The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [19]
Gifts from God? Who else would operate that way?
Exactly when this sort of thing first started happening to me is difficult to say. By the time I got to college it was the biggest thing in my life, and it became bigger.
It felt so good.
After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it. The grace experiences seemed to be cumulative. They didn’t lift me up and then drop me down leaving me lower than they found me. They added to each other. The dry spells were just plateaus on an ever higher climb, but that didn’t stop me from looking forward to the next jump while I was digesting my last one.
There was usually a sensual rush of warmth and well-being. Sometimes that was all there was to it. Just feeling good.
I was doing things just right. I felt graceful and beautiful. Life was graceful and beautiful. We were moving very well together.
The message part of grace was something I was never quite at home with. I was perfectly comfortable when it seemed like just a simple greeting. “Hi, Mark.” “Hi, God.” And that would be that. It wasn’t a one-sided affair. I could start it. “Hi, God.” And usually he’d come back, “Hi, Mark.” Not always, but there were probably plenty of times He said “Hi” and I missed it.
It was when there seemed to be more to it that it bothered me. “Look, God, I don’t ask you for motorcycles, don’t ask me to go slaying infidels.” I was never sure of what was being asked or what lesson I was supposed to be learning. I doubt that God really wanted me to slay infidels but He might have, the same way He probably still has somewhere in the back of His mind the possibility that I’m angling for a motorcycle.
I was never at the point of saying for sure that this or that was definitely the work of God. I just wanted to keep the possibility open. If there was such a thing as grace, I didn’t want to cut myself off from it.
Somewhere back in my childhood someone told me about drowning sailors being kept afloat and eventually deposited on land by porpoises. More recently some marine biologists decided to check these accounts. What they found out is that porpoises simply like to play. The research concluded that porpoises probably take as many drowning sailors away from land as toward it. “I had no more strength left but I was floating toward a beach about twenty yards away. I figured I could just about make it when this fucking porpoise came along and…” There are some phenomena which you normally hear only one side of. Maybe when I found out the truth of porpoises and drowning sailors I should have started having second thoughts about grace, but by that time I was thoroughly hooked.
HIPPIEDOM. I wanted to be a good hippie. For me and lots of other people a good hippie was something very worth being, if not the only thing worth being.
In a way I’m glad no one seems much interested in being a good hippie any more. It wasn’t an easy thing to be. I hope the fact that no one wants to be a good hippie any more means the whole thing worked, that the world is slightly less the desperate, mindless, cruel nightmare of unawareness that gave birth to hippiedom.
Maybe everyone’s part hippie now so that really good full-time hippies like what I tried to be aren’t needed any more. It’s what the good hippies wanted all along anyway. Maybe we could get doctors and lawyers to do the same.
A good hippie had no last name. It wasn’t entirely my fault I wasn’t a better hippie. “This is Simon, and Kathy, and Jack, and Virginia, and Mark Vonnegut.” Some of the best hippies I ever knew introduced me that way. If they hadn’t I probably would have found some way to work it in.
I had other shortcomings as a hippie. I didn’t have too much trouble getting over the idea of private property, but the big problem was that although I did all the things good hippies do, I always did them with