Books of a Lifetime

A House for Buddha by Ross Parmenter.  Woodstock Press.  529 pp.

Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life by Dolores LaChapelle.  Kivaki Press.  383 pp.

The Lyndoniad by William Guy.  Xlibris.  444pp.

On my second trip to Mexico—I believe the year was 1991—my wife and I had arrived at the Basilica of the Virgin of Solitude in Oaxaca when she noticed Mass was about to begin.  She has always loved religious services in Mexico, and said she’d like to attend.  Nowadays I would go with her, but in those days I was vaguely anti-Catholic and spoke almost no Spanish.  We’d passed a bookstore on our way, so I decided to go back.

I don’t know what could be more futile than browsing in a bookstore full of books in a foreign language—you’d think even Mass would be better—but I’ve never seen a bookstore I didn’t like.  This was a small place whose proprietor was obviously the owner, and he soon realized he had a clueless gringo on his hands.  “Tengo un libro en Inglais,” he said.  And he brought out a volume entitled Lawrence in Oaxaca, by Ross Parmenter.  I opened to the illustrations, and saw a photo of Lawrence standing in the courtyard of the Basilica where I’d just been.

That was one of the luckiest discoveries of my life.  It was a beautiful volume, and I bought it on the spot.  Somehow, in recounting the ninety or so days that Lawrence spent in Oaxaca, Parmenter summed up the entirety of Lawrence’s career and writing life.  I was enthralled by the volume, and it led me to reread Lawrence, and to dip into a number of things—like Mornings in Mexico and The Plumed Serpent—I hadn’t read before.  In the early nineties all my interests seemed to come together, and I wrote a book on sex and spirituality that included a chapter on Lawrence, who saw the depths of sexuality as few ever have.  I sent a copy to Ross Parmenter, and he actually called me on the phone when he read it (and mentioned a few corrections he would have made).  That began a brief long-distance friendship.

Parmenter had been a music critic for the New York Times, and had published a number of books, but Lawrence in Oaxaca was the only one that found a major publisher (and it wasn’t all that major).  He was a writer who put things in rather than leaving them out, but that worked perfectly for his book on Lawrence, because he took the work that Lawrence did in Oaxaca and expanded it into a whole life story.  He had been retired from the Times for years, typically spent six months in Manhattan and six in Oaxaca.  The bookstore owner had told me as much, and said the man was much loved in that city.  He loved the place and the place loved him.

I had mentioned in the book that I practiced Zen, and he let me know he had also spent time in Japan, and had written a book about his sojourn there, entitled A House for Buddha; unable to find a publisher, had published it himself.  Quite modestly, with no pressure, he asked if I would like a copy.  I had a long-time interest in Japan, and sent him a check.  He soon sent along A House for Buddha, which was a coffee-table sized hardback that came in at 514 pages.  Each page had two columns of print, and enough words to fill three pages of a normal book.  He had written what amounted to a 1500 page book, which included a number of his own drawings.

We seemed to have exactly the same tastes, a love for Mexico—especially Oaxaca—and an interest in Japan and Buddhism, which resulted in both cases in a religious conversion of sorts, though he practiced Pure Land Buddhism, and my meditation practice gave me a new appreciation for the teachings of Jesus.  I was in my early forties, and Ross in his early eighties, but I felt a real kinship with him.

I wasn’t, however, ready to sit down to a 1500 page book that seemed largely about Japanese architecture and a brand of Buddhism I didn’t practice.  This, I thought to myself, is the kind of book you read in old age.

Or during a pandemic.  When everyone keeps telling you you’re old.

I’ve been self-isolating in Asheville, taking on long reading projects and enjoying the stretches of time, and I thought of books I’d left in Durham, including A House for Buddha.  I began to think this might be the time for them.

Another such book is Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life by Dolores LaChapelle.  It too is self-published, also uses the double column format to get words on the page, but it also, literally, seems to be a book in which a writer put everything she knew about life.  There are countless intriguing things about this volume, like the dedication—“This book is for the San Juan Mountains”—and the epigraph under the title: “Man is not the supreme triumph of nature but rather an element in a supreme activity called life.”  Also the chapter titles (just to include a sampling): The Greek Language Problem and Plato; Addiction, Capitalism and the New World Ripoff; Lessons from Primitive Cultures; Taoism;  Childhood Play and Adult Ritual; Bringing the Sky into Your Life; Sacred Sex.

It was that last subject that originally captured my attention; LaChapelle too has a chapter on Lawrence.  I believe it was because a friend knew of my book about sacred sex that she recommended this one, and Dolores LaChapelle, to me.  LaChapelle was a renowned deep powder skier (an activity about which I know nothing) and a T’ai Chi practitioner as well as a deep ecologist.  She was an excellent writer, and interested in everything; she wrote her heart out in this book.  She has a massive collection of fascinating quotations at the beginning of every chapter; the quotations alone are worth the price of the book.  You can see why a publisher wasn’t interested, or wouldn’t know what to make of it: where would they pigeonhole it (and without a pigeonhole what would they do)?  But if you want to hold a human being’s life and spirit in your hands, this is the book.

I hope it doesn’t seem too self-serving, or filial, for me to mention as a third volume a book of poetry written by my brother, The Lyndoniad.  In a way it seems ridiculous to call this the book of a lifetime when he has also written a four-volume novel, a book of collected poems, and four volumes of travel essays—as well as having translated the Iliad—and yet in a way The Lyndoniad spans all of those projects.  He dedicates it to his high school American history teacher, and in a certain sense it began in his senior year, when President Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson took over.  He found that moment, in the words of his introduction, “electrifying.  The present moment suddenly seemed to matter to me as it had not under President Kennedy, whom I found something of a cypher, and in Lyndon Johnson—I’m not sure exactly why—I saw American history embodied as a living force, a reality.”

My brother was as anti-war as the rest of us; we all had our problems with Johnson during the war, and in a sense the war made him a tragic figure: he had been a great—if overbearing—Senator, and his domestic programs as President were remarkable, but the war dragged him down.  He startled the world by deciding not to run in 1968, and his life ended soon after that.  It was a sudden and rapid decline.

You will never see—as I have—the entire bookcase devoted to books on Johnson that my brother has in his dining room.  He has been studying the man for much of his life.  I had read a fair amount of The Lyndoniad in manuscript, and am now making my way through its published form.  It reads like a kind of Spoon River Anthology of the Sixties—though the versification is much better—with every voice related to Johnson or his Presidency, though we’re often not sure how.  The voices are not identified.  The effect is to see the way the war dominated that era, and dominated and tormented the mind of LBJ.  He’s like Ahab with the Great White Whale.  He can’t defeat it.  He can’t begin to understand it.  It was him against the war, and the war won.

It’s startling to hear these expert opinions on the war, from the finest minds in the country, and realize how dead wrong most of them now seem.

William Guy doesn’t think of this version as being final, necessarily.  He took the time to assemble and edit it when the pandemic struck, and we were all starting to wonder how long we had (and what we should do with our unfinished projects).  For a person of my generation, it stands as a monument to our youth, which seemed tormented at the time.  We had no idea what we’d face in our old age.

We’d welcome Lyndon Johnson with open arms at this point.