We Built a Bridge

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By William Stafford

 

Far up the canyon where the salmon leap

and splintered sunlight nails the forest floor

the people without houses put their feet.

 

And often here below we drag a breath

of something from the wind we missed, and steeply

think: The place we built to live is too near death.

 

THE face is what we use for getting acquainted. The face of Ken, our camp mystic, was still and lined, with heavy brows and steadfast dark eyes. In human affairs almost everyone shouts loud enough, but few listen well enough. Ken listened. He spoke intensely, too; he meant not only every word he said, but more—he meant some other words and things with his eyebrows.

Despite the popular conception of pacifists, none of the rest of us was a mystic; but we used to gather around and talk to Ken, where he had set up a little orange-crate desk for his typewriter, on the lawn outside of the music room, during the summer of ‘42. Those were days of hard work on the mountain roads, and many of us not used to physical labor were weary all week; but those blocks of work were riven by Sundays, and then we could lounge and talk and dream.

Ken worked hard. He corresponded with Japanese Americans in their concentration camps; he prepared articles, and he corresponded with other mystics; he would plunge, with any of us, into deep conversation. We learned from him about the kind of life in which physical arrangements are made for the deliberate cultivation of elaborate mental experiences. Western Protestant religion used few of the techniques, Ken said; but many other religions were noted for cultivation of the inner life.

Our thoughts in those wartimes were peculiarly susceptible to Ken’s kind of philosophy, for we met continual frustration; and every magazine, newspaper, movie, or stranger was a challenge to convictions that were our personal, inner creations. After most large unsettling experiences, I understand, the mystic’s doctrine enjoys a revival; and today many are concerned with the struggle between the “yogi and the commissar” in each of us, and it is commonplace now to appeal to an inner conscience of mankind for salvation from terrible new weapons. In 1942, however, mysticism had not much vogue; and it was we in camp, homeless in our own society, who followed with sympathy the discussion of inner experience.

Ken introduced us to other listeners, leaders in the flourishing California group of mystics: Allan Hunter, the Christian mystic; Aldous Huxley, the novelist turned mystic; and Gerald Heard, “the man who ruined Huxley.” And it was a trip to Gerald Heard, arranged by Ken, that brought to fourteen of us our most intense experience in the unknown region. The trip, arranged several months in advance, was a week-long furlough visit to Gerald Heard’s quarters, a place called Trabuco College, a new group of unpopulated buildings, isolated, unadvertised, in the hills of southern California.

Even today I cannot divide the effects of that visit, with its opening perspectives, from life experiences that would have existed even without the week of education at Trabuco. As a matter of fact, the experience began even before we left camp; it began on the last day of work before our furloughs began. We worked in snow that day. First the far peaks grew vague; then the intervening sweep of space received a tremendous gentleness—spaced, slow flakes, thicker and thicker. We saw the evergreens whiten gradually, aloof in the lazy fall; and when we looked straight up, the flakes were falling dark from nowhere, down, down, into our eyes. Our trail along the mountain became a long aisle through a remoteness; and we walked back to the truck without talking. It was as if something were trying to make up to the world for a great loss, and to put it to sleep.

It was after dark the next day, in January of 1943, when fourteen of us got out of two cars parked in a grove of live oaks and hiked a half-mile or so up the rain-channeled winding road that leads to the hilltop on which are the Trabuco College buildings, overlooking the big country that extends from the high mountains just behind to the coast below and beyond Capistrano. Carrying suitcases and sloshing along the starlit road, we passed the row of eucalyptus trees and the orange grove, and came to an open square about an acre in extent, blocked in by the low, tile-roofed buildings—a long L-shaped dorm, a round dim blob, which was the meditation building, and a really long, complex building, which was—according to Felix, (1) our guide and Gerald Heard’s right-hand man—the dorm-kitchen-library-cloister. We paraded along the cloister, lighted by a succession of coppery lamps along the wall, and into a gigantic dining room with a fireplace and long tables, and then into a big dim kitchen, where a sprightly man, dressed in faded overall pants, tennis shoes, and an easy corduroy coat, was stirring a large steaming vat of—we found out at once—soup. The man was Gerald Heard, himself.

He had a sandy emphatic goatee, a corn-silky mustache, and a quizzical intent expression. He ladled out soup to us, and we stood around sipping it (so that we wouldn’t have to wash any spoons) and talking over plans for the week to come. It was a new adventure for most of us. We talked rapidly, waving our hands and making shadows on the far wall, our eyes round from the darkness through which we had come and the light to which we were going.

How could we plan our lives for the next week so as deliberately to induce profound mental experiences? We had never before attempted the project—most of us, at least—in such an intentional way. We had for counsel now a man who was devoting his life to the problem; he explained that it was foreign to most Western thinking, that only a few practiced a pattern of living designed to promote mental, or mystical, experience. In that big kitchen, beside that kettle of soup, we free adventurers talked our way to a plan.

We decided to get up at 6:30, meditate for half an hour (Gerald Heard meditated for hours at a time, but we didn’t think we could take it), eat breakfast, janitor around our rooms, and then meet in the library at nine for a session till eleven. Then we planned to meditate for another half-hour, eat lunch, and go out to work on the ranch. The college-ranch was designed to be self-subsistent, and there were many projects waiting for mystics to engage in while they were resting. After our chores we would meditate at five, eat, and have our last daily meeting from about seven till ten. Everyone agreed.

From then on we followed that schedule, with slight variations. Each of us had a room, a small, white-walled cell, with a bed, a bureau, a desk, and a kerosene lamp. The buildings were new, and the beds good. The place for meditation was a special building, round, with one entrance, an antechamber in which to leave one’s shoes, and then a velvet curtain through which one stepped into a circular interior of plain walls and concentric, plush-­covered levels on the floor, like a stadium, on which one sat to meditate, in total darkness.

We ate at the long table in the dining hall with the fireplace; and at our noon meals Gerald Heard read aloud to us, from the book of Taoism, St. Augustine, and others. We met for discussion in the library—a small room, with bookshelves, a fireplace and high French doors leading out to terraces on two sides, and to the cloister on another. Through the big windows we could look out on the mountains and hills, and—far away through a triangular piece between the hills—the ocean, and Catalina Island.

That first night we broke up our session in the kitchen and paraded, a deliciously anticipating, dream-cherishing line of novices, each with a flickering lamp, along the cloisters, dropping out one by one at the rooms. Each unpacked, looked over his room, and—before going to bed, I’m sure—sat staring at the white wall and thinking about the whole experiment—and pondered.

Our group sessions were spirited talks, almost entirely by Gerald Heard, who spoke rapidly and clearly and with vivifying expression and emphasis. We were a responsive, participating audience, appreciative of his picturesque, figurative language. He would sit at one end of our half­ circle about the fireplace in the library; at night sessions we turned out all the lamps and talked by firelight. During his talks he would get up, pace back and forth, and drive his points home by gesturing and by lining up his arguments as if with chalk on the mantel. Sometimes he would perch on a foot-high block of wood used for a seat right beside the fire. He was always animated, always ready to go into a whimsical illustration, and was delighted anew with each telling point or apt figure or allegory.

The night sessions were particularly impressive, with the fire crackling, sending out beams to the rapt, swarthy faces; to the dark books on the wall shelves; to the tall windows looking out on the vast wild slopes; and to the lean, sparkling man with the quick head and the decisive goatee. Some of the listeners were pictures; one, for instance, was tall, with a face all shadows and angles—like the Curry painting of John Brown—the intense eyes, the sculptured face. George was there, a shadowy face against a wall, a searcher, sometimes whimsical but with a streak of serious dedication to finding something … something. There was Roy, a former reporter, an intellectual, versed in mysticism. There was Dick, a rustic-looking saint. There were an architect, an advertising man, a college boy, an electrical worker. All of us listened; and the fire became quieter and more meditative as the night moved later past the room.

One day we had a visitor to talk, an Indian swami. (2) He spoke of the simple, inward life; but he wore an impeccable suit, a gold wrist watch, and a big ring; as he talked he smoked cigarettes, and the smoke curled about his head. I looked around the circle of novices. All were dressed casually; some wore moccasins. Only one wore glasses; none smoked.

Of Gerald Heard himself one trait was particularly noticeable, perhaps because we cannot always expect it in an intellectual who consents to clutter up his life by associating with novices; he was unswervingly cordial, unconcerned with passing accidents of existence, patient with people and things. One day when the man whose turn it was to cook became absorbed in Gerald Heard’s talk and let our lunch burn so that smoke poured out of the kitchen window, Gerald Heard noticed it from his perch by the library fireplace, paused briefly in his rapid talk, and waved his hand happily: “Ah! an offering to Jehovah.”

We stayed with our schedule for meditation—a total of an hour and a half a day. Some of us had no idea what to do during the time, and when we asked our teacher he quoted Pascal’s words attributed to the character of God: “You can’t be looking for me unless you have already found me.” My own meditations were uneventful; and when I realized how much longer Gerald Heard was meditating every day I began to suspect—I must confess—that he evolved during the time some of the plots for the mystery novels which I had heard about his writing. One of our men, however, who experienced impressive mental events during the meditation, recorded the trend of his thinking.

He told me that he eliminated thoughts—“ … erased, erased; I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” He received a kind of vision of timelessness, a feeling that life can make us sensitive to everything and that if life can make us sensitive to the past it can make us sensitive to the future, that life creates time. He turned his mind inward, as he said, and got a feeling of going beyond. “It’s a profound thing,” he said, “it’s a very profound thing.”

I made up for the blanks I drew in meditation by jotting down, in a scrawl by firelight, the trend of Gerald Heard’s remarks; he has expressed them more completely in several books, but I like to go back over my summary, to get the flavor, in his divisions of men:

“There are three types of persons—the realists (who say our senses tell us all), the conventionalists (who say there is something more, some power we should keep in good with, if it’s convenient), and the third type, those concerned, really concerned, with going beyond the senses, with finding out what you can’t see—which is what really matters.”

His talks were sprinkled with little sayings, asides, insights, some of his own, some quotations: “Sympathy is the understanding of the heart: understanding is the sympathy of the mind. … If there is no chance or accident in life, then each man is hurt partly from his own choice: each man himself strikes himself. … The only people who can get things done are those who don’t aim directly at getting those things done. The only way to pursue happiness is to pursue something else, and it comes over the shoulder. … The only person hard all the way through is a saint. The holy men of India have been said to ‘whitemail’ others into supporting them. … At the time of the fall of the Roman Empire a common judgment was ‘If it’s a state announcement, it’s a lie.’ … The Roman Empire fell, not from conquest, not by disease, but by a ‘failure of nerve’. …”

Many of his phrases we found useful later, and they give an indication of the flow and direction of the talks: illumined spirit, inwardly profitable, the way of wonder, alert passivity, anonymous memories, the love offensive, divine incarnation.” As he talked along he would some­ times bring our attention sharply to a height of anticipation: “Suddenly everything is lit with a terrifying heightening of significance.”

I remember two of his contributions when the men were discussing objection to war. In the first of the two he helped by supplying a concept not always applicable but often useful later. The concept was that of the “specious present,” an interval during which nothing effective can be done to interrupt a series of events that has passed a certain critical point. His illustrative comparison was that asking a pacifist what he would have done if he had been in command on Pearl Harbor day is comparable to running the Normandie at full speed till it reaches only fifty feet from the dock and then turning to a passenger and saying, “All right, you stop her.”

His other contribution was a little more disconcerting. One of the men asked, “When people say we are cowardly or dumb, and so on, for not joining in the war, how can we prove that it isn’t so?”

“Do not attempt to do so,” said Gerald Heard. “We are each of us fallible, cowardly, and dumb. We can say, as great men have said before, ‘Yes, it is true, I am a frail vessel in which to transport the truth; but I cannot unsee what I see. …’ ” (3)

The  days slipped mystically by. Through all of the week we received no news from outside. We had no radio, and of course daily papers were taboo—and unavailable anyway. We had concentrated on an experiment in living. We had tried meditation. We had talked with a sin­ cere, practicing, eloquent mystic. We had acquired an interest in Trabuco College—a place we now considered partly ours. We had “charged our spiritual batteries.”

On the last day, carrying our luggage and escorted by Felix and Gerald, we walked down the road we had partly repaired, across a bridge we had built in the afternoons, to our transportation in the oak grove. We started the material motors, turned out of the material gate onto the material paved road, and raised our material arms in farewell to our hosts, who stood waving from the edge of the ranch of mysticism—a place of old coats, tennis shoes, and general casualness; of white red-roofed buildings on a hill looking down on the lower mountains and the ocean; a place where Gerald Heard talked to us around the fireplace, saying, “Why … why?” talking the power of accepting within ourselves a responsibility for what goes on between ourselves and others.

Notes

  1. Felix Greene, the master builder of Trabuco College.

  2. Most likely this was Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

  3. Gerald Heard’s response was very much in keeping with his early 1940s thoughts and writings on the topics of surrender, anonymity, and similar ego-effacing traits that he, in echoing many saints, considered spiritual virtues.

William Stafford (1914-1993) was a poet, pacifist, and college instructor. He received many honors, including the 1963 National Book Award for his poem Traveling Through the Dark. He was appointed United States Poet Laureate for one year in 1970. From 1975 until 1990, he served as Poet Laureate of Oregon. The prolific Prof. Stafford published approx. 3,000 poems during his lifetime.

The Barrie Family Trust is most grateful to Oregon State University Press for granting permission to post this riveting chapter in its entirety, which is from the OSU Press 2006 reprint edition of Prof. Stafford’s book, Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time, originally published in 1947. Please visit the OSU Press webpage at this link to purchase William Stafford’s revelatory book, Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time.

"He was unswervingly cordial, unconcerned with passing accidents of existence, patient with people and things."