The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.