Our Bodies, Our Lives

Of all the upheavals which happened in people’s personal values in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, none can really compare with the revolution in how we viewed our bodies. When I grew up, discussion of bodies was almost taboo. One’s attention was constantly directed inward, toward inner virtue as opposed to external beauty. We tried to look as nice as we could with our limited circumstances, and cleanliness was certainly next to godliness. But all of our family’s resources were directed toward education and inner value.

Only in the late 1960’s did people begin to take a finely-tuned look at the body instead of ignoring it. In my case, as for others, in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s feminine honesty broke new ground. If she could discuss menstruation, the clitoris, writing the words down in a novel everyone was reading, perhaps we could discuss them with each other. Not that I did. The prohibitions for me were much too strong. But I began to think about myself physically in a different way.

I never owned a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective to give accurate health and medical information to a broad audience of women, but I think all my friends did. Wilhelm Reich’s phrase “the body is the unconscious” also contributed greatly to this new way of looking at oneself. For if this were true, people were whole, all of one piece. There was no separation between body and soul. The one reflected the other completely.

What followed was a wealth of new ways of thinking, spawning interest in many new and old fields. All of the hippie traveling we did helped, leading people to understand that what we were doing in the West was not the only way. The mind/body connection was explored in physical practices such as yoga, hard and soft martial arts, massage, quigong and meditation. Alternative healing, birthing and dying were all opened to examination and experiment. Food and diet were finally admitted into the health picture.

We had new attitudes about what was attractive, such as natural looking bodies, and people began to understand that emotional weather was part of one’s personal picture as well. People began to sort out what could be cured and what you must live with. Chemical imbalances could now be treated. Handicapped people were helped to achieve their goals. Sexual orientations of all kinds were tested. Everything could be talked about, and generally was!

Line, Marty and Paul live through this change. Each of them is reticent about their own physicality, but they begin to see its importance. Line becomes a nurse, working first in gynecological wards and then in oncology. She studies herbal remedies and practices such as Reiki, and is fully awake to the extraordinary journey people take from birth to death. She becomes a midwife in later years, sharing all that she has learned.

Marty, who has always thought of herself as unattractive, moves into a stronger relationship to her body as she studies tai chi and disciplines her voracious, intellectual mind. She takes photographs which show that consciousness is fully present in the body. Paul, who spends the 1970’s in Alaska, contributes as an educator with an open heart. He marries a French-Canadian woman who insists on treating her early cancer in her own way. Paul also has to deal with his own post-polio syndrome as he gets older.

All of this change was welcome. It complicates things to have so many choices, but also enhances one's ability to give of one's particular gifts. By this time we have come full circle and focus too much on surfaces. We need to get back to an understanding of how much inner values affect our external selves. But time and our ever-renewing culture will probably take care of that.

With One Hand Waving Free

Yesterday, before lunch, I finished a first draft of With One Hand Waving Free. Unlike last year when I celebrated the end of a draft of Fit Company for Oneself with a fire, a glass of wine and some chestnuts, this year I took a nap in the sun in the hammock! Yes, in October in San Rafael, California, the sun is strong in the middle of the day and, though it has moved far to the south, it falls full on the hammock that is the furniture of our front garden ‘room.’ Sweet sun lies upon me like a human hand, blessing me with its warmth.

The title of this book, from Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is apt for Line, Marty and Paul. Each of them, in his own way, finds a “diamond sky” to dance beneath, intent on seizing the day and letting tomorrow take care of itself. Indeed it is inherent in their understanding that if you embrace the gifts and needs of the day, tomorrow will follow naturally, resulting in the life you are meant to live.

Line uproots herself from Chicago, taking her small son but leaving her husband who is embroiled in growing violence. She takes a train to San Francisco, where Marty is already living. Marty goes to California to live with a family she met in England, but then takes a clerical job which frees her to read and think as she likes. She falls for an enigmatic young architect whose absences and silences Line distrusts. Paul finishes college, at last brought face to face with the fact that he cannot become a Lutheran pastor as is expected. He takes a teaching job in Fairbanks, Alaska. The end of the book finds Sparky (Line) reunited with her gang in San Francisco when Paul stops briefly on his way.

So now that you know what happens, do you want to read the book? When I read fiction, I go straight to the end to get it over with. Then I am free of the plot and can read to find out what the writer thinks is important, and how the characters embody his or her values, or not. I am reading for values, plain and simple. Needless to say, many books do not stand up to this kind of reading! But that doesn’t stop me. I write for values too.

Robert Pirsig states in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals that the world is nothing but value, that value in fact drives evolution. He asks whether quality is to be found in the subject or the object, and when he realizes that it is in neither, he decides that it is independent of either and the source of both. He states that “without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last. Dynamic liberals and radicals need conservatives to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded change. Conservatives also need liberals and radicals to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded stagnation [http://robertpirsig.org/MOQSummary.htm].”

This is a big topic to drop into a blog post crowing about finishing the draft of a novel! Nevertheless, in trying to place what my novels are doing in the world I think about it a lot! They are clearly not providing heroes and heroines fighting obvious good and evil. They do not sponsor the received ideas of any nation or creed. They are a sincere attempt to watch my characters muddling through experience based upon my own and that of my friends and relations. Line, Marty and Paul make mistakes, have successes and failures, which are often not understood until much later. In a complex world such as ours, growth is not always in one direction. People grow up, down, around and through.

And it is slow! With a great deal of luck, my characters will be in their fifties before I let go of them. Maybe even older. What does it mean to become whole? To become a real person? These questions open a look into the dynamic values in which I am interested and which I hope that Line, Marty and Paul’s lives embody over time.

Alternative Spirit

The list of people leading alternative spiritual practices in 1969 when I arrived in California is so long, I can’t do more than name them in a blog piece. But even to name them evokes the rich spirit of aspiration, exploration and controversy rife at that time at the edge of the continent, where, as my Dad said, “all the loose nuts and bolts in the country had rolled!”

Two Episcopalians probably opened Pandora’s Box. Bishop James Pike, who led Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill only a few blocks from where I lived, had just died. But his charismatic personality and challenges to orthodox belief were legendary. He advocated the ordination of women, racial desegregation and the acceptance of lesbians and gays as leaders, things so common now we cannot imagine the heat they generated in his day.

Alan Watts was on the radio so often in the early 1970’s, I could hardly bear to listen. (I would be more receptive now!) He had been an Episcopal priest, but by this time was living on a houseboat in Sausalito and interpreting Eastern philosophy for the West both as a teacher in the American Academy of Asian Studies and a programmer for the radio station KPFA.

Murshid Samuel Lewis gave up his inheritance to embrace mystical and spiritual teachings, becoming a teacher in the Chisti Sufi order. Known in San Francisco as Sufi Sam, a voice told him, “I will make you spiritual leader of the hippies.” He developed the all-embracing dances which were the beginnings of the Dances of Universal Peace, now done all over the world.

Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki headed the burgeoning San Francisco Zen Center. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was read by almost everyone. (Still is!) When he died in 1971, Zentatsu Richard Baker enlarged the focus and reach of the Zen Center, leading it to become an institution with monasteries at Tassajara, San Francisco and across the Bay in Muir Beach, as well as opening Green’s restaurant. The Zen Center became a huge educational, and even a political force during Jerry Brown’s governorship of California.

Though not associated with traditional spiritual groups, Esalen Institute, located near Carmel and in San Francisco, played a huge part in our cultural life. Studying consciousness using countless psychological and physical methods, the Institute fostered everything from meditation to organic food! Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, it is still going strong with public workshops exploring the sciences and humanities.

By the time I arrived, the Diggers, founded by Peter Coyote and Peter Berg, who met at the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had left town. The Diggers were an anarchist group which provided free food, health care and shelter in the Haight Ashbury, but then merged with other communal groups to form the Free Family.

Steve Gaskin, 1969

Steve Gaskin, a teacher at San Francisco State, was giving Monday Night Class in an auditorium on Ocean Beach (also used for rock concerts), attended by hundreds of people up and down the coast. He had been greatly affected by his psychedelic experiences and was a proponent of right livelihood and ecological practices. One night, Alan Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta to the group, unleashing the Hare Krishna movement upon the city! I certainly never went to Monday Night Class, but we were all very aware when Gaskin collected a caravan of over 60 vehicles in 1970 and left San Francisco, traveling across country and forming an intentional community at The Farm in Tennessee.

Werner Erhard started his est seminars in San Francisco in 1971. After a Dale Carnegie course and teaching Mind Dynamics, he felt he could develop a course of his own. Hundreds of thousands of people took est training which fueled the personal growth industry of the 1970’s.

I felt inoculated from much of this discussion by my powerful Lutheran background and I was too independent to become involved in communal movements. Being able to support myself meant that I could think what I liked, and in the shifting friendships and involvements of those years, world literature was my guide.

Neither Line nor Marty are bowled over by the self-styled gurus arising around them. Line goes Sufi dancing which leads her to herbal healers and teachers as well as the early women who worked with natural childbirth. But she is pragmatic and working at a hospital. Marty plots an aesthetic course, studying photography and reading Russian literature in addition to working full time. Nevertheless, the winds of exploration blowing through the Bay Area, the storms of controversy, and “the sunshine of your love” all wafted through their lives to some effect.

First Computer

In 1970 I got a job with the legal publishing company Bancroft-Whitney typing case summaries dictated by attorneys. In a large light-filled room on an upper floor of a brick building south of Market in San Francisco, eight of us did this work day after day. (In truth, work was secondary to the lively cultural traffic in the office! Probably no different than it is today.) In the corner was a large computer terminal, which came to life when a computer at the home office in Rochester, New York, called it through a WATS line. When the beautiful girl who ran this behemoth quit, I got the job.

The point of this particular dictation was to composite indexes. Thus, an attorney could cite subjects of a case, dictate a page number and the computer in Rochester compiled the page numbers into a list, an index at the back of a book. This exacting work was done by only one attorney as the subjects must take a particular form. The job introduced me to the life many of us now have, in that we are at the mercy of the internet! (“You were doing cloud computing back in 1970,” says Don.)

It was frustrating to wait for the call which was supposed to happen each day at the same time. It didn’t always. Often one end or the other would lose communication, dropping the line. I had to figure out what had gotten saved and what hadn’t and how much work to re-do! I would be fuming in my corner, trying not to disturb others who were humming along at their work. The terminal used pin-fed green-and-white-lined paper. Due to deadlines, I sometimes worked Saturday mornings, though I took off another day of the week to make sure I was only working 40 hours.

Computers played a big part in my work life from then on. I typed and retyped manuscript on mag cards, cassette tapes (frustrating because when the writer added a paragraph, you had to go in and reformat a lot of data when it was stored in a limited, linear fashion!) and finally random access floppy disks. I ran Fortran programs written by the crack programmer Pat Schilling whenever she wanted to accomplish something. I was even part owner of a company which introduced computing to architects, the unique Design Logic, which contracted computer-aided drafting among other services.

Discovering databases was something of a watershed for me. Before relational databases came in, I could cause quite a bit of structure, slicing, dicing and reporting on data using dBaseIII and IV. (I made up databases for the characters in the novel I was working on as well!) Ditto for spreadsheets. For a while I worked at one of the early computer help desks, aptly called Computer Hand Holding.

Without a clear career path or even a desire for one, this becomes Marty’s experience. In her artistic life, she journals and takes still photographs. In the full flush of her new intellectual freedom, she doesn’t want to write for a living or get into the technical demands of professional photography. She gets better and better work in offices as her computer skills increase. But it isn’t without hazard or frustration, as most of us now know!

Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.

Hannah Arendt, Boris Pasternak and Us

The film Hannah Arendt dramatizes the controversy which raged around Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Though she lost friends and alienated family members, who misunderstood her reporting as lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, she continued to insist that individuals should be seen as persons, rather than members of “a people,” a tribe. Eichmann, the organizer of transportation for millions of people taken to concentration camps during World War II, was found in Argentina and taken back to Israel for trial for war crimes. He was hung in 1962.

Because Eichmann insisted he was simply obeying his superiors, Arendt did not see that he could be convicted in a court of law, though she wrote that he must hang because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth” with others. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe those who are simply thoughtless, who refuse to connect their actions with the consequences, who refuse to be persons.

I am currently reading the new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This book helped set me on my path when I first read it in 1966, but some of it, especially the philosophical discussions, were fuzzy in the earlier translation. In this one they are extremely clear! The first time I read it, I gravitated to the powerful story of a man who remained a person in the face of the monumental pressure of the ideological revolution in Russia. In the first translation, the story was wrapped in thick romance about love and art. [The movie, of course compounded this!] In this translation the romance is pared away, revealing a story which is set not only in history, but is about all of us.

Here in the West, too, we’ve been buried in ideology. If you think you are free, have a look at the BBC production "The Century of the Self", a four part series on how corporations have used Sigmund Freud’s and his nephew Edward Bernays’ theories to subliminally affect your life. In order to be free, to be a person, one must look deeply into one’s reasons for doing things. Most of us, in order to work, to have friends, to contribute to society, make some compromises with our innermost beliefs. But, being a person involves drawing boundaries and acting on them. Our global economy and information system relentlessly inform us of the effects of our actions. Do we pay attention?

Doctor Zhivago is filled with moral quandaries and ideas, a long rumination on life and art. Tolstoy’s social doctrine of the Kingdom of God on earth was part of the huge ferment of revolutionary thinking at the end of the 19^th Century. Pasternak’s Tolstoyan character Misha Gordon, a childhood friend of Zhivago, believes that personhood began with Christ. For him, the Gospel began as a “naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? … In that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.”

It doesn’t matter where our personhood, our responsibility comes from. It is a gift which we must not refuse. Eichmann and Pasternak are good examples of the poles which may be lived out with relationship to one’s culture and society. “Life,” Zhivago tells the partisan leader who has imprisoned him, “has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle; it eternally alters and transforms itself; it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”

It was this trust in life which initially thrilled me about Pasternak’s book. Harrowing experiences awaited its characters, as they await us. That trust did not desert Pasternak, even as much that he loved was taken from him. It was a good thing for me to learn as I was setting off into the future.

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.