Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Madame Blavatsky's Baboon

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon
A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

by Peter Washington 
Schocken Books, 1995

At the moment, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is out of print -- which seems unfathomable, since this tremendously entertaining book is also one of very few resources if you wish to puzzle out the cast of characters that launched the “New Age” in America.  If you despair of ever untangling the Rosicrucians from the Vedantists, Gurdjieff from Ouspensky, or St Germain from the Secret Masters, here is your book.

As a prospective reader, the most important thing to know about this book is that it is NOT primarily about Madame Blavatsky.  She is dead on page 100.  The primary pleasure and benefit of this book is Peter Washington’s ability to sketch out compelling life sketches of the main characters who brought spiritualism to America.  These include: Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, J.G. Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Idries Shah.

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is packed with rollicking jaw-dropping good stories and tremendously fun to read.  At the same time, it also presents a painfully bare view of human nature.  As you may have already discovered, our capacity for self-delusion turns out to be entirely perfectly limitless.  There is nothing so ludicrous, so obviously wrong, or so thoroughly debunked that we cannot believe it and go on believing it as long as we live.  If a belief makes us feel special or part of a group, we will sign on to absolutely utterly anything.  This book proves that on nearly every page.

For example, how amazing it is to learn how much of Helena Blavatsky’s worldview and philosophy is based, not on the teachings of disembodied Tibetan masters, but on the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton.  In other words, a good part of what you’ll find in your local New Age bookstore originates from the man who wrote “It was a dark and stormy night.”

As a lifelong student of alternative spiritual traditions, I know that scandals are part of the territory.  Still, it is sobering to learn that the tradition of “renouncing the teacher but keeping the teaching” goes right back to the beginning.  In fact, it is very nearly universally practiced.  Almost every one of the teachers profiled here knew that their own teacher was painfully duplicitous, if not downright fraudulent.  The most charming teachers wore their own fraudulence lightly.  As Peter Washington writes, “Much of HPB’s life is a glorious comedy, as the tone of her letters often tacitly recognizes, but it could have tragic consequences for those who trusted her”. (86)  This turns out to be even more true of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti than of Madame Blavatsky.

The life sketches Peter Washington paints are generally but not always well-rounded.  It is jarring to move from his scathing depiction of Charles Leadbeater to his almost reverential portrait of Rudolf Steiner.  (Peter Washington is not entirely to be blamed for this: Leadbeater the proselytizing pedophile is a remarkably despicable character.)  Washington is at his best when he tells the story of Krishnamurti, who comes across as a gifted spiritual teacher, a pathetic prisoner, and an aristocratic spoiled brat.  I simultaneously wished to bow to him, to embrace him, and to slap him across the face.

I hope very much that this book will one day be re-issued in a revised expanded version.  It often seems to me that the names of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Krishnamurti are revered by people who often don’t know the first thing about who they actually were.  Or even wish to know.  What passes for respect is often just laziness and the desire to have an empty slate for our own projections.

For example, it’s much easier to revere Ouspensky and Gurdjieff if you can forget that they loathed each other.  Both claimed the other was a fraud.  (Ouspensky even came out at the end of his life and proclaimed himself to be a fraud, which his students piously ignored.)  

Ask your local mystic, intoning about the enneagram, who Gurdjieff actually was, and you’ll likely be offered a soy chai latte and told to listen to your own inner wisdom.  Don’t be bought off.  The truth is complicated, and not infrequently pathetic, but also fascinating.  It is necessary, too, to be reminded of the high cost of delusion.  Everyone who professes to be “a deeply spiritual person” should swap their rose-tinted lenses for reading glasses and sit down with this book.

Hazelnut

When I was a child I believed that the hazelnut tree growing on the side of the dirt road just past the cemetery was actually a mystic portal, a secret door to other worlds. When I was eighteen I knocked three times on the side of the tree and walked, through the trunk, into Bombay. It was still called Bombay then. I was immediately cheated by taxi men and put on a one-way non a/c bus to Hyderabad. Some people will know exactly which tree I am talking about. Two-thirds of the way down the dirt road, with the farmhouse behind you and orchards on both sides, there is a solitary hazelnut tree that juts out from the right side of the road, that stands there like a sentinel. The wide smooth space on the side of the trunk of the tree is actually a secret door, though there is no telling when it will open, or for whom, or where it will lead. The smooth space extends between hip and eye level. When the secret door opens it is just big enough to squeeze through. It is possible the hazelnut tree was struck by lightning many years ago. A not unreasonable possibility, considering the tree’s height and position. More likely it is only a space from which a wide branch fell long ago. It took the bus sixteen hours to get to Hyderabad. I sat in the very back of the bus, in the middle, and was thrown into the air with each bump. I knew that I had made the very biggest mistake of my life and now would most probably die. I got off the bus only once, at a roadside dhaba where men sipped tea out of clay pots, then crushed them beneath their sandals. I looked around. The only thing that was familiar was the Moon. Even compared to most eighteen year old boys, I was quite exceptionally helpless. Nothing prepared me: I had only walked through the trunk of the hazelnut tree. I was not in any way brave, strong or resourceful. A lot of what gets called accomplishment is just accidentally not dying. A circumstance for which I cannot take credit. Many years later, not yet old but with white in my beard, I returned to the farm, to the dirt road, to the hazelnut tree. At least it appeared to be the same tree, on the same road, on the same farm, but it could not have been because I had passed through the door in the tree to the other world, when the other world was still called Bombay, and it occurred to me that in all the years following I had never passed again through the door. I had never returned. I considered it. But what could be done with me now in the world I had left long ago? I would only be in the way, like an oddly shaped tool with no obvious use. (What is it actually? I think it’s a pineapple knife.) Nothing that came out of my mouth would ever make any sense. Just the same I rested my cheek on the smooth place on the trunk and listened to the hazelnut tree, breathing heavily as it dreamt.

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Forthcoming: Zymbol

My story "Pa, Randy and the Sugarhouse Fire" is forthcoming in Zymbol, a print magazine out of Boston focusing on the tradition of surrealism and symbolism.
Thank you to everyone who encourages me.  (Despite their better judgment.) 

A Tokyo Love Story

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)

As you can imagine, it’s a terrifically delicate business. A challenge. To spend an entire evening at the neighbors’, across the table from the luminous red-headed wife, her blouse low-cut, her voice like drinking bourbon, her smile dazzling, a smile in which an invitation may or may not be concealed, her businessman husband at her side, overworked but affable, with the easy confidence of the incorrigibly successful, and their radiant girl-child, as bright and warm-hearted a child as ever lived. It’s a tremendous challenge, as I’m sure you can imagine, to sit there all night, apparently enthralled by their antics and exploits, their charm and cuisine, with my composure impeccable, my demeanor irreproachable, when in fact I don’t give a damn about any of them. Not a whit. I care only for their pet rabbit. The rabbit wears his resplendent brown fur in the style commonly referred to as “fluffy”. His name is Bunny. Bunny is five years old. Imagine having one’s own rabbit! He is the most adorable and beguiling creature I have ever in my life beheld. Could other rabbits possibly be like him? Bunny is the only rabbit I have ever been with. I mean that platonically, you understand. But other rabbits must not be so magnificent. Not like my Bunny. Because otherwise the news would be full of rabbits and people would stay home with their rabbit instead of spending their entire lives going here and there on the trains, staring all the time into their phones. Tokyo with a rabbit. Well, it just changes everything, doesn’t it? Here in Tokyo we have no animals. That’s not true. We have crows and cockroaches and dogs who wear shoes. A bunny rabbit in Tokyo is something downright revolutionary. No doubt this will knock the bottom out of the market for pet beetles. All night I remain at the neighbors’ table. My voice subdued, my expression rapt, my eyes where they ought to be: on the crudites, on the girl-child’s origami, on tops of the wife’s freckled breasts, composed even as my chest feels fit to burst and my heart is forever and always with Bunny, who is allowed to roam freely through the downstairs in the evening. Bunny prefers shadowed corners. It’s one of the things we share in common, Bunny and I. But now and then Bunny comes around to survey the perimeter, to visit the humans and make a show of his boundless tolerance to adult and child alike. I endeavor to keep my breath slow and calm. I speak as long as I am able to speak. When I can no longer speak I do my best to amiably nod. I remain at all times a gentleman. It’s not my fault. Bunny toys with me. Nothing about life in Tokyo ever prepared me for a rabbit. Now and then Bunny will even run figure-eights around my stocking feet. I myself am faultlessly discreet. But not Bunny. Bunny is shameless.

Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Flann O'Brien

The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien

Edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper

Translations from the Irish by Jack Fennell

Dalkey Archive, 2013

Often a collection of short fiction is the place to start if you wish you wish to begin to discover a writer unfamiliar to you.  For example, you could begin to explore Joyce with Dubliners, or Beckett with the Complete Short Prose.  Not so in this case.  This book is for fans and scholars.  If you are not yet a fan, you will be shortly, but please: start with At Swim, Two Birds.

That said, Dalkey Archive has done great service by rescuing these stories.  Several of them are so vivid and appealing that I expect that they will now be anthologized for as long as the human race hangs on.  I am thinking of “John Duffy’s Brother” and especially “Scenes in a Novel”, which experiments with the device of characters in rebellion against their novel, prefiguring At Swim, Two Birds.

The story that impressed me most was “Drink and Time in Dublin” -- a relentless and unsparing account of going on a bender.  My god, but the man tells a lot of the truth.  (When I visited the Writer’s Museum in Dublin, I went up to the attendant and said very earnestly that I wished to visit all the places in Dublin associated with the life of Flann O’Brien.  The gentleman shook his head at me and said, “You couldn’t possibly, you’d die a’ alcohol poisoning.”)

“Slattery’s Sago Saga”, the forty-one page manuscript of O’Brien’s last unfinished novel -- about a plan to remove all the potatoes from Ireland and replace them with sago -- is a joy and a frolic.  If there turns out to be an afterlife, you will find me in the pub of that establishment, begging Flann O’Brien to tell me the rest of the story.

Résumé

I have almost no skills whatsoever. It happens that I can write a little. Not nearly as well as an educated person could write a century ago, but since nowadays many people can hardly write at all, it is useful and (very rarely) even a slightly big deal that I can write a little. Also I am able to read. Nothing special about that either. Except that nowadays almost no one reads, particularly not in the traditional fashion, considered now to be archaic: in a straight back chair, in a silent room, for three hours, with a blank page to copy out admirable sentences. People are too connected now. People are too important. There are so many exciting things on which to click. It is possible that I have somehow become stranded in the 19th century. Telephones I find spooky and unnerving, like a person who never leaves home without a Ouija board. Driving an automobile, no matter how cautiously, seems to me a rash and reckless act. I say that I am able to write and I am able to read. However, it often happens that I am unable to write or read. I am not a reliable person. I admit it. I could never get a job as an automated teller machine or a commuter train. When I cannot write and I cannot read, I try to pay attention. Of course this is exactly nothing. Paying attention cannot be said to be a talent, not even in the slight way that writing or reading might be said to be. Just the same, there are fewer and fewer people paying attention. So few that the ability itself appears endangered. So many things clamor for our attention now. So many noisy, bright, and unpleasant things. No small number are downright terrifying. I am not in any way a special or talented person. I am only taking advantage of the general decline.

Account Information

(from A Forest Ten Feet Wide, Tokyo, 2013)
Here in Tokyo, My husband and I went to the bank to sort a few things out. The bank teller explained that I had been out of the country so long that my account had fallen asleep. Unfortunately, there was no way to wake it up. It was entirely impossible because a) I’d lost my card (just a few years back) and b) I’d lost my bankbook (forever ago, before I ever understood what bank books are for and why they are so important to Japanese people) and c) I had no valid work visa. There was money in the account. Not a lot of money. A lot of money for me. “There is no way to do anything?” I asked the bank teller. Meanwhile, my husband was already getting mad. “So now we just lose everything?” “It is difficult”, said the bank teller. He asked us to return to the seating area and he would see what he could do. Twenty minutes later he called us back to the counter, presented me with my new bankbook (Winnie the Pooh!), told me I’d get my card in the mail, and in the meantime, would I like some cash? “Special case”, he said. The degree to which Tokyo is rule-bound can hardly be over-stated. At the same time, things like this do happen far more often than is generally admitted. After all, there are so very many rules. If you’re going to break one of them, you might as well break them all. Addendum: My husband reads over my shoulder and is flabbergasted. He insists that I have missed the entire point, omitted the primary point of interest, skipped the heart, soul, and flesh of the matter. Please excuse me. I will try again. The bank teller was absurdly impossibly gorgeous. Not handsome, not striking, I am talking about breathtakingly global celebrity gorgeous.*  While we waited, we watched advertisements for the bank’s services on the video in the waiting area. Not one of the famous people shown was anywhere near as good-looking as our actual bank teller. Fortunately we had been required to fill out the forms in advance. Otherwise we would not have been able to remember why we were visiting the bank.
Imagine an angelic yet masculine clean-cut boy-band star who has unfathomably decided to devote himself to courteous banking. You must know this moment: when you think, oh so obviously photo-shopped and then realize oh no, wait, this is actual life. He could have sent us away with nothing. We would not have made a fuss. We would have come back cheerfully, every three days, for the remainder of our lives, to see if he’d changed his mind. He also spoke excellent English. Almost perfect. Of course my husband spotted an error. “We do not say the account is sleeping”, my husband said. “We say it is dormant.” My husband went on to explain that he just happened to be a tutor, teaching English privately, professionally, casually, for a very reasonable rate, at his home, and here was his business card, which he presented at once with smile and a flourish. That dog.

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* Please contact me privately for branch information.