where you will find joy, comfort, excitement, relaxation. You may also know sorrow, discomfort, boredom. In one way or another why not take your pulse? Interpret your experience in your journal or your solitary reflections.

You may want to share your interpretations of experience with others. You may not. There is always risk that your interpretations may reveal more about yourself than you planned. But this may be good for you.

I have felt the pulse of varied experiences; some of the interpretations I share with you in order to make the point that our living words, acts, and attitudes are interpretations of experience. If one is honest and candid with himself, if no one else, the interpretations may provide insight into the pivotal questions each must answer for himself: Identity, “who am I?” and destiny, “what do I want my life to be?”

***
THREE HOURS IN RENO ON A FRIDAY EVENING:

The sky is invaded by a Niagara of neon, flashing, glaring, inviting humans to be inhuman in the gambling casino. For that is what occurs in these plush, vulgar establishments – an awful transformation of the human to the inhuman.

Ceaselessly fed by silver coins, the slot machines click, and the wheels spin, as the young swingers and the old hags, youthful mods and paunched cigar-clenchers, cowboys in week-end jeans and divorcees from wherever make artificial offerings to their own hungers. There are sharp-eyes too, alert, never resting – the dealers, house cops, and change-girls.

Do not be confused or deceived that I’m reverting to the Puritan conscience, falling back on old cliches. What I observed was not immoral, for immorality, however defined, centered on human need however much that human need may be distorted by anxieties, alienation, or aggression.

But I saw persons dehumanize themselves in the ritualistic armswing that pulled the lever and in the hypnotic fascination with which they signaled the dealer to deal another card.

Aware of my own cargo of memories, some of them marked “guilt”, I think I know now, why, (instinctively?) I have always believed there is no pleasure in gambling, although for a very few there is profit. In the rigid faces of Reno I knew that the travel-ad come-ons and the dazzling posters are no small fraud, but an immense swindle. Gambling in Reno is love-less, sex-less, joy-less.

Three hours in Reno on a Friday evening brought in a tide of sad compassion, but also represented a leak in the dike of hope for human nature. A night for Robinson Jeffers, not Robert Browning.

With what soft light were those brown mountains moonbathed prior to glare of the Niagara of neon?

RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONAL

“We’re glad you didn’t die,” said Mark, his six-year-old voice somewhat more shrill since the tonsil operation.

“I’m glad I didn’t,” I rejoined truthfully.


“Are you glad me and Shawn didn’t die?”

“Very glad indeed.”

Then, after one of those pauses, when one almost feels the convolutions of a child’s mind, Mark commented, “That’s because you love us so much.”

Perhaps the better human motives are more complex than that, but what a proposition to offer one who takes unseemly pride in his studies of theology, psychology, sociology. We want life because we love.

Where, Ecclesiastes, is your cynicism? Where, O Thomas Aquinas, is your SUMMA? Where, O Ralph Waldo, is your transcendental oversoul? Where, Hegel, is your system of thesis, antithesis, synthesis? We want life because we love.

And I remembered OUR TOWN and Emily. I think I’ll let the volumes of the scholars acquire dust for awhile and seek out playwrights and poets and ponder the wisdom of the very young.

ISN’T IT AWFUL? (AND PROFITABLE)

The hippies hang out in Haight-Ashbury. There you will see the beards, be-flowered long hair (masculine), teeny-boppers, guitars, peace-stickers, and paper-backed copies of MACBIRD. There you will hear reports of pot-smoking, trip-taking sans usual transportation methods and hear legends about the hallucinogenic efficacy of seeds of the Hawaiian woodrose as well as about LSD.

In the second week of May, there were rumors abroad that the coming Summer would see the arrival of 200,000 young and aging hippies who would celebrate a “Summer of Love.” There were those among the City Fathers who solemnly warned their publics about immorality and sanitation problems. Some of these politicians proposed that hippies be banned. How, in a city that encourages (encourages?? seduces!!) the last tourist dollar possible? After all, some “hippies” arrive clean in an ivy-league or Saks suit, changing later to the sleeveless vest, properly soiled, the filthy jeans and the abjuration of washing. More interesting still, some of the hippies are not insolvent because Dad or Mom regularly sends a check from Topeka or Evanston or Madison. The banks report a willingness to cash good checks even when tendered by young persons who smell somewhat over-ripe.

Then there are the Diggers – who may be the modern equivalent of the medieval monastic hostel, where the hungry wayfarer was fed without fee. The Diggers, volunteer and nebulously disorganized, scrounge and scavenge all varieties of food in order that he who is hungry in Haight Ashbury may eat. No cost. How about that?

But City Fathers are worried. That old “image” again. There is talk about re-routing municipal bus lines around Haight Ashbury in order to shield commuters and shoppers from seeing the hippies at their tribal songs, dances, love-ins and other assorted rites of rebellion and freakout.

But at the same time, the “scenic” bus lines organize tours of Haight Ashbury. A fascinating paradox of the cultural attitudes of bus companies, is it not? Is there less concern about staining (by staring at hippies) the morals of the Tourists than Commuters? Or do the residents really want the existence of Haight Ashbury, and for that matter, topless North Beach, but prefer not to have to concede the disparity between “The City” as a new cultural Athens and San Francisco as the compliant and competent keeper of the Tenderloin tradition? Is tolerable morality linked to profit-motives, inevitably? What would morality based on prophet-motives be like?

LIVING ON THE SQUARE

Sitting in the sun, I watched the boys kicking the soccer ball, observed the little girls turning and prancing in their mimes and movements.

The building complex (The Cooperative) is so made that the rear sections of a number of buildings share a common green or “square.” The porches are convenient not only for the charcoal grill and a cool brew but also for inconspicuous supervision.



The cooperative housing units were of various colors, but not as many different colors as the children at play. There were Negroes; there were descendants of Europeans, blond or dark, but white. From the Asian melting pot, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and indistinguishable but lovely strands. There were those whose parents came from South of the Border. The children in their own spontaneities were grouped severally, by sex, age, interest, but not by color. And I had some reason to believe their parents were concerned not about color differences but idea-likenesses on which they could agree so as to demonstrate a united front or stake out common ground.

It was a prediction of things to come – this living on the Square. How long? Is there enough time?

SEAL ROCKS – FOURTH VISIT

Four visits in four different years: I had stared from the fabricated observation points but always birds, never seals on Seal Rocks. Some people said the seals no longer sunned on Seal Rocks. But on this elevenish morning on the tenth of May, they were there. Long before reaching Cliff House, I could hear the barking and honking oversounding with living challenge the mechanical rumble of the bus.

I fed dimes to the telescope – ah, Reno, if you knew what dimes could really buy. Blacks and browns, assorted sizes, sunned and squirmed and dived and swam. The rancid coffee in the miserable plastic cup suddenly lost its habitual attraction. If there had been no barrel within toss range, I would have violated the anti-littering law, for I could no longer abide the instant when the eternal was seeking me out.

Another dime: There in focus were two bull seals, one bulkier but grimier with age. Their throats swelled, their red mouths gaped with their bellowings of threatening confrontation. The smaller retreated into the surf, continuing to agitate from a safer distance. His meaning was quite clear to me, “Some day, some day, you old bastard, down you go and I get the harem.”

A glad thing that the seals are not always there. Nearby in Golden Gate Zoo, the animals are there, regular hours for visitors. The gorilla, haunched on his cement island, is there on schedule, staring his mournful, rage-full contempt. Who are the watchers and who are the watched? I have outgrown man’s zoos. That elevenish morning I wrestled with the authentic charms of freakout. Apeman go home.

Seals: Never sun on Seal Rocks always, but always sun sometimes on Seal Rocks. It is not enough to be born free.

ON NEVER BEING THE SAME AGAIN

If the sob in her three-year-old throat was contrived, then watch out all ye repertory players and method actresses. “But, I won’t see you again,” said Shawnie, clutching me with that unhesitating abandon and cerebral innocence, which is a great gift given to grandfathers.

I trust she erred; that she will see me again, for we prize our meetings. But in a gutsy sort of way, she was right. She won’t see me again; at least not the “me” of May 6-11, 1967, for that was a me that never had been before and would never be again. I may seem the same; old, visible habits and features persist. But I had changes since that July meeting, ten months before, when we waved goodbye and headed East. I will change again before we meet again, assuming the grace and luck of life that we will meet again.

But there are forces in life which alter and weaken my vision of myself, and I am changed. But also there are forces in life which strengthen and support this “me,” uncovering resources that needed revealing in order that I may BE a support and changer. Adjectives are not essential; ask Hemingway (if you can). The “me” that Shawnie may meet in its changedness needs neither adjectives nor judgments. But pronouns and verbs are vital, I avow. Who cares?