Chapter One--

 

Prologue in the Middle:

 

The Philosopher Loses his Way

with Words

 

Where is the one who has forgotten words?
That’s the one I’d like to have a word with — Chuang Tzu

Practical wisdom is knowing what to do next.
Do you build the door first, or cut the hole in the wall? — Aristotle (annotated)

 

 

At age sixty-seven, sitting in the graveled garden just below our California kitchen window I hear the bonging big bass wind chime, the gaudy tinkling Chinese one, the splishing pattering copper fountain made by some craftsman in far Anatolia. A green hummingbird explores the water; above by the corner of the garage blooms a burst of blood red roses.

As a boy my grandma’s flowers made me dizzy. She grew fragrant rich old roses in her garden on the south side of Milwaukee, and delirious white and lavender lilac bushes that jubilated after the snow melted. I would walk around the yard smelling them all, or kneel on damp earth by the concrete block foundation of the house and put my nose down to little white lilies of the valley—the eastern sort, dainty bells that smelled so sweet, and nodded when I breathed.

Grandpa and grandma had built the house in the late 1800s. They moved there from farming country north of Milwaukee, where their people had immigrated from Luxembourg in 1848, fleeing the wars. Frank and Carrie Molling raised six children, of whom my mother Ione was the youngest. They planted a maple tree on the east side of their house, and as a girl Ma used to climb it. I would lean back against its mighty trunk watching fiery orange leaves the color of my hair float down in the fall, or twirly green maple seeds spinning on the air in springtime.

My father’s people also came to America in the 1840s as refugees from the Great Hunger, the Irish potato famine. From St. Paul, my grandfather John Moriarty moved to Milwaukee to work on the railroad. Probably the family originated in County Kerry, in the West; Moriarty is still a common name among the shopkeepers of Kerry, and on old tombstones.

Well, Ed Morearty married his Ione, and their first-born John eventually became a philosopher, or at least a professor of philosophy. Now "philosophy" means "the love of wisdom," and in Irish my name muircheartaigh means "navigator," which is actually a bit like "philosopher"—a supposed sage who dispenses wisdom and tells people whither to go.

So this book is one man’s practical wisdom—tales of how I lived the first half of my life as it was more or less handed to me, what befell me and how I escaped with a little help from my friends (and enemies), what I made of my life then, and what I’ve gleaned from my mentors.

But note well, dear reader: Wisdom travels with her charming androgynous pal Folly, and even close friends get them mixed up. So beware of following my directions—just navigating my own life has been a challenge, and even in my sixties I keep correcting course; you’ll have to keep a sharp eye out for your own particular rocks and whirlpools, not to mention pirates.

My fantasy of heaven is that we will have ten thousand days (as "Amazing Grace" sings) to tell our tales—and others will listen. But there’s a tribe on the northwest coast of America who believe that the purpose of human life is to live in such a way that we have good stories to tell the young ones, while we still walk the earth. So here are some tales and standup comic routines, and lessons learned (or not).

Lesson # 1.

Know when to fold ‘em. Socrates’ daemon, his spirit guide never instructed him what to do—only, "Don’t do this!" Time and again my guardian angel has flashed a warning: "Stop! Get out of here."

It’s the Principle of the Vacuum. Be brave enough to create a vacuum in your life, and wise enough to know when. What will fill the void? You don’t know—but if your gut says whatever you’re doing now has outlived its usefulness, just drop it. Walk away, with ears and heart open. Fear not, life will turn up. It’s Jesus’ bio-spiritual principle: if the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it bears much fruit.

Lesson # 2.

Like wisdom, blessings come in many forms—love and affection, good health, a sense of security, powers of body and mind. But sometimes the Goddess wears the grim mask of danger, injury or great loss, and we don’t see her wink behind the veil.

I remember when my twin sons were three, their mother and I took them trick-or-treating for the first time. While they clutched her hands and goggled at goblins and fairies, I slipped ahead and ducked behind a tree.

"Where’s daddy?" they whimpered. "Mommy, where’s daddy?!"

"Boo!" I shouted, jumping out with horrible face and claws. "Aargh!"

From loss to terror to joy—that time, in moments.

Both these lessons came home to me at age 36. Till then I’d been blessed with a pretty easy life; I usually went with the flow, did what I was told, tried to be good, followed my natural talents, grabbed opportunities as they came along. But in my early thirties things began to come unglued, and on a truly lovely summer afternoon in Boulder, Colorado, 1975, I snapped my life in two like a stick. It felt like dying—and it felt like break free or die.

Books had always been my delight—"right livelihood," Buddhists call it. Teachers loved me, schools paid me to study. A seminary gave me free room, board and tuition in high school, so I could be a Catholic priest and save souls. I quit, worked for a year in a molding mill and then a refrigeration plant, where they offered to put me through engineering school if I would come back and work for them. But designing chicken freezing units was beneath me; I envisioned myself as Professor Morearty in coat and tie, lecturing on lofty matters, saving the world. My working class mother and dad would be so proud.

I was given partial scholarships to Marquette University in my hometown of Milwaukee, and a totally free junior year abroad. Comfortable fellowships carried me seven years to a Ph.D. in Social Thought at the University of Chicago, including a year in Calcutta, where my delightful Catholic wife and I conceived radiant twin sons, and I studied 19^th century Indian intellectual history.

I turned my mind to India because I dreamt of weaving the world together—and getting paid for it. The dream came true in 1967, at age 29, when I fell into the best teaching job in the world: helping to start Callison College, an experimental "cluster college" of University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. "California’s the garden of Eden," Woody Guthrie sang, "if you’ve just got that dough-re-mi." Carole had enough dough for a down payment on a pleasant tract house, with grass and a walnut tree, half a mile from the university. I walked to work. It was glorious.

My colleagues were brilliant, education was our true religion. Creating a college with these men and women was amazing. It was Hannah Arendt’s "moment of freedom" in the public space—we did as we thought best, untrammeled. We gave no grades, but crafted personal letters of evaluation in each course. We held classes on the lawn, invited students to our homes, and retreated together once a year to a camp in the hills for Frisbee, guitars and high-flown talk.

All our students spent the sophomore year at programs we created in India and Japan; they returned as Indian dancers, budding scholars and journalists, film-makers, musicians, students of yoga and zen. These children of the sixties were venturesome and eager to learn, and we hoped we were teaching them to be (like ourselves) idealistic citizens of theworld, lovers of the intellectual life, and benefactors of humankind. I was getting paid for telling the truth and building one world. What a deal.

But the Empire’s bloody boots came trampling our garden. The groovy sixties in America ended definitively in the spring of 1970, with the invasion of Cambodia and the gunning down of unarmed students at Kent State and Jackson State. On the usually somnolent Pacific campus 1200 students came out to rally, and I gave a stormy speech against the war.

Not long afterwards I was unanimously recommended for tenure, and denied by the administration. At the same moment my wife of ten years told me, "I’m tired of your moods and your anger. I want a divorce." She was right, our marriage was dead--but I felt doubly betrayed.

During one last year of grace at the college, I taught an introductory class on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, and we chanted early in the morning. I remember one day lecturing enthusiastically on how the self-absorption of early Buddhism, which aimed at individual nirvana, became transformed into the ideal of the bodhisattva who chooses to stay in the cycle of death and rebirth, out of compassion to liberate others from their suffering. I believed in that. Students told me later, "John, we saw your aura shining this morning."

I felt deeply ambivalent about leaving the university. On the one hand, I was appalled to discover that I was weary of the verbal life. In the middle of a perfectly intelligent seminar, I’d hear a little voice inside say "I wish they’d all be quiet." Or I’d look down at my soft hands and ask, "Are they just for holding chalk?" Talking and listening, reading and writing all day long, enough already! I’d had my words’ worth. Deep down I’d known in opposing The War that I was rolling dice with my job, and I thought, so be it.

But what could I do except teach? A sympathetic dean recommended me for a part-time job in San Francisco, teaching Buddhist studies, and with misgivings I accepted. My Buddhism was thin, so in June 1975 I climbed into Dragon Baby, my little yellow Datsun 1600 convertible, and drove across the desert to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, to bone up on the Buddha.

Thus it came to pass, on a sunny afternoon at the edge of the mountains, I faced the edge.

I found myself sitting on the second story balcony of a college dorm room, grinding away at a truly dense chunk of scholasticism: Nagarjuna, the fourth century Indian Buddhist philosopher. After the thousands of books I’d devoured with delight, I hated every inch of this stuff. Polysyllabic Sanskritic abstractions swarmed on the page like black ants in a jungle, my eyes blurred, I kept yearning down for relief at the women swaying by on College Avenue. Then one paragraph caught my attention:

The personality type who is fueled by anger, Nagarjuna wrote, can transform that anger into the intellectual power of discerning distinctions, of understanding that "this is not that." Well, the chosen subject of my dissertation had been Swami Vivekananda, "He Who Delights in Distinctions." And I was angry: my own college had thrown me out, my wife had thrown me out, and I was sure those earnest seekers after enlightenment in San Francisco would soon see what a fraud I was, and they would throw me out. My bones wouldn’t even bend into a half-lotus, and in my distress I could not chant. From popular teacher to bogus Buddhist sage? This Was Not That.

My whole body shouted what I’d refused to hear for a year: Quit Teaching or Die. I could feel damn death rising in my gut, billowing up behind my neck and shoulders like one of those immense black Boulder summer mountain storm clouds, like the coal-black Tibetan demon in the poster on my wall, all fangs and claws and a garland of human skulls, grinning.

I hadn’t prayed in years, not to the God of my mother and father and the Pope, for sure. Now I looked into the dark inside me and cried out to some glimmer of light up there, "I can’t do this! I’ve done book learning all my life, I can’t any more. It will kill me. God, you are just going to have to take care of me. And my sons."

I sat for a while, breathing. Then I slapped the book shut without marking the page and went down for a walk in the sun.

I wandered Boulder in the vacuum I’d created. Scholarships, fellowships, and a two-years-at-a-time secure salary in academia had sustained me all the way to age 36, the way a union-secured factory job had carried my dad and our family for thirty years. Now I was giving all that up? What on earth would I do for a living? Empty shavings in a molding mill? There was a second-hand paperback store in Boulder; maybe I could start one of those back in northern California? I had no capital but I had friends, and bookstores were a thing I knew.

Carole flew nine year old Mike and Brian out to me for a month and they settled in happily, drawing cartoons day after day—"We always start with the nose, Dad. Noses are funny." We would go walking while they chanted "We’re living with our daddy, in Boulder Coloraddy." Once we met a hippie with a big snake, who told tales of deadly jungle vipers in Vietnam, and how a buddy had survived by chopping off his own arm before the venom could reach his heart.

"Was he telling the truth, Dad?"

Was I chopping off an arm?

We escaped in Dragon Baby to Rocky Mountain National Park. I hauled a full pack, they bravely shouldered blue sleeping bags up through the forest. On a sunny plateau, on a perfect mountain afternoon, we set up camp.

Suddenly, marauders! Dozens of chipmunks, scrambling for our food! Surrounded, we frantically strung cord between trees and hung our food bag in the middle. The pirates stood beneath on little hind legs, waving their paws.

We talked and slept under glorious stars, my sons and I. Next morning we hiked among flower meadows toward Eagle Pass, till they said, "This is far enough, Dad. We’d like to go back now."

So we walked down the mountain and they flew home to their mother. I loaded up Dragon Baby and headed for California—but not to home, I had none.

My friend and former student Richard Lyness had an apartment near the university. "You can stay in my basement, there’s a big waterbed down there. Of course there aren’t any windows, and the only light switch is at the top of the stairs."

So that whole month of September, 1975, Richard and I would drink beer in the evenings, eat peanut butter and baloney sandwiches, and discuss the universe. Then I opened the cellar door and went down to my watery bed—without a flashlight, I couldn’t afford one. Dark Journey through Tunnels of the Underworld, Subterranean Rivers, shades of Joseph Campbell and Beowulf.

For Grendel, I had Dragon Baby. With her top down, shaggy beard and long red hair a-flying, I zoomed off to university towns in the region, but discovered they already had second-hand paperback stores—all except Stockton, and there I could not abide. Plus it dawned in my gut that keeping track of another ten thousand books would be a nightmare. But wooden bookshelves drew me—I studied their construction, running fingertips on pine. Using hand saw and hammer, I had built crude particle board cabinets for my sons….

What to do? Move to San Francisco, live on unemployment, credit cards and hope. But September was hot that year, and Dragon Baby kept boiling over as she climbed the Altamont. Finally in The City I looked for roommates, but they all seemed "weird, man."

I needed space and quiet. High on Clayton Street in the Haight, I unearthed another basement apartment—but this one had a big west window, looking out on the Park and the Bridge. The little old German landlady addressed me as Doktor Morearty. I paid the rent and moved in, alone.

That fall I wandered endlessly in Golden Gate Park, lusting after young mothers on the playground. I bought some marijuana, and lost my Swiss army knife and address book. I took the N Judah streetcar down to the ocean and walked barefoot on cold wet sand. On the cliffs above the Bay I screwed up courage, spoke to a woman, and she took me home to bed. After breakfast she sent me on my way: "You need a wife."

I wandered the public library, pulling books off shelves at random like I used to do in the bowels of Harper at Chicago, but nothing held me. The only book I read that whole year was Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, who’d been one of my teachers. It’s the tale of a discontented middle-aged American who goes to darkest Africa saying "I want, I want…," and eventually returns to his wife. Lucky him.

Each day the question chewed at my guts: how to make a living? I took a massage class and discovered a knack. But as a professional masseur, I would have to touch a lot of people I found it distressing to touch.

I’d created my vacuum. But where was the Goddess with her blessings?

 

Table of Contents

 with a nod to Tristram Shandy, of

Walking to Omega:
Tales of a Peacenik Carpenter

by John Morearty, Ph.D.

Prologue: The Philosopher Loses His Way with Words ..................... 1 
     In which our hero is introduced in the middle of his life, which is falling apart.

Little Johnny ................................................................................. 10
      In which our hero is born, learns to read, falls in love with his third grade teacher, finds machine gun bullets, and wins second prize in a Catholic essay contest.

A Very Minor Seminary ................................................................. 24
      In which he studies to be a priest, wets his bed, wins the billiard
tournament with his eyes shut, and is enraptured by Gregorian chant and
plane geometry.

Plato’s Shaving Bin ....................................................................... 34 
        In which he leaves the seminary, discovers first love, the Northern lights
and the smell of pine shavings, and does not join the Marines.

Trolleybus College ........................................................................ 42 
       In which he sloshes through snow to class, reads Toynbee, cuts off
poor people’s electricity, joins and quits ROTC.

Navigating Germany ..................................................................... 53
       In which he wears a red beard and black beret, drinks beer in Munich,
scorns Khrushchev and Heidegger, climbs an Alp, and is enraptured by a
stone chapel and stained glass.

Omega Labyrinth ......................................................................... 62
       In which he discovers Jesuit mentors Bernard Cooke and Teilhard de
Chardin, encounters the duplicity of the Catholic church, and does not join
the CIA.

The Towers of Chicago ................................................................. 72
       In which he falls under the spell of Great Books and great teachers,
studies Sanskrit and Bengali, and marries a good Catholic girl.

India ........................................................................................... 87
        In which Calcutta thrills and nearly kills him and introduces him to
his guardian angels, and in which he conceives twin sons within the aura
of the Taj Mahal.

Born in Chicago ......................................................................... 113
        In which his children, and his doctoral dissertation on the Indian
Golden Age, are born.

Golden Days .............................................................................. 125
       In which he helps start a groovy experimental college in California.

Getting Serious ......................................................................... 136
       In which he watches Chicago 68 on TV, is disillusioned with liberalism,
leaves The Church, scandalizes colleagues, refuses to pay war taxes, and is
given a seashell.

Unglued ................................................................................... 155
       In which he pickets Caspar Weinberger on campus, is denied tenure
and divorced, sews a down jacket and carves a walking stick.

Boulder Interlude .................................................................... 177
       In which he studies Buddha, and learns not to say I me my.

Into the Woods ........................................................................ 179
       In which he falls among floor sanders, lives in a commune, plays a
shakuhachi, builds a strange table and buys a fine circular saw.

The Hippie Carpenter of Carpenter Road ................................ 199
       In which he takes refuge in a meadow, builds decks and pine furniture,
plays with his teenage sons, and throws wild summer solstice parties.

No Nukes, 1979-1984 .............................................................. 222
       In which he discovers The Bomb, fears for his sons’ lives, becomes a
peace activist, blockades Livermore Nuke Lab and dreams in jail.

Standing Up in the Wind ........................................................ 249
       In which he interviews peace activists in the Southwest, who defy
Socrates’ advice.

Nicaragua: Dancing Under the Guns ...................................... 277
       In which he builds a deck while listening to Ollie North, defends the
Sandinistas, goes to jail again, falls in love with a hardcore activist and
just can’t stand it.

An Irishman on His Hind Legs ............................................... 305
       In which his dancing father offers sage advice, tries out a new word
on his sons, and no longer feels like going to a dance.

The Tabloid, the Congresswoman and the Sandwich ............. 310
       In which our hero discovers a free community newspaper, a radiant congressional candidate who loses, and (at last) his Mate.

Spouse of My Life .................................................................. 336
       In which he declares bankruptcy, marries a good Catholic Dutch girl
and plants roses.

Taking Shelter ...................................................................... 350
       In which he flees from substitute teaching, starts a weekly TV show,
buys a new truck, meets Madame Defarge, hangs a lot of doors, and
rediscovers his community newspaper.

Ladders, Wolves and Companions ........................................ 365
       In which he builds lattices and a yin-yang deck, works in a thriving
peace community, sees through 9/11, says goodbye to his first wife,
acquires ten grandchildren, teaches nonviolence workshops, and makes
friends with the wolf of Gubbio.

Epilogue: Limping to Omega ................................................ 405
        In which he picks thimbleberries with an old soldier.