Golf in the Kingdom

by Michael Murphy

  The symbol of the journey reflects our state, for man is surely on the move toward something. Many of us sense that our human race is on a tightrope, that we must keep moving or fall into the abyss. “This world is for dyin’,” he said that night. We must die to the old or pay more and more for remaining where we are.

  Yes, there is no escaping the long march of our lives: that is part of the reason people re-enact it again and again on the golf course, my golfing teacher said. They are working out something built into their genes.

  But there are other myths to govern our lives, other impulses lurking in our soul, “myths of arrival with our myths of the journey, something to tell us we are the target as well as the arrow.”

  So Shivas Irons would have us learn to enjoy what is while seeking our treasure of tomorrow. And—you might have guessed it—a round of golf is good for that, “. . . because if it is a journey, it is also a round: it always leads back to the place you started from . . . golf is always a trip back to the first tee, the more you play the more you realize you are staying where you are.” By playing golf, he said, “you reenact that secret of the journey. You may even get to enjoy it.”2

  THE WHITENESS OF THE BALL

  What the golf ball was to Shivas has been hinted; what it has come to mean for me remains unsaid. And for a reason. Its power as a symbol is so complex and labyrinthine, so capable of lending itself to the psyche of each and every player, that once an attempt like this has begun to comprehend its “inner meaning,” all bearings may be lost. For the golf ball is “an icon of Man the Multiple Amphibian, a smaller waffled version of the crystal ball, a mirror for the inner body.” The more I ponder its ramifications the more I see that each and every bit of this world reflects the whole.

  A friend of mine sees it as a satellite revolving around our higher self, thus forming a tiny universe for us to govern—a marvelous image really when you think about it, one I am sure Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff would have approved of. Our relation to the ball is like the Highest Selfs relation to all its instruments and powers; the paths of its orbits reflect those of the planets and suns. The ball is then a symbol of all our revolving parts, be they mental or physical; for a while we re-enact the primal act of all creation: the One casting worlds in all directions for its extension and delight. Shivas anticipated the image in his notes: “For a while on the links we can lord it over our tiny solar system and pretend we are God: no wonder then that we suffer so deeply when our planet goes astray.”

  The ball is also a reflection, as Adam Greene said, of projectiles past and future, a reminder of our hunting history and our future powers of astral flight. We can then ponder the relation between projectile and planet, our being as hunter and our being as God; the hunter, the golfer, the astronaut, the yogi, and God all lined up in the symbol of the ball.

  “The ball is ubiquitous,” say Shivas’s notes. “It is in flight at this very moment above every continent. Moreover, it is in flight every moment of the day and night. It may take flight one day on the moon, especially when you consider the potential prodigies of mile-long drives and the wonder they would bring to millions. Consider the symbolism inherent in that indubitable fact: a golf ball suspended in air at every moment!” There are so many golfers around the globe.

  At rest, it is “like an egg, laid by man,” for who can tell what prodigies the next shot will bring? In flight it brings that peculiar suspended pleasure which lies at the heart of the game; it is “a signal that we can fly—and the farther the better!”—it is a symbol of our spirit’s flight to the goal. It is almost perfectly round, for centuries of human ingenuity and labor have made it so, and “the meanings of roundness are easy to see.” (Parmenides and other Greek philosophers said that Being itself was a globe, that we must therefore “circulate” our words in order to tell a “round truth.”)

  So the symbols and meanings are endless. But when all these are said and done, there is a fact about the ball that overpowers all the rest. It is the whiteness of the ball that disturbs me more than anything else. “Though in many natural objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own,” said Herman Melville in a well-known passage, “and though certain nations have in some way recognized a certain pre-eminence to it, there yet lurks an elusive something in the color which strikes panic to the soul.”

  Only black so reminds us of the great unknown. Black and white, we throw them together in the old cliché, but somewhere deep in both there lies a hint of powers unforeseen. Do they remind us of the void, since they represent the absence of all ordinary hue? Is it annihilation we fear when we encounter them? “All colors taken together congeal to whiteness, the greatest part of space is black,” say the journal notes. “What would happen if someone introduced a golf ball painted black?”

  THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLE

  In no other game is the ratio of playing field to goal so large. (Think of soccer, American football, lacrosse, basketball, billiards, bowling.) We are spread wide as we play, then brought to a tiny place.

  The target then leads into the ground, leads underground. I realized this once reaching into one of the exceptionally deep holes our Salinas greenkeeper was cutting in 1949 (he had procured a new hole-cutter). What a strange sensation reaching so far into the ground. What was down there, underneath the ball?

  There was a section in his notes entitled “The Psychology of Passageways,” which has a bearing on the hole’s mystery. In it there was a list of “holes and doorways in our ordinary life,” which included a long paragraph about the significance of looking through windows (something to the effect that windows have a function other than letting us look outside, that we build them to simulate our essentially imprisoned state), another on the subject of toilets and the draining away of our refuse (including some sentences about the need to examine our stool whenever we feel disjointed), an essay on picture frames and other boundaries on art objects, and a list of all the “significant openings” in his own apartment (apparently, he had taken a careful inventory of these). There was also a list of “Extraordinary Openings.” This included a constellation in the new zodiac he had made (see “A Golfer’s Zodiac,” page 160), various kinds of mystical experience—an entire catalogue in fact of transports and ecstasies; a list of historic figures (including Joan of Arc, Pythagoras, Sri Ramakrishna, Seamus MacDuff, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton, and a Dundee cobbler named Typhus Magee); a list of historic events (including the outbreak of philosophy all over the world during the sixth century B.C., the first flights at Kitty Hawk, and a drive he had hit sometime during the summer of 1948); certain places in Burningbush and its environs (I think he compared these to the points on the body which are probed during treatments with acupuncture), a golf course in Peru (perhaps the Tuctu golf course, which he had mentioned during our conversation at the McNaughtons); certain phrases, philosophical terms, and lines of poetry (including the word Atman, the Isha Upanishad, and a limerick by one of his pupils); a list of coincidences in his life; and the unpublished manuscript of his teacher.

  Our first passageways, he said, are the avenues of sense—our eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth. We build our houses and churches to simulate these, we relate to the earth itself as if it were our body, for “we start as someone looking out, and as soon as we look we think of escape.”

  “Life is a long obsession with passageways,” the notes go on, “we are ever breaking through to the other side—of ignorance, isolation, imprisonment. Memory, catharsis, travel, discovery, ecstasy are all ways of getting outside our original skin.”

  He thought it significant that an entire fairway, with its green, rough, hazards, and traps was called a “hole,” that the tiny target was used to characterize all the rest of the playing field. “ ‘How many holes have you played?’ is the way the question is asked, not ‘how many fairways?’ or ‘how many tees?’ ” He thought it had something to do with the fact that after all our adventures, all our trials and triumphs on the
journey-round we are left with that final passage through; that the hole and what it leads to is really what the game is all about.

  As it turns out some of the most original thinking on the subject has been done by Jean-Paul Sartre, who ends Part Four of Being and Nothingness with a short essay on the hole and its implications. I don’t recall Shivas quoting Sartre but their thinking on the subject has some extraordinary similarities. The French philosopher, admittedly, is not an accomplished golfer, but his apparent grasp of the hole’s mystery suggests that he has had his problems and triumphs on the links. “Thus to plug up a hole,” he says, “means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist.” (How we golfers can sympathize with that.) “Here at its origin we grasp one of the most fundamental tendencies of human reality—the tendency to fill. . . . A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places, in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude.” In establishing a plenitude! Perhaps this is the most fundamental clue. And the comprehension of that essential act of sacrifice involved in every disappearance of the ball into the hole (sacrifice and inevitable rebirth)! For the journal notes say, “In golf we throw ourselves away and find ourselves again and again. . . . A ball is in flight somewhere at every moment. . . .” What are all these but glimpses of plenitude! To fill the hole with our ball is to reaffirm that fullness.

  REPLACING THE DIVOT

  Our green-loving philosopher claimed there was no better way to deal with our existential guilt than replacing a divot or repairing a friendship. “We act on friendship every moment: with our fellows, our land, our tools, with the unseen spirits and the Lord whose world we are tending.

  “Golf is a game of blows and weapons. In order that the game continue we must make amends for every single act of destruction. In a golf club everyone knows the player who does not replace his divot. One can guess how he leads the rest of his life.”

  Replacing the divot is “an exercise for the public good.” It is also a reminder that “we are all one golfer.” There would simply be no game if every golfer turned his back on the damage he did.

  A GAME FOR THE MULTIPLE AMPHIBIAN

  Bobby Jones and other lovers of the game have attributed its widespread appeal to the fact that it reflects so much of the human situation: comedy, tragedy, hard work, and miracle; the agony and the ecstasy. There is something in it for almost everyone. Shivas liked to quote the Religio Medici, especially the passage that described man as “. . . that great and true Amphibian whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.” He believed that golf was uniquely suited to our multiple amphibious nature. It gives us a chance to exercise so many physical skills and so many aspects of our mind and character.

  I need not catalogue the game’s complexity to make my point: you know about all the long and the short shots; all the nuance of weather, air, and grass; all the emotion and vast resolution; all the schemes for success and delusions of grandeur, and the tall tales unnumbered; the trials of patience and fiendish frustrations; all the suicidal thoughts and glimpses of the Millennium. We all have a golfing friend we have had to nurse past a possible breakdown or listen to patiently while he expounded his latest theory of the game. How often have we seen a round go from an episode out of the Three Stooges to the agonies of King Lear—perhaps in the space of one hole! I will never forget a friend who declared after his tee shot that he wanted to kill himself but when the hole was finished said with total sincerity that he had never been so happy in his entire life. No other game is more capable of evoking a person’s total commitment.3

  This immense complexity delighted Shivas. In fact, he would add more complexity to the game, perhaps to satisfy his endlessly adventurous spirit. Running, for example, has been left out, as well as jumping and shouting; so he advocated your exercising these basic functions sometime during the golfing day if you wanted to balance your mind and nerves. We must give these large needs adequate expression, he said, otherwise golf would “imprint too much of its necessarily limited nature on us.” For “. . . every game must have its limits, simply to exist, just as every form and every culture does, but our bodies and our spirits suffer.” So somewhere and somehow we should run and jump and sing and shout. (I don’t want to give you any advice about this, especially when I think about some of the trouble I have had on golf courses when I have tried to follow his advice. Perhaps you should confine these more strenuous activities to your local schoolyard or gym. But you might find it interesting to see how your game fares when you exercise those muscles and functions that golf neglects.)

  This is true for much more than running, jumping, and shouting though. For our golfing teacher maintained in his inexorable way that our “emotional and mental body” needed as much exercise as our physical body did. So “poetry, music, drama, prayer, and love” were essential to the game too. “There is no end to it,” he said, “once you begin to take golf seriously.”

  OF A GOLF SHOT ON THE MOON

  It can now be argued that golf was the first human game played on another planetary body. Those two shots Alan Shepard hit with a six iron at the “Fra Mauro Country Club” have brought a certain stature and gleam of the eye to golfers the world over. Coming as they did while I was writing this book, they appeared to me as synchronicity: the game has a mighty destiny, the event said; Shivas Irons was right. In the shock I felt when the news appeared (I had not seen the television show) I thought that in some inexplicable way those shots had been engineered by Shivas (from his worldly hiding place) or by Seamus MacDuff (from his hiding place on the other side). But the subsequent news that Shepard and his golf pro, Jack Harden, had planned the thing restored some perspective to my hopeful speculations. Still, the meaning of it continued to loom before me. Golf on the moon! And the command module named Kitty Hawk! (Shivas had called Kitty Hawk an “extraordinary opening” in this unfolding world and had worked with Seamus all those years on the possibilities of flight with “the luminous body.”) The event was a tangle of synchronicities.

  I wonder how many other golfers have felt the same way. So many of us are alive to the other edge of possibility (perhaps because the game has tried us so sorely) and ever alert for the cosmic meaning. This event confirms our sense of mighty things ahead.

  There are other implications, however, some less promising. A trusted friend of mine, someone with a quick keen eye for injustice and intrigue, saw an ugly side to the whole affair. It was, he said, an imperial Wasp statement, however unconscious, that this here moon is our little old country club for whites, thank you, and here goes a golf shot to prove it. I hated to hear that, for I wanted to dwell on the hopeful meanings.

  And I am left with thoughts about the character of Alan Shepard. What could have led the man to design that faulty club, smuggle it on board with those “heat-resistant” balls and risk some billion-dollar disaster from flying divots or tears in his space suit? What could have led him to such monumental triviality amid the terrors and marvels of the Moon? The madness of the game had surfaced again, I thought, as I pondered his motives.

  Had NASA put him up to it for public relations reasons? Maybe they wanted some humor in the enterprise or the backing of certain rich and powerful golfing senators. Perhaps he would collect on some stupendous bet (after all, he was interested in money and had made a pile in his astronaut years). Or could it simply be that all his golfer’s passion to hit the ball a mile now had a chance to express itself, indeed the chance of a lifetime, the chance of history! Perhaps the collective unconscious of all the golfing world was delivering itself at last, seizing him as instrument for the release of a million foiled hopes for the shot that would never come down. And indeed the cry came down from space, “. . . it’s sailing for miles and miles and miles,” Alan Shepard was giving the mad cry of golfers the world over who want to put a ball in orbit and reassume their godlike power.

 
; 2 I have often thought that his sense of golf as the journey-round was deepened by his memory that the eighteenth green at Burningbush was built on a grave.

  3 An insightful book in this regard is The Mystery of Golf, by Arnold Haultain, reprinted by The Serendipity Press (circa 1971), though out of print now.

  The Inner Body

  A. AS EXPERIENCE

  WHEN SHIVAS GAVE ME that midnight lesson and whispered his instructions to “ken yer inner body” I sensed his meaning at once, even though my “good mind” kept raising questions. Most psychologists would say that he was merely reinforcing my kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense, making me more aware of the messages coming from my muscles and enteroceptors. Or they might say he was making me more sensitive to “the body image,” the fluctuating gestalt that emerges from our various bodily sensations. They would thereby reduce it all to proportions which their psychology could manage, for psychologists are generally conscientious people quite concerned to keep man’s psyche orderly and comprehensible, and God knows, they have a hard time with the limited tools and maps they have. Concepts like the “inner body” or the “higher self” give most of them enormous difficulty: the Irons-MacDuff Psycho-Cosmology as a whole would give them a very bad time indeed.

  But that night Shivas was turning my attention to much more than the kinesthetic sense or the “body image,” though these are related to it. For him, the inner body was more than metaphor or “experiential construct.” It was a vivid undeniable reality forever impinging on our workaday world. And once you paid attention to it, it was a doorway to marvelous realms.