A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
Subscribe and Save up to 55%
This first volume from The Sun’s first decade is a glimpse into the magazine’s early years. “Subtle, sometimes mystical,” the Los Angeles Times says, “this anthology never disappoints, alternating whimsical essays with soulful contemplations.”
Table of ContentsX
Foreword Sy Safransky
Sy’s Spac Lorenzo W. Milam
News From El Corazón: In The Composing Room Pat Ellis Taylor
Sharing History, With Rufus John Rosenthal
Riches Sy Safransky
Autobiography #40 Carl Mitcham
Selected Stories Sparrow
Quiet Life In A Loud World Robert Horvitz
Family Stories Ramona Alvarodiaz
Fathers Sy Safransky
Angel At The Gate David Guy
Opened Flesh, Naked Spirit Elizabeth Rose Campbell
Sara Elizabeth Sy Safransky
Being A Parent John Rosenthal, Patience Blandford, Dee Dee Hooker
Insisting On Love John Rosenthal
First Sexual Experiences Personal stories by our readers.
The Pornographer David C. Childers
Savarin Richard Williams
Wine: A Lesson In Self-Discovery Frank Graziano
Maps To Where You Live Joel Jackson
Possessiveness And Jealousy Brian Knave
At Work Joe Blankenship
The Choice Of Emptiness Jim Ralston
Three Photographs John Rosenthal
Sickness Paul Kommel
Cholestiatoma David Koteen
Nothing Scares Me Dusty Miller
Facing The Struggle Peg Staley
Asking After My Own Light Roger Sauls
On The Mind And Cancer Stephanie Matthews-Simonton
The Dolphin Messenger Michael Shorb
Patricia Sun Elizabeth Rose Campbell
Oil Alan Brilliant
Fugitives Carol Hoppe
There Is No School On The Second Floor Ron Jones
Looking Back: Tuli Kupferberg On The Not-So-Bygone Sixties Howard Jay Rubin
Kicking The Corpse — Or Is This Love? Sy Safransky
How To Really Change Society Sparrow, Bruce Terrell, Gerard Saucier
Peace Nigger’s Long March David Grant
Chronicles Michael Shorb
Going Against The Dragon: An Interview With Robert Bly Sy Safransky
Facing Fear Dee Dee Small
Lord Shantih Thomas Wiloch
Kali Comes Home Elizabeth Rose Campbell
Amazing Coincidences Patricia Bralley
Letter From Boston: Spiritual Fascism In America Moira Crone
Lou, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid Karl Grossman
An Interview With Swami Muktananda Sy Safransky
Psychology Today Judson Jerome
The Lazy Man Thaddeus Golas
How Things Came Into Existence Franklin Mills
Living Within The Question: An Interview With Reshad Feild Howard Jay Rubin
Tales Of Trickster David Citino
An Evening With Ram Dass
Zen And The Art Of Peanut Butter W.G. McDonald
Read an ExcerptX
When I started The Sun in 1974 — peddling the first crudely, printed issues on the street for twenty-five cents each, the “office” fitting neatly into my knapsack — I had no more idea where it was going than I do now. Which is to say, I’ve been as consistently surprised as any of its readers by the magazine’s unpredictable turns, its unusual marriage of the sacred and the profane, its many changing faces — mystical and harsh and honest and funny — and its extraordinary evolution from a local oddity to a national “magazine of ideas.”
Each monthly issue is an amazement to me, shaped by invisible currents I know better than to try to name; the people who write for the magazine and the people who read it startle me with their passion and intelligence, their faith in the power of love, their acknowledgement of the great mystery and the great truth in each of us, which words can only hint at, but oh such lovely hints . . .
This is a book of the best of those hints, in essays and interviews and poems and stories and photographs and drawings, published during the first ten years of The Sun. Some of the authors or people interviewed are well-known, others are unknown. That, too, has been typical of The Sun — to mix, without reference to anyone else’s formula, such diverse voices as somehow feel right together, like a cook, without regard to recipe, reaching for a little of this, a little of that.
Bent over the simmering stew, I’m the head cook and chief bottle washer. I love it back here in the steamy kitchen, all these strange fragrances in the air, friends dropping in, sun streaming through.
As before any meal, a few words of thanks: to Lorenzo Milam of Mho & Mho Works, for his generous support and razor judgments; to Doug Cruickshank, Lorenzo’s partner in Mho & Mho, for the book’s handsome design; to John Cotterman at Lunar Graphics here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who typeset the articles; to Carol Logie and Jan Bellard and Lisa Holm of The Sun staff who, along with me, proofread the book, though I suspect a few errors slipped by us; and certainly to all the people whose work appears here; and also to those whose work doesn’t, but whose contributions are just as deserving of praise.
Sy Safransky
In the first Sun I came across, there was a funny, wise speech by Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, which resonated with my many memories of two decades before. There was also a fine interview with O. Carl Simonton on our bodies as metaphors for our minds. I immediately sent founder/editor Sy Safransky a check and a long letter. I told him to mail me all his back issues. I also asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.
I’ve since had a chance to read all the past issues of The Sun twice. Once, shortly after I received them, for my own edification. And again — a year or so later — when Sy and I decided to put together an anthology, the one you are now holding in your hand.
I had moved to Tijuana by the time the second reading came about. I was suffering from a broken heart; in keeping with the American artistes’ tradition of running away from our country of origin, I moved to TJ, which made me as close to an expatriate as I could wish. I rented a house in a Tijuana barrio river valley and lived there in splendid, broken-hearted squalor.
I kept the issues of The Sun in my bedroom, or, on occasion, in my outhouse (no running water in Squalorville) and as I dealt with insomnia, or adjourned in the company of various flies and spiders homesteading in the outback Shangri-La, I would attack another issue, marking the copies, folding down the corners of the pages containing the articles I liked. I started to compile a list for Safransky, a list which represented one fan’s version of The Best of The Sun.
A house with no heat or water connects you with the earth. I had then (I have now) a certain fancy for show birds (chickens). They — the Belgian Bearded Bantam d’Anvers, or the Barred Cochins — would fairly often join me in my bedroom (or, on occasion, near the throne). Me and the chickens and the skinks and the noise of the Tijuana water-trucks. The Sun was my only intellectual companion and my only love in those days. And I have never lost my love for The Sun.
It was there I met the aptly named Patricia Sun — whose picture and words quite swept me off my feet. It was there I was first introduced to Pat Ellis Taylor, a master, obviously, out of my generation. It was in those dusky rooms that I first met Peace Nigger — whose writing must surely match in joy and in existential passion the long journey of Juan Ramón Jiménez and his wise donkey Platero. . . . Jiménez travelling in poverty through the plains of Spain; Peace Nigger and pack-laden goat Iowa marching bravely, wordlessly, through the infested swamps of Mississippi.
It was there I could journey with Peg Staley as she fought the cancer that had invaded her own sweet breast — the same breast that had once fed her babes, that now was feeding something far darker. Peg, the brave, the desperate; in anger, in sweetness, in grief, in endless journeys, seeking — what? — relief, spiritual nourishment, hope, understanding, some answer. Caught, trapped, on the cruel point of the worst question one can ever ask oneself, lost in the gloom of a life-destroying disease: did I do this to myself? If I did, why? If I didn’t, why do these so-called “helpers” keep telling me I’m responsible for my own suffering? It was a potent, scary, hideous, somewhat hopeful, ultimately hopeless, journey, and I think that you and I might have done much the same. . . .
It was there that I met Dr. Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, who taught cancer patients (like Peg) to try to visualize their cancer. It was there I met Ron Jones and David Spangler and David Koteen and Rufus — Rufus, certainly as wondrous a dog as anyone would want to spend the day with. It was there I met poets like Christopher Bursk and David Childers and Hal J. Daniels III and Adam Fisher and David Searls and Sparow and Name Withheld. And Safransky.
For he is the regular of regulars, isn’t he? He’s the one that is always there, typing, pasting up, taking the stuff to the printer, selling the ads, cutting the articles from inchoate down to genius size, nibbling all the while on yet another cup of coffee. I can see him now sitting at his bestrewn desk, wiggling his toes, scratching the unruly Hasidic beard, muttering Hasidic wisdom to himself, worrying, always worrying, always worrying. Thinking, as many of us do, of the very early days, him and his sandals, apologetic on the streets of Chapel Hill, selling copies of The Sun — “Won’t you buy one? Would you be interested, let’s see, it’s a new magazine, about, uhn, well about energy, and work, and friends, and community.” He’s a little embarrassed, and yet — after all, it’s the first thing he’s done on his own. Except quit The Long Island Press, run away to Europe, worry. Like Blake, the perfect all-in-one writer/printer/distributor; unlike Blake, always fussing: “Am I doing the right thing?” “What would my father think?” Sy’s mind the busy bee, fretting endlessly, making honey.
In snippets — over the years — he has told us much about himself. We have had a chance to experience, with all the grief, worry, acceptance (worried acceptance, at that), his marriages, his loves, his father and mother, his doubts. “You’re a mensch, but you’re too mushy,” Dass once told him, straight on. How wise that Dass.
We got to share in his fussy paternalizing, stewing over The Sun. “Am I doing it right?” “Is it worth it?” he would wonder, sotto voce — especially during the early days. “Am I wasting my time?” he would fret, and we could hear his mother, his father, two thousand years of Judaic heritage, wrangling in his ear. “Are you blowing it, Sy? Not again Sy. . . .”
Ah Safransky, you are something, aren’t you? Keeping on keeping on. Getting out yet another issue. Dealing with the advertisers, the subscribers, the landlord, the typesetter, the crabby writers, the lawsuits, the occasional burst of beautiful publicity (CoEvolution Quarterly! National Public Radio!) and always another issue to get out. Always. It never quits, until you’re dead, or until it’s dead, or until you retire — which might be the same thing.
We are there at the birth of his child, taking the bloody sheets to the laundromat. We are there with him when he moves into the office — after the breakdown of his second marriage. We are part of his family, nu? And the day his mother comes to visit; as always — sigh — such a troubled visit. Does she like The Sun? Does she understand what Sy has done for so many of us, the loving, worried, always worried, sons and daughters of the spirit-sun. Is he too much i’ th’ sun? We know she asked him, didn’t she, if he was eating properly, getting enough sleep. . . .
And the day his father died. It was a heavy occasion for all of us — in no way lessening the pain and the questions and the memories: a long weekend — the trip to New York, the hospital. New York: from lovely Chapel Hill. A long journey — in every sense of the word.
And then there was the day when he and Priscilla (and you, and I, and countless others) travelled in the snow all the way to that ashram, in frigging Pennsylvania, or was it upstate New York, and the car broke down, and there was a spectacular wreck, and we were late, and the baby started crying, right in the middle of the Meeting with The Master, and someone had to take her outside, but we had to go on, no matter what — because we wanted some answers, and we had to figure out if Muktananda had the answers, the answers we were seeking, the answers all of us are seeking, always. . . .
I guess that is the word, the one that most belongs about the corona of The Sun: “seeking.” It should be emblazoned there. Not “Endure Burning.” No. God, no. Rather: “Endure Seeking.” To never be satisfied, ever. Never sure if these new-fangled/ancient ideas out of the East can mean something, can do any bloody thing for us. Especially to those who live (god forbid) in the winter/snow summer/humid/sweaty wastes of North Carolina. The Dark Enduring Sun of North Carolina!
From the ash-ridden, paper-littered office on Rosemary Street (there is a couch with straw weeping out of the bottom, isn’t there?) to those of us adoring fans in Washington, or California, or Maine, or Illinois, or Texas (or Colombia, Vancouver, Tijuana). We are all there, rooting for it, aren’t we? The Sun has filled a special place for us, hasn’t it? There is no other magazine I can think of that fills those two disparate needs: one for straight, good, honest, artistically deliberate writing, classical interview and reportage. And the other: for writing that addresses itself to the suspicion that many of us have — that there is a spiritual being there somewhere (perhaps without, perhaps within) who is available to us if we try, if we are honest enough, if we quiet our blabbing brain, if we give ourselves a chance at peace, and silence, and honest searching: the God of Answers, some very important Answers. If we are ready to listen. If we are willing to learn, put down our Western either/or. What is it they tell us? It's not either/or; no, it’s either/and/or. . . .
“You know what I want to put in A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky,” I say to Sy, as we start on this project. “I want to put in the very first essay you ever wrote, the one in Issue #1.” “But why?” says Sy, no little ashamed. “Because,” I say, “it’s prototypical you, prototypical Safransky.” From the very first issue, the folded 8½ x 11 sheets, grainy and poorly printed, dated January 1974, typed up on one of those portable Royals, with a picture-cartoon by Mike Mathers of some big fat guy with a tourniquet on his arm, shooting a big syringe in his arm, the syringe marked “ALASKA OIL.”
And on Page 15 there’s “Sy’s Space.” That’s what he called it. A page long, a few hundred words, with printing so off-center (he couldn’t do that now, not in a thousand years, even if he tried) it comes out as SY’S SPAC, some 21st Century Spac opera by this Martian guy in the rolling hills of Chapel Hill:
“A CLOUDY (emphasis his), dreary day, sick with a cold, yet I want to mark the day, the year, to settle old accounts and begin something anew. It is what I am always up to, and I see how foolish it is, and how necessary. I can no more draw a line between yesterday and today than I can continue without one. The weight of days is too great. The spirit needs release. . . .”
“But why?” he wonders, sniffing, slightly ashamed of this raw effort from more than a decade ago. Why include it in the proud prodigal Best of The Sun? Why? Why not? Our pasts speak to us, and we have to listen no matter how distorted the words of our child, no matter if it causes a slight blush. . . .
“And so a new year,” he said, “a new longing — no, rather the oldest — to be different, to be better. I yearn for the end of attachment, and, with barely a pause, I am already dreaming of a more beautiful body, a more elegant mind, a self better able to receive, and give, love. I ignore the only wisdom of my years: that I need only accept myself. And I forget that time is but the one eternal moment in which we are created, and forgotten, in the timeless mind of God. . . .”
“Yearning,” “attachment,” “love,” “beauty,” “one eternal moment. . . .” “the timeless mind of God. . . .” It’s like one of those poems out of Shakespeare, those sonnets. Or it’s like the corner of a laser photograph. From the sonnet you can construct the whole set of Shakespeare’s later corpus. From the edge of the laser photograph, you can create (befogged, but visible!) the whole universe. From the primum mobile, we can create the next ten years. Longing. Wisdom. A cold! And he asks (don’t we all — at one time or another?) for a more elegant mind, a more beautiful body. Right: A Beautiful Body. Of Literature.
Sy gave us a spac to grow on, didn’t he? And now it fills whole pages, whole issues, whole books. And if we observe the babe very very carefully, we can delineate an entire humanity. “How foolish it is, and how necessary,” he says. “Necessary,” he says. “Foolish,” he says. Necessary. The Weight of Days. . . .
Ah, Sy.
I suppose he is right. It would be a bit self-indulgent, wouldn’t it, to reproduce the man-child words, so far out of the past? We loathe mushy self-indulgence, we readers and writers in The Sun, don’t we? It would embarrass us all, wouldn’t it, we participants in the growth of Safransky and His Bright Sun? This light from the corner of the new and richly flowering garden, reflecting — as suns and gardens must — so brilliantly on all of us; with all those gold and green silver spacs. . . .
— Lorenzo Wilson Milam
by Our Readers | November 1979
For three weeks straight, both nights of the weekend we struggled and tossed around, cramped under the steering wheel of his Impala, windows steamy. No luck. What is it some song says, “We just couldn’t make it fit”? Literally.
by Carl Mitcham | May 1980
Her kitchen window looks out on a soap opera:
Intimate friends and their problems constantly disturb her life.
She cannot see the trees or even the ground. In Afghanistan
tanks roll through Kabul, and there are no children under ten left in Cambodia.
She can’t rest at night worrying about whether Harriet is sleeping with George.
Will they make their house payments?
by Sy Safransky | November 1983
Safransky: In one of the poems you read last night, you talk about longing for “the cheerful noises to end.” You said, “When I’m too public, I’m a wind chime ringing to cheer up the black angel.” What do you do to get away from other people’s noises and your own? Bly: Well, I can’t get away from them when I’m giving poetry readings, but when I’m home I spend time by myself. Every once in a while a short time completely alone. . . three or four days in a woods cabin I have.
Safransky: In one of the poems you read last night, you talk about longing for “the cheerful noises to end.” You said, “When I’m too public, I’m a wind chime ringing to cheer up the black angel.” What do you do to get away from other people’s noises and your own?
Bly: Well, I can’t get away from them when I’m giving poetry readings, but when I’m home I spend time by myself. Every once in a while a short time completely alone. . . three or four days in a woods cabin I have.