I spoke of I and Thou with an Arab student I met at the International House in Berkeley. It was lonely at the seminary on holidays. Most of the single students went home. I had taken the bus to Berkeley to look for someone to be with, but it was just as empty on that campus. The coffee shop was open, and I ordered a milkshake. The Arab student and his young blue-eyed female companion prepared it for me, giggling and flirting.
The young man did come and sit with me at a booth, probably at my invitation. He was a graduate student in economics and spoke of how he would apply his studies to the situation in his country. He smiled dismissively when I explained my own interest in theology and the new book by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber. To introduce the Eternal Thou into the universe of discourse, however, felt more labored than logical. He looked over his shoulder to his companion. Serious purpose and resolve were carved in the dark ancient lines of his face, but he was distracted now, full of fire and mischief, his eyes giddy with delight and desire. His obsession with the young woman reigned supreme over our dialogue, which ended shortly. Was I in encounter with the Eternal Thou in some important sense, in the person of both the man across the table and perhaps the woman behind the counter?
A small but quite memorable thing happened on my first Thanksgiving Day. Interesting how such seemingly insignificant moments become part of the architecture of our minds. I was grateful to be invited by the student body treasurer and his wife Alice for dinner that day. I was directed to sit next to Alice’s sister, who appeared in my sky like a dazzling comet with a trailing flare. That was when a spry, preppy, flamboyant woman sat next to a dimwit who was pulled to her by his roots. Which fork do I use anyway? Do I eat the salad first? Was I being invited to be her boyfriend? That couldn’t be! If only I was capable of pursuit. I hated my oversized dull brown suit, which made me look only skinnier and browner against this celestial luminary.
Was this house of fire and fog in some sense sacred ground?
It turned out that I could drown the pain, if only temporarily, of the thorn of anxiety both of my discomfiture in intimate situations like this and of something like individualized existence itself. That the anomie was not a temporary condition but a permanent inhabitant of this clay vessel was sinking in as a foregone conclusion. I began taking the Greyhound bus into San Francisco. The Hungry Eye, known for its jazz, was too far away from the bus depot. It was on or just off Market Street that I saw The Young Lions and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing and ate Mars Bars in grand cinemas and submerged myself in dark adult amusement arcades and burlesque shows of comedy acts and dance routines harking back to vaudeville. On the screen I saw women in bathing suits frolicking, shaking supposedly to the swing music of small combos and big bands. It was amusing, however, how the music of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and the Dorsey brothers was tacked on so out of sync. While the music changed, the reel continued in dead silence.
Most shops were closed on holidays. My face went by in the windows up and down the lonely boulevard. The one place always open day and night was the bus depot cafe. There I sat and watched the “Anchors Away” navy men in uniform milling about waiting for their buses. I played Frank Sinatra on the juke box, “If you’re young, take a chance if you love her. Tell her you love her, tell her you love her.” The song was an abyss of dread for young inept lovers who craved tenderness but were afraid to risk themselves enough to say, Could you put up with me forever? And their ship was waiting in the harbor.
For me there was no Thou but for the waitress. At the counter alone with its apple pie, coffee, and cigarettes, the I was vagrant and impotent. It was voiceless except to ask for the remaining piece of pie or a refill. In the asking, however, its voice was heard and for a fleeting moment the cup brimmed over. And the song continued, becoming urgent, “Tell her now before it’s too late. And before she belongs to another. . ..” By now the young wilted I was a prisoner in Alcatraz looking into the waters of futility. It was said that no one has escaped by swimming across from the prison island to the mainland, the undercurrents being so powerful.
In the middle of the night there were few passengers. The dark vinyl seats soaked up whatever light there was. The hit songs played in my head as the bus moved across Golden Gate Bridge and through the sleeping towns. The driver called out their names as we came to them, Sausalito, Mill Valley, Larkspur. The street lamps glowered down in the fog as a passenger got off the bus and walked away. The classy Foster and Kleiser and other billboards drew the eye on the freeway as we passed them. The freeways were brand new then. Everyone was talking about how one could drive forever without coming to a light. This luxury blinded us all. No one saw how these roadways would proliferate. No one understood their true meaning in terms of their political provenance or their human and nonhuman consequences.
When we came to San Anselmo the driver glanced at me in his mirror.
5 | Yosemite Valley
I sat down by the river and read
I was split into two Kierkegaardian halves, intellect and existence. On the intellectual level I was applying myself well, asking good questions in class, impressing my teachers and classmates with my love of learning, getting As in my theology classes though doing only fair in Hebrew and Greek, church history, and the psychology of religion. I was truly eager for this new knowledge and the new perspective and promise to which it would surely lead. It was the early dawn of my theological awakening, and I was impatient to see what the new day would bring. I even bought a new book by a Princeton theologian to read during the summer months when I would be working at Yosemite National Park. Sin and Death were present too in the form of Pride and Wrath. I became arrogant in the imagination of my heart, quarrelsome even with some of my teachers.
On the existential level, the level on which we live, move, and have our being, I was carried away by the undercurrents of the Bay Area waters. I knew when the buses came and went, and I braved the fog, cold winds, and damp air to lose myself in the neon of Market Street. I would not be held prisoner to a traditional piety that was plagued by misgivings, and whose walls were disintegrating against the tsunami force of life itself and the sheer size of the world. This secret manifesto was issued quite unconsciously by the way I was trying to forge my survival as my own bewildered self in this new situation whose dangers and mysteries I did not know.
What I craved was carnal knowledge. Why could not I breach the confines of this theological hill, find my way to The Hungry Eye, listen to Bye Bye, Blackbird, and quiver to the tapping of the cymbals, the hollow echoes of the base, and the weeping of the saxophone? Who sat at those tables? Was there a counter? Was there dancing, a crooner? Would I be shown to a seat, and would I cast a long shadow? How much would it cost? Let Sin and Death, now as Lust and its reverberations of Wrath, prowl. The mind was crazy with imagination and desire. I would taste of the salt winds of freedom. I would comb the waterfront for all the dark vacant corners where women and men came to watch the sea.
If there was a Golden Gate Bridge between the two levels, it was Martin Buber, who knew the power of the Bay Area undercurrents over an empty vessel. And I knew in turn that any theology presenting itself for my assent must first pass the muster of I and Thou. The Buddhist theologian Takeuchi Yoshinori calls the similar bridge between the hither shore and the yonder shore the bridge of transcendence. One can cross over in either direction both on the Takeuchi Bridge and on the Golden Gate Bridge between intellect and existence.
My first summer in America was spent working for the Curry Company in Yosemite Valley and helping out with the National Parks Ministry. The seminary had arranged for this, and I had the chance to work with young adults from all over the country. One young woman from Mississippi had a relationship with a Lebanese cook. I looked at that heavyweight man with the chef’s white uniform and hat with a wave of jealousy. I was well aware of being drawn to her myself. Aside from her classical face, there was something withdrawn and unreachable about her. This was something inherent in her, I suspected, not a front she put on to keep others at arm’s length.
I assisted with Sunday morning worship services held outdoors next to Yosemite Falls close to the Lodge. The Reverend Glass was park chaplain and pastor of the small wooden church where evening services were held. The real inspiration for all who came to Yosemite, however, were the