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In March of 1961, 35 year old Allen Ginsberg, the acclaimed poet of the Beat Generation, left the United States on an extended travel agenda that would eventually take him to India by February, 1962. He spent the next fifteen months traveling throughout India and a few close by countries, returning to the United States in July of 1963 through Japan to Vancouver then home.
Six months prior to his departure from India, sometime after midnight December 11, 1962, Ginsberg boarded the Doon Express at the Howran Station in Calcutta headed toward Benares. Standing on the platform and waiting to the last second to get on the train before it pulled away, Ginsberg squeezed out every moment of time he could bidding adieu to a young woman ten years his junior he had been crossing paths with on-and-off over the years since his early days as a struggling poet in New York. After the train station goodbyes neither Ginsberg nor any of his ragged band of Beat Generation followers would ever see her again, she apparently disappearing into the hinterlands and milieu of the sub-continent and lands beyond.
The young woman on the platform was Hope Savage, a magnetically charismatic and fabulously beautiful American said by those around Ginsberg to be the onetime girlfriend and love of his life of Gregory Corso, a major member of the Ginsberg coterie.
Savage had shown up to become a member of that same inner circle sometime around mid 1955 after having listened to the suggestion of David Madden, a man who had absolutely no connection with Ginsberg and/or the Beat Generation, but who would eventually become the author of at least eleven books. Madden and Savage met early in the year 1954 when he was 21 stationed in the Army at Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina. She was age 17 from Camden, located some 35 miles from the base.
Madden was the person who was literally responsible for plugging in the spotlight and flipping the switch that illuminated Savage in the center stage of the Beat Generation. Before meeting Savage, in the few short years that transpired after graduating from high school, Madden had attended the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, been in the Merchant Marine, and in 1953, rather than waiting to be drafted, volunteered for induction. Savage had dropped out of high school and pursuing her education in her own fashion, studying in libraries and on college campuses which, each in their own way, put the two of them together at the same time at the same place.
Madden's above so mentioned educational background and experience set him head and shoulders above the typical run of the mill GI that for a 100 miles in any direction around the army base scrounged for every available and maybe not so available female to stick the bone to. It also put him and an Army buddy, who had gone to Harvard, into the right interest mind-set to attend an avant-garde movie being shown in the auditorium at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. They noticed a young girl a few rows in front of them and several seats over, a girl Madden would later describe as having never seen anyone more beautiful. Waiting for the movie to start he and his buddy talked back and forth how neither of them would ever have a chance with a girl that looked like her. While the film was being shown, in the dark, unbeknownst to either of the two GIs, the girl that was so much their center of attention got up and moved to the seat right next to Madden. In the book The Blue Hand: The Beats In India (2008) by Debora Baker, in an interview with Madden, speaking of Savage writes:
"It was not just the beauty of her face that transfixed him. Her skin was the purest, palest and almost unearthly whiteness. At the time most girls kept their hair closely styled. Yet hers was so long and so lovely, it reminded him of the print he'd seen once of Botticelli's naked Venus emerging from a clam."
Then Baker goes on to quote him as saying:
"(It) didn't take long to figure that there was more to her than beauty. She made the move, he decided, because she was lonely and they looked interesting. What she wanted, he saw right away, was to talk to someone who was likely to understand her, someone conversant, it developed, with the Greek plays and the poetry of Swinburne, Shelly, Keats, and Blake."
During the less than a year period that elapsed between the time Madden and Hope Savage first met he suggested, then hard-core encouraged her to go to New York, most particularly Greenwich Village, telling her she would find a richer and more indepth environment more closely suited to her longings than she could ever find in South Carolina. Much to his chagrin she did. As it was, just about the same time, he was reassigned and shipped out, spending his last year in Alaska. In 1956, after receiving an early out, he married a woman he met while pursing completion of his B.A., albeit all along maintaining a continuing friendship with Savage as well as he could, at least via mail.
Before Savage showed up in New York the aforementioned Gregory Corso had left, having moved to Cambridge becoming a quasi poet in residence at Harvard, mostly supported by a group of students that were enamored with his street-wise ways. In a letter from Corso to Ginsberg in San Francisco dated August 23, 1956 and published in An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso (2003) he tells Ginsberg in so many words that in June 1955, after leaving Harvard, he met, referring to Hope Savage, a beautiful female Shelley. Corso, who would have been age 25 at the time of his meeting with Savage, goes on to say:
"(She) dug me and gave me a place to live and has been with me up till a month ago when I decided that I wanted to go to California. She went back home and expects to join me soon. She sends me money and delightful letters and I love her very much. Was she, who taught me. She has fantastic memory, only nineteen, can recite and feel all of Shelley, yes all, Prometheus [Unbound], Alastor, [The] Revolt of Islam, and also fifty stanzas of Swinburne's The Triumph of Time-but more! She is going to kill herself on her twentieth year. She planned her death two years ago. The year that I lived with her was all her ... she'd lock herself in a room and would walk up and down up and down ... spoke to no one but her Gregory ... weep, she'd weep and weep ... I can't really inform you about her, but I tell you she is the greatest person I've ever met, and if ever you meet her, I doubt if you'd disagree. Her name is Hope Savage."
In August 1956, in the letter he sent Ginsberg, Corso told Ginsberg he met Savage in June 1955 after leaving Harvard. He says she had been with him 'up till a month ago', meaning roughly July 1956. That basically plays out the two of them being together a year. He then headed west to be with Ginsberg ending up in Mexico City. Savage arranged for a plane ticket back to the states, but shortly after that she headed toward Paris, later unable to be located by Corso when he traveled there in search of her.
In the same letter, which is not shown in the above quote, Corso writes both briefly and cryptically that Savage was with Anton when they met. Apparently after he left Harvard he returned to his old haunts in New York because the Anton he speaks of is Anton Rosenberg, the epitome of understated cool, probably the most notorious, coolest, hip dude in all of Greenwich Village and beyond.(see) How it was that Savage was with Rosenberg is not known, but it is known Corso and Rosenberg were friends, so it wouldn't be unusual that the two of them would cross paths.
In April of 1960, some two years before her train station goodbyes with Ginsberg, Savage, on the cusp of age of 24, was in Delhi after nearly five years traveling throughout Europe, Afghanistan Ceylon, Nepal and India following her initial arrival in Paris. She was in Dehli in an effort to implement her next contemplated move. In the ephemeral search of her continuing odyssey she had finally set sights on the kingdom of Bhutan, isolated and tucked away between India and China along the rugged south sloping reaches of the Himalayas. In her attempt to cross into Bhutan she discovered it was practically impossible without prior arrangements, being turned back at the border and told to go to Darjeeling for the proper papers. In Darjeeling she was told she would have to go to Delhi, a one-way trip of 1000 miles, which she did. If she ever received the proper papers or ever went into Bhutan legally or illegally is not known, but if she did, either way she didn't stay because two and a half years later, as stated in the opening paragraphs above, she ended up in Calcutta having caught up with Ginsberg somehow.
In a review of Baker's book in American Scholar titled Enlightenment Lite, Sudip Bose writes of Ginsberg's travels in India:
"(Ginsberg and Orlovsky's) journey became one endless high, as they indulged every day in morphine, opium, ganja, bhang, or the psychedelic pills that Ginsberg carried around in his backpack 'like radiant isotopes.' When they met up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger in Delhi, Ginsberg and Orlovsky were 'high as kites,' having 'managed to score some morphine after less than a week' in the city."
How long Savage had been traveling with Ginsberg in India is not totally clear, however, long or short, but mostly short, Ginsberg's continuing over the top self indulgent actions --- and those done similarly by others, i.e., heroin and such --- is one of the reasons she had grown so deeply disgruntled with everything.
However, if she herself was a total angel, she wasn't being viewed as such by Indian authorities. On December 10, 1962, the day before Ginsberg left Calcutta and the two of them said their goodbyes, Indian authorities had handed Savage an expulsion notice, accusing her of immorality and giving her just ten days to leave the country. After that most people that follow her agree she disappears from the grid, albeit, a few reports regarding her whereabouts have surfaced on-and-off. Some point to her being seen in Beirut, Lebanon sometime in 1970-71 and traveling with two children, both girls and believed to be hers, the oldest around 2 years of age. Another report jumps to 1975-76 with her being seen in Iran, Pakistan, Nepal, again with 'two toddler daughters.'
Kids or no, Hope Savage does have family, being one of seven children of Henry Savage, Jr (1903-1990). Her younger brother, Samuel P. Savage (1940 - 2019) of Wisconsin is an author of several successful books. In the early years, in a general fashion, prior to her travels she contacted him on and off, in later years, during her more extensive travels, he is, in his own hand, on record as saying he had never written or received a letter of any kind from her.[1]
Somewhat short of two years after Indian authorities were attempting to expel Hope Savage from their country and she was seeing Allen Ginsberg for the last time, as well as few years after trying to get into Bhutan. but before any 1970 having kids reports of Savage, true or not, surfaced --- found me some 750 miles southeast of Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal and Burma in the then wide-open drug infested railhead city of Chiang Mai, located in the far northern reaches of Thailand.
After meeting a Buddhist monk in the city from China, the two of us left on foot traveling north high into the mountains through Laos, Burma, and on into the mountainous regions nobody knows who they belong to, basically retracing the steps of the ancient Chamadao, the Tea Horse Road. After days and days of walking, of which all or most of the particulars are fully articulated in Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery, we ended up going our separate ways, he turning toward wherever he was going, me being left outside the gates of a remote, ancient, dilapidated Zen monastery --- a dilapidated monastery perched precariously high up on the side of some steep Chinese mountain situated somewhere along the southern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.[2]
With no formal access to the monastery apparently forthcoming, one day I followed some monks into the fields. When they returned, I returned, entering the monastery right along with them. After hulking in the corner and eating scraps off the ground tossed to me over a period of days I woke up one morning to find a halfway decent pile of folded clothes sitting in front of me. I cleaned myself up, put on the clothes and was pointed to work in the kitchen food preparation area doing clean up and more or less garbage and latrine detail. Soon, as I got some sense of my surroundings, I began sneaking in and sitting in meditation in the main hall with the rest of the monks. Eventually, falling into and following the strict monastery rules and schedule as mandated by tradition over the centuries. Nobody said anything and nobody questioned why I was there. Not even the master. Months went by and I continued to sit in study-practice.
One day a very old and ancient man came down from the mountains and apparently asked to see the white monk who was said to be under the protection of the Lord Buddha. I was quickly brought before his presence. Because of respect paid him by all, plus the serenity he seemed to abide in, it was clear the man was Enlightened. Even so, no sooner had I arrived when a look of disappointment seemed to cross his face. As he turned to walk away, in a flash he swung back around with his staff swinging toward me. As I raised my arm to block the blow just as quickly he lowered the motion of the swing and before I was able to counter the move he had knocked me off my feet. Huge roars of laughter permeated the room. Here was this billion year old man who had easily knocked me to the ground and I know he must have been saying to everybody's enjoyment, "under the protection of Lord Buddha, my ass!" He extended the end of his staff to pull me up, which I took. He then strode out of the monastery and back into the mountains.
There was something about the old man that would not just let go and it continued to nag at me for the longest time. Months went by. Finally, when the weather turned such that I could, I sought the old man out, visiting him at what was not much more than a stone-pile hut along the edge of a stream. This time when I came before his presence there were no swinging staffs, only a sweeping open-palm hand offering me to join him for tea. Several days went by and during that time not one word passed between us.
Going to and from his abode was a very arduous several day trek, much of it through rugged and steep very high altitude territory. A good portion of the trail followed along side a series of streams that may or may not have been the same one, that was sometimes rushing and other times placid depending on the steepness or flatness of the terrain.[3]
On the second day out returning from the Zen man's abode I suddenly came upon a person with their back to me kneeling with a wooden stave bucket scooping water from the stream. There was some distance, maybe 30 feet, between the path where it was elevated several feet above the stream and the stream itself. Except for the Zen man, in all the time since I had left the monastery proper I had not seen a living soul, at least anyway, since I had entered the steep mountains. Coming across someone set me aback, especially someone with a wooden bucket. The last thing a person merely traversing through the area would need to be carrying with them would be a heavy full size wooden bucket, meaning to me possibly someone more permanent in some fashion. When I walked down toward the stream and about half way between the path and the stream announced my presence, the person, startled, let slip the bucket into the downstream flow. At that moment, turning toward me I could see the person was a woman. From my position off the trail and closeness to the stream I was able to quickly stop and retrieve the bucket, but after doing so and turning back, the woman was gone.
Besides the initial setback coming across a person in the first place, what was really nearly incomprehensible besides the fact that the person was a woman was that she was not of indigenous stock, but instead, in the quick glimpse I got of her, appeared Caucasian. I don't know how long it had been since I had seen another Caucasian, especially so a woman, and blue eyes. It had been so long I had actually forgot they existed.
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Thinking she must have needed the water I scooped the bucket full and set it in the middle of the trail taking a position on the continuing up-rising side above the path and just sat there waiting. Even though I was at a high altitude and it was generally cold because of it, it was still at the warmer time of year, so dressed in right clothes as I was, sitting in the direct rays of the sun, relatively speaking you could get warm. In doing so, as the wait for the woman to return for her bucket began to lengthen, I began to get drowsy, closing my eyes now and then until I was actually napping. As soon as I discovered I had fallen asleep I jumped up, but in that short time the bucket was gone.
With the little bit of light remaining before sunset I knew I wouldn't be able to make it very far down the trail before night set in, and for sure I knew I wasn't about to try and traverse the trail in the dark. So said, I decided to find a place close by the trail sheltered from the wind and hole up for the night, hoping for a fresh start in the morning and possibly a return by the woman.
After scrounging along the edge of the stream for something edible together with some bread I had been carrying with me since leaving the monastery I ate and settled in for the night. As I sat there in the very last of the waning twilight, sheltered from the wind just off the trail, I remembered that on a couple of occasions I had gone into the village some distance down and below the monastery with several of the monks. On one of those occasions a man in the village who had a rudimentary use of English had tried to tell me something I wasn't getting the full grasp of. He signed me to wait while he went to get something, returning with a well worn magazine, possibly German or Dutch, and pointed to pictures of the women in the advertisements. What he was trying to say, showing his hands with his fingers up and counting, that 8 to 10 --- what I determined to be months before, and even then possibly more or less --- a western woman had come to the village. When I asked what happened to her he pointed toward the mountains. At the time I didn't quite know what to make of it and for the most part quickly forgot it --- that is until that night sitting there and I began wondering if there wasn't an element of truth to it.
The next morning just as I was waking and trying to shake off the morning chill as well as get the kinks out after a night of sleeping on rocks and hard ground, I looked down toward the trail and saw the woman standing there looking at me. This time rather than disappearing she gestured for me to join her. She had made a small fire and was in the process of making hot tea, a truly welcome delight. She apologized for her behavior the day before saying she was so shocked to see anyone, let alone a white man, she sort of lost it.
She said her name was Hope Savage, and after learning I was an American, told me that she was from South Carolina. She also said she had stayed at a village for a few days months back many miles down the mountain trail but wasn't aware of any monastery. She had seen what looked like ruins of what may have been a monastery at one time but didn't seem Inhibited from the distance she saw it. Wanting to stay away from any religious context or involvement she said she kept her distance. I asked her about the wooden stave bucket and she said she had a small cabin not far she thought might be used as a retreat of some kind. She said it had a roof, a door and a place for an inside fire, so it was warm and comfortable and we could go there if I liked. Which we did. So too, when I asked, she had not seen the Zen man, although she said she had been left stuff on occasion, but didn't know from who. Her not having made contact with the monastery meant she had not passed through the monastery portals to the outside we were in, so I wasn't sure if the two of us were operating on the same time frame reference, which could mean, but not necessarily so since I wasn't versed in such things, that her year and my year, if I had a year, were two totally different times. Both having never passed through or outside the portal at the same time, yes. One outside, the other not, yet still meeting, not sure. But for me at the moment it didn't matter because I found it exhilarating to talk with someone who knew English and having come from a similar enough background we could both share the conversation.[4]
We spent the rest of that whole day into the night together, then the next day and night before parting the morning of following day. Most of what has been alluded to in the main text above, that is Paris, India, Bhutan all ring true. How long she was going to stay and continue doing what she was doing she wouldn't say, although she seemed to think it wouldn't be long before she moved on, primarily because how harsh the conditions were. She did seem like she would not be willing to endure another winter there, at least that high up in the mountains. She seemed thoroughly interested in the fact that I had arrived in the general location by coming up through Thailand, Laos and Burma and indicated that might be a return prospect for her. She wasn't clear on any passports or visas or if any of them were valid. I think, like me, nobody knew she was there. She also expressed interest in seeing why the two of us held such differing views about the monastery. We parted company the morning of that third day and I never saw her again.[5]
When Hope Savage and I met that morning for the very first time along the trail and she told me her that her name was Hope Savage and that she was an American from South Carolina, none of it, relative to her, carrying any special meaning to me beyond the moment. That is to say, up to that time in my life I had never heard of a Hope Savage, that she existed, who she was, how she fit into the hierarchy of the Beat Movement, or that she was even associated with or a member of the Beat Movement. I would be hard pressed to say that at the time, unless you were part of the immediate inner circle of that movement, nobody, including me, would have. I'm not sure if she even knew. When it came up, either by me or through comments that led to it by her that I knew Bob Kaufman and had met Jack Kerouac, it became clear in her responses and the direction of our conversation that she was more than just familiar with the Beat movement. Even though I heard Ginsberg read "Howl" one night at the Insomniac in Hermosa Beach didn't mean I was somehow deeply involved in the Beat movement, so I saw no reason for it to be not much different for her. Nor, do I recall her specifically offering anything at the time that would have modified such an assumption.
So said, almost everything related to Hope Savage as it applies to the two of us has since been overlaid with information as to who she was or how she fit in relative to Corso, Ginsberg, et al, only done so after the fact. What people knew of her then was more-or-less individually held information done so by a half a dozen to maybe eight or so people traveling or scattered around in widespread and unrelated habitats. It wasn't until that information was gathered together in aggregate that a more singular, comprehensive picture formed. Otherwise, in a larger perspective, except possibly for one thing when I first met her that morning, I perceived her as being not much more or much different than any number of earlier seekers such as Mercedes De Acosta, Guy Hague, William Samuel and the spiritual traveler given the name Larry Darrell by W. Somerset Maugham in his novel The Razor's Edge, who had gone to India searching for or hoping to find an answer and perhaps even Enlightenment.
The one thing that truly impressed me as different from the others, different as well as it related to later seemingly higher profile seekers along the path such as Bhagavan Das and Steve Jobs, was how far or deep Hope had explored both into her spiritual self and penetrated the physical environment. Except for Darrell, most of the early seekers and those that followed pretty much stayed within the confines or easy reach of comfy civilization. Previously above, offering a brief description of the area we eventually met I wrote that going to and from the Zen man's abode was a very arduous several day trek, much of it through rugged and steep very high altitude territory with a good portion of the trail following along the side of a stream that was sometimes rushing and other times placid depending on the steepness or flatness of the terrain. Although Hope may not have been consciously aware of it, nor did she seem to be following any learned, formalized, laid out, or structured dictum, innately she was replicating a classical regimen with ancient roots emanating far back in the past that embraced perfection of the precepts (Sila), thoughts brought to a state of quiescence (Samadhi), diligent practice of the trances (Jhana), attaining toward insight (Prajna) and being a frequenter to and of lonely places. Hence then, where it was we crossed paths. Bill Morgan, in his 2010 tome sub-titled The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, wrote of Hope Savage, "She dreamed of escape, and the more remote and exotic the destination, the better." Except for a brief moment in passing one night where she told me something that went like, "It's nice to have an orgasm once in a while you don't have to do yourself," she seemed to be fairly satisfied with her life.[6]
As to her beauty so alluded to by others, although for the most part, except when necessary for other reasons, she was, because of the cold, covered head to toe and had on well worn boot-like footwear, she still was exquisite, moving with the grace of a ballerina both in hand gestures and movements across the ground. And, even though there were probably no beauty products for a 1000 miles around she needed none. As for Corso's comments regarding her memory and ability to recite fifty stanzas of Swinburne's The Triumph of Time, although no poetry was mentioned, it was easy to tell her mind overflowed with imagination, wit, and intellect. Through it all though, the exquisiteness, the beauty, the intellect, she seemed to me, just below the surface, just plane tired of it all.[7] [8]
Our conversations, although not exclusively concentrated on things spiritual, they were not ignored, blocked, or even lightly sprinkled over the top, but more if anything, webbed dimensionally in all directions thoughout. And why shouldn't they? After all, Hope had left childhood environs behind not so much to leave something, but in a continuing growth sort of way, in search of something, with that something being blanketed by a deeper meaning of some kind. In an effort to establish context I told her I had been doing study-practice at the monastery and as a young boy done darshan under the auspices of the venerated Indian holy man Sri Ramana Maharshi. She shrugged it off almost as being unimportant. Unlike most of the others that followed in her footsteps such as Bhagavan Das and Ram Dass, et al, she viewed most of the esteemed holy men she had crossed paths with as being either charlatans, phonies, or looking for a quick marker saying many of the same things I would hear sometime later from Pulyan's Teacher and not unlike what Paul Brunton wrote about in his travels in India in the early 1930s. Re the following:
"One heard so much of certain so-called holy men who possessed repute of having acquired deep wisdom and strange powers; so one travelled through scorching days and sleepless nights to find them, only to find well-intentioned fools, scriptural slaves, venerable know-nothings, money-seeking conjurers, jugglers with a few tricks, and pious frauds."
Somerset Maugham had traveled the length and breadth of India interviewing swamis, sadhus, fakirs, and holy men up and down the scale and the things he heard from them he heard over and over, and that was the crux of the matter. In "The Writer's Notebook," (1946), in sort of a last straw, of one sufi Maugham concludes:
"He said the things I had heard from others twenty times before That is the worst of the Indian thinkers, they say the same things in the same words
"(T)hey repeat it like parrots, there is no denying the fact that it is irksome to listen interminably to the same statements. You wish at least they could think of other metaphors, similes, illustrations than those of the Upanishads. Your heart sinks when you hear again the one about the snake and the rope."
It was one of the things that intrigued me about Hope. Yet there was more, although I was then and still unable to put my finger on it as well as being uncomfortable with the wording of the concept because it comes from a place within me before words are, but once formulated, one of the reasons she was so unreceptive to guru types. To me she seemed Awakened --- without being Enlightened --- most likely since birth or very early on, living with it her whole life and, although realizing there was difference between herself and others, not knowing what it was. I think that was the motivation of her continued search for an answer. Some people thought she was crazy, I thought otherwise.[9] [10]
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
ALLEN GINSBERG: WICHITA VORTEX SUTRA
THE WANDERLING AND HIS UNCLE
Their Life and Times Together
BARBARA BACK
MAUGHAM'S FEMALE CONFIDANT
BHAGAVAN DAS
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT
ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE
THE WANDERLING
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Footnote [1]
The following letter, written to and for Gregory Corso by and from Hope's brother Sam, was found in the Ginsberg Archives at Stanford University under Miscellaneous, the letter, from Paris and dated May 2, 1963:
I guess you will wonder if I will speak of Hope, but I know nothing but that she is in the Orient and well (for a card to my parents at Xmas) and a few months ago she ran into Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg who would know more of than I. I have never written or received a letter from my sister.
Sam Savage
Adam Osborne, who grew up at the Ramana ashram from a toddler to just before being a teenager, told me that sometime prior to his father's death in 1970 a man by the name of William Samuel contacted him in the U.S. and expressed an interest in meeting his father. In their conversation Samuel told him that he and Osborne (the younger) had met at the Ramana ashram in India in 1944 and that during his stay, on the night of the full moon in April of that year, he, Osborne (the younger), his mother and another young boy he thought was Osborne's brother, went on a ritual walk around the holy mountain Arunachala.
In April of 1944 the moon was full on Saturday April 8th. That would put me still at the ashram proper in early April and putting the "boy" on the way home on board a ship in the Indian Ocean, by previous reckoning as figured out in British Ship MV Tulagi, toward the end of May, 1944 and most likely back in the states sometime in June, 1944.
According to the date Sam Savage put on his letter, May 2, 1963, and the contents therein as they relate to Hope, would put her almost exactly one year to the date ahead of Osborne's comments, with her in turn then, as referred to in other comments to Ginsberg, et al, in place to be on her way to the Himalayas.
The following has been extrapolated or pulled forward as it were, from Footnote [10] because of it's relevance here:
I know she had got far enough into Africa and Arabian Peninsula areas to have reached as far south as the port city of Aden, as well as Ethiopia, Iran and back to India, but that was all well before going into the Himalayas when I crossed paths with her. Referring back to Deborah Baker, previously cited, and her book Blue Hand she writes, and of which totally substantiates what I have presented albeit from a completely different unbiased source and what I have been saying all along:
"Upon returning to India that winter, she found her way to a remote and inhospitable valley in the western Himalayas."
ZEN IN TIBET
Although a little off subject related to Hope Savage herself specifically, because of what I have presented regarding her within these pages, especially so how we met, there are those who come forward on occasion taking issue as to what I have cited as a Zen monastery, a monastery they take as being in Tibet --- with Zen and Tibet in their view not necessarily going hand-in-hand. In clarification, for those who may be so interested, the following is presented:
On the ancient Silk Road, of which I have made reference to and also called the Chamadao, the Tea Horse Trail or Tea Horse Road, and of which were or are all integral parts of the Silk Road, there is a place known as Dunhuang in northwestern China on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Sixteen miles southeast of Dunhuang is the Mogao Caves, a complex of some 700 or so caves dating back to 400 AD, perhaps before, carved out of the living rock above the Dachuan River. One after the other of the caves are adorned with Buddhist statuary and art, among them one cave specifically noted for having a hoard of manuscripts known as the Dunhuang Manuscripts discovered hidden and sealed away for well over a thousand years. The following is what Wiki writes on the manuscripts:
"By far the largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras, commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious merit. Several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen. Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist manuscripts has been on the Ch'an (or Zen) texts, which have revolutionized the history of Ch'an Buddhism."
There is a book titled TIBETAN ZEN: Discovering a Lost Tradition (2015) by Sam van Schaik based on his study of rare Tibetan manuscripts discovered among the hoard of manuscripts found in the aforementioned sealed cave. Taken together van Schaik's works offer a heretofore unknown window into the existence of a Tibetan Zen tradition that has not been known previously to scholars and laypeople alike, whether Tibetan, European, or Chinese. See:
OM MANI PADME HUM
When I was a young boy in the fourth or fifth grade or so two of my grade-school buddies and I used to pull a Radio Flyer through the alleys around the neighborhood collecting pop and beer bottles for the deposit. After we collected a wagon load we would turn them in various places around of which one was a bar. In the process of pounding on the back door I got to know the dishwasher there, an elderly (to me) Chinese man.
As a young boy without a lot of experience in the matter --- and never with my buddies --- I used to go by the bar and meditate in the alley with the old man even without the necessity of turning in soda or beer bottles for the deposit. Sitting in the shade on the back steps amongst the garbage cans and flies behind the bar one afternoon, while drinking hot tea out of tiny little cups with no handles in a near ritual-like tea ceremony he insisted on, the elderly Chinese man told me a story about the bombing of Japanese occupied Taiwan by B-29 Superfortresses of the United States Army Air Force during World War II. He said from ancient times there was a "girl Buddha" whose followers believed that reciting the same mantra that the Green Lama used, Om Mani Padme Hum, would, because of her compassion, deliver them from harm. He said even though he himself had not practiced or invoked the mantra, while seeking refuge in the midst of the attack he inadvertently ended up amongst a group of believers who were also running to find shelter from the explosions. Then, while within the group, most of whom were verbally repeating the mantra, overhead, pure white and almost cloud-like, the "girl Buddha" appeared in the sky above them actually deflecting the trajectory of the bombs away from their exposed path until they reached safety and out of harms way.
The mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, came up because of a 1940s comic book superhero called The Green Lama that used the mantra much like Billy Batson used Shazam to become Captain Marvel --- to invoke superpowers --- and, in the Green Lama's case, like Captain Marvel, gaining super strength, invulnerability, the ability to fly, and even being impervious to bullets to the point of being bulletproof. The old dishwasher had six or eight copies of the Green Lama, all in like-new mint condition, of which, for whatever reason, he gave to me.
During those back-alley sessions, if the Chinese man used any names relative to the "girl Buddha" I don't recall them. Anything I know about her other than his description of the protection she provided, I have garnered later in life. Basically the "girl Buddha," or more respectfully, female Buddha, is known as Kuan Yin (also know as Quan Shi Yin and Kwan Yin), a Chinese female incarnation of Chenrezig (Avalokiteshvara) the Bodhisattva of Compassion. A bodhisattva is an Enlightened being who has decided to "stay in the world" rather than becoming a fully Enlightened Buddha and living a compassionate life for the sake of all beings. With the mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, Kuan Yin tirelessly attempts to deliver all beings from suffering.
It was not long after the war, with me still being a young boy, that I began traveling around the desert southwest with my Uncle and started interacting with Native Americans on a regular basis. It was during one of those same early travels that I first heard about and actually met Navajo code talkers. It was also at that same time I first heard about their neighbors, the Zuni.
The Zuni have a rich and varied history, especially when juxtaposed against indigenous tribes that have historically inhabited the same area. Many things are considered somewhat out of the norm when the Zuni are compared with their counterparts such as the Navajos and Pueblos. So too, as related to our purposes here, there is a legacy that the Zuni have an archaeological artifact that has script written in the Tibetan language, of which one segment has been translated as being Om Mani Padme Hum.(see)
"Going to and from his abode was a very arduous several day trek, much of it through rugged and steep very high altitude territory. A good portion of the trail followed along side a series of streams that may or may not have been the same one, that was sometimes rushing and other times placid depending on the steepness or flatness of the terrain."
As the above quote from the main text testifies, although getting to and from the Zen-man's abode wasn't debilitating to the point of total exhaustion, it was still a difficult trek. After barely being able to do it myself I was amazed that such an ancient man was able to do it in the first place.
Even though he and I were not able to communicate verbally in the standard way because neither of us had command of each other's languages, he as a man of Zen as were my leanings, for all practical purposes the two of us were quite comfortable in how we had established a working relationship of understanding between us. However, not operating at his level, for me there remained many more unanswered questions than answered ones.
In the mountains generally it was out-and-out cold, but in the rarefied higher elevation where we were it was even more so. Even so, considering the usual outside nighttime temperature drop, with the tiny almost candle-like fire in his stone hut, it was typically bearable.
The day before I was to leave we spent a good part of the daylight hours scrounging around for burnable material. To me the amount we gathered seemed much more than would otherwise be necessary, but what I found even more odd was that we left nearly half or more of what we collected neatly stacked at the long abandoned stone hut he had shown me a few days before.
After returning to his hut and leaving the rest of the material we gathered, we put a little food, a few utensils and tea in a shoulder bag then went back to the abandoned hut before sundown for reasons to me unclear. After arrival we ate, then in the declining if not all but gone sunlight he searched around and found what at one time appeared to have been a fire pit. Following his lead the two of us built a fairly good sized, considering what his fires were usually like, an almost pyre-like pile of combustibles. With the sunlight gone and total darkness having fully encroached on us by the time we finished the Zen-man lit the fire.
We sat in meditation facing each other across the fire on an east-west axis with me facing east toward what would eventually be the location of the rising sun. At some point into our meditation, and non-Siddhi related, there was somehow a coalescing of our mind processes forming a single mental entity where we both able to understand each other's thoughts.
In the thoughts he was willing to share he revealed he had spent many, many years as a young man on the other side of time in Gyanganj, but one day he passed through the monastery portals to the outside world and when he did, he became an old man.
For the record, in an other example of a similar or like-type thought exchange, Ram Dass, in an article in Yoga Journal, November 1976 (pp 6-11), related that once he found himself in a very close similar situation between himself and his spiritual mentor, the venerated Indian holy man Neem Karoli Baba:
"He laughed and spoke to me. It's interesting --- he had always spoke to me in Hindi, and my Hindi was very bad. In India there was always somebody translating. But on these other levels the transmission is in thought form, and then it comes out in whatever language you think in"
Before the full abilities of the thought exchange phenomenon faded into oblivion I brought up, considering his age, about the arduous trip back and forth through the mountains to and from the monastery for example, and how, even for me in my somewhat comparable youth and the physical condition that accompanies it, how difficult it was. What I garnered as a response was that I travel my way and he travels his way.
The next morning the Zen-man was gone. So too, neither was he to be found when I returned to his hut, although I did find a rolled up piece of cloth tied to the strap of my shoulder bag. Marked on the cloth, most likely done so from the burnt end of a wooden stick, were four Chinese cuneiform characters, one in each corner and, filling most of the center, the outline of some sort of a shape I didn't recognize.
The first part was answered right after leaving the airport to the train station. Almost immediately I saw a giant map of Jamaica and instantly I recognized the shape of the island as being the exact same shape the Zen-man drew on the cloth. Secondly, on my train ride through the cities and hinterland I saw all over, again and again the dominant colors of red, yellow, green and black in the graffiti adopted from the country of Africa and used by the Rastafarians in the graffiti that was plastered all over on almost every available open space. Those two eye-openers along with my experience high in the mountains with a Jamaican man of spells called an Obeah led to the meaning behind how the Zen-man traveled those so many years earlier as found in the following:
In the paragraph this footnote is referenced to the following sentence is found:
"Her not having made contact with the monastery meant she had not passed through the monastery portals to the outside we were in, so I wasn't sure if the two of us were operating on the same time frame reference."
Having passed beyond the walls and portal into the monastery proper, and without having left that sanctuary, I still ended up at the ashram of the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai is south India in some fashion with the help of the woman whose farm was well within the hinterlands of the monastery's environment. Even so, nowhere does it show up how it was I ended up back at the monastery. It is clear that I did because in Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery I write that I was abducted by military irregulars outside the walls one morning and taken back to civilization.
"I scooted as quickly as I could across what was left of the ashram grounds between me and the gate and out onto the street, melding into the small milieu of what counted as crowds in those days, disappearing.
"Years passed and one day a friend of mine helping me go through a few things ran across my rather loose knit so-called collection of decoders that were sort of doing not much more than just floating around in an unconnected fashion in a drawer."
The above sentences as found in the above quote are the two closing sentences at the end of Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery. Although the physical visual-space that separates them is small, the gap between the two as related to the passage of time within the context of the sentences is huge. One moment, when all the trials and tribulations that have been laid out from childhood through to the Army, the monastery, the Himalayas, et al have ended, I walk away from the ashram, suddenly jumping to many years later, apparently comfortably safe back at home in the United States as though nothing ever happened --- simply hanging with a friend sorting through a bunch of decades-old Captain Midnight decoders. Let me just say, in more ways than one, it involved war torn Burma, the Japanese Invasion of India, the crash of a C-47 high in the rarefied air in the Tibetan area of the Himalayas after being lost on a flight from Calcutta, and a U.S. Army captain who came over the "hump" from China and his visit to the Ramana ashram at the same time I was there.
To outside observers such as Hope Savage and initially myself, the monastery was as she saw it 'what looked like ruins of what may have been a monastery at one time.' Every once in awhile a small handful of monks would exit the ruins from what would have been where the main door to the monastery would have been at one time. If I came out of my Nirodha state long enough upon their return to see where they went in the ruins, it was always empty with no signs of monks anywhere.
One day when some monks came out of the ruins I got up and followed them into the fields hoping to pull something, anything, out of the ground to eat. They didn't stop at any fields but continued on, I just didn't have the strength to keep up with them over any distance. However, when they returned a short time later, I returned, entering the monastery in a single file line right along with them. In doing so, as a double set of rough hewn wooden doors, which hadn't been there previously, closed behind me, I suddenly found myself inside of a fully functional Zen monastery. For additional clarification and insight into the phenomenon please see:
"Somehow leaving her had a certain overwhelming sense of sadness for me because of the seeming finality of it all. I had experienced a similar situation years before as a young adult with a woman of parallel standard and quality, an experience that did in fact end with a near 100% never again to be seen finality, a finality I would have chosen to end differently given the chance. The same way an odor or smell can take you back to a time and place in your memory, because of a closeness in replication of that certain loss, I was engulfed by a swift lightning-like reoccurrence of that same feeling from ages long past that swept over me leaving me with a lingering sadness. Although the feeling faded rather quickly, the memory of the event, once dredged up into my surface thoughts, can still be brought up."
The above quote, which is highly related to the paragraph regarding Hope Savage it is footnoted from, actually refers to two people other that Hope Savage, each in their own way probably as beautiful. First is a woman I met in the Long Beach Museum of Art a few years after graduating from high school while still in my youth, or at least young adult stage. In most of my works I refer to her as the most beautiful woman in the world and of which pretty much holds true to this day. Of her I have written the following:
"The rest of the year slipped by, and possibly because of that strange feeling that felt so real and the strength of it's strangeness, we were able to override any number or mitigating factors, to such a point we saw each other as much as possible. Then, sometime around the middle of the following year I received a confirmation letter from the Selective Service informing me I would be inducted two or three months before the end of the calendar year and would have to report on a given date at a given time and place. The second I showed her the letter, except for one rare occasion, reality hit and I never saw her again. Less than three weeks before I was inducted she met some USC dude who in the following year while I was still in the army, having barely a year of service behind me and being nothing but a lowly PFC, she married --- a play on the old gone off to college (him) while I remained nothing but a dunce working stiff (in the Army) trick."
The second person is who brought forth from my deep past the feelings I so allude to, and of whom I met several years later, the two of us having met and traveling in Thailand together as she sought to enhance a spiritual need by venturing into the jungles of Asia and becoming a frequenter of lonely places in an ever expanding attempt to enhance a deepening Awareness.
"According to the Buddha and how the sutras are said to present it, to manifest or execute the abilities of Siddhis, a stringent regimen of meditation and concentration MUST meet certain levels of accomplishments. To reach such a level the meditator must be perfect in the precepts (Sila), bring his thoughts to a state of quiescence (Samadhi), practice diligently the trances (Jhana), attain to insight (Prajna) and be frequenter to lonely places."
Phyllis Davis, mentioned at the end of the previous footnote, Footnote [5], on a spiritual quest found herself in a position where she was confronted by the above precepts.
Unlike most, in an honest assessment of herself, Davis questioned if she could meet such criteria, that is, being masterful in Sila, Samadhi, Jhana, and Prajna and be frequenter to lonely places. However, as time passed and people in her life she cared for and loved began to come and go, some on a more-or-less permanent basis by pushing up daisies, she began reevaluating just where she was finding herself in the overall scheme of things. She eventually traveled to the jungles of Thailand to resolve the issue.
Not very many days, years, or months separated Hope Savage and I chronologically in age, being born only a short time apart. She, however on the east coast, me on the west. How she got to be how she was is not fully known. Her father was a highly distinguished lawyer, mayor of Camden and a recognized author of several books. My dad ran away from home when he was 16, was a 'carny' barker in the sideshow of a major traveling circus (see), worked the gold fields of the Mother Lode in the High Sierras, made tires for Firestone, worked in the shipyards on the construction of Liberty Ships, then went on a years long binge when my mother died, sobering up just enough to marry my Stepmother for a few years.
Hope's younger brother Samuel, growing up with her in the same family says, most likely reflecting back on her as well but speaking of himself, that he was "brought up on the dashing glories of the Romantic poets by his mother and on the scientific rationalism of Darwin by his father."(see) When she quit high school I still had a year or so left. Around that same time Gregory Corso describes her as a "female Shelley," able to "recite and feel ALL of Shelley." In those days, that is my high school years, for me, the closest I came to knowing anything about Shelley was that his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein, of which every Frankenstein movie that came out, at least the original Universal Studios released ones, I went to see, up to and including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley shows up along with Shelley early in the plot to Bride of Frankenstein, but, of Shelley himself and his works, I knew nothing.
When I moved back to the southern California beach city of my early years to start high school after living with a foster couple in an inland city for a few years where it seemed a good part of the youth aspired toward being greasers --- with duck-tail haircuts, collar up leather jackets, and fighting after school with chains --- and where I actually worked part time in a what some people might consider somewhat seedy, a card club poker casino called the The Normandie Club, to an area where a good portion of the teenagers leaned toward the coming of embryo-surfers, was for me, quite a change. We are talking prototype Gidget's and Beach Blanket Bingo replicates.
In my case however, by the time I reached my junior year on into my senior year I had long since morphed outside the fringes of high school haute cultures, be they socialites or surfers, into more of a Maynard G. Krebs bohemian type, hanging out, at least after graduation, in places like the Iconoclast Coffee House on Wall Street in Redondo Beach or the Insomniac on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach.(see)
So too, those last two years, almost always found me hauling around an over the shoulder canvas pouch with a continuing series of notebooks a la Leonardo Da Vinci, sketching and writing a montage of all kinds of useless drivel along with several Zen books that, albeit mostly just at the end and post high school, I was able to pull out and quote extensively to anybody who would listen --- of which no one would.(see)
One of my closest high school buddies at the time, also on the fringes, had taken piano lessons most of his life and actually got so good at it that playing the piano became almost a second nature for him. Although he could read music, because of an almost innate ability to sensibly improvise playing the piano he loved modern jazz, especially as played by his jazz heroes of the day the Lou Levy Trio and Dave Pell Octet. Somewhere along the way I picked up a similar interest regarding jazz, and because of it and the fact that I knew who Lou Levy was unlike almost everyone else our age, we started hanging together. Although my buddy didn't know it, initially I really only knew who Levy was because I thought he had been married to Maxene Andrews of the 1940s World War II singing group the Andrews Sisters, famous for their Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B as well as a number of others. She was it just was a different Lou Levy. The Lou Levy we are talking about here was married to the sports car race car driver Ruth Levy and friend to my friend, Mary Davis, also a sports car race driver besides being the owner of the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, who made it clear to me one day years later when she introducing me to Ruth.
I attended several gigs with my buddy for both Levy and Pell during and just after high school. As well, even though we were under age, the two of us went to Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse at the foot of Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach to hear his All Stars and other groups regularly. Matter of fact, I even appear in a photo-shot of the inside of the Lighthouse used on one of Rumsey's early record albums, wearing one of my dad's way oversize for me sports jackets (in those days men were required to wear a jacket and tie to get in. Later I bought a three-piece corduroy suit).
In any case, for one of my high school art classes, which was about the only classes I took in those days, I had to design an album cover, so I chose Howard Rumsey. At the time, the girl I was mostly inseparable from, a fellow artist and, although from a staid family, leaning toward a quasi-bohemian lifestyle as soon as she left her house, selected for her album cover Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. I can still remember to this day how little I knew about anything in those days. Here she was, someone I thought as a contemporary and she knew about Scheherazade and stuff like that and I had never heard of it.
To emphasize what I mean, in ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds, speaking of that exact same time period I write:
"Prior to the advent of the soaring '60s, that is, in the unenlightened middle-to-late '50s, I was a teenager growing up in automobile conscious southern California and owned an immaculately spotless early model Ford Woodie Wagon. Like most high school kids whose cars are a big part of their life, I spent enormous amounts of time maintaining and reworking mine in an exacting and meticulous standard never before dreamed of by the manufacturer. I scraped, sanded, smoothed, bleached, stained, and spar varnished the wood beyond the brightest of the brightwork on the most expensive yacht. There was such a depth of reflection to the wood that a person could hold their arm to the darkened inner door panels and see themselves with clarity to their armpit. The most important thing for me however, was the popularity the car provided during my high school years. I could cruise the beach and high school campus with my buddies and girls would literally clamor for a ride." It is a good thing David Madden had a couple of years of college under his belt when he met 17 year old Hope Savage or he would have never been able to compete, I know I sure couldn't have.(see) For a more indepth coverage of those so above aforementioned high school years please see:
In the above main text the two men had gone to the university under pretense of seeing an avant-garde movie being shown in the auditorium. Although they each had been in college at one time, at this point of time in their lives both were actually bottom of the line 21 year old GIs from a nearby military base. The girl was neither college nor university enrolled either, having dropped out of high school and barely 17 at the time, pursuing her education in her own fashion, studying in libraries and on college campuses --- a combination of which, each in their own way, put all of them together at the same time at the same place.
Sitting in the auditorium prior to the movie the two GIs notice a girl sitting alone a few rows in front and several seats over, a girl one of the men later described as "having never seen anyone more beautiful." Waiting for the movie to start he and his buddy talked back and forth how neither of them would ever have a chance with a girl that looked like her. While the film was being shown, in the dark, unbeknownst to either of them, the girl who was the center of their attention had got up and moved to the seat right next them. The GI who had been quoted as saying the girl as him having never seen anyone more beautiful has also been quoted as saying the following:
"It was not just the beauty of her face that transfixed him. Her skin was the purest, palest and almost unearthly whiteness. At the time most girls kept their hair closely styled. Yet hers was so long and so lovely, it reminded him of the print he'd seen once of Botticelli's naked Venus emerging from a clam."
He then goes on as saying:
"(It) didn't take long to figure that there was more to her than beauty. She made the move, he decided, because she was lonely and they looked interesting. What she wanted, he saw right away, was to talk to someone who was likely to understand her, someone conversant, it developed, with the Greek plays and the poetry of Swinburne, Shelly, Keats, and Blake."
The girl, of course, turned out to be none other than the Beat Generation's missing woman Hope Savage.
The observance by the two men of the young girl in the auditorium that night that was so overwhelmingly captivating is one of those super-rare happenstances men dream of, that for some unknown, mysterious reason come together in time, place, and universe and then, when added together just happen. An event not at all unlike an equal or like earthshaking interaction between two men and their observance of a girl-come-woman along a waters edge the end of one summer in Maine, albeit of the two men, one of them being Albert Einstein.
In the text the following quotes are found, Einstein and a man known only as the uncle, are walking on the beach on the last day of Einstein's final summer in Maine when they spot something bobbing in the ocean just beyond the surf line, the roundness of which suggested that of a human head. As they watched, the object began coming toward them and with each movement closer revealing more clearly a female shape, seemingly with nude shoulders. "It was a perfect body," the uncle admitted. "A perfect girl's body.'
"Then, as the universe intended, both men sat down in the sand and watched the girl. First she danced, keeping her toes along the edge of the water, teasing the waves. Then she crouched and picked at the sand, touching it like some part of a body whose function she didn't quite get.
"As the men leaned back, digging their back into the sand that seemed to anticipate their shapes, they realized she wasn't putting on a show. Not consciously.
"'She's a mermaid, playing in the sand,' my uncle said. Einstein grunted an agreement. At a certain point, it seemed that if they spoke too loud, she'd dry up and disappear, but the mist in the air combined with the haze of their fixation kept her damp and alive."
Any number of people who came in contact with Hope thought something was the matter with her, that she must be nuts or crazy or some such thing. Even her father was concerned with how she conducted herself, so much so that in her mid-teens, or it has been said, he had her placed in a mental hospital and given shock treatment. The following is found in THE TYPEWRITER IS HOLY: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation By Bill Morgan (2010), Chapter 8, page 80:
"Worried about his rebellious daughter, Hope's father once had her committed to a mental hospital for shock treatment, but her spirit remained unbroken. It was obvious that living a bourgeois life was not going to be in her future. She dreamed of escape, and the more remote and exotic the destination, the better."
The following is what I wrote about her in the main text above:
"To me she seemed Awakened --- without being Enlightened --- most likely since birth or very early on, living with it her whole life and, although realizing there was difference between herself and others, not knowing what it was."
As found in "The Last American Darshan" and "The Boy and the Sage," without any formal religious background or training, according to the scribes recording it, within an hour of my face-to-face meeting with Sri Bhagavan, my mental barriers were reduced to nothingness. The following is what people said about me following the experience after I, as a young boy, had sat in the ashram meditation hall in Darshan under the presence of the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi :
Well before I started kindergarten my mother became very ill, eventually dying some months later. During the months leading up to her death my father, because of having to work so many hours to help cover medical expenses, made arrangements for me to live with a foster couple. No sooner had I moved in with them and started a new school than the two-week Christmas vacation, or winter recess as they call it now, rolled around and the couple took me, without my father's consent, to India, not returning until sometime around the start of summer --- in the interim missing the whole last half of the school year.
Before going to India it seemed that no matter what, the couple wanted me. After being there it was as if they could not get rid of me fast enough. For the most part, it seemed, as the very young boy that I was, I was highly fortunate they just didn't abandon me somewhere along the way. Without mentioning it to my father or grandmother that I had sat in the presence of a venerated Indian holy man with somewhat startling results, they simply told them I kept saying things like I could see but that there was no me, that it seemed like the whole back of my head was gone but I could still feel it with my hands, that I was both dirt (earth) and sky.
After returning from India I ended up staying with my grandmother on and off for an unknown period of time. It was she who was initially concerned about my seemingly askew perspective on things. In turn, because of her concerns, she contacted my uncle to see if he had any idea where my father was. Almost immediately, after being unable to locate my father, my uncle came out to assist, one of the first of several trips before he actually remained on a permanent basis.
Even though my uncle was not worried about my behavior at the level my grandmother seemed to be, he agreed her concerns carried a certain high amount of validity. My uncle was aware I had been to India, but at the time he didn't know I had been in the presence of a prominent Indian holy man and, although he had at one time met and knew both Rabindranath Tagore and the Zen master Sokei-an, he was not really versed in things spiritual as they flowed from the Eastern side of things. Even so, my uncle, through pure gut intuition and a long time running association with Native American spiritual elders of the desert southwest and possibly even in consultation with them, felt my behavior was quite possibly spiritual in nature.
He searched around for someone who might have answers and in the process came across Swami Prabhavananda of the Southern California Vedanta Society and then Paramahansa Yogananda of the Self-Realization Fellowship. He took me to see both not because he knew them or was familiar with their works, but for no other reason than both were of the highest profile in the Eastern spiritual movement that had taken root on the west coast during and following World War II.
"After that, most people that follow her agree she disappears from the grid, albeit, a few reports regarding her whereabouts have surfaced on-and-off. Some point to her being seen in Beirut, Lebanon sometime in 1970-71 and traveling with two children, both girls and believed to be hers, the oldest around 2 years of age. Another report jumps to 1975-76 with her being seen in Iran, Pakistan, Nepal, again with 'two toddler daughters.'"
How accurate any of the above reports are regarding Hope Savage and having kids in tow during the early to mid 70s is not known. Any children born from her womb from that era, if still alive, would be full grown adults by now, approaching or in their mid 40s or so, with Hope herself having crossed into the 80 years of age bracket.
Up to this point in time, at least as far as I know, Hope herself nor anyone claiming to be an offspring of hers has come forward in any fashion, publicly
or otherwise --- either about themselves or divulging information about Hope, her whereabouts or demise. As it stands, I have my own ideas on the matter, that is, her whereabouts, and until it is shown to be otherwise by someone that can tell me something about her I know that others don't as proof, I'll stick to it. My premise has to do with the contents of the below quote found previously in the main text, especially so the next to last sentence:
"She seemed thoroughly interested in the fact that I had arrived in the general location by coming up through Thailand, Laos and Burma and indicated that might be a return prospect for her. She wasn't clear on any passports or visas or if any of them were valid. I think, like me, nobody knew she was there. She also expressed interest in seeing why the two of us held such differing views about the monastery. We parted company that morning and I never saw her again."
That next to last sentence refers to the two of us in conversation holding differing views about the monastery. I told her of my experiences and thoughts on the subject, but I could tell, even though she listened intently, she scoffed beneath the surface at the idea. It was my star parallax story that got to her the most and it is my belief her curiosity got the best of her.(see)
After we parted company it is my belief she decided to find out for herself. For all I know she found a home and is still there, remaining to this day at age 26 or so. She could have also gone for only a short time and still been able to show up in Lebanon and/or elsewhere a few years later even though personally I don't subscribe to the Lebanon and elsewhere stories as being valid. I know she had got far enough into Africa and Arabian Peninsula areas to have reached as far south as the port city of Aden, as well as Ethiopia, Iran and back to India, but that was all well before going into the Himalayas when I crossed paths with her. Referring back to Deborah Baker, previously cited, and her book Blue Hand she writes, and of which totally substantiates what I have presented albeit from a completely different unbiased source and what I have been saying all along:
"Upon returning to India that winter, she found her way to a remote and inhospitable valley in the western Himalayas."
As for kids being conceived, the gestation period, or raised in the environment existing in the hinterlands beyond the monastery walls after entering is something I have no knowledge of. How an infant or child would age to adulthood or how long it would take I can't say. There is no perception to the passage of time, but aging does occur. Once returning through the doors to the Samsara-side things are different. However, on the two of my excursions into the hinterlands beyond the monastery walls, that is, going to the farmhouse or to see the ancient man of Zen, I very rarely saw other people and only a smattering of structures --- and for sure I don't recall seeing any children. That is not to say it isn't so, only that what I was meant to see is what I saw.
RUDIMENTARY ENGLISH AND THE MAN FROM THE VILLAGE Regarding the man who had a rudimentary use of English mentioned in the main text above. After I had been returned to the monastery from my sojourn to the Ramana ashram in India the Zen master brought him before me. Before he left I asked if he remembered the time I was in the village and he handed me a magazine, pointing out photos of western women. After a few back and forths he nodded yes that he remembered. I then asked him if, since that time had he seen or come in contact with that same or any western woman. He responded with the following as found in the source so cited:
"He said the woman had come into the town from the mountains heading away from the monastery and the village in the direction of the escarpment. She had left something with a villager she said was for the white monk and that the 'something' ended up in his hands and, although he didn't have it with him, he still had it. Then he said a few days later she was back in the village although this time going the other way toward the direction of the monastery or back into the mountains. After that he never saw her again."
When I finally had a chance to go to the village and retrieve what the western woman left for the white monk, it turned out to be no more than a folded over in fours piece of paper with a mid-size for the page fairly neat but unclear as to what it was drawing in the center. No words, no signature, no date, no initials. Unless the drawing was supposed to be a double entendre of some kind it didn't make much sense no matter which way I turned it and looked at it. The closest the drawing resembled anything to me in a Rorschach Test sort of way was a woman's vagina. If it had been drawn by Hope and intended for me, and that was what it was, then it might have some sense to it if it was related back to the few days we were in the mountains. If that was what it was, but referred somehow to some potential future event, then for sure I didn't get it. See:
AND NOW, FOR THOSE WHO MAY ME SO INTERESTED, GRIST FOR THE MILL: Starting in late August 2005 to late September 2008, on and off in two widely separated yet combined events --- and not really sure if I would be good at anything relevant --- I volunteered for hurricane duty with the American Red Cross. After having done so I was deployed back and forth for weeks-and-weeks-and-weeks between four hurricanes starting first with Katrina then Rita, then a few years later, Gustav and Ike.
During my volunteer deployment for Hurricane Katrina followed immediately by Rita I was paired from almost the very beginning --- and throughout the rest of my deployment --- with a young woman a few years into her early 20s. Although the two of us had been put together in a team initially by pure happenstance, after we worked side-by-side day and night week after week and got to know each other, we made certain thereafter that we were always paired together in some fashion, even to the point that when we re-upped for Rita after Katrina we did so as a pair.
In the beginning volunteers were coming in from all over and teams were haphazardly being thrown together by people who didn't know what they were doing any more than we did but had clipboards. I was sent to a hotel to seek out the person who was to be in charge of the group I was to be assigned to. There were supposed to be 12 of us, two teams of six so we could rotate shifts, but there were only six total available of which I was one. It was night and the group was sitting around the hotel pool patio hoping for more arrivals and transportation. Although we eventually got transportation, three rental cars, which were like gold, the powers that be thinking there would be 12 of us, no more arrivals showed up. At least for our team, with only six or us it meant two to a car and room for our junk. In the meantime the young lady of whom I speak, although I had never seen her before, had availed herself of the pool and was just climbing out to come to the table when I was walking up.
I was hit immediately by the fact that she had a near duplicate look to Botticelli's Birth of Venus that depicts the goddess Venus arriving at the shore after her birth, having emerged from the sea fully-grown. Secondly, being hit by the thought of duplicates, I almost fell over because she was a breath taking near perfect mirror image of what I remembered of Hope Savage --- and, if such things were possible, could have easily been stamped out of the same mold that Hope Savage had been back in the day.
As our three week deployment grew to six and beyond, in general discussions over time, among other things, it came out that prior to hurricane duty she had basically been hanging her hat, temporarily at least, at her uncle's place in Wisconsin, in all places, Madison. She also told me, although an American, she was actually born abroad because at the time of her birth her mother was travelling in the Far East or Middle East, or as she put it, some such place.
We eventually ended up assigned to a Red Cross Service Center in Austin. In Austin on our time off we watched the bats fly out from under the bridge a few times at sundown and went to San Antonio for a couple of days. Took in the River Walk and rode the little boats in the canal and toured the Alamo. What happened to her after I saw her later in Europe two years after Rita I have no clue. Except for a selfie photo she sent one day maybe a year or so later via a now no longer active e-mail address that showed her by a waterfall with her long locks sheared off that was it.
For more on the hurricanes, Red Cross, et al, please see:
As a teenager in high school, mostly because of the restoration efforts on my Ford Woodie Wagon, I met and became friends with one of the top Ferrari and Maserati sports car racing mechanics around, a man by the name of Joe Landaker who just happened to like the woodie and my work on it. During those years he was the chief mechanic for a couple of the top racing teams in the country, Tony Parravano and John Edgar Enterprises. One day I was hanging out in his shop like I did once in awhile when the movie actor Steve McQueen and a buddy came in looking to possibly buy one of the race cars. With McQueen concentrating on Landaker specifically it sort of left me and his buddy outside the conversation, so the two of us began a bit of small talk. In the process I told him I thought the tan three piece corduroy suit he had on looked pretty sharp. He said he would sell it to me for 10 bucks. I said OK and with that he started taking off his suit right then and there in the shop, shirt, tie, everything clear down to his underwear. Except for the ten bucks all he wanted was the pants and shirt I had on. We exchanged clothes, he left with McQueen and I had a ten dollar corduroy suit.
Continuing in the same vein, the following quote shows up in Footnote [4] of Guy Hague. Hague, who had stayed at the ashram of Sri Ramana circa 1938, and my Merchant Marine Friend had been discussing egos, what they were or weren't in relation things spiritual, most specifically Enlightenment. During their discussion I overheard not only 'ego' in such a context for the first time, I also heard mention of Sigmund Freud, someone I heard of for the first time as well. To wit:
"A few days later, without the merchant marine knowing about it, I went down to the public library in Veterans Park and asked one of the librarians where I could find some books on Freud, pronouncing his name as it looked when written, 'Frooed,' rhyming with food. The librarian asked 'Who?' and again I said 'Frooed, Frooed,' showing her the slip of paper. By then several other libraians had gathered around, and one of them laughing, said, 'Oh, the boy means Freud' (rhyming with 'froid') with all of the others soon joining in laughing and pointing at me like I was some kind of a dolt. I ran out of the library as fast as I could, but before I even reached the bottom of the steps one of the librarians caught me and talked me into coming back. She sat me down at one of the tables way in the back by myself and brought me a whole bunch of books and information of Freud. On and off throughout the afternoon and up until the library closed she went over them with me. As much as I read that day and as much as she tried to explain it all to me I still didn't get or figure out just what an ego was. It wasn't until a year later or so when a movie came out called Forbidden Planet that it all started to make sense. In the movie the main villain was a creation of the mind, a monster from the Id. The Id was part of the triad Freud proposed along with the ego and superego --- and suddenly it all made sense, except that is, why the Navy man insisted there was NO ego. That information was destined for later."
For a quick, concise overview on the Ego, Super Ego, etc., from a Buddhist/Zen perspective, please visit Thirty Minutes To Enlightenment and scroll down to Number Six. See also The Ally In Shamanism. See as well:
A year or so before I started high school and unknown to most of my peers and me, a semi-bohemian literary movement began taking root in various parts of the U.S. that eventually grew to such a point that by my second year in high school I had become more than peripherally aware of it. The movement, given the name The Beat Generation, was mainly centered in and around San Francisco's North Beach, Venice West in Los Angeles, and Greenwich Village in New York City. Two of the top movers, both of whom would become renowned poets in their own right, were Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
In the South Bay just around that same time and into after graduation for me --- although never reaching anywhere near the level as the other aforementioned Beat places and me not really knowing a whole lot about the Beat movement in those days --- I started hanging out at the Iconoclast Coffee House and the Insomniac hoping to be or at least think I was "cool" and possibly even absorb or learn some of the movement trends.
The Iconoclast was just a few steps east up the hill from El Paseo and the Horseshoe Pier on Wall Street in Redondo Beach while the Insomniac was a few miles north of Redondo Beach on Pier Avenue just across the street from Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. Betty Jean at the Iconoclast was cool, but of the two places, the best part for me was taking home to my place an extraordinarily fabulously beautiful young redhead, an Insomniac regular, regularly. Or at least once in a while, or on occasion. Or maybe just once or twice, by the name of Jolene. Unfortunately Jolene, who was highly polyamorous, loved speed even more, and sadly dead from Bennies before having even reached the end of the 1960s. By the time I was out of the Army everything had changed. When I went in it was Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. When I got out only a few short years later it was the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and Bob Dylan.
CAFE FRANKENSTEIN, LAGUNA BEACH EUROPEAN COFFE HOUSE, CIRCA 1959
In high school at the time I was one of the few who gravitated toward the early stages of the Beat Movement, at least at the extent or level I did. After graduation it was a little different because the "movement," before it withered and died, or morphed into something unrecognizable, expanded on it's own in an underground sort of way taking in and absorbing it's own truly cool types. Once it mainstreamed the Beat Generation was done and it's true adherents scattered to the four winds.
One Saturday morning a couple of the extra curricular on-campus type science clubs got together and sponsored an all day field trlp to the Griffith Park Observatory, AKA the Los Angeles Planetarium, of which, having fond memories of as a young boy, I decided to attend.
Everybody either traveled in groups or in pairs and sat on the bus accordingly. Me, not being one of the science types I arrived alone and sat in a seat alone. Just as the bus began pulling out one last student got on. As he walked down the aisle all the single open empty seats began to mysteriously fill up with backpacks, people suddenly laying over sleeping, etc., so with the only real open seat available being next to me, making himself stiffly comfortable he sat in it, with neither of us making eye contact or talking.
The year before I had semi-established myself with the science major types from a project me and my connected at the hip female artist companion and I made and submitted to the science fair. It was a good size black and white 3-D working model replica of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory with all the whys and wherefores his experiments would or wouldn't work. The project, although built as a fluke, won awards clear up to almost going to state level, and brought accolades to the school, science department, teachers and students. Just as the bus was pulling out of the parking lot one of the science students, noticing I wasn't traveling with my artist friend, came up to my seat and clearly in jest asked where the Bride of Frankenstein was, meaning of course my female companion.
The Bride of Frankenstein comment must have jogged something in the guy next to me because after the bus started going and several minutes of silence out of nowhere he told me how much he liked my science project saying it broke all kinds of molds and such. From there he moved on to how much he, and thus then by inference me, liked Frankenstein movies, quickly expanding it to the Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy. Soon the conversation turned to all the drive-in horror movies we had seen. Spending the rest of the day together two things happened. One, without really knowing each other we made arrangements to see two of the movies in question together at our local drive in theater the following weekend, and two, some of the other students, when they had a chance pulled me aside and told me or asked me if I knew he was gay, albeit using much more derogatory euphemisms of the day.
We never really ran around together or saw each other socially, he having his own circle of friends and me, as sparse as they were, mine. As it was he was one year ahead of me in high school and started community college when I started my senior year, with him moving on to Cal State Long Beach. We continued with the horror and monster movies, meeting once a month or so, making big bags of butter and salted popcorn and taking our own drinks as we always had. One day he showed me a photograph he took in Laguna Beach of a coffee house called Cafe Frankenstein and insisted the two of us go there in that I hung out at the Iconoclast and Insomniac on a regular basis. So we did, going down to Cafe Frankenstein, although he wouldn't join going with me to either of the south bay coffee houses.
In regards to Cafe Frankenstein and Wikipedia's comments in several of their otherwise pretty good critiques on the Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon series of beach movies such as Beach Blanket Bingo. Wiki editors are of the opinion that the after beach establishments the gang usually hung out in such as Big Daddy's club in Beach Party and Cappy's Place in Muscle Beach Party are a reference to Southern California beach coffeehouses in general and Cafe Frankenstein in particular. Beach coffeehouses in general perhaps, but the three beach coffeehouses I mention, the Iconoclast, Insomniac, and Cafe Frankenstein being like Big Daddy's or Cappy's Place with other than a very broad brush is questionable.
It was because of my loose association with Cafe Frankenstein, thanks to my above mentioned friend, that in my early twenties I was inadvertently put into a position to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian holy man that eventually became the Beatles spiritual guru.
I was headed south on Coast Highway in Laguna Beach when I went by Cafe Frankenstein, a European coffee house I had grown sort of fond of since it's inception a year or so before. Not a regular, but having been there several times and knowing by name and vice versa several of the habitual denizens I turned around and went back. Soon several of us were talking old times and such when it came up that I was traveling alone because typically when I showed up, I was accompanied by a friend. I told them I had just been out cruisin' with no real intention of going by Cafe' Frankenstein let alone stopping. Some in the group's interest circulated more closely around my friend. Laguna Beach has always been a strong LGBTQ community and knowing my friend was gay and I was straight was he available, all stuff I told them they would have to determine on their own.[1]
As for me, since it was really the first time I showed up at the coffee house alone and joined in with a larger circle of people, they brought up a second thing, me. Most knew or knew of my Uncle who had been an artist within the larger artist community in Laguna Beach in the late 1940's after the WPA but before he returned to the Santa Fe and Taos area. So too, several knew I had crossed paths with a number of the Beat Movement folk including Allen Ginsburg, even having heard him read "HOWL." When I brought up the fact I had been study practicing under a man who had studied under a venerated Indian holy man known as a Maharshi, a man I call my Mentor, one of the men in the group jumped in saying he was a member of SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and he heard some Maharshi guy that had just arrived from Hawaii on a world tour was giving a series of lectures at the Masquers Club, a club for actors, starting the next weekend and we should all go,
The next weekend came and much to my chagrin and total surprise several in the group actually put it together and pulled it off, meeting at a designated spot with all six or seven of us cramming into my immaculately restored 1940's wooden Ford station wagon after installing the very back third row seat then on to the Grand Prix restaurant in West Hollywood for brunch before heading over to the Masquers Club.
Mary Davis, the owner of the Grand Prix then later the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, and who I knew, after she found out what our gaggle of young-to-old, bearded and unbearded, long haired and short haired, gay and straight, people of color and under a rock pale-white incorrigibles were up to, comped all of our brunches and even joined us on our way out to the parking lot to see us on our merry way. Coming back after the lecture I talked everybody into stopping by the Insomniac on Pier Avenue or Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse across the street in Hermosa Beach or both. Everybody agreed and needless to say nobody got home until way late in the night of sometime the next day.
The weekend I went to see Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Masquers Club in Hollywood I was still in my early twenties and relatively naive about such things. My mentor had taken me to see Swami Ramdas for a brief interlude not long after having received my drivers license and still in high school, but I was yet to meet the two others he would eventually introduce me to before I left for the military. I had agreed with my friends at Cafe Frankenstein to see the Maharishi on a lark figuring it would never come off, so I never said anything to my mentor until afterwards, and of which he wasn't very happy. The Maharishi and I never talked nor did we make eye contact. One of the confidents of the Maharishi at the actor's club told him someone in the audience (me) had sat before the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in his ashram, however following his lecture, in what seemed to me as a somewhat hasty retreat, he left the raised stage area quickly without interacting with anyone not closely associated with him, and those that were closely circling around him.
It has been said a picture is worth a thousand words. Below are three pictures which should, when added together equal 3000 words. Comprehensively co-joined together in a narrative while recalling backwards in time as to what I pictured in my mind when I came in contact with him at the Masquers Club with my friends and our discussions on our way back and at the Insomniac afterwards, should pretty much sum up or shed some light on my first and lasting till this day impression of the Maharishi.
The following, with the exception of some minor editing, is found in it's entirety in Footnote [9] of The Code Maker, The Zen Maker:
In the summer of 1960, somewhat more than half-way between the time I graduated from high school and was drafted, a buddy of mine and I went of an extended all summer long road-trip through Mexico. After driving as far south as the Yucatan and the Chicxulub crater on the way to Chichen Itza, the following, from the source so cited, is found:
"In the meantime, not being able to sleep myself, with no real artifical light nearby or any being produced around the horizon polluting the night sky, I pulled my telescope out of its box and, turning on the headlights for a few minutes so I could see, proceeded to set it up. Then, before shutting off the lights, looked at my circular sky chart I invariably carried with me in those days to find the best time to view M31, otherwise known as the Andromeda Galaxy. What is relevant here is my mention of the 'circular sky chart I invariably carried with me.' The sky chart was a flat paper card-stock device about 8 or 10 inches square with a circular wheel that could be turned and in the process, show the position of the stars and constellations at any given time. I still have the same chart and even though it remains a faithful standby I no longer carry it with me on my travels having been semi-superseded by a Night Sky i-Pad app, albeit in those days, I always had it amongst my stuff.
Although everybody reading this might not agree, the paragraphs in the rest of this footnote presents probably the most important thing ever written about the existence of Gyanganj, Shambhala or Shangri-La in modern times. In Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery the following is found:
"(B)ut on nights between the clouds or without clouds, so many stars seemed to blank out the night sky you could hardly make out any constellations."
While at the monastery I spent many a cold night meditating outside and on occasion pondering the stars. One night, having a familiarity and strong working knowledge of astronomy it dawned on me because whatever the time difference that occurred or didn't occur inside the walls where I was and that of the outside world --- unless it was a mind game --- there would have to be a difference in star position, if by nothing else the 26,000 year precession of the poles, however slight or minor, between the two. From that difference, if there was one, one's place in time could then possibly be determined.
After passing through the doors into the monastery I went around to the outside front of the monastery and measured off a respectful distance and spent several nights observing the stars and taking note of their positions. After so many days I exited through the monastery doors to the outside world and measured off the exact same distance, sitting in what would duplicate the same spot, again spending several nights observing the stars and taking note of their position. When someone took notice I was doing 'something' I was strongly and harshly reprimanded by the Master and in so many non-understandable words told to cease and desist.
I never did a formal follow up. However, unscientific as what I did was, using my sky chart, fixed mountain peaks relative to the rising and setting of stars, position of the circumpolar constellations, etc., I did observe quite dramatically so, a parallax --- a parallax position-movement similar to what occurs when looking at a close object and blink one eye as opposed to the other and the difference of apparent movement because of bifocal vision --- the implication being an actual physical time-frame reference difference between the two realms. To my knowledge, relative to the existence of Gyanganj, Shambhala or Shangri-La, in the history of the world, I am the only person to have ever done such a thing.
NOTE:
PRESENTED HERE MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2019, 8:10 PM PST: It is with deep sorrow I find myself reporting that Sam Savage, younger brother of Hope Savage, passed away in his sleep January 17, 2019 after a long illness. Please see:
BELOW IS THE LONG TIME PREVIOUS FOOTNOTE THAT APPEARED HERE FOR YEARS LEADING UP TO HIS PASSING: It is not known if Hope Savage's brother Samuel is or is not still alive. According to an article in the publication Numero Cinq in February 2016 Sam Savage entered hospice "for his final days," complicated by a blood disease suffered by him for decades called "alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency." See:
THE BEST OF THE MAUGHAM BIOGRAPHIES:
SPIRITUAL GUIDES, GURUS, AND TEACHERS INFLUENTIAL IN THE RAZOR'S EDGE: VAGINA OR VENUS FLYTRAP? "It was not just the beauty of her face that transfixed him. Her skin was the purest, palest and almost unearthly whiteness. At the time most girls kept their hair closely styled. Yet hers was so long and so lovely, it reminded him of the print he'd seen once of Botticelli's naked Venus emerging from a clam."
It seems like my Uncle had always been around. However, that wasn't really always the case. While it is true he was more-or-less a steady full time guardian for me during my early formative years, say just before I was eight years old until shortly after I turned twelve, basically overlapping and during the same period of time my father and Stepmother were married, he was more than just simply being around or a babysitter. Besides being a fairly well established artist in the desert southwest with strong ties to the indigenous populations that inhabited the area, he was as well what I call a biosearcher, even to the point of having several plant species named after him.
During those formative years of my life, albeit always under the ever watchful eye of my stepmother and her then never ending supply of money, she spared little or no expense to see to it we got whatever we wanted, as long as it was within reason and made sense. What was unusual about all of that was sometimes what my stepmother viewed as being within reason and making sense was sometimes more wayout than what my uncle and I thought would be. So said, he was given complete authority to oversee me as he so chose, as long as I received extensive education in the sciences, hard academics, philosophy, and the arts and as well as he saw it, travel. In the end it was my stepmother who picked up the tab on all of our expenses and adventures. It was she who gave the final yes or no to any wild scheme my uncle or I cooked up. And it was she who had the power and ability to pull the strings to get us out of anything of an undue nature we may have accidentally got caught up in.
A few years before my uncle died he embarked on a personal expedition to explore the Vortexes said to be associated with Machu Picchu high in the Andes of South America. Afterwards he traveled over to the Brazilian side to bio-search the vine banisteriopsis caapi, associated with the Ayahuasca, the Sorcerer's Brew, along the upper reaches of the Amazon when he broke his leg. Returning to the States, weak from the complications of that break, with dementia sneaking in and his body defenses down, cancer took over and he died a couple of years later at age eighty-six. In a large part it was because of his intimate knowledge of southwest indigenous plants that I, starting as not much more than a mere ten-year old boy, but mostly less, ended up exploring a good part of the desert with him.
Among other things for example, because of that same intimate knowledge, the famed astronomer, meteorite hunter and mathematician Dr. Linclon La Paz sought him out for assistance. La Paz's idea, as explored more thoroughly in the article on Frank Edwards, was, because of the controversy that continued to escalate in the minds of a few surrounding the so-called Roswell Incident was to have my uncle help find out if and where any of the plant growth on the suspected debris field related to the incident may have been moved, removed, replanted, tampered with or altered in some fashion and if possible determine the flight trajectory of the suspected airborne object, all of which was done by the way
Secondly, in another example, and a major one at that, found at the source so cited, as in the above, relates to my uncle and thus then back to me --- the biosearcher he was and the ward of his I was, having been pinpointed as the mysterious informant mentioned so prominently by Carlos Castaneda in his series of Don Juan books:
"Deep in the desert southwest, before Carlos Castaneda met the Shaman-sorcerer that became famous in his series of Don Juan books, Castaneda had a chance encounter with a somewhat mysterious hallucinogenic bio-searcher and mushroom hunter from the Taos, Santa Fe, New Mexico area. It has been chronicled that the bio-searcher, known only as the informant in various Castaneda writings, some written by Castaneda himself, some by others, and some even written by those not always sympathetic toward Castaneda, agree for the most part --- unsympathetic or not --- that the informant was the actual person that FIRST introduced Castaneda to the rituals and use of medicinal plants." As found in The Roswell Ray Gun, without telling anybody, my uncle had returned from his trip to South America early because of having not only broken his leg, but, if not just flat-out fatigued, he was weak and ill as well from some undiagnosable jungle rot. The instant I was informed of his situation by his long time doctor I left for my uncle's home in Santa Fe to see him. It was only then I discovered he was actually on a serious downhill trajectory. I knew a huge fund of otherwise unknown or purposely withheld information would no longer be able to tapped when his mind disappeared and he was gone. He always seemed so together and wise, but in those last few years I could see him slipping and I knew there were many, many things that would go unanswered when the time came.
As I was sitting next to my pretty much bed ridden uncle as he was inching towards the end of his days we continually jumped back and forth between conversational subjects. In that my uncle knew Allen Ginsberg, I had brought up Hope Savage when all of a sudden, after a brief mention of the Meteor Crater for one reason or the other, he asked me to retrieve several books from his jumble of shelved, piled, and scattered around stacked books on what was called the Carolina Bays.
The Carolina Bays are an inline series of closely associated rather large seemingly non-natural geophysical landforms with no known, or at the very least, controversial, origin. Although there are supposedly thousands of them of varying sizes strewn all along the Atlantic coastline and inland a bit from as far north as New Jersey to Florida in the south, a great proportion of them are so large, especially in the Carolinas, that until they were seen from the air for the first time no one had put them together as possibly having come from or formed by the same phenomenon. Some people think they are impact craters from a comet or meteor.
"On that apocalyptic day a large meteor streaked across the northern polar regions. It skimmed low across Quebec, before ploughing into the Laurentide ice sheet that covered the Great Lakes region, creating an enormous elliptical crater in the ice. The displaced ice from this hyper-velocity impact was fractured and crushed into a fine paste, and blobs of this icy material were ejected at ultra-velocity up though the atmosphere and into a ballistic arc down towards their target regions. Millions of these slushballs of uniform teardrop shape, but widely varying sizes, splattered in two giant wings across central and eastern North America, forming clusters of identical elliptical impact depressions orientated towards the Great Lakes area. Thus only 12,900 years ago, the entire eastern half of North America was completely obliterated, and the world was plunged into a little Ice Age." Others vehemently discount the possibility. My uncle and I have always subscribed to the impact side of things, that's why when Meteor Crater came up so close in conversation with the mention of Hope Savage it rang a bell for my uncle, the biosearcher that he was, particularly when he related it to the drawing Hope gave me. The drawing was not of a woman's vagina per se', but a Venus fly trap, albeit a double entendre --- sort of --- all of which I was eventually able to figure out thanks to my uncle sitting next to him while he was on his death bed.
Notice in the four graphics just below that the top left one describes the natural habitat area for the Venus flytrap, that being the states of North and South Carolina. On that same graphic the location of the city of Columbus in South Carolina is clearly marked. If you recall, Hope Savage was from Camden, not far from Columbus, Columbus being were she first showed up relative to her history. Notice too, in the graphic next to it, top right, it shows where the debris from the impact fell, if not creating the Carolina Bays, at least falling in the exact same area where they are --- and is well, the exact same area that is the natural habitat for the Venus flytrap.
So, what's the point? One of the books my uncle had me bring him related to the Carolina Bays was titled "The Mysterious Carolina Bays" written by none other than Hope Savage's father Henry Savage. The Venus flytrap in Hope's drawing that I mistakenly took as a drawing of a vagina, which I'm sure was done so by her on purpose, hence the double entendre aspect of it all, was some kind of a huge cryptic message, a huge cryptic message that was either never followed through on by Hope or I didn't get, or both.
Footnote [3]
When the four Chinese characters were deciphered they turned out to mean nothing more than colors: red, yellow, green and black. The outlined shape in the center remained a mystery and meant nothing to anybody who saw it. The mystery however, was solved on its own some 15 years later, a period time that found me living in the Caribbean island country of Jamaica, and was solved almost on the first day I arrived for what turned out to be a two year stay. So too was answered, before I left the island, my comment regarding how arduous the trip back and forth through the mountains was and his response that I travel my way and he travels his way.
THE WANDERLING'S JOURNEY
(please click)
Footnote [4]
RETURN TO THE MONASTERY
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SHANGRI-LA, SHAMBHALA, GYANGANJ, BUDDHISM AND ZEN
1935: BUDDHA IN THE BHUMI-SPARSHA MUDRA POSE, ANCIENT RUINS, NGARI, TIBET
(please click image)
TIME TRAVEL: MEETING YOURSELF
Footnote [5]
PHYLLIS DAVIS
Footnote [6]
Footnote [7]
PERCY SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY AND LORD
BYRON
AS SEEN IN THE 1935 FILM THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
(please click image)
STEVE McQUEEN AND THE TEN DOLLAR CORDUROY SUIT
THE WANDERLING AND HIS HIGH SCHOOL CHUMS
ORIGINAL BOOGIE WOOGIE BUGLE BOY FROM MOVIE BUCK PRIVATES
(for video click image)
THE WOODY PARKED OUTSIDE HOWARD RUMSEY'S LIGHTHOUSE
(please click)
Footnote [8]
A SINGLE DROP OF WATER HELPS SWELL THE OCEAN
Footnote [9]
THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
THE BOY AND THE SAGE
Footnote [10]
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF HOPE SAVAGE:
VAGINA OR A VENUS FLYTRAP
MAYA RUINS AND THE SPRING EQUINOX
MARGARET RUNYAN CASTANEDA
PHYLLIS DAVIS
OF COBRAS, SCARABS, MASERATIS, AND ZEN
STEVE McQUEEN AS HE LOOKED AT LANDAKERS'S SHOP CIRCA LATE 50'S
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THE WANDERLING'S '41 FORD SUPER DELUXE WOOD STATION WAGON----RIGHT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL, MY FIRST SPORTS CAR, A 1952 MG TD
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI'S WESTERN DISCIPLES
EGO, SUPER-EGO, MONSTER FROM THE ID. FORBIDDEN PLANET,
1956. FROM THE 1611 A.D. SHAKESPEARE PLAY "THE TEMPEST."
THE WANDERLING AND HIS HIGH SCHOOL CHUMS
THE WANDERLING'S '41 FORD SUPER DELUXE WOOD STATION WAGON
(please click image)
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CAFE FRANKENSTEIN
RESTITCHING THE HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF SPACE-TIME
SAMUEL P. SAVAGE
SAM SAVAGE PASSES AWAY AT AGE 78
THOUGHTS ON SAM SAVAGE AWAITING THE INEVITABLE
SAM SAVAGE: LIFE AND WORK
ONLY MENTION OF HOPE, BUT NOT BY NAME
Good biography. Lots of Maugham graphics, from early childhood to late adult.
Everybody knows Hemingway drove an ambulance during WWI, nobody knows Maugham did.
Includes a section on the missing years of the Razor's Edge
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