The
Dharma Bum of Bolinas – Ananda Brady Pt Reyes Light interview
Call him by any one of the
names – Ananda, Baba, Khalifa – he acquired on a journey that
took him across Asia and into the remotest territories of his own
head. Better yet, call him a bodacious hippie, though that label only
tells a part of Brady’s story that began in Kansas in 1945 as
Craig, led him to Southern California and included a stint as a
reservist in the United States Marine Corps.
In 1968, as the world seemed
to come unhinged, Brady escaped from nearly everything and everyone:
the Brady bunch, Christianity, western civilization and even America.
He succeeded all too well.
In his
new book, “Odyssey: Ten Years on the Hippie Trail” (Aventine
Press; $26.95) Brady describes his experiments with drugs—LSD,
hashish and kif—and his intimate encounters with a variety of
sexual partners. Sixties rock ‘n’ roll rarely echoes across the
pages of the book, though now and then the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band provides a soundtrack for the action.
“Odyssey” runs to nearly
600 pages. It’s probably too long and too unshapely. The narrative
rambles and meanders like his journey itself. but Book Three, “Into
the Mystic,” which is set mostly in India, might be accurately
termed a masterpiece of spiritual literature. It’s also a brilliant
tale of adventure for adults seeking enlightenment. Jack Kerouac
would surely enjoy it. So would Harry Potter‘s J. K. Rowling.
The narrator (and main
character) describes the beauty he finds in poverty and the poetry
found in prison. He portrays drug dealers and the divine, crossing
borders and frontiers both real and imaginary. At times reading the
book feels like traveling on a slowly moving train that makes local
stops across a phantasmagoric landscape. Pilgrims climb aboard,
travel briefly and disembark. Soldiers check passports. Brady goes to
the end of the line, where he becomes deadly ill. A sense of suspense
surrounds him and philosophical questions rise up from the dust and
the camel dung.
“Why had I been touched by
this madness of the wandering mendicant?,” he asks. “In my heart
of hearts I know that it’s precisely this madness that is
permitting me to view these cross-sections of the world’s
humanity.” He adds, “I’m not a part of it, but I’m seeing it
as closely as I can, and meeting it on its own terms.”
Along the way, Brady records
nearly everything he sees, hears, smells and touches: “the
rumbling, honking cars and buses outside the open window, the
scratchy radio, fumes from the traffic, the incense burning on the
small shrine.”
The best parts of the book
unfold in the present tense. The reader inhabits a palpable world
that’s punctuated by dreams, nightmares and hallucinations. Is the
storyteller conscious or unconscious? Or has he entered into the
bardo,
that Buddhist place where “one’s identity is reduced back to
zero,” he explains. The pleasure of the book derives from not
knowing where unreality stops and reality begins. Even the jobs Brady conjures up as barber, cook, yoga instructor and jeweler seem like magical
explorations into the unknown, rather than tasks to make money and
delay the inevitable return to civilization.
To write his kaleidoscopic
travelogue took 20 years—twice the length of time it took to make
the epic journey itself. “Creating the book was as much of an
odyssey as the ‘Odyssey’ itself,” he said over hot tea on a
rainy afternoon at the Pine Cone Diner.
It wasn’t until 1993 that he
began to jot down what he remembered of his travels in the 1970s; a
trip to India in 2011 acted as a catalyst and prompted him to finish
the manuscript in 2013. Much of the writing happened in Bolinas,
which he describes as a kind of paradise for hippies.
“Living in Bolinas for the
past 34 years has been like living in a small village in a foreign
country, and an adventure,” he said. “We’re a family. We strive to find the best
in each and everyone, even if we don’t always speak to one another.
There’s a great deal of tolerance in the community and we work to
keep the peace and adhere as best we can to the best parts of the
hippie paradigm.”
With his white hair and beard,
Indian scarf and hand-made rings, Brady could be a dharma bum who
traveled with Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, the Beat writers who
paved the way for the hippies and their spiritual descendants. With
one eye on the past, and another on the present, he muses on his own
improbable journey and on the chances of anyone following in his
footsteps.
“Kids today do make the same
journey that we made in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said. “But it’s
more dangerous now. A war zone can pop up almost everywhere. India
isn’t the same country it was when I first went there, either. The
middle class since the tech boom has wealth, and good for them, but there are so many cars and motorcycles on the road now it makes travel difficult. It appears to be losing some of its culture due to TVs in every home, where there used to be groups of men singing near street-shrines, for example, but when you look beyond appearances you
can also find a solid bedrock of spiritual life.”
On a recent visit to Benares,
perhaps his favorite destination in India, Brady found more trash
than ever before and more tourists and tourism. “I didn’t feel so at home there as I did once,” he said. As soon as he could, he bought a train ticket,
traveled north to the source of the Ganges, joined an ashram and
found the sort of peace all pilgrims seek.
“When I first saw hippies in
Southern California, I laughed at them,” he said. “It took a
while for the hippie ideal to sink in, but I began to see that it was at its heart a serious and important spiritual movement on a Biblical scale, something I could whole-heartedly devote myself to. Now my goal
is to follow the enlightenment principle and try to avoid the
self-destructive principle. Life here in West Marin makes that
more possible.”
Jonah Raskin is the author
of “A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature” and
a frequent sojourner in West Marin. “Odyssey: Ten Years on the
Hippie Trail” is available on Amazon and Kindle; a signed copy may
be special-ordered from Ananda, along with $25 cash or a check, to
P.O. Box 873, Bolinas, CA, 94924.
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