Aram Saroyan's Articles on Lions Roar

Aram Saroyan on the ordinary experience that changes our lives – if we only notice it. When I was in high school at Trinity in New York, and during the years I sporadically attended several colleges, I had a number of experiences that I recognize today were as important, as formative, as anything that occurred in the classroom, and probably more so. I came across a book by Alan Watts when I was going to Trinity called This Is It. In the title essay, Watts discusses moments, common to people all over the world and throughout recorded time, in which one perceives that one is a part of some larger whole. I found the book tonic for my own development, confirmation of experience I'd known but never discussed or heard discussed. If a man or a woman, you or I, walks outside the house on a particular day and experiences a sense of this oneness-a very reassuring perception in the several instances I recall in my own life-this isn't something that will be the subject of a discussion on Nightline or Charlie Rose. Nor is it likely to be covered by any print media, not even The Star or The Enquirer. Watts quotes the following paragraph from Sketch for a Self-Portrait by Bernard Berenson, with the prefatory remark that it is "one of the simplest and 'cleanest' accounts of it I have ever seen": It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember -- I need not recall -- that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one. An essentially nonverbal experience of this kind became the subject of one of my first poems, and an ongoing touchstone of my practice as a poet. I'm not sure what year this happened. I still may have been going to Trinity. That seems the most likely scenario because it takes place at the bus stop on the corner of Madison Avenue and 79th Street, where I used to wait in the late afternoon for the crosstown bus to take home to West End Avenue, after an hour or two of after-school revelry at Stark's coffee shop on 78th Street and Madison. At a Bus Stop I turned to an accumulation of women the instant a break the light was so clear the forms that instant exceeded names outsped the words which follow follow slowly like thunder its lights Years later I came across a line in Krishnamurti that seemed to refer to this experience: "Between apprehending and naming, is experiencing." If I understand correctly, Krishnamurti says here that in the interval between seeing something and putting a word to it inheres the true experience of what it is, or perhaps more accurately of what is. I remember trying to get this into a philosophy paper at NYU, and feeling pretty excited, only to be given an F on the grounds of it having nothing to do with the assignment. This sort of thing frustrated me. At the end of the term, one in which I was enthusiastically engaged in reading Plato and in writing the assigned papers, I received an F. The rest of my courses went no better, and after failing four out of five of them, with a D in English, an appointment with a staff psychiatrist was scheduled for me. The psychiatrist turned out to be a dark-suited fellow with dirty fingernails, I noticed. He reviewed my academic record and then looked up at me. "Well," he said summarily. "There are two possibilities here. One, you're mentally defective. Or two, you have study inhibitions." "I'll take number two," I said sheepishly. He didn't get the joke. The philosophy paper may have been read by a student assistant. But the discouragement had the effect of helping to turn me away from the university system, a fateful occurrence in my life. The judgment that my piece had nothing to do with the subject may even have been correct, on balance, because the state I was speaking about is nonverbal, an embodiment of what happens when words disappear for a moment. Poetry and certain prose works may be the paradoxical effort to portray the state in language. Here is a sentence from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was written late in Stein's career and became a best-seller. In it she adopts the more down-to-earth sensibility of her companion to tell the story of their life together. The eponymous Miss Toklas is describing an experience of Miss Stein's as a schoolgirl in Oakland (the city about which she famously said, "There's no there there"): She remembers a little school where she and her elder sister stayed and where there was a little girl in the corner of the school yard and the other little girls told her not to go near her, she scratched. I'm not sure how it happens -- partly at least a consequence of the cumulative effect of the sequence of thirty-eight words before the single punctuation mark, the comma that precedes the two final words -- but "she scratched" occurs with a force and presence I find unparalleled. It reminds me of the brief parenthesis in Lolita that Tom Stoppard cites, in the profile of the playwright by Kenneth Tynan, as his favorite parenthesis in literature. Nabokov writes: "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three." It occurs to me I'm writing another philosophy paper here, trying to redeem a failing grade of forty years ago. In another experience of my own, I was riding the 79th Street crosstown bus home. It was winter this time, already dark in New York at somewhere between four-thirty and five. I know I was at Trinity because I was worried about homework, lots of it, which I needed to do and hadn't a real will to do nor quite an adequate ability to do. I'm sixteen or seventeen, not a happy camper. I'm twisted with remorse and simultaneously a nervous system unlikely to bend to the required task of the moment, past a certain point. After we'd crossed Central Park, somewhere between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, the very stretch it occurs to me now where twenty years later my childhood friend Sandy Kirkland would jump to her death from an apartment building, an estranged wife and mother of two -- it suddenly dawned on me that I was on a bus, that outside the bus, as it moved down the street, it had turned dark, night had come on, lights were on in the buildings that lined the street; and above the buildings was the night sky, and all was right with the world. In that moment, it would seem that my consciousness had switched from its microcosmic state of personal issues and problems, to a macrocosmic awareness that I inhabited a larger universe -- that in fact my consciousness was but a single filament of this larger whole. During the sixties, the poet Gary Snyder, an honorary elder of the hippies of my generation, said, "We must move from a preoccupation with material states to a preoccupation with states of being." Was it a Jungian synchronicity that a chemically synthesized form of this consciousness was widely distributed throughout my generation, like a sort of parting gesture of the industrial epoch itself? In his 1989 biography of Allen Ginsberg, Barry Miles records a meeting between Timothy Leary and Ginsberg during the early 1960's in which the two plan for the widespread dissemination of LSD to the new generation in order to accomplish a revolution in consciousness. I was appalled to read that. During the summer of 1965, when I was 21, I roomed with two actors in Woodstock, New York, where they were interning at the Woodstock Summer Theater, and I remember an evening when one of the roommates, Chris, came back to our place and told us that a waitress at the Expresso Coffee House, the local hangout, had LSD, and it cost five dollars. Five dollars -- at that time a little more than the going rate for a first-run movie. So we had to weigh this-had it been twenty-five dollars it would have been easier to dismiss. Would we ante up five dollars to try this new thing? Some people said it produced the equivalent of Buddhist enlightenment, and that the state of mind lasted for eight hours or more. A bargain, no less. I was, then, so I would learn a few decades later from Miles's biography, one of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary's guinea pigs. Another aspect of this story is that the historic meeting between Ginsberg and Leary is also not widely discussed. Here were these two leaders of the counterculture taking a meeting and deciding to accomplish a revolution in consciousness. Again there's been no significant coverage. I don't recall even a review of the Ginsberg biography that mentioned this meeting, and yet it seems to me perhaps one of the most historically significant occurrences of the second half of the twentieth century. What did acid do? It rendered a variation on what I've already described, and quoted from Bernard Berenson, all of which occurred without chemical help. Indeed, I believe that most of us have these experiences but, as they are not the subject of public forums, what is one to do with them, finally, except perhaps to forget them? In the late sixties, just after I'd gotten married, I remember staying briefly at the Chelsea Hotel. It was summertime, and one night there was a terrific thunderstorm. I was woken up and got out of bed and went over to the window and watched the lightning strike, spreading sudden silent illumination over the city. Then would come the late-breaking thunder, the noise of the lightning, which traveled so much more slowly than the light. I got back into bed and listened to the thunder, entirely unpredictable and yet inarguable, inevitable, and hence as perfect as music -- and again there was the sense of being part of something much larger than the self. When something catches the attention so completely, our thought process gives way to a perceptual level that doesn't involve the mind's insistent duality of good and bad, yes and no. It's snowing! one suddenly sees, and in that moment...

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