"ENAMOURED OF INTENSITY"

I resonate with this phrase"enamoured of intensity" from George Eliot's female character in Middlemarch. When I was a student, I equated intensity and angst with intelligence and being alive. It was certainly an East Coast thing. I suspect it had some of its roots in the Beat Generation. It was also partly from the Existentialists.

Walking around in black turtlenecks and tights, sitting in dark coffee houses or bars, talking about horribly depressing things was the high as I was starting college. And New York and Paris were the only places to really be alive.

When psychedelics hit the scene in the mid-sixties, we pretty much collectively turned to the West Coast. Boy, did they do the scene better out there. The difference between Timothy Leary's scene in Cambridge and New York and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in California, then Oregon, was an archetypical difference between California and New York. In Woody Allen's Manhattan and recently in The Social Network, the difference was captured.

I remember reading some Rudolf Steiner description of the roots of the East Coast of the USA as stemming from the time of Atlantis and the Pacific Coast from Lemurian times.

My recollections from descriptions of the lost continent of Atlantis are of a society that was so very advanced in science and technology and so detached from warmth and humanity that it self-destructed. It would have been the land mass where now is the Atlanic Ocean.

The Lemurian world was the Pacific rim, all the way to Asia. What I remember are descriptions of a dreamy world, with the spiritual as alive as the material.

I guess I am really going back to far to say that I was 'enamoured with intensity'. What I wonder now is whether it was more about neurosis. Whether, we equated being fucked up somehow with being alive. Because my generation did spend considerable time and money and energy trying to get ourselves un-fucked-up.

Recalling all the self-help and spiritual trips that have paraded through our society is almost a nightmare, but, it has its humorous side. The young among my readers don't know the half of it. Some of the impulses had some good effect, some had disastrous results. You have probably heard of the bad stuff..James Jones, Rajneesh, and other cults hurt so many. But, we tried and tried.

I remember one night when we were living in Sussex, England when we made a plan to go to London to see Guru Maharaji. He was called the "Boy Guru'. At that time he was a teenager who was supposed to be enlightened. Maybe he was. We had to get a babysitter for my daughter, and take the train and tube through a terribly dreary freezing cold London night. (For the best description in the world read the 20 page first paragraph of Dicken's Bleak House.) When we got to the door of the auditorium they told us that Boy Wonder loved fruit and the price of admission was a donation of fruit. We left on a bizarre quest around the City to find a water melon and succeeded against all odds. (England at that time was not part of the Common Market and had shortages of everything). We came back and entered and sat for several hours staring at a beautiful throne they had made for Boy. Some strange people chanted some fluffy chants. The someone came into the room and announced that Boy had fallen asleep in his limo bringing him to the auditorium and that he needed his rest so come again another night.

We had lots of time to wonder whether this was a great spiritual lesson as we reversed our trek.

Obviously, tremendous materialism and scientific innovation are now a West Coast deal. It is also obvious, but worth mentioning that the angst has migrated and magnified. I want to start a movement to revive the fine art of hanging out. It could be the most healing thing to come down the pike.