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Overview
"The author’s eye is wide open, and her writing is fresh, funny, and exhilarating."—Peter Matthiessen
"Marilyn Stablein’s wry voice tells how it was, calmly and clearly, unadorned. . . . whether on the ground with sadhus and chapatis or in the sky with diamonds, these wry prose poems evoke a last epiphany of the best of East and West."—Keith Dowman, author of The Power Places of Tibet
In 1965, Stablein drops out of Berkeley and travels to India and Nepal with her lover. Their brief getaway turns into a seven-year stay. "There are times when I ask myself," Stablein writes, "What am I am doing here? My answer: to paint, to study a culture; to uncover its secrets; to listen to the whisperings, the sacred oral traditions; to learn by heart the names and faces of deities so I can capture their images on paper and strive to imbue each image with the greatness of its namesake, its spiritual essence. Art is my muse and practice. The world is my palette, artists my teachers; art lives and breathes in the people I meet."
In the heyday of the ’60s Stablein encounters luminaries of the American counterculture like Ram Dass whom she accompanies to interview HH, the Dalai Lama, on the spiritual value of LSD. Later, when the Indian police come to arrest Stablein for having an expired visa, Kalu Rinpoche quips "The Buddha never had visas," and orders her to hide in a closet next to his tantric human bone costumes.
Includes photos and recipes.
Marilyn Stablein, writer, artist, and performer, is the author of seven books and a frequent performer of her work. Her art has been widely exhibited. She lives in the Hudson Valley and co-directs, with her husband, Alternative Books and The Uptown: A Performance Space in Kingston, NY.
Synopsis
The funniest, best, truest (and secretly truest) writing ever done on life in India. —Gary Snyder
Publishers Weekly
In 1965, Stablein (The Census Taker), then an 18-year-old Berkeley art student, set out on a summer jaunt to Paris. Her European tour became a seven-year wander through India and Nepal. Stablein roamed the subcontinent as a sort of spiritual tourist: moving with the seasons, cooking local dishes, imbibing local hallucinogens and making pilgrimages to holy caves, rivers and, with Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), to see the Dalai Lama. Her travelogue is strikingly self-absorbed: her musings on chai (Asian spiced tea), dung beetles, leeches and an ice lingam are detailed and sometimes intriguing and humorous, but there's a paucity of information about the people she encounters. Even Stablein's boyfriend, with whom she lived throughout, remains a blank, except for a short reminiscence as Stablein prepares to leave him. The effect is claustrophobic and meandering, although the book briefly coalesces in the chapter "Turning the Wheel," where the author writes, "My path circles, fans out like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond." The book ends rather abruptly when Stablein is deported from India, moves to Nepal, marries an American, gives birth to two children, decides Katmandu is too dirty for infants and flies back to San Francisco. In her preface, Stablein writes, "There are times when I ask myself, What am I doing here?" Her immediate answer is that she's there for art, culture and spirituality. But she provides a more convincing (though indirect) reason after giving birth to her son: "Mother is home... I don't need to travel any more. I'm already home." (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.