"Thornley, Kerry - Zenarchy v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thornley Kerry)

Why they were called Human Be-Ins was obvious, for just by being there we had created all this haunting beauty.
Although it lacked the strident quality of a demonstration, this gathering could not help being an eloquent protest of all that was drab and uninspired in the surrounding dominant culture. Only the tiniest children took it all in stride as something quite natural to be expected.
More Gatherings of the Tribes followed during the spring and summer of 1967 in the Crystal Springs area of Griffith Park. Before long we organized a tribe of our own called the Gentle Folk with our friends who were into sexual mate sharing and psychedelic s. Most of them we had met through Kerista, a movement that enjoyed a brief, spectacular success as the hip religion - establishing communes in ghetto slums - until the founder, Jud the Prophet, turned most of us off by coming out strongly in favor of the war in Vietnam.
I recall carrying our banner through the early morning mist, sitting beneath it later as an American Indian squatted in front of me and, without uttering a word, made a beautiful flower out of some feathers and colored pipe cleaners we'd brought to give a way. Then he handed it to me.
Before dawn I would also gather rose balls - flowers just about to bloom - from bushes around our house. Whenever I made eye contact with someone at the Love-In, I'd toss them one. Some Diggers who liked my rose ball idea once gave me a big, fat joint of Acapulco Gold.
Our whole tribe huddled one morning under the same blanket, giggling. God's eyes made of yarn. Peace emblems and scented oils. Guitar-strumming minstrels. Beautiful women in flowing long dresses. Laid-back Hell's Angels. Bewildered crew-cut servicemen on liberty and little old ladies looking for Communists. Afro-Americans with drums. Practically everything and everybody you wouldn't expect to find anywhere else was here.
One of the little old ladies went home with flowers in her hair and wrote a nice column about us in the Pasadena newspaper for which she happened to work. As she was to note, when we cleared out of the park in the evening, not a speck of litter was left behind. For the most part, the rest of the media confined itself to inaccuracies such as underestimating our numbers by many thousands or implying that we were outstandingly sacrilegious. Every effort was made from the start to insure that we would become nothing more than a passing fad.
By the middle of that summer, the cops were infiltrating us and making busts for marijuana possession with increasing belligerence. Earlier, Timothy Leary had said, "I didn't mind it when they were calling us a cult because that means a small group o f people devoted to an ideal, but now they are calling us a movement, and that means we are in danger of becoming a minority group." By this time it was worse, for we were a generation. As the misrepresentation and persecution increased, the morale of our fragile social miracle deteriorated and with it went most our much-touted love.
"Hippies don't like to take baths!" became a popular cliche and so everyone opposed to personal cleanliness ran away from home and joined us. Whoever originated that rumor was probably speaking for how they themselves would have opted to behave in an atmosphere of freedom. Mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy insured that every unseemly trait projected our way by those who feared themselves would become the truth in short order, for Time and Newsweek began to function as recruiting literature. So it was not long before it was no longer hip to be a hippie.
Astonishing, though, was that anything had happened in the first place. Nobody could say precisely what brought us to be, but LSD got much of the credit. Unlike junkies, pot-heads were always a sociable lot. Acid, however, was to endow them with a cosmic confidence in the righteousness of their way. That in turn led to lectures and light shows and psychedelic boutiques and, ultimately, a movement strong and vigorous enough to be taken for a generation. But in fact, it had contained people of all ages with little more in common than independence of mind.
Among my friends in those days was a man named John Overton. A technical writer for the aerospace industry, a White devotee of Black culture and a consummate seducer of women, he began to blossom spiritually with LSD, psycho-drama and human potential groups. Briefly he became involved with an Indonesian cult that recommended legally changing one's name in order to reprogram an unwanted self-image. So he changed his first name to Camden, because he liked the sound of it, and his last name to Benares, after the city where the Buddha delivered his first sermon.
Since then, he has written Zen Without Zen Masters (Falcon Press, 1985), a book that inspired this one and which seems to have grown out of our stoned 1967 discussions about mysticism and authority. To the best of my knowledge he also wrote in those days the first American Zen story, as a result of a visit to the Oracle Tribe's mansion. Published in his book as "Enlightenment of a Seeker," it is about a young man who didn't know what to think of himself. Then one day he overheard another say of him, "Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead." As Camden explains, "Hearing this, the man was enlightened."
Among the scholars of hip I did not know personally, Gary Snyder was into something he called Zen Anarchism. Everything else he said also attracted me.
As Japhy Ryder, he was hero of Jack Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums. In the interview with Ginsberg, Leary and Watts he seemed at once the most sensitive and the most politically sophisticated.
As a libertarian I was acquainted with that astute minority among us calling themselves anarchists. That they were not a bunch of psychopathic bomb throwers out to stir up chaos and violence, but a group of sociologists independent of the constraints of institutional financing, was just beginning to dawn on me.
At the library I was always obtaining books about Zen Buddhism, for I was aware that it was one of the keys to the fresh liveliness of what was happening. Writers in the Free Press and commentators at KPFK frequently quoted Zen sayings. When I was serving in the Marines in Japan I'd made a cursory study of the subject, but came away more puzzled than enlightened- both with Zen and Japanese culture in general.
Now Zen struck me as the natural lifestyle implied by anarchist politics - and from the Taoistic perspective of Zen, anarchism seemed the logical political option. Like the Yin and the Yang, they belong together in a dynamic synergy of creative power.
In his final work, Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts was to reach the same conclusion, linking the principles discovered by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu - Taoist sages as responsible as the Buddha for the flavor of Zen - with the anarchism of Peter Kr opotkin.
Pondering the words of Alan Watts in the Oracle interview, about the destructive power of names, I decided it was not the labels so much as our attachment to them that constituted the problem. Much like the Psychedelic Movement, our consciousness began to narrow. As the Hip Culture we were used by Madison Avenue to sell fashions. As the Love Generation we became hateful and angry because we saw ourselves as loving and young, and those opposing us as spiteful and old. Perhaps the secret of survival , now that we were being named from the outside anyhow, was to forever create new names and always be ready to let the old ones go.
Early one Saturday morning, wooden blocks seemed to tumble and clatter away from my mind in all directions. Had it been satori (enlightenment), I wouldn't have been so annoyed since then by the trials and tribulations of living. But it was something that nearly allowed me to understand what those old guys meant. When my mind closed in on it, it slipped away like an eel - but that took time because I was quite thoroughly stoned on marijuana. After that, my fascination with Zen outstripped my devotion to rigid anarchist ideology.
Then there was the night I was having a bout of insomnia and jumped from bed, ran into the dining room, grabbed a sheet of paper and a laundry marker and wrote one single bold word: ZENARCHY!
I hope that didn't kill anything.


Chapter 2
The Birth of Zenarchy
During the days at 77th Street, I didn't write much about Zenarchy, but I contemplated the notion of a periodical by that name. I was experiencing considerable frustration over lack of editorial freedom as managing editor of the libertarian newsletter. My fascination with the counter-culture was not shared by the publisher. But then nearly everything was getting on my nerves by the middle of the summer.
Degenerating under police pressure and media hoop-de-la, the hip culture was becoming steadily more difficult to defend as my enthusiasm for promoting it increased. Smog-ridden Los Angeles with its maze of freeways kept bringing to mind Timothy Leary's advice to "turn on, tune in, drop out". (Or as Camden was to phrase it: "fly up, freak out, fuck off".)
Everyone was saying urban existence was not for heads. I was turned on and I fancied that I was tuned in, so I began making jaunts to the woods to see what smoking a number there was like. A whole new drug experience seemed to result in nature's universal living room - both overwhelming and comfortable.
As did many before and after me, I searched for a place to live in the outskirts of Los Angeles - only to discover there were none. Expensive hill property or desert comprised the major alternatives to the megalopolis. So my wife, Cara, and I decided to sell our Volkswagen and use the money to move to Florida. Our ultimate aim was to purchase or build a houseboat and plunge into the Everglades.
As it happened, we never got any farther in the direction of unspoiled wilderness than a cottage on a farm near Tampa, Florida. Then, I got a job across the bay and we moved into town. At least there was no smog.
After becoming immersed in the writings of Chuang Tzu - the only person in history besides Diogenes whose reincarnation I would care to be - I began publishing a sporadic newsletter in flyleaf format called Zenarchy. Principally this was to keep in touch with my California friends.
Usually I would type up a page or two when the mood suited me, paste a dingbat or two swiped from another publication between blurbs, and then pay the local offset printer to run off two or three hundred copies.
My original ambition in California had been for a monthly or quarterly journal, but the sparse format proved serendipitous. Most of my friends were inspired to begin issuing newsletters of equally simple design, stimulating their friends in turn to do the same. In the early Seventies there emerged a whole network of one-person journalistic efforts, most of them well worth the reading.
Following are portions of the Zenarchy broadsides, beginning with the August 19, 1968 issue published in Tampa:
ZEN is Meditation. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation.
As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
"Having said that zen study is knowing yourself, the roshi went on: In America you have democracy, which means for you government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I in my turn am bringing democracy to Japan. You cannot have democracy until people know themselves. The Chinese said that government was unnecessary and they were right. When people know themselves and have their own strength, they do not need government. Otherwise they are just a mob and must be ruled. On the other hand, when rulers do not know themselves, they push the people around. When you do not know yourself, you busy yourself with other people. Zen study is just a matter of getting your own feet on the ground." (from Matter of Zen by Paul Wienpahl, New York University Press, 1964)
STONED SERMON #1: Dogen's Hole
Having as little as possible to do with the powerful - that was Dogen's splendid Way of Buddhas and Patriarchs. So when one of his followers accepted for his Zendo a gift of land from a grateful Regent whom Dogen had instructed, the fool was driven by the master from the monastery.
Moreover, Dogen ordered the portion of floor where the erring monk customarily sat in zazen torn out - and in the earth beneath it he had his students dig a six-foot-deep hole.
Zenarchy is new in name alone. Not only is it the Bastard Zen of America which has grown to flower over the recent decades in nearly everybody's pot - it is the heretofore nameless streak that zig-zags back through the Zen Tradition, weaving with delirious defiance in and out of various sects and schools - slapping the face of an Emperor here, rejecting a high office there, throwing a rule-blasting koan at a bureaucrat elsewhere - and coming to rest finally in the original true words of Lao Tzu (from a translation in Laotzu's Tao and Wu-wei by Dwight Goddard, Thetford, Vermont, 1939): "When the world yields to the principle of Tao, its race horses will be used to haul manure; when the world ignores Tao, war horses are pastured on the public common."
Nevertheless, there was never a greater Zenarchist than old Dogen Zenji - for in that astounding hole of his can be found a monument to Freedom as enduring as the very Void.
Such gentle tolerance as he displayed is a rare thing, too, in the world of men and Buddhas. But then his Compassion for the foolish monk was no doubt boundless, as befits an Enlightened One.
That was followed by a September 4, 1968, flyleaf titled "QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN LAO" containing these statements from Lao Tzu:
"It is taught in books of strategy: 'Never be so rash as to open hostilities; always be on the defense at first.' Also: 'Hesitate to advance an inch but be always ready to retreat a foot.' In other words, it is wiser even in war to depend upon craft and skill instead of force."
"When well-matched armies come to conflict, the one which regrets the need for fighting always wins."
"The good commander strikes a decisive blow, then stops. He does not dare assert and complete his mastery. He will strike the blow, but will guard against becoming arrogant. For he strikes from necessity, and not out of a zest for victory."
"Both arms and armor are unblessed things. Not only do men come to detest them - but a curse seems to follow them. Therefore, the True Man avoids depending upon arms."
"I am teaching what others have taught - that the powerful and aggressive seldom come to natural deaths. But I make this wisdom the basis of my whole outlook."