The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [31]
Nice to be back. The next day was more work: no more tears, no more tangles.
THE GOOD OLD-FASHIONED ORGANIC WAY. A commune a little farther up the coast, rather than exploit animals or use any sort of machine, plowed their land by harnessing themselves to the plow four at a time. This was seriously discussed at our place somewhere in between my first two breakdowns. We eventually compromised on a roto tiller, the worst of both worlds.
We hadn’t taken to the woods just for a change of scenery and a different way of life. The physical and psychical aspects of our adventure were inextricably intertwined, but the head changes were what we were really after. We expected to get closer to nature, to each other and our feelings, and we did, but even these changes were relatively superficial. They merely meant getting in touch with things that were already there. We wanted to go beyond that and develop entirely new ways of being and experiencing the world.
We had only vague ideas about the shape of these changes or when they would happen, but we looked forward to them eagerly. Since they would result from being free of the cities, of capitalism, racism, industrialism, they had to be for the better.
It was a lot like taking some new drug and waiting for the changes.
“Is it happening yet?”
“I think I’m walking more with my feet than my head.”
Push-ups and football were out. Yoga and frisbee were in. Hamburgers were out, soybeans and brown rice were in.
Fifty-pound sacks of dried milk from a wholesaler were better than quarts from the corner store but not as good as from our own goats. Buying Canadian was better than American. Red Chinese work clothes were better still. Bartering was better than cash but couldn’t touch dump picking. Anything that could somehow be construed as counterrevolutionary was out. I had my problems digging Charlie Manson and felt bad about it sometimes. Not that the people there were heavy into Charlie’s trip, it was just hard to have bad feelings about anything or anyone that Nixon and company didn’t like. If it had come down to choosing between Nixon and Charlie it’s hard to say which way the farm would have gone. It was a hypothetical situation, a not very likely one, but a fair amount of our lives was tied up with hypothetical situations—the revolution, ecological disaster, the last judgment, the breakdown of Western civilization, Armageddon.
Apocalyptic expectations, revolution, economy, as important as they were still didn’t get to the root. The truth is we didn’t really know what we wanted. Ego death, mystic oneness with all things, seemed like it might be what we were after but it also seemed pretentious. We were after something a little less flashy but no easier to describe adequately. The best model I could come up with was wanting more of my life to be like playing with Zeke.
I think most of us were fed to the teeth with the brand of rationality that had made up so much of our education. Western rationality had made a dreadful mess of a lovely planet, but it was more that this form of rationality had taken up the lion’s share of our minds without giving us much in return. Rational truths were true enough, but they were mostly trivial, boring, and not particularly useful. We wanted to free some of our rational brain space to make room for other ways of being. Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths.
Folk medicine, astrology, the I Ching, other things Western rationality held in contempt, were more training exercises than things we absolutely believed in. We trusted gut impulses more and more, our plans less and less, and found ourselves having gut feelings about more and more things, and getting more and more done and feeling better and better about what we did.
There were some spooky parts to it. Stubbed toes, strange clouds, how many snakes we saw in a day, all fit together and had meanings which we would be able to figure out some day