An idealist sets out to save the world and barely manages to save himself.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gets Lost in Translation. The volunteer's Peace Corps experience transmutes into a quest for the Truth, and ends with an excursion into insanity. India's Earth Goddess mythology unravels his American, Sky God belief system. It doesn't matter whether we cleave to our systems or not (he doesn't), they inform our outlooks regardless. Nothing says it better than this tale. The author begins as an unbeliever, and is done in by themes from his own religious tradition anyway.
Excerpt
CHAPTER I
Sanity Is Relative
The jet lurched as the landing gear went up. There was a disconcerting CLUNK, but no one suspected trouble until twenty minutes passed with no gain in altitude. It was a routine shuttle, New York to Washington, half empty. The doctor and I, raddled by a 26-hour flight from New Delhi, were stretched out by the emergency door where there was extra leg room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We’re having some trouble with the forward landing gear. The crew is trying to operate it manually, and we’re waiting to be told whether to fly on to Dulles or return to Kennedy. Meanwhile, the flight attendants will instruct you in emergency-landing procedures.”
Remove your shoes, place a pillow in your lap, clasp your hands behind your head, and put your head in the pillow. Nobody seemed to panic, though one trainee stewardess kept walking up and down the aisle drawling, “Why don’t y’all smile? Why don’t y’all smile?” The head stewardess tried showing the doctor how to work the emergency door, but he couldn’t focus.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Just show me how.”
Air control turned us back to Kennedy. As the plane settled earthward, the doctor began flailing his arms, beseeching the head stewardess, “Do you think we’ll really crash? Do you think we’ll really crash?”
Unable to resist the irony, I pulled a vial from my pocket and offered, “Want a tranquilizer, Doc?”
“No,” he said, “I figure after a certain point a person is justified in losing control,” and resumed doing just that.
The crew had cranked the gear down manually, but couldn’t lock it. Nor could the plane be steered, but the pilot brought it to such a feathery landing you couldn’t feel wheels touch the ground.
“Boy,” the doctor marveled as we were towed to the terminal through a blaze of emergency-vehicle lights, “you were cool as a mule.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. To the doctor, it mattered whether we crashed. To me it didn’t, and that wasn’t sane. India had taken this normal American to a place where life and death blurred to a single, delirious continuum.
To an extent, all Peace Corps Volunteers unlearn their cultural sanity. Some of us unlearn it a bit too well, and find ourselves helped home by a Peace Corps doctor.
Asa D Seeley, a young Afro American man, shares his struggle to leave his past behind as he reaches for his future. In his one-of-a-kind style, he searches for answers...from the visible & invisible. A Memoir in Poetical/Prose form.
