How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  How in the world do these twenty or thirty seagulls pull this off? In the harbor, they have permanent fixtures on which to stand by day and bed down by night—guard rails, posts, rooves, and gutters. But two hundred miles out at sea, there is nothing permanent except the ship, and these birds spend almost no time resting their tail feathers on your vessel. The water is constantly changing. The waves are moving past on their long trips from mid-ocean to the East Coast. And the air, which is where the seagulls spend most of their time, is a permanent turbulence. Every molecule of slosh and windy whuffle will be six hundred miles away by the next day, replaced by molecules from far away. Yet the seagulls carve some mysterious sort of solidity from this non-stop slip and flow.

  So you write a poem in an effort to figure it out. It’s a piece about the seagull versus the spider. The spider finds a cluster of permanent landmarks, makes sure of those monuments’ solidity, epoxies the ends of silk cables to them, then builds a grid of strands. The spider parses its territory with its web as methodically as a cartographer spinning lines of latitude and longitude to make sense of a map. The spider starts with the permanent and makes it even more comprehensible, even more manageable, even more reliable. But how in the world does the seagull manage in a sea with no permanent footholds, no grids, nothing set in place, and nothing that stays the same?

  By finding the permanence that underlies non-stop change. By finding something utterly invisible—pattern—and learning to master it. By finding the secret of things that repeat. By sensing the cycles and swirls hidden within the churn. By discovering the habitual tricks in the twists of the winds and the waters, tricks that wind and water use over and over again. The seagull lives by mastering those iterations in the flow, by taming and harnessing those permanences in the most seemingly impermanent of things. It rides the tics and the stutterings, the churns and the obsessive shudderings, the predictable repetitions with which nature fashions even the most turbulent of floods, currents, courses, and streams. To survive in a maelstrom, the seagull learns to harness the whorls, the hidden structure, the invisible syntax of change.

  The secret of the seagull was something you would have to master if you were ever to find a solid footing of your own. But that would take a bit more wandering.

  u

  After a long voyage as ballast in the bowels of a pleasure boat, you landed in the Israeli port city of Haifa. You could tell that Israel was a vigorous democracy even when you were still a hundred yards from shore. There was graffiti on the thirty-foot-high vertical walls of concrete separating the land from the water. It said, “abolish the military government” in Hebrew. The Jewish protest industry was calling for full citizenship for the country’s rural Arabs. In no Arab nation would you ever find graffiti saying “abolish hatred of the Jews.”

  My mother had given me the Haifa address of some distant friends who would put me up for a week. And who would teach me one of the secrets of permanent flow in humans. They were the Levis, and they were wonderful—a father and mother and two kids my age living in a Haifa suburb of small, white stucco homes surrounded by greenery. The father and mother had come from Germany, but German-Jewish culture has two manifestations: cold, icy, and cerebral; and warm, huggy, and, well, yes, ummm, cerebral. The Levis were on the warm and huggy side. One day Michael Levi, the son my age, took me to a party. Remember, I had been frozen out of every party in Buffalo, New York, including the bowling party for my own bar mitzvah. So I did not know party rituals. Not a single one of them. But Michael taught me one key rite. Walk up to someone who looks all alone. Stick out your hand and announce your name. The other person will do, guess what? He’ll stick out his hand and announce his name. What Michael didn’t teach me was how to remember the name. One of the hardest parts of partying.

  The seagulls would have been proud. The handshake ceremony was a tiny bit of regularity in the flow.

  Twenty years later I would use Michael Levi’s lesson in sticking my hand out and announcing my name to Michael Jackson. And Michael would stick out his hand and say, “Hi, I’m Michael,” with a warmth and normalcy that would have stunned you. But that’s another story for another book.

  The Levi family took siestas in the early afternoon, a common practice in the countries crowded around the Mediterranean. I wasn’t interested in sleeping. So one day I borrowed a bicycle and went exploring. I rode down block after block of small, white, stucco homes with red-tiled roofs until I found a woodsy spot, parked my borrowed bike, spotted a barbed wire barrier between the trees, found a place where the wire’s integrity had been compromised, and stepped over the stomped-down string of metal barbs. Often when something says “don’t enter,” entering is the most interesting thing you can do.

  Remember T. S. Eliot’s message: if you have something heroic to do, do it now. And Edna St Vincent Millay’s imperative: if you want to see the infinite in the tiniest of things, adventure, explore.

  I walked a hundred yards and discovered that I was in a huge compound with roughly ten single-story, aircraft-hanger-sized open work sheds laid out along the sides of a massively-wide, pounded-down earthen avenue. Coming toward me from a quarter mile away, down this barren central boulevard, was a man with a German shepherd. And he was aiming his steps directly at me. When he reached me, he said something incomprehensible in Hebrew. I didn’t understand a word. So he tried again. He said something incomprehensible in Yiddish. At least my mom had taught me how to say “I don’t know a damned word of Yiddish” in Yiddish. So he motioned me to follow him. We walked a half a mile through the compound and found a building totally unlike the huge sheds. It was a small, white, stucco house with vines growing on its walls and roses in the tiny strips of garden that surrounded it.

  When my guide with the German shepherd stepped up the single-porch-step and rang the bell, one of the most fetching sixteen year olds you’ve ever seen came to the door. Miracle of miracles, she spoke English. And she explained what this strange place was. Many of modern Israel’s founders had been socialists. And the socialist party—the Labor Party—ruled the country when I arrived. The socialists built housing for incoming Jews, mostly fugitives from the fierce anti-Semitism of Russia and Yemen. This was the complex in which laborers made windows, doors, wallboard, and all the other components of a well-built house. It was a socialist business run by the Labor Party, the party in power. The comely girl explained that this was the house of the foreman who ran the place. He was her dad. He’d be along in fifteen minutes. And she was proud of what he was doing. Instead of bathing in luxury at home, he was cleaning himself up in the communal shower, the shower the workingmen and women used. He was demonstrating his solidarity with his laborers. Just as the socialist ideals of his political party said he should.

  Dad appeared a few minutes later, still toweling himself behind the ears. And he was a wonderful host. So, apparently, you can run a building industry on a socialist model. And even if you can’t, you can offer a total stranger tea.

  u

  My single sexual encounter during this period of romantic drought occurred one night when I took the bus to Tel Aviv for a classical concert. As the crowd gathered around the auditorium, it was clear that there was not a single soul in the throng with whom I could identify. Then, suddenly, there was one person whose sloppy style of dress flashed a message: “kindred soul.” She saw me. I saw her. And our eyes did that thing that almost never happened to me with a woman—they met. Yes, we had eye contact. She and I were ushered to assigned seats far apart from each other, but we were aware of each other during the entire performance. When the musical event let out, I saw her up ahead of me walking away from the concert hall with another man. A taller man. Not a hopeful sign. I rushed to catch up. She sensed me behind her, turned around, introduced me to the other guy, then abandoned him. She spoke no English. It was before I could speak any Hebrew. I don’t know how, but we made a date. Sign language? When we got together again at the as
signed time a day or two later, we walked through Tel Aviv at dusk and when darkness fell ended up on a jetty jutting out into the Mediterranean Sea. Horizontal. My hands probed for the personal parts beneath her blouse and her jeans. She welcomed the penetration. But, remember, I have the hand-eye coordination of a millipede wearing boxing gloves. I couldn’t remove any of her garments. Which meant, that for all practical purposes, she was clothed in cotton armor. We never saw each other again. Alas.

  After a month of sponging off of the Levis in Haifa and living with a college professor friend of my mother’s and his wife in Jerusalem, I found my way to a Revolutionary Marxist kibbutz in the Valley of Jezreel, where Jehovah himself had once walked like the Jolly Green Giant, thundering angrily to himself about everyone’s transgressions. Like The Lord, I was relatively friendless. Unlike the Almighty, I was also stripped of the only device I’d ever had for controlling my world—language. When I’d arrived in the land of the prophets, I couldn’t speak a word of Hebrew. And that would be my undoing.

  The kibbutz had a solution. It was called an ulpan—a six-month crash language learning program. Every day twenty foreigners on the kibbutz got together for four hours to learn the local lingo—Hebrew. We paid our tuition by doing four hours a day of farm work. Usually it was the work that none of the kibbutzniks wanted. For example, we were given the privilege of getting up at 4 am, arriving in the fields before dawn, lifting seventy pound bales of straw, tossing them thirty or forty feet to the next poor foreign ulpan student in line, then heaving them up to the flatbed of a wagon whose height grew as we sandwiched each new layer of bales in place. If Myron’s discobolus thrower had tried even an hour of this, it would have reduced him to a twitching pile of charley horses. But the job had a reward. At noon, when we finished, we went over to the giant building housing the community’s chickens, took fresh milk, broke a newly laid egg or two into it, added fresh honey, and had a farm-fresh organic milkshake.

  Somehow, shot-putting hay bales and picking more Israeli oranges than the average Floridian family consumes in a lifetime didn’t improve my utter ignorance of the language. Nor did trudging through the three-foot deep muck of the former malarial swamp in which my new habitation was located. Said muck proved so devoted that it followed me into my tiny, one-room foreign-student shack and formed an undrainable morass on the floor deep enough to drown a colony of otters.

  Libidinous encounters were not something I was doing particularly well with on the collective farm either. For example, the only Swede I’d ever run into in my life was this girl on a kibbutz across the valley who made Greta Garbo look like moldy cream cheese. She had blue eyes, jet-black hair, a complexion that could make you faint, and was passionately interested in sex. Unfortunately, she wasn’t interested in having it with me.

  Then there was the French temptress who showed up as a two-month visitor on my kibbutz. One night, there was a dance in one of the narrow shacks with mud-covered floors that passed for shelter. Someone put a lot of old, slow records on the phonograph—things by groups with names like the Ink Spots, the Blotters, and the Smeared Parentheses. I asked the shy Gallic beauty to dance. I danced with all the suavity of an epileptic earthworm, but I did have an edge with this woman. I was the only one in the room fluent in French. The two of us shuffled rhythmically around the room in the dim light, our bodies micro-millimetering closer and closer. Finally, every one of her convex protuberances was squashed delectably against some corresponding concavity in my form and vice versa. With a certain aura of mutual consent, we lost our footing and found ourselves glued together on the bed. Then, as my hands began to seek the treasures beneath her undergarments, she went stiff and asked (in French), “Why are we doing this? Do you love me?” I guess the still-nameless sexual revolution hadn’t reached Paris yet. The relationship pretty much ended with that question. I was not the type to feed a girl a line. And confessing that I was sex starved didn’t seem appropriate.

  Things were becoming desperate, and the survival instinct seized me by the larynx. So I tried to make up for the amputation of my only skill—the ability to irrigate unwashed eardrums with words—by doubling down on my study of the native tongue. I arose daily at 4:30 a.m. so I could find time to memorize the Hebrew dictionary (no kidding), including every definition (in Hebrew) of every noun, verb and adjective. Despair not, I only managed to creep through the good book at the rate of four memorized definitions a day. When our six months of language instruction was over, the other ulpan students left. But I stayed on, took correspondence courses at night, carried a small transistor radio so I could listen to Hebrew talk-radio programs in the wagon on the way down to the orchards, and eavesdropped on conversations in the apple groves about which cabinet minister was sleeping with what general’s wife. I even listened in on shreds of Hebrew gossip rising to the tops of twelve-foot ladders high among the upper branches of the apple trees. Despite my fear of heights, I tried to convince my unwilling pores to absorb extra idioms and ablatives, and finally descended to writing some of the clumsiest Hebrew short stories since the days when King Saul went nuts.

  However, I wasn’t exactly swift at kibbutz labor. A charming middle-aged woman and I were given an assignment: wash 1,500 dishes and approximately 6,000 pieces of cutlery every night in the communal dining hall. This was one of the great vocational mismatches of modern times. I had such astonishing hand-eye coordination that if I really concentrated I could cleanse approximately one dish every ten minutes. My partner’s qualifications for the job were almost as spectacular. She had gotten a doctorate in philology from the University of Heidelberg, then had taught in the kibbutz high school for fifteen years, and had finally decided she wanted to take a load off her brain and wash porcelain. It’s a wonder that anyone in the communal dining hall ever ate with a clean utensil!

  My fellow dish-dunker had grown up in Germany before Hitler made things uncomfortable, and she had oodles of gentile friends. Germans, when they’re not gassing everyone in sight, can be the most delightful and cultured people in the world.

  Then she’d slipped out of Germany to Israel in the nick of time and had realized her dream of living in a socialist paradise, which is pretty much what this particular kibbutz managed to be (thus defying the laws of nature that had turned Russia, China, Cuba and several other choice socialist paradises into Dark Holes of Calcutta). When World War II was over, she’d saved the allowance the kibbutz gave her ($1.65 a week…I’m not kidding) until she had enough money for a trip back to Europe. She went to France and Italy, but couldn’t bring herself to get any closer to Germany than the border. So her old friends came to meet her. They had all the intelligence, charm, and gemutlichkeit for which she’d loved them. And they wanted her to come back home…permanently. She trembled at the suggestion. They couldn’t understand why.

  The whole Nazi nightmare, with its ideology of racial hatred and organized violence, had been foreign to the nature of her gentile German chums. To them it seemed like an otherworldly seizure, one that could never return. She didn’t share their optimism.

  u

  Lonely as things were on the kibbutz, they allowed me to get a handle on something that was ridiculously out of whack—me. You recall that at Reed College I’d pursued satori—Zen Buddhist enlightenment—with a vengeance. Merging everything I’d read on the topic with Rimbaud’s command to systematically dissociate the senses, I’d come to the conclusion that habits like breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sleep were escapes, defense mechanisms, and that to get to the bottom of is-ness, to get to the tiny pilot light of spontaneity at the base of your soul, you have to peel your escape mechanisms away. I’d tossed regular mealtimes out of my life. And I’d made an unwelcome discovery. Many months later, all I could think of was food. Sleeping on the floor in the living area of a small, modern dorm at Reed at 3:00 a.m., my mind was focused like a laser on the mayonnaise and salami in the communal refrigerator. Walking down the street in Haifa or Tel Aviv,
I read every menu in a restaurant window and salivated at the pastries on display in the window of every bakery. And on the kibbutz, I couldn’t wait until the bread truck arrived late in the afternoon with barrels of loaves still hot from the baker’s oven. When we foreign students finished our work at 4:00 p.m., we would head for the communal dining hall, take a newly-arrived loaf, carve it up, slather the thick, moist, warm slices with margarine and jam, and plump ourselves up so we could survive the next famine entirely on body fat.

  The food fetish was blotting out my ability to think about nearly anything else. And it was blimping me. I’d gone from 138 pounds up to 150. OK, I was still skinny. But I didn’t see it that way. I thought I was as bloated as a hot air balloon.

  I’d fought this problem for a year. Then a solution occurred to me on the kibbutz. I remembered something I’d forgotten—three meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I went to the kibbutz library, headed for the encyclopedia, looked up breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and studied what the essential nutrients at these meals should be. I set myself the task of reinserting those meals into my daily habits, aided by the fact that these were the precise meals that the kibbutz dining room served. To gain further control over my wildly invasive food obsession and my boundless eating, I decided to measure everything I ate. How? At the center of each table in the communal dining hall were stacked plastic coffee cups for beverages—coffee, tea, and juice. All the cups were precisely the same. I put a cup above the food on my plate, and measured out precise amounts of meat, vegetables, and potatoes. I outlawed desert.