Very few! It depends on who you’re talking to. I could have told you. Everybody in the Village – that’s Greenwich Village – could have. Because we didn’t make anything of it. Now, if you worked beside him at the New York Times, that was different. The journalists didn’t know. Wonder why?

No one to whom it would have been a big deal knew. All of us who took it with a grain of salt – just a fact, nothing to even discuss with him – all of us who treated him as just human, we knew.

This story, “White Like Me” (June 17, 1996, by the brilliant Harvard professor Henry L. Gates Jr., sometimes called a “superstar”), was supposed to be the startling posthumous core revelation in the biography of the New York Times book editor/critic Anatole Broyard. Impeccably well written, the article was convincing. But as I pondered in the months since, it became clear that the slant should be corrected. That despite the fact that the story appeared to cover all angles.

But did it?

The well-known Harvard University author of this essay took a portion of a biography (from interviews, primarily) and—perhaps understandably—generalized. He was evidently unaware of the impression retained among Anatole Broyard’s friends and acquaintances.

To go back, then, to 1966. I was introduced to Anatole by his “closest friend for many years” (quoting the article, p. 69: this was “the poet and Blake scholar”), Milton Klonsky, who said to me one evening that we were to be joined by not just a Times reporter. But—going out of his way to make sure I did not miss this point—a Black man.

Why would he tell me this, and even before the introduction? Well, for one thing that fact wasn’t obvious. Nor was it, once known, pertinent to the friendship. So it was made completely clear. Nor was I even admonished not to tell anyone of it. I had the impression everyone knew; nothing led me to think otherwise – no attempt at concealment. But then, it was down in the Village. Race, sex, being gay – none of it was a deficit in that (Greenwich Village) community in that 60s period. Nor would it have been among that group, in any period.

1. To move on, about seven months before Anatole died, I revisited him, up in Cambridge. That is a revealing story—worthy of being part of his professional record. Collecting material from the 60s for his memoirs (published as Kafka Was the Rage, but which he died before completing), he was hoping to collect “Milton stories” from me. (“People want to read about the 60s,” he said.) That chapter never appeared – due to death. (For clarity’s sake, let me say that the Margaret in the publication is not myself.) The material he talked to me about that day – what he intended to focus on in his 60s chapter—is unwritten. He had set the chapter up, the slant, the focus (perhaps the “surprising switch” that he customarily used between the end of a chapter and the start of the next). But the book ended—before he got there.  He was jumping on the trampoline, sure he was going to live, in high artistic inspiration, when I talked to him by telephone, just after our conversation. Sometime later I learned that that October, he was dead, leaving a manuscript that could not conclude on the point proposed.
2. As to why some people knew he was black (and if like me, thought that everyone did), whereas others thought the contrary, I think it important to add some data. For instance, in the conversation referred to above (in 1990), he cited a cherished value—which obliquely or implicitly addresses this question. Ironically, he had avoided the disparity of being looked down on, due purely to birth certificate. (H. L. Gates, Jr. says, “Anatole Broyard, Negro writer, was the larger lie,” which he deleted from his life). But there was another side to that coin. He became looked up to. There is some suggestion (in the comments quoted) that he coveted this position. Anyone would. That is belied, however, by his exact words in 1990. He opened up to say, that he was greatly thinking about and missing Milton Klonsky—in that (word for word), “After he died no one talked to me as an equal.” Without interacting and dialoguing on equal grounds, life paled. He said Milton Klonsky was “an ironist” with him (“a romantic” with me). MK had said to me, “You’ve never played with me. I can go to any carnival. Put on any mask. I’m an ironist—on the very highest level.” That “very highest level” was perhaps the key, where settling the aspect of the racial factor would not be the end of it. Indeed, once given the privilege of equality, that you exercised it.  (Klonsky was known for indirection, when not being blunt. Anatole is accused of this same style, as if it meant insincerity or a drawback, if used. He lightly said the word here in Cambridge, as if it stated a certain breadth of approach, an ability to stand in distance, the way humor or self-deflection does. Or all the possibilities the true ironist knows how to assert.)
3. I believe this and other “replies” will turn up data that belongs in his Papers. If the added record is not printed in The New Yorker, I will look for somewhere in which to preserve this data. The touchingly “human” narrative of how he waited in the snow at the train station in Boston for me, recovering from cancer, positive, generous, in the January before he died—the beautiful pair of photos I took at that moment, young and healthy-looking. Unincluded information of how he came to write “What the Cystoscope Said,” for instance. Also, the counter-reply—that in his generation, not only he and Ralph Ellison had writer’s block; nor (further) was he alone in receiving a never-fulfilled advance for a manuscript. Further, as to why Chandler Brossard was asked to delete a reference in the text of the unpublished of Who Walk in Darkness, I have extra info.
4. Though here in America, there are numerous opportunities to read book reviews, if you jump to a country like Romania, where authors (such as Arthur Koestler) were blacklisted, you will notice how the intellectuals, even now, value the Sunday literary section of the Times. Who Anatole Broyard was and what he contributed belongs, in fact, in an international context, such as there, where there was no concern what color might have gone into the genes to create the information and style appreciated.
5. The essay does not mention the caricature factor (watermelon/black) in the manuscript of Who Walk in Darkness. What he would have replied to this 1996 New Yorker story, we do not know. We do know (or I know) what happened in the case of an earlier misunderstanding, when his father misconstrued the motive of a deathbed suggestion, in which the intention was to remove pain.
6. What was shocking in some quarters must have been that the “revelation” was considered a well-kept secret. Also, that many writers are praised (considered interesting) for “inventing themselves.” Take Faulkner, as example. So even here, because of having certain blood, was one to be denied a privilege accorded to artists, right and left—to invent the way they see themselves, use their life material inside their creativity? No one told me, “This is a matter to be kept hush-hush.” This is a truly troubling point. Though an eminently researched opening presentation, which is highly contributive—up to the point it stopped, due to (probably) the inaccessibility of other material.

            There must be at least one person on The New Yorker staff who would be interested in hearing what material is available, to revert to a fairer portrait of such a figure in the US publishing scene.

Very sincerely yours, with the highest respect for your great publication,

MARGARET A. HARRELL

Postnote: No one was. Though kindly replying that this was their position.

          West 4th Street: Human Like Me
Another Look at the Portrayal of Anatole Broyard, in “White Like Me”

West 4^th Street, the location where, as reported in “White Like Me,” Anatole Broyard, stepping out of the subway, became white, is ironically precisely the street where Milton Klonsky lived, though not precisely at the subway. Two of Milton Klonsky’s best friends were Anatole Broyard and Seymour (Sy) Krim. They were very different as writers, but they belonged to the same literary period, which Krim has characterized in What’s This Cat’s Story? , explaining how the high value put on intellectualism affected his generation rather adversely—noteworthily including himself. Krim’s kinetic effusiveness of style is opposed to that of the New York Times critic Broyard, who was uneffusive, while being exquisite (see Kafka Was the Rage).

What causes me to write this, even having waited some time to do so, is that I saw Anatole nine months before he died, and that from the first day I was introduced to him—back in 1966—I was not told I was to meet Anatole Broyard, the writer/critic, but Anaole Broyard, the writer/critic, who was black (or was the phrase “spade”?). This seemed unnecessary, but I had no choice but to learn this. Anyone whom Milton Klonsky, Anatole’s “closest friend for many years,” introduced to him got this information up front, as if it were the most open nonsecret in the world, and with no restrictions whatsoever about whom one told. For this reason, I was completely taken aback and baffled at the implication that “the world” did not know this (in a fascinating, masterful New Yorker revelation after his death).

Certainly what I would call the Greenwich Village world—in particular, the West 4^th Street world—did know him. Any reporter (back then) could have dug up the information, despite the fact that he did not brandish it on letterheads. I could have written a news story about it and in fact when Anatole and Milton were typecast as characters in the manuscript of Who Walk in Darkness, the author was threatened with a suit for caricature by Anatole (the character based on was to be depicted with the flagrant detail of “eating a watermelon”). Thus, caricature. This particular information I received from Milton Klonsky.

Milton Klonsky would never have endured a friendship in which, as Anatole himself said, in his obituary tribute, there was any “compromise” whatsoever (“which,” he said—the refusal of compromise in a relationship—”condemned him to a rather lonely life”). The racial detail about him was stated without stress or emphasis—just included, if no other part of the introduction were kept.

I happened to live in Greenwich Village in the last half of the 60s, just around the corner from Milton Klonsky (who lived between West Fourth and Eleventh streets), during which time I saw Klonsky many evenings. Jumping to nine months before Anatole died: after not seeing him during the intervening years, I had an appointment for a dramatic meeting with him in Cambridge. I would like to record the graciousness of that meeting and something of the subject. He was working on Kafka Was the Rage. By the flukes of life, then, I have some insight into how the book would have gone on. For at our meeting, he was convinced he would live, would finish it; just afterwards when I telephoned, and instead of letting the machine speak, he picked up, he said he had been “working out on the trampoline.” That he felt great, in high energy, inspired. That he was going on with his chapter of Milton stories (the chapter perhaps never written, certainly never published); that he approved the character creation in the text by me I had given him, in that he found himself now calling “Milton” (as he wrote his own 60s text) “Robert” (in his mind). “Robert” was the fictional name that I used. There could have been no greater blessing given me, than that the publication I envisioned was honorable.

Let us describe that snowy day in Cambridge at the train station, in 1990, after not seeing each other for 20 years. He a famous critic.

The ground was covered with snow. I came in by train. He had assured me that he would wait at a particular place near the station exit. I couldn’t find him. After twenty minutes, I telephoned his home, to see if he was there. He was still at the station, waiting. Then I saw him. It was easy to recognize this handsome man in the snow, wearing a scarf around his neck, which—in that it hid the wrinkles you see on other photos on book covers—left the impression of a man 50. He did not say, or imply, that he was young. He had told me on the phone he was “an old man now.” Nothing of the sort. On the contrary, I took two, as it turned out, showpiece photos; from them, anyone can see this is a beautiful person: in one, he is smiling; in another, looking reflectively, or introspectively, down, at nowhere in focus.

He was recovering from cancer, he told me; that he was going to be all right, but that he had a cold (even so, he had waited in the snow); and so he invited me to a light, informal lunch. Remembering him from the late 60s, I would have expected nothing else, though he didn’t know it. He said he was writing his memoirs on the 1960s (“People are interested in the 60s”), currently “collecting Milton stories.” As his Kafka never reached the 60s, this now looks extremely poignant. He said to me “You were an important person in Milton’s life.” (He had the plan of contacting other people as well; I say this, in case they never found out.) He also showed no judgment at my choices in life. He said, “You seem to have found the formula for happiness.” I have to admit that in such a situation, I could not remember the stories I can now, stories partly prompted by reading Kafka Was the Rage. As the book ended, and I knew that he had died only nine months after this meeting, that I had seen him hopeful, artistically energized, and that this had all been reversed,  then playing out conversation, I realized (or interpreted) that the book did not end where it was intended to, at least on that January day in Cambridge. I searched my memory for what I had not brought to mind then. I would have reminded him about one of Milton’s favorite stories—how much Delmore Schwartz loved the Giants. That one day when Delmore’s radio broke, he listened to the rest of the game on Milton’s radio—telephoning to ask him to put the receiver by the radio and let him listen till the end, which he did. Or I could have noted that Milton said that Delmore and Anatole were so handsome that when they used to walk down a Village street together, a whole street of heads turned to look at them.

I also remembered—per the end of Kafka, which implies the opposite (at the end of Kafka, Anatole is finding solace in feminine beauty, in pointed contrast to Klonsky, who is not; and Anatole uses the situation to hold forth on a seemingly philosophical value of his), how “What the Cystoscope Said” came into being:

Anatole’s father was dying, in very great pain. The son thought his father would appreciate if he offered to put him “out of pain,” by bringing extra medicine. The father did not appreciate the suggestion. He misunderstood. Milton suggested they go on a double date, to take his mind off it. To get the full impact of this requires reading the closing implication in the final chapter in Anatole’s posthumous publication. In an exact reverse of the last paragraph there (of the manuscript as it stood at Anatole’s death), as if it were a dichotomy laid out with a ruler, in this turning point in his career, so far as achieving skyrocketing fame for it, it is Anatole who rejects all prospect of diluting the pain or deflection. And sits down in solitude at his typewriter, to produce the monument to the memory of the incident concerning his father’s death. Thus becoming anthologized in short story collections—in fact giving him a certain fame. It was partly in remembering this that I felt a no, at the end of his book. The structure of the prior chapters practiced the technique of impression reversal. The next chapter, I felt sure, would have reversed—or shown the contrary side—as he recaptured his masterful decision, the day he began “What the Cystoscope Said.” How could it end, short of showing this reverse facet, as prior chapters had—in the technique he handled so gracefully: to convince the reader of a stated situation, then follow that buildup (that uncontrovertible impression) with a total 180-degree shift, even what the reader thought engraved in solid rock. So what impressions of himself would he, the writer, reverse, had he gone on? Even some impressions that he himself had not seen through the pattern of; Milton had called writing “heuristic.” It was a place where you learned, about yourself also.

As Anatole and Milton conversed daily at the end of Milton’s life, so Anatole told me, he added that “After Milton died, no one talked to me as an equal.” It was a stunning moment.

“Cystoscope” showed himself in the act of understanding that his father did not want to be spared even excruciating physical pain; in biographical life. Remembering the surprise due to his father’s shock—bringing great energy to the task first in the writing and parallel to that, in the life situation—he might, had he lived, have tackled the corners where the race issue lurked. Writing induces virtually simultaneous shifts in consciousness and priority, when a topic creates a breakthrough, in the act of writing on it.  We see this in the memoirs of Carl Jung, where he comments that he picked up, for his autobiographical reflections, only places still holding energy—that is, saved till then to be dealt with. Those situations already dealt with had no energy and were ignored in his autobiography. That is, it is sometimes the very structure of a writer’s life that subjects s/he is intended to deal with, in the writing, hold the energy until used in that way. This block—being opened, at the time of death—left “open” what he would then have done about it. He died, knowing full well that this so-called secret would not “die” with him.

So I didn’t come up with valuable Milton stories for Anatole that day. I could bring up many now.

I also remembered how Milton had finished that conversation the day when he told me “When the time comes to finish—just finish.” He had exclaimed, “They were waiting for me.” That is, his friends. Was it true? This was no an arrogant statement, but something almost gasped, as if wrenched out. The conversation was on the subject of his advice about writing (“I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.” Pause. “Though in many ways, they weren’t mistakes.”) By his friends waiting for him, I took it to mean that it was a group, blocked in a force field; and that they were waiting, as it were, for the first step forward of one—at which point as a group they would have all begun to race onto the literary (perhaps world) scene. This was the impression in Krim’s portrait, when he pictured Klonsky as having the potential to be an Einstein or other great pioneer. In the coterie around Krim in the fifties, such predictions could seem reasonable, as they routinely had what Krim called almost illegally high ambitions. A New York intellectual environment that did not produce in literature this imagined result, but was virtually unreported on, in the figures that one by one dropped out.

Cyril Connolly had written of Milton Klonsky, in a London publication, that there were people who were friends of very famous people, who were quoted by them and sometimes turned into characters. But who were less-famous themselves. He said that perhaps they were “too proud to compete.” He said Milton Klonsky was such a person for his generation.  I had thought that he didn’t do enough. When I approached Anatole, reflecting this idea of Krim’s and of myself, Anatole said that he thought Milton did rather a lot. He began to list what he thought were the important works. This unarrogant, generous judgment, I felt, was evidently the way he saw ambition, and his own seasoned choices in his life. As we know, writing can be a great healer and self-interpreter. In the end, approaching this chapter, on the 60s, something stopped the writer. And I, having seen how intent he was, on going forward, find it a more intriguing question than the one of race; for after all, I knew about that for 24 years beforehand, and could have myself “blown the whistle” at any second. But I thought everyone knew. I encountered the reference from the moment of having an appointment with him one night in 1966, set up by Milton Klonsky, who was there too. The Harlem story, in Kafka, makes the information on his birth certificate, as C, transparently probable. He fit in down there in Harlem. Why? But he also had the manners of a gentleman. He went to great lengths to honor Klonsky’s memory, which he thought deserved, in a shared story as a Times Obituary for Klonsky. That, to him, was important. Really important. He made dead-sure that it got done.

I somehow feel, having listened in 1990 as he told me, at the end of his life, the value he put on being “talked to … as an equal,” the time had come to turn the tables and be very very sure that slant was mentioned, along with the other information.

It gives extraordinarily profound precision, to say of someone that he “wanted to be a writer, not a black writer. So he chose to live a lie rather than be trapped by the truth.” I found this indefensible. What I did find defensible, on the other hand, was the perceptive comment: “Broyard had confessed enough in his time to know that confession did nothing for the soul. He preferred to communicate his truths on higher frequencies.” On the other hand, while I am sure it is true he “preferred to communicate his truths on higher frequencies,” I am not sure about the first part—based on a quotation I took down, in which MK said precisely that he (himself) liked to “beat upon my breast”; i.e., his graphic picture, with its ancient references, to confession. If, as Anatole graciously said of Milton (in print), one could not “presume” to say anything about him, it’s seems “ironic”—that’s it—that one can say everything about himself, seizing on a facet, his Birth Certificate, penned down by people who (as Gates helpfully documented) did so, the very next year after “close to” 100 blacks were “lynched.” (This would be a good place to take a look at a dream Anatole reported.) In the new century, we will not confine people to one single frame of references—as here. Though this material on race should not have to be excluded. But we will multiply and make combinations, diagonals—as he, I believe, already did.

 See the March 7 obituary of Klonsky written by Broyard for The New York Times Book Review Supplement (1982), in which he uses this phrase (“His originality was such that though he was my closest friend for many years, he would suddenly strike me as a total stranger,” a phrase perhaps instructive in the present circumstances). As a sidelight of this sentence, he was defining originality—that it might include the ability to totally surprise. If it did so, it could be looked at from that point of view, though it could also be put into other lists of motivations and value (or psychological or sociological) systems. Which was it, ultimately and primarily?? Was it originality, and thus organic in the total personality or soul level, or was it primarily an escape or complex of some sort? The answer was all-important if a judgment were to be reached.

 Milton Klonsky, described as a Greenwich Village “poet genius,” a cult figure to Village literary people, in a book on “New York City in the 50s,” and as having “an IQ that could stutter your butter”—by Seymour Krim, in an essay on him, reprinted in his final posthumously published 1991 essay selections—was commissioned to write his memoirs on W. H. Auden, by The New Yorker, but died in the process in 1981. This long essay on Auden was included in his own (Milton Klonsky’s) posthumous selected essays, as “Chester, Wystan, Rhoda, and Me: A Fragment” (pp. 89-101, in A Discourse on Hip); it is otherwise-unpublished documentation about Auden, including the one nonhomosexual affair that he had, which was with Klonsky’s estranged wife. Klonsky told me, which is nowhere published, that he eventually came to believe that it was Auden’s roundabout relationship with him, that caused the deflected affair with his already-distant wife. Klonsky was friends with the other literary notables of the day, including such writers as James Ages. Klonsky begins the essay, walking along “West 4^th St.,” reading the Times. Having unfortuitously died while writing this commissioned article for The New Yorker, he is probably, for this accidental reason, not known to The New Yorker readers, though he is known to readers (in the past) of Commentary, Partisan Review, Hudson Review, etc. He was a very central figure in the coteries described in “White Like Me,” and was featured in the final paragraph of Kafka Was the Rage, in its posthumously published form—which was not as Anatole, had he lived, intended to continue it. He intended to continue, with a chapter of 1960s memoirs, beginning with his “Milton stories”—but ended the book in a broken-off version, cut short by his own death. In the accounts above, information was terminated as these figures of a generation of New York City friends and intellectuals tried to record their memories. Klonsky was the topic Anatole Broyard had reached in his memoirs, when he himself died, in 1990. The brief description, concluding the book, was not what he indicated to me was the note he wanted. Yet again, Klonsky did not go onto the record in any update since Krim’s essay in the way he otherwise would have. The comments included here (in the current short essay) come from two sources primarily: Anatole Broyard himself and Milton Klonsky—who at one point talked to him daily, at other points weekly. Anatole himself said it was daily, in the late period. If anyone needs to comment on the record, and cannot himself, it would be this person, whom Anatole described, in print as “my closest friend for many years,” a New York City intellectual “poet genius,” who was Jewish, white, of Russian ancestry. Published  in 1991, A Discourse on Hip , his Selected Writings, was expected by the publisher to take off by word of mouth; therefore, was never publicized. Therefore, this information was virtually unavailable to any researcher. Only by looking in the poet Delmore Schwartz’s letters, and in the index finding the reference to a letter Klonsky wrote to the Draft Board, would one have some documentary idea where to start looking for anecdotes. Schwartz said that Klonsky wrote the Draft Board, who drafter him, that being a poet he could not be called away on such short notice. The Draft Board relinquished, and gave him an extension from the Draft of six months—to get his papers readied.

 The posthumous Paragon House selected essays, which Krim participated in collecting—among which was the reprint of his 1960 essay, entitled “Milton Klonsky.”

 The article specifically says, that stepping out on West 4^th Street, Anatole Broyard became white, which is, ironically, the very street on which Milton Klonsky had his walk-up Village apartment. Thus, in all Greenwich Village, this is the one street it would be least accurate to cite.

 We had set up the meeting, to recall “Milton stories”–on his part, for his memoirs. I had in fact taken down many of the fabled phrases of Milton Klonsky, that made him a cult figure (verbatim, as he said them). This picked up where Krim’s essay, ending at 1960, stopped. I came on the scene in 1965.

 On the very night that Delmore died, he went down to the Village. And he met Milton. I was almost there but had just left. They talked. It was one of the very final moments in Delmore Schwartz’s life, and his old friend was there, perhaps representing all the old friends who would have liked to be there. How was his mind? I asked. It went in and out of lucidity, I was told. But at times, it was “completely lucid.”

 A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky (T. Solotaroff, Ed.). Detroit, Mich: Wayne State University Press.

The post From New York City: Letter to the Inhabitants appeared first on Margaret A. Harrell.

Romain Thomassin, a French filmmaker, is right now editing down hours and hours of film, made on location in mi-October for a commissioned 15-minute documentary on Hunter S. Thompson and San Francisco – featuring Hell’s Angels.

For that, he interviewed Peter Richardson, David Streitfeld, and me on location, in Hunter’s old hanging-out spots there. Just wrapped up. Now the hours and hours of film are being edited down to fit the show format. Final edits are in Paris in December. Then this will appear on French TV to an audience of 100,000. I’ll alert ou when short doc is posted on their website.

THEN THE JULY GONZOFEST, the final one. To celebrate Hunter S. Thompson’s birthday this year, a stellar lineup for a panel on The Hell’s Angels Letters gathered at Louisville. KY, July 13.  Here are some photos from past Gonzofests I attended.

Gonzofest 2023 was held at the High Horse Bar July 14-15, 2023 from noon until late into the night – A large bar and music venue.  And lots of music there was.

See the brand-new TV interview on the GF by founder Ron Whitehead here.

Attendees flocking from all over the country, snapped up the 400 tickets and made a most lively crowd. As did the expert Friday panel on The Hell’s Angels Letters. This Hunter S. Thompson themed festival is complete with an Art and Literary Contest, local breweries, and live music.

To read more, go here. And here. TO BUY TICKETS, GO HERE. 

Image credit above: graphic artist Mary Fields

Photo credits: Juan and me and my face: artist/poet Jinn Bug

If you would like a signed copy of any of my books, let me know so I can take a copy for you to the Gonzofest! There is also now an e-book option for The Hell’s Angels Letters on Amazon here!

THE HELL’S ANGELS LETTERS PANEL:

Earliest Hints of Gonzo:

Pranks, Agonies, as a Young Hunter Prepares His Launching Pad

Peter Richardson teaches Humanities and American Studies at San Francisco State University. His publications include critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and Carey McWilliams, who edited Thompson at The Nation magazine. He is currently writing a book about Rolling Stone magazine for the University of California Press. 

Margaret Ann Harrell spent thirty adventurous years abroad in Morocco and Europe, returning to the United States in 2001. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow and has authored eighteen books, including The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic in collaboration with Ron Whitehead (Norfolk Press) and Space Encounters III—Inserting Consciousness into Collisions: A True Fantasy Adventure by the Earth through the Quantum Entangled World. Also, the Keep This Quiet! memoir series and Particle Pinata Poems. She is an editor and an advanced light body meditation teacher as well as a cloud photographer exhibited now and then in Romania, Italy, Bruges (Belgium), and New York City and a mentor to those wanting to go deeper into themselves and their potential.

William McKeen is a professor and the former Chair of the Department of Journalism at Boston University; he is the author or editor of thirteen successful books, including Outlaw Journalist, Mile Marker Zero, and Everybody Had an Ocean. McKeen teaches journalism history, literary journalism, and rock n’ roll and American culture and previously taught at Western Kentucky University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Florida, where he chaired the department of journalism. Before beginning his teaching career, he was a reporter, then associate editor of The American Spectator and the Saturday Evening Post. Mile Marker Zero is “a tall but telescopic-sight-true tale of Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and a large cavorting cast running around with sand in their shoes at ‘ground zero for lust and greed and most of the other deadly sins,’ Key West,” wrote Tom Wolfe. McKeen spent his early years in England, Germany, Nebraska, and Texas.

Dr. John F. Brick teaches English, first-year rhetoric, and creative writing at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His scholarship includes a comprehensive annotated variorum of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which traces the development of Thompson’s 1971 classic across extant texts and archival documents and provides comprehensive historical, cultural, and literary context. The result not only recaptures something of the first blush of Vegas‘ satire and profundity but offers unprecedented granularity in examining Thompson’s creative process at the height of his powers. Dr. Brick’s most recent work examines intersections of sportswriting and nationalism. In his spare time he enjoys distance running and cycling, and playing for the Milwaukee Hurling Club.

Timothy Jack Denevi is a professor in the MFA program at George Mason University and the past nonfiction editor of Literary Hub. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Time, the Paris Review, and New York Magazine, to name a few. And he has been interviewed prolifically, across the spectrum of major news outlets, including the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, following the release of his highly successful Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade against American Fascism. Denevi grew up in Los Gatos, California, and lives near Washington DC. He is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Ron Whitehead, co-founder of & Chief of Poetics for GonzoFest, is a Lifetime US National Beat Poet Laureate. His life is newly documented in the film Outlaw Poet: The Legend of Ron Whitehead (2022). “Ron Whitehead is Bodhisattva in Kentucky,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics,” said Hunter S. Thompson. An award-winning poet and performer, author of 30 books and 40 albums, his words have been translated into twenty languages.

 Art by Grant Goodwine 

Inside the Kitchen

With Rory Feehan at the Frazier 2019

Margaret Harrell – Hunter Thompson

Juan Thompson and me over dinner in the Brown Hotel

Juan Thompson, Margaret Harrell, a firing range

Photo credit: Jinn Bug

Ron Whitehead and Jinn Bug

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Click to read the marvelous interview conducted by John Kennedy.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. He sets the interview up this way:

Never for a moment quail before your antagonists. Your fearlessness will be to them a sure token of impending destruction, but to you it will be a sure token of your salvation—a token coming from God. – Philippians 1:28

She says life has taught her that being spiritually fearless and unapologetically yourself is an essential component of identifying and nourishing the God-given gifts and purpose one is born with. She realized that to achieve that for herself she needed to cast aside crippling self-consciousness. Achieving that easier-said-than-done goal, she remembers, was greatly assisted by some of the notable men in her life. In her memoirs, Harrell illustrates how  Thompson, Klonsky, and Mensaert particularly exhibited the sort of authenticity that was vital to helping her learn how to express her true self.

JWK: You’re latest book is called The Hell’s Angels Letters and is a full-color coffee table book that follows up on your Keep This Quiet! memoir as . . . 

Click on the link to read the article.

A marvelous thank-you to the publisher, John Kennedy.

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is one of my favorite books by me. Readers often tell me how much they like it. Yet it’s not nearly so well known as Keep This Quiet! The human story in it is complex, about four writers’ lives as they intermix with each other. Three very intelligent, fabulous males in all their complexity, spread across a continent and a globe, that I, in my “hub” in Morocco or leaving once a year for a month in the United States kept exciting ties with.

Just landed on New York City soil, for a brief stopover in New York, where did I go? Of course, unannounced, my feet took me down to West Fourth Street in the  Village, walking the entire distance from midtown, telling myself I didn’t know where I was walking to. Of course, I knew. To Milton’s for my yearly indispensable feasting on his witticisms and steely analysis of whatever current predicament I found myself in in my marriage. His advice might be, when I bemoaned Jan’s suicidal tendencies,”Give him something to rise to. . . Or go down with him. But don’t be a bystander while this man commits suicide.” Never, that is, be a bystander in your life. Plunge into it. I always felt ten miles high, like Alice, after listening to such talk from an insider, who knew life through and through. And had the soul of a guru. With Hunter the attraction was something else. But deep and strong – and necessary – it was. And we often caught up on these trips to the States. Then back to Morocco, to my primitive sunny lifestyle there. Temporary, I always knew. But temporary was lonjg. Fourteen years of Oum Kalthoum, and Jacques Brel, and of course Mozart, all Jan’s favorites. And I forget Piaf.

REVIEWS:

“A passionately written memoir that doesn’t sit around being fit and proper and straight laced . . . As a key to the lives of these three writers it is idiosyncratic and in age where blandness is the norm, it is a pleasure to go on her journey and find out a little about what made these men tick and what drove her to them – Eric Jacobs” – Beat Scene print magazine (UK) # 70

Click here for a short YouTube video with some art and drawings by Jan during our life in Morocco.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

In this sequel to Keep This Quiet! Margaret relocates to Morocco with her exotic, fascinating, unstable Belgian poet husband, Jan Mensaert. Living in villages, she adopts the local lifestyle of cooking on charcoal and shops for fresh groceries daily with a basket in open air markets. But the main focus is on her encounters with the three male protagonists, “outlaw” authors one and all, brilliantly creative and with the personalities that match. In once-yearly trips to the United Statets, she re-energizes on a diet of one-liner advice, deeply digested and wise, from genius-poet Milton Klonsky. This, she reports to the reader, magically as if her mind were a tape recorder. She also gets Gonzo updates from Hunter Thompson – two relationships that never lose their hold or significance, even necessity. From Morocco, to Belgium, to Switzerland, and the United States, Margaret pits wits with – learns from – and grows through these rare, close – sometimes romantic – relationships with men who exemplify authenticity. At one point, trying desperately to find her, Hunter writes, “Dear Margaret, Where are you and why? I’ve lost track completely. My last definite word was from a toilet-hole in Algiers.” He wants her to work on his next manuscript. This is 1971. Moving from 1970 (Belgium/a Cairo honeymoon) to 1986 (the Jung Institute Zurich), the book ends up fittingly at Hunter’s Owl Farm. Where else could the last two chapters take place? There, she reintroduces herself to Hunter. In fine form, he is trying to take the romance to the next level.
Actually, they both are intent on it.

REVIEWS:

“Margaret A. Harrell has done it again. In her brutally compassionately explicitly honest second autobiography KEEP THIS QUIET TOO! Harrell manages to repeatedly pull the rug out fromunder the reader. She travels from North Carolina to New York City to Morocco to Belgium to India toSwitzerland to Owl Farm, and many other places,…in search of her self. From depth psychology to dream analysis tohangoutologies to ecstatic love making to out of body astral travels to spirit guides, adventures andmisadventures, she is guided and guides herself ever homeward to her own heart and soul. Margaret A. Harrell’snew, second, autobiography, like volume one, is a masterpiece.” – Outlaw Poet Ron Whitehead

“Keep THIS Quiet Too! is a real-life saga of living and learning with eyes and ears open. At times adventurous, at times sensual, Keep This Quiet Too! hinges upon the complexities of human relationships, especially the challenges posed by the heart-wrenching feelings of love that may or may not be fully requited. Highly recommended.” – Midwest Book Review

“An honest and unflinching examination of the choices we make.” – San Francisco Book Review

Click for another short video of Spanish dances and honkeytonk composed by Jan Mensaert, played at his fast pace. A deeply artistic personality with all the drawbacks that can go with it. And the ebullient upside.

I love this piano music. Jan was a natural entertainer, but if you ever wanted to meet an artist in your life, he was the consummate artist. That’s one of the main reasons I was attracted to him.

A cameo appearance comes in from 1990, Willy Van Luyten, my boyfriend at the time, who also got roped into the drama of my life as it unfolded on a spiritual level at this point.

Willy Van Luyten

A short video clip taken from Nick Storm’s videography of my first presentation at the Louisville Gonzofest. This one is on first meeting Hunter. Need I say more?

Hunter Thompson at ranch 1991, where the book ends

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His wife, Susan Miner, is pulling back the curtain on aspects of his teaching and life that she observed at his side these last decades. To do this, she will have a weekly newsletter, the first one having just come out August 5, 2018. She writes:

My focus will be on what I believe is the central message of the Lama Sing Group, through all 45 years, underscored in Al’s final year +. I will reiterate their message in layman’s terms based on conversations he and I had, as well as those we had with the Group sometimes in private readings, and include accompanying excerpts from as far back as 1973 because the message never wavered. Go here to read the first newsletter. I especially love the part about the lions.

Al Miner first comes into the Keep This Quiet! series in Too! He reappears in Initiations and Ancient Secrets Revealed. Here is how he is introduced:

Midway through Keep THIS Quiet Too!, after leaving my husband in Morocco, I was living in Charlottesville, VA. Happening to take a workshop at A.R.E. (the Edgar Cayce organization), I asked who was the most reliable psychic; the first name that came up was Al’s. I was not used to psychic readings. Being a novelist at the time, I counted on getting all my information through inspiration and self-enquiry. But something had changed. I had to get some urgent questions settled. Things had become confused. I thought Milton Klonsky, after death, was guiding me. So I needed a source who saw beyond our 3-D reality. See Al, I was advised. The suggestion was unanimous. And he really came through.

On his website Al introduces his psychic journeys (with the Lama Sing group):

For over four decades, while the Lama Sing group was giving information sought by individuals and groups, Al was off  in his own incredible journeys on “the other side.” NDE descriptions (near death experiences) often depict some of this, but the remarkable thing is that Al has an “NDE” every time he does a reading and disassociates from his body so completely it is much like the process of “dying.”

The purpose of this website is to share, not only the information given by Lama Sing, but also the insights obtained by Al during his journeys and his intent to return with full Consciousness in order to incorporate that Consciousness into his life on Earth.

Mystical  Channel

Allen Joseph Miner, a Western mystic teacher of Enlightenment, is considered by many to be the foremost trance channel of his day, and the successor to Edgar Cayce. An accidental psychic at that. He is the largely anonymous originator of such terms as “sea of faces.” He became a channel (a working psychic) though a series of unexpected incidents and mishaps (or tests) that revealed unquestionably his mission and level of consciousness. Today he is the author of forty years of readings, individual as well as general-interest. And of over 15 books. The tale is best told in “Al’s Story” on his own website,  which describes the Lama Sing group he channels as a collection of spirits from God-consciousness. But for a quick overview, some highlights are below. The quotations are with permission:

ABOUT CHANNELING. What is it?

Channel is that term given generally to those who enable themselves to be, as much as possible, open and passable in terms of information that can pass through them from the Universal Consciousness, or other such which are not associated in the direct sense with their finite consciousness of the current incarnation.

Al Miner and Lama Sing

Revealing a Life Purpose

In a chance hypnosis session with Dr. E. Arthur (Art) Winkler, it was suggested  “You will go back to that time and place of greatest spiritual significance to you now.”  What happened next is recounted as follows, reprinted in extracts with permission. A shorter account is on their current website:

The next thing Al knew, he was awake, but where seemingly moments ago he’d been lying down, on the leather recliner, now he was standing. Adjusting his eyes to the dark, he realized he was outdoors, apparently under a twilight sky that was giving way to nightfall. He looked at his hands to see if he was really awake, but they were different somehow, as if not his own, and the shirt he’d had on when he’d closed his eyes as Dr. Winkler had begun talking to him in that strange measured pace, had been replaced by a heavy, simple garment of some sort that went almost down to his feet. And there, on his feet, instead of his shoes were sandals. Abruptly aware of people talking behind him, he spun around. Not far away was a small fire with a group gathered close around it, obviously warming themselves against the frigid air. A bit further away were the silhouettes of palm trees next to a small pool, and far off in the distance, he could make out sizeable dunes surrounding them in a sort of gigantic bowl of desert hills. The members of the group were talking amongst themselves with excitement, not seeming to pay any particular attention to his presence off on the outskirts of the oasis.

Something from behind seemed to call Al, shaking him loose from staring at the scene. Turning, the voices carrying on in the background, he stood, gazing out toward the skyline and into the night beyond, a feeling of joyful anticipation growing deep within, that someone he cared about very deeply was soon to arrive. As he searched the horizon for an indeterminable time, he wrestled with thoughts. ‘What is going on? Who am I and where am I? Who is this I’m waiting for that I seem to know but can’t quite remember?’ all the while the thrill inside all but bursting forth in expectation that one so dear to him would, in moments, come walking out of the darkness down the dune to him and their small, waiting group. And then he started to hear a voice, calling to him. Softly, barely audible at first, but slowly growing louder, the voice of this Dr. Winkler calling him to come back.

This chance hypnosis session revealed an astonishing gift. Continuing from the earlier website account:

 Once fully back, Al wanted to tell his friends about his incredible experience, but instead, they began to tell him of their own experience and of information he’d been giving. Al refused to believe. “Well, that can’t be true. I was in this desert oasis and…” but they weren’t listening, too excited about what he…or someone…had spoken . . .  Laughing, they told him they’d actually been having a conversation with him and he had told them many things, even about another friend of theirs, who Al had never heard of, who lived in Maine and was in deep trouble.

Confused and not able to believe what was being said by the others, Al wanted no more part of this, when Dr. Winkler said, smiling, “I’d like you to hear this”, and reached down and began playing the tape that had recorded the entire session.

When the recording started, and Al heard the voice, he wanted to jump up and run out of the room. What he heard was obviously his voice, but not only was the accent not his, how could it be that he was speaking with them while he was having his own experience in the desert? The more upset Al got, the more everyone else laughed. Finally, Dr. Winkler brought a chair over and sat down next to Al.

“It’s okay,” Dr. Winkler said softly. This kind of occurrence is rare, but it does happen. You have an uncommon ability to move in the sonambolistic state of hypnosis very easily.”

What happened when he went back to a time several centuries in the past (while simultaneously diagnosing illnesses in the “present”) became the turning point, leading up to the decades as full-time channel that occurred since. However, the conversion was not without preparation or “tests.”

It would probably be well to add in conclusion that the “chance” hypnosis session happened after several out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in Al’s earlier life, perhaps in some way preparing him, giving him more of a propensity to believe in unusual phenomena.

There was a near drowning at the age of four in an icy Wisconsin lake, in which, as Al was floating peacefully down to the bottom, looking around at the beauty in the vividly clear lake, he saw a snake swimming towards him. The last thing he recalls, before remembering waking up in his bed with a pile of blankets stuffed around him, was the snake, which sight broke his trance and scared him enough to begin his frantic climb to the surface.

When he was nine, he was not expected to survive the rheumatic fever that had been ravaging his young body for more than six months. He was aware, as he lay staring at the ceiling, of the doctor speaking with his mother in a hushed voice in the next room and that she began to weep as he consoled her. And then, as she had so many times when the pain became excruciating and the fever too much to stand, My-Lady (as he called her) came to him as he gave way to deliria, holding her hand out, lifting him out of his body and into worlds beyond.

But this time was different. Instead of returning him, as she always did when the pain subsided, they traveled far away, and when they returned, it was not to his body but to somewhere just above his home. Somehow he could look down, past the roof, the ceiling, and into the kitchen, where he saw his mother weeping, and in the next room, his body lying still on the sofa where they had temporarily moved him. As My-Lady showed him the scene, Al knew he was being given a choice—leave with her to remain in realms beyond, or return to his frail, sickly body and to the pain. It was his love for his mother that caused Al to return. There would still be quite some time of pain and recuperation remaining, but it was strangely different, and somehow bearable. That was the last time Al would see My-Lady, though unbeknownst to him, she would be born on Earth four years later, and in the autumn of their years, would return to him to become his wife, Susan.

Finally, there was the time he was coming home very early in the morning after finishing a night in a club with his band, when he got a flat tire. Not really needing to be concerned about anyone coming at this hour of night on the deserted back-country road, but pulling onto the shoulder anyway, Al had gone around to get the spare and jack, and was buried to his waist in the huge trunk of his 55 Olds.

Suddenly a flash of light shined into the trunk from behind him, and the next thing he remembers, he was sitting on the bank of a ditch about ten feet deep, about fifty feet across from where his car had been, lights flashing and people running about, talking, shouting. A sheriff, pad and pen in hand, was calling across to him, “Son! How the hell’d you get over there?”

Somewhere down the road, Al could make out the other car, its front-in totally smashed, his own car upside down in the ditch. A shaken Al was having difficulty relating the incident: “I was trying to get the stuff out to fix my flat, when I saw this glaring light and that’s the last thing I remember.” By now, Al was hearing the sheriff’s voice more and more muffled, as if miles away, “Well, son, how can that be? They were doing about 80 MPH when they came up over that hill. Could only’ve been a few seconds before they hit you. I climbed down the ditch to look at your car. Back bumper’s rammed under your back seat. If you hadn’t gotten outta the way, that car would’ve cut you in ha—…”

With the sheriff continuing to ask him questions he could not answer, Al was quietly asking himself: “My life’s savings are gone—saxophone, clarinet, car. What’ll I do? And how did I get all the way over here? What’s happened here?” as the ambulance sped away with the other car’s occupants.

In a recent reading, Lama Sing said that, among many other things, certainly Al’s choice to change course in two major points in his life—first from the entertainment business and then from corporate America—were like tests for him to move from temptations—like the lure of money and stature—that would enable him to be a pure and open channel through which these works could flow.

I had the delight of meeting Al and Susan in person, and there was no more humble yet lofty, Light-filled person. Enjoy the website that accumulates his learning and teachings.

BOOKS AND PROJECTS. See Library of Consciousness™ | By Al Miner & Lama Sing for the many projects of the Library of Consciousness, a library of readings, and published and up-coming books.

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Harrell’s bold and searching collection takes readers on an odyssey of inquiry, with the first and foremost question being ‘How to establish that / Yes, I am / One with God and God is / One with You.’ But rather than provide an answer, Harrell’s poems seek to use the question as a gateway into a thought-space where the act of seeking knowledge results in spiritual transcendence. In a note, Harrell describes her spirituality as a conscious, living thing shaped over time by a series of spiritual events she calls ‘initiations,’ and through her poetry, Harrell seeks to divulge her spiritual wisdom.

The principle spiritual tenet in Particle Piñata is that all knowledge of the universe is united in an ever-shifting entity to which all people contribute and borrow, including the poet’s literary inspirations Baudelaire, Emerson, Whitman, and Joyce, and major figures from the poet’s own life, which include Milton Klonsky and Hunter Thompson. . . .

Touching on religion, philosophy, particle physics, linguistics, and more heady concepts, Harrell’s collection is a cosmic, often esoteric whirlwind which seeks to bring the poet’s conception of a spiritual being to life.
Takeaway: A cosmic, sophisticated collection that touches on spirituality, philosophy, and physics.

Great for fans of: Milton Klonsky, Delmore Schwartz.

From the Publisher:

The Particle Piñata collection spans over forty years of Life tackled from the heart. The genesis emerged when, living in Morocco in 1980, Margaret Ann Harrell began recording her dreams. And they poured in, introducing her to image trails.” She was in deep contact with the unconscious. In it resided this poet, a “second-class citizen” of herself. The poet to whom words came easily because after all she was in the unconscious, whereas the conscious prose author struggled, edited, cut, sweated, and was published. No longer is the poet in the closet. Having been a spokesperson for “the unconscious,” or collective unconscious, before, in this poetry Harrell brings in the transpersonal nature of us all. From after-death communications to stimulating RUMI-nations to metaphysics in “a bottle,” her poems bring puzzles, thought-provoking, with depth. Many are “To the Earth,” announcing prophetically, in the 1980s, the upheaval we are seeing today. True to the brand of humor of the unconscious, there is a section of brilliant word play, narrating insights about the untold stories of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, theChrist spirit, and the universal Christ consciousness.

From—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate

The time of the grandmothers, of the nurturing healing feminine energy has arrived. Patriarchy has sewn destruction long enough. We must all, female and male, become healers, seers. In her epic PARTICLE PINATA, author Margaret Ann Harrell stands in direct lineage with the desert mystics, the poet prophets of old and, simultaneously, with the contemporary cutting edge avant-garde. In a whirling dance with the creative forces of the universe Harrell draws explicit and implicit lines to Rumi, Blake, Yeats, Joyce, Jung, and others while forging mystical connections with clouds and coastlines, dancing in the borderlands of space and time, of being and not being, of embracing and letting go. And she accomplishes it all in her own distinctly original poetic voice. Through decades of carrying these poems from continent to continent, Margaret Ann Harrell has continued to add new poems and photos, to edit and revise, to transform her self into an ever evolving being, into this masterpiece book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go ahead, open the front cover and enter. You’ll never be the same.

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Fortunately, I discovered there was more of myself. After exhaustively covering much of my life, I had not peered closely enough into the 1990s, that grand period when my life was pretty haywire by normal standards. Was one book enough to cover it? My garage said no. It revealed forgotten mysteries, thoughts, convictions. I geared up to go in hot pursuit. Here is a glimpse of the new edition of Keep This Quiet! IV: Ancient Secrets Revealed that is just about to come out!

Author’s Note to the 2018 Edition 

I am peering into the past in this edition, at times trying to decipher—from newly retrieved materials in my garage—who I was back then; who this person writing in my name was, this person that I absorbed into me and spoke for, when—uncovering these writings “she” made for herself—I find I didn’t exactly remember “her.” I “remembered” who I am now, and how I thought I got there. Ah. It’s not the case at all. Often, when she speaks for herself, resurrected from the past, I find a different voice. And, I ask myself, if I can’t even remember myself properly, interpret myself in the “past” properly, how on Earth can I speak for someone else? How can any of us? Thus, it is really true, from what I’ve learned in revising Keep This Quiet! IV, that everything is subjective. Even, my internal records of me are subjective, my memory is, with only these newly discovered documents, these confessions and accounts, guiding me into the “past” this time—steering as into an old mine but with a real miner’s light.

The boxes piled up. Some from 2001, when I packed up, left Belgium, and prophetically came to North Carolina, to live. But I never opened them. They went through two moves and one day as they sat in the garage in their original boxes, guarding their secrets, someone warned me they could attract termites. Cardboard could. That did it. Slowly I would move them into other containers. Hopefully throwing out a lot. But that’s not exactly what happened. In writing Keep This Quiet!, volumes one and two, I had the foolproof chronology of Hunter’s letters. But what about Keep This Quiet! IV. Not at all. But I had something else. Letters from me to me. I hadn’t known I was writing them to me, to my future self or my “inner masculine” (animus) energy. To my shadow, whoever. From my shadow even.

So what did I leave, as in a bottle, for my “future self,” me, right now? It fills in a lot of details. For in an Awakening, a lot that we’re  not ready for we discard, interpret wrongly. Now my mature self is ready—for what I recorded fresh off the inner waves: an unexplored, documented history I would never have reconstructed exactly this way. In fact, I didn’t. These writings, some twenty-five years old, inform the previously published edition, shedding new light on spots I dimly recalled; also, time has finally caught up to what was ahead of the times (such as when I, with spirit guides, predicted—in the future—“out of control events,” in particular, grave dangers from misunderstood, highly energized, on-the-move archetypes, such as “Home”).

Inserting them into the earlier account, I listen as with a conch shell to those waves of information my greater self brought, planted,  sometimes prophesizing—that would all have been lost had I not beckoned myself back with interest. This includes what appears to be almost fairytale narrations, of multidimensional meanings. And in this way, looking at these records, I synched my life’s advance notices with now, listening to this very bold, out-of-the-box thinking “past self,” who, indeed, was quite different than what I thought, as you will find out. As she made her records before nontime became Time and unity consciousness and my multidimensional self expressed itself further (as we all do) in real-time variations of some of these and other insights all over the globe NOW.

 

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Here is the interview:

I thoroughly enjoyed being interviewed by this gifted person. Young and energetic too.

Her second interview with me – on Keep This Quiet! IV: More Initiations was just posted July 18. Click to listen.

Her brand-new December third interview with me  – on the value of meditation (stories, tips, etc.)

Victoria Lynn Weston has worked as an intuitive consultant for over 15 years. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Victoria has been a featured guest on dozens of radio, television shows and print media including; the Atlanta PARADE magazine, The Atlanta Business Journal, ABC Nightline, ABC Talk Radio; CNBC; BUSINESS WEEK Online; INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, WIRED NEWS and THE NEW YORK TIMES. Victoria is also the President and Founder of AYRIAL.com and MediaQuire.com.

Full interview/ press release

 Must hear audio w clip to inspire people to share

 And the full range of Social media outlets – from Pinterest/Ayrial to Facebook/MediaQuire and even FlipBoard/MediaQuire

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The third in the series, Keep This Quiet! Initiations continues my memoir. As well as being a memoir, this book is indebted to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (born in 1875) and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (born in 1900 in Vienna), who dreamed together of uniting physics with psychology. I attended the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, Switzerland, a suburb of Zurich, 1984‒87.

Jung Institute Library – photo Julia B

It was in Zurich I had my first initiation. The initiation built on the sudden (to me) death of Milton Klonsky (November 29, 1981), which baffled me, made me question whether death really existed in a nonphysical sense—a question I wanted to answer for myself by experience. Did the mind that told me “I was a crazy kid. You know what I was crazed by? Immortality” just vanish into dust? He went on: “I’ve died. But I’ve died into me; he’s still around. I can talk to that kid anytime I want to.” Was Milton’s astonishing mind (that library of knowledge, beacon of sparkling insight) obliterated? . . .

When I started writing, I had no idea how strong the Jung‒Pauli quest aspect would become. The opening section grew longer than I expected. It kept bursting the bounds I set for it, establishing a quest.

One needs an initiation like in Zurich only once—to come in and shatter the old, firm basis, every assumption I took for granted. I think a lot of people can relate to the pattern of breaking through a block to the future, annihilating obstacles to it. The way this comes about will create an individual story, a personal myth, or contribute to, as Jung put it, “dreaming the myth onward.”

Even when we have spiritual experiences today (outside established religion), we are often given in the States at least Western explanations. Whereas in the East it’s more matter of fact, because there is an ancient societal culture that regularly guided people in a structured way through some of these experiences.

In fact, if there was a great drought, people might gather in a tent and pray and chant for rain, and on a sudden moment the guru would say “now let’s all go out,” and rain would start. Or they might call on the rainmaker. Society expected this kind of participation—which we in the recent West didn’t. (Except in some Native American situations.)
The following true story was told often by Jung, who got it from Richard Wilhelm, a sinologist who translated the I Ching and brought it to Jung’s attention. Wilhelm witnessed the story below unfold:

A rainmaker, Kiau Tschou, was summoned to a Chinese village after a long drought. The situation was dire; local rituals had been to no avail. Upon arriving from another province, the withered old man asked for a hut to be constructed and enough food and water for five days brought, then settled into solitude. There was not even a dark cloud for three days. The fourth day saw dark clouds, then rain and rain and rain. The villagers asked how he made the rain and he answered that he didn’t: “When I first arrived in your village, it felt discordant, disharmonious, unbalanced, disturbed. And I felt out of sorts with myself.” He had then retreated into the hut to reestablish his inner harmony. And the rain came.

About this story a Buddhist article, “Turning a Tap in Adelaide, a Downpour in London,” adds:

The rainmaker replied, “No, you don’t understand. You see, where I come from everything happens as it is supposed to. It rains when it’s supposed to rain and stops when it is supposed to stop. It is the same with the people too. We all do as we are supposed to as well. But when I alighted from the carriage in your province I recognised at once that you are all out of harmony and so it was no wonder that it did not rain when it is supposed to. Being here myself I became infected by your disharmony and I became out of sorts. I knew that if anything could be done then I would have to put ‘my own house in order’ first. And that is all I have been doing for the past three days!”

I want to leave the impression that my experiences are not particularly unusual.
They are, however, “irrational,” counter to the left brain. But the left brain and even the ego are just a piece of our physical self, a piece of the “known quantity” of us, which we all know is only a glimpse, like our limited glimpse into the universe.

An underlying wish in this book is to make “becoming yourself”—your most individuated—seem “safe,” if you will, while adventurous and unsafe. But the kind of unsafe that’s fun. And fulfilling.

SOURCES:

The rainmaker story is told by Jung in various forms. The above account is based on the one by psychologist Stephen Diamond, “Redefining Reality (Part Two), Psychotherapy, Synchronicity, and the Rainmaker,” Evil Deeds/Psychology Today, January 8, 2010. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201001/redefining-reality-part-two-psychotherapy-synchronicity-and-the-rainmaker.
Ven Sochu, “Turning a Tap in Adelaide, a Downpour in London.”

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