Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Graves was a master at turning things inward. In what I’d intended to be a hard-nosed interview on the question of form versus formlessness in modern painting, he eventually had me on the floor of his studio tossing Chinese coins, consulting the I Ching . It wasn’t an easy sell. By that time in my life, I’d reached the conclusion that Asian spiritual texts were probably best left to spiritual Asians. The Bible is an Eastern book, pure and simple, and when one considers the many messes, psychological and material, we in the West have made in its name, one shudders to think of what harm might be unleashed from similar misinterpretations (most due to ignorance, others calculated and insidious) of The Bhagavad Gita, The Rig Veda, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead .

I knew that the I Ching was oracular, a book of divination whose system of hexagrams, refined in China over a period of three thousand years, was centered on the concept of the dynamic balance of opposites throughout the universe, and the notion that all events, personal and cultural, unfold somewhat predictably in a matrix of perpetual change. I was hospitable to that concept and curious about its practical application, but I insisted on keeping the same distance from the I Ching that I might keep from a guru’s ashram or an encampment of Gypsies. Morris Graves was, next to Allen Ginsberg, the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met, the sort of man who, if he said, “Come with me,” you’d grab your coat and go because you’d know that wherever he led you, it would be more interesting than where you’d been at the time.

Thus it was that at Graves’s urging I capitulated, posed a question (a rather general one about how to proceed on my life’s journey) and set about tossing the coins (yarrow stalks, the preferred method, being unavailable). I can’t remember the English name of the hexagram I received as my answer, but I’ve never forgotten the explanation of the hexagram, its verbal direction. It was composed in formal prose, stilted, and a little aloof, perhaps as befitting an ancient oracle, but it boiled down to this: “Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.”

The advice was so good — so simple, wise, and encompassing — that I’ve never felt the need to consult the I Ching again. It was quite likely the best advice I’ve ever received. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I’d actually followed it.

Gray, chilling, pappy, and blah, Manhattan in March of 1965 had resembled a bowl of leftover mush, the one that, if you remember the fairy tale, caused Mama Bear to exclaim, “This porridge is too fucking cold!” Then one Sunday near the end of the month, New Yorkers awoke to a morning as sweet and fine and budding with optimism as Goldilocks’s training bra. Like some silent yet amplified public-address announcement, the sun called people into the streets, where they were so surprised by the absence of snow and snot that they actually smiled at one another. By Southern California standards, not to mention Hawaii’s, the day wasn’t really all that warm, but it was a change, a definite improvement, and the response was widely mobilizing.

That afternoon, my girlfriend Eileen and I strolled over to Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The change in weather had turned the park into some kind of walk-through jukebox. Every few feet, it seemed there was another impromptu source of live music. There were, as usual, the young aspiring folkies armed with cheap guitars or harmonicas, who stationed themselves here and there in Washington Square on any good day; but that Sunday there also were small rock groups, jazz trios, elderly classical violinists sawing away in front of actual music stands, and men from Russia or the Middle East, individually or in pairs, playing exotic tunes that neither Eileen nor I recognized on instruments we could not identify. A few of the musicians were busking, boxes at their feet into which passersby were invited to toss monetary tokens of appreciation, but most seemed to be playing for the sheer joy of it; a multicultural, nonjudgmental precursor of American Idol; and even as ominous clouds — darker, more imposing than Papa Bear’s big brown butt — lumbered in from the Atlantic, the dozens of mini-concerts continued, as if music alone could hold the new spring in place and keep a resurgence of winter at bay.

Then (it must have been between three and four o’clock) there came a noise — distant at first, but rapidly drawing closer, louder, and louder yet — a sound so potently primal that it resonated not only in the ear but in the gut, in the spine, the groin, and the heart. It was like an excerpt from an opera performed on the Fifth Day of Creation, before the existence of man and woman, when Jehovah was still up to his armpits in stardust, leaving Lucifer, his baton a twisted rod made of snakeroot and mud, to direct the chorus.

One by one at first, then all at once, every singer’s song trailed off, every instrument squeaked to a halt. It had quickly become apparent that the sonar interruption was coming from above, and as if yanked by marionette strings, all heads tilted upward, lifting to see a jackknife of wild geese scratching God’s secret name in the sky.

I’d no idea the migratory path of Canadian honkers traversed New York City. It could have been an aberration, the geese diverted by a storm or an unusually voluminous release of chemical steam from a refinery near the Jersey Shore, but whatever the reason, the mighty wedge passed directly over us, northward bound, flying so low above the city it was a marvel that it didn’t crash headlong into an observation deck or a mogul’s penthouse.

For some in the square, the native-born Manhattanites, it was probably the most direct contact they’d ever had with wild nature. Even transplants from places such as Idaho or Arkansas were visibly surprised, delighted, and moved. And just before the great birds vanished in the distance, just as their primordial barking faded away, the entire population of the park — musicians, tourists, winos, dog walkers, workers enjoying their Sunday holiday, everybody — erupted into spontaneous applause.

And then… and then at that exact moment — and I swear I’m not making this up — the sky split open as if from cesarean surgery, as if ripped by the knife blade of geese, and there was a cloudburst of typhoon proportions. Soaking, blinding, the rain spilled on us in such volumes that within minutes every living soul had fled the park. Even pigeons took shelter. Washington Square was totally emptied. It would take more than a deluge, however; more than the river of time itself, to wash away the magic, the winged reminder that there are wonders in play on this planet whose eerie beauty urban man, with all his ingenuity, all his ambition, all his vanity, can never ever quite match. Not Soutine, not Pollock, not even Graves, who came as close as any artist has to concretizing in paint the hair-raising yet somehow nurturing music of the wild.

I’d been in the Big Apple less than ninety days when I joined New York Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. It was a relatively new organization, just starting to gain traction, and it didn’t matter that I had no intention of making films, I had credentials as a critic (albeit in faraway Seattle), and since the objective of the Cinematheque was to promote experimental artists and their work, the group welcomed any and all support. For my part I’d had a keen interest in noncommercial movies since being introduced to “An Andalusian Dog,” the shocking 1929 collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, at a University of Washington screening the previous year.

One night each month, I believe it was the first Thursday, the Cinematheque would show recently completed films or work-in-progress by such underground directors as Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. For members only, the screenings were at midnight at the New Yorker Theatre on upper Fifth Avenue, and I was a dedicated attendee; dedicated, perhaps, to a degree that verged on the obsessive if not the silly. What follows are two cases in point.