Watts stack.
With this, I am perhaps turning the last page on my research of the counterculture. When I finished “Retreat” I took a road which led me into the unusual terrain of self-help literature and the applications of psychoanalysis to business. That resulted in the comic book “TPM” which I remember as being incredibly satisfying to make. In due course, I’m going to do another print run of that.
In 2022, I was also busy with the “The ‘S’ Word,” another counterculture book, but about music and spirituality. Simultaneously, starting in August 2021, I was reading the books that informed “The Garden.”
Coming out of “The Garden”, headed back-to-reality as it were, I’m not inclined just yet to go on another research trip. I need to sort things out here on the material plane otherwise, as Stephen Gaskin put it, I’ll be “flappin’ in the breeze.” Therefore, currently, I only have a small pile of books to work through. Top of that list, sayonara to the mystic counterculture if you like, was Alan Watts’ autobiography “In My Own Way” (1973) which came out the year of his death.
I’ve read a number of Watts’ books, and they are uniformly enjoyable. Reading Alan is quite like reading a blog by someone very erudite. His writing is characterised by his freewheeling and informal authorial tone, which, because you’ve heard recordings of it, you can hear in your head. And he confesses many times in “In My Own Way” that he enjoys the sound of his own voice. His meeting with Carl Jung in 1958 is somehow emblematic of this, he reflects upon it that Jung “spent almost the whole time asking questions.” That’s another way of saying that although Alan was greatly impressed by Jung’s warmth, intelligence, and sense of fun, he didn’t really seize the opportunity to shut up and listen to him.
To be fair to Watts, this enjoyment of his own voice forms a part of his very healthy self-love. As he elegantly puts it, “since it is written that you must love your neighbour as yourself.” There’s not enough of that around. What we see on social media is the opposite, people showing off in a misguided attempt to curry each other’s respect and affection.
He’s certainly read all the important texts, and spoken to all the relevant people, but he lays it down in a very relaxed and non-judgemental way. But if the arguments in the books are always cogent, they are, even if he intended it so, a little thin on substance.
Mount Fuji across Paddy Fields.
There was a great deal I liked. I loved the numerous references to gardens, gardening, and gardeners (the last always satisfyingly grouped together with other denizens of the alternative underground: “…wizards, yogis, artists, poets, musicians, gardeners and madmen…”). Watts’ account of the potency of matcha confirmed what I suspected from my experience of it, “Mac-ha or koi-cha, the powdered green teas used for the ceremony, would doubtless be banned in this country if they were widely known, for, taken in strength, they are highly conducive to the states of consciousness characteristic of Zen meditation…”. And I jotted down notes of further places to visit from his luminous descriptions of Japan, should I ever get the chance to return…
However, what has really lingered with me is his, not exactly comfort, but acceptance of himself as a “weird” fellow, following his own “weird”. That’s something that I too am beset with. Indeed, close friends have advised me to dial it up a little more! Watts quotes at length this story from the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu:
The area of Ching-shih in the state of Sung grows fine catalpas, cypresses, and mulberries. But those of more than one or two spans in girth are cut down for monkey-perches; those of three or four for ridgepoles, and those of seven or eight for the solid sides of coffins for the wealthy. Thus they do not attain the normal term of their lives, and fall in mid-career to the axe. This is the danger of being useful.
In sacrifices of purgation one does not use bulls with white foreheads, pigs with large snouts, nor men with piles as offerings to the river. This has been revealed to the soothsayers, and such creatures are therefore held inauspicious [for sacrifice]. The sage, however, would regard them as highly auspicious.
Then there was a hunchback named Su. His chin touched his navel. His shoulders were above his head. His pigtail pointed to the sky. His innards were upside-down, and his thighs were against his ribs. By tailoring and laundering he made enough to live, and by winnowing grain he produced enough to feed ten. But when the authorities conscripted soldiers he stood in the crowd waving them off, and when a work-party was pressed into service he was passed up as an invalid. Yet when they doled out grain for the needy, he got three full measures as well as ten bundles of firewood. If a weird body helps a man live out his full term, how much greater would be the use of a weird character!