Out of Chaos, a Dancing Star

My father sits at the center of the knowable universe—of my knowable universe—like the giant Zeiss projector at the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood where, as a teenager, I held a summer job, projecting images of the shared past, offering insights into the unaccompanied future, and leaving behind, long after he spoke his final words, a suggestion that the mysteries of the distant past, as well as certain extraordinary experiences just spinning into view, share consistency and—perhaps—a more-or-less rational explanation.

“I’ve been on a strange voyage,” he had asserted to me during our after-school meeting in his rented room near Hollywood High School, when I was a student there. More than a decade later, I came across the identical words in his personal writings, along with this enigmatic elaboration: “The experience cost me something, I suffered some, but something happened.”

As every psychologist or close observer of mankind knows, humans have a bottomless ability to tell ourselves stories about the reasons for doing and feeling as we feel and do. And, in addition, there could be no expectation of total frankness from a complex and intellectual man such as Ethan. Even frankness to himself might have been too much to ask, given his higher-than-average level of intelligence. Yet, in my own professional life in the field, I have learned that observable traces are left of the paths the mind takes between conception of action and action itself, through self-delusion, obfuscation, and the simple “saving of face.” Defining my father’s path is my prime purpose here. I am on a search, endeavoring to follow his myriad, complicated paths, barely traceable, in the direction of, if not his true nature, then of a truth that will ring more true than most of his previous truths.

In or around the year 1965, my mother, a schoolteacher, took a sabbatical year abroad, leaving my younger brother and me to manage the house where we lived. Several times during that year, Ethan flew south from his place in San Francisco to spend a couple of weeks with us. Time has erased from my mind all but a handful of incidents from that period. But one of these—possibly the most important—was a single, largely one-sided, conversation between my dad and me as we sat one afternoon on the sundeck of our Hollywood Hills home.

The important part of that afternoon was intangible and in many ways beyond comprehension, and therefore my recall is in large part visual. But even so, something essential got communicated to me. Its significance—felt, although scarcely understood at the time—was never entirely forgotten.

The visual: the scarred and faded red floorboards of the deck on which we sat. That deck ran the width of the living and dining rooms and was affixed by large diagonal braces to the stucco of our three-story, Spanish-style house. Some 30 feet below, our scruffy backyard was partially visible between the boards. Along the deck’s edges stood white-painted upright posts with horizontal wooden crossbars, very much resembling a post-and-rail fence in an old Western movie. Beyond the backyard lay the no-man’s-land of a ravine, where poison oak grew and only deer and rattlesnakes willingly roamed.

I recall Ethan in the full sun that afternoon, shirtless and dressed in tan shorts, straddling a chaise lounge, his sandaled feet planted on either side of the chaise, paperwork stacked in front of him, a cigarette pack and ashtray beside him on the floor.

At his back, reaching high above his head and occupying the entire eastern part of the view from our deck, rose the scruffy, gray-green hump of the nearby mountain, which constituted the last of the eastern Santa Monica range along the edge of Griffith Park. Below and to the north, some miles beyond the steeper side of the ravine, in the direction I was facing that day, stretched the Burbank boundary of the San Fernando Valley. The hazy Verdugo Mountains marked the farther distance; and all the rest was dazzling sky.

I sat a few feet from him on an upright chair, within the shadow of the house. From there it was necessary for me to turn my head a few degrees to the right when I wanted to see his face; but, detached and musing, I was mostly free to gaze down the canyon toward the Warner Brothers movie studio, with its distinctive and oft-photographed water tower.

My father did almost all the talking—nothing new in that—but on this occasion, memory suggests that I actually listened. I seem to have been uncharacteristically passive, and did not utter a single antagonistic or defensive word, nor make snide comments, nor even offer a query that might have gotten him fired up—for once genuinely mellow, in other words, and willing to take in anything that he chanced to say as long as there was no attack. Against attacks, I was always prepared to move quickly away.

The surprising thing about that day, on further reflection, was that I seemed to have wanted to hear him out. I have never had a problem remembering my dad’s unwelcome, often critical and ill-natured words, but that day, for some reason, our relations were entirely benign. And because of the lack of threat, I was aware that his words began to take on something close to the quality of wisdom sensitively imparted. Perhaps they were even wise words, although with a single exception most of them—much as I might wish it otherwise—are beyond recall.

I apparently had no expectations and therefore imposed no barriers. I merely sat passively, with no purpose other than taking in—without sarcasm or comment—whatever presented itself.

Many decades have passed since that afternoon, and most of the content of what was said has slipped away; yet I have never lost possession of one particular element in that conversation. It came when the afternoon was waning; when, interrupting a long silence following a particularly deep exhalation of smoke, my father muttered, apropos of nothing that had been said thus far:

“Out of chaos comes a dancing star.”

I looked at him and said nothing; but, typically for him, even my lack of a question demanded further explanation.

“Also sprach Zarathustra,” he said, pronouncing the German slowly and distinctly. “The title of a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One of monumental importance; especially so to me.” He nodded a number of times, reached for his cigarette, and inhaled thoughtfully. “Zarathustra was a Persian holy man a thousand years before the Christian era. Nietzsche’s writing is notoriously obscure, and as a result almost no one reads the book. I’ve spent a great deal of time with it, however, and its profound significance becomes ever more clear to me.”

The words “dancing star” had a Hollywood ring to it, and perhaps that is one reason why it remained in my memory all these many years. I silently repeated the curious name Zarathustra to myself a number of times in an effort to store it away, just in case it had something important to tell me. At the time, I could not have known the weight and strength of its importance.

By the end of that afternoon—of which I have only these insufficient memories—I was left with the feeling that I had received from my father a brief exposure to some portion of a hitherto unknown aspect of his interests and thoughts; of his erudition.

And that day has remained with me ever since.

Ethan died three years later, in the same memorable year in which Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Each of the three deaths was unexpected and shocking. The news about my father came via a phone call to me from a former patient of his; a man who, I learned later, had become his close friend and confidant. Although only in my mid-20s, I was next of kin; thus it was I who was given the task of making the final arrangements. The friend explained the steps I would need to take for final disposition of my dad’s remains.

At the funeral, some of his patients were conspicuously uninhibited in their expressions of grief. But when it was over for them, it was over. They knew all they were ever going to know, and therefore mourned a fathomable loss. Whereas we, his family (that is: myself, my brother, and our recently remarried mother, all of whom kept ourselves well composed during the ceremony) have, in one way or another, remained conflicted about the man for the rest of what remains of our lives. To this day, none of us has ever really known precisely what to make of him.

I recall only occasional discussion of Ethan among us over the years, and perhaps there was some comfort in the informational dead end we had reached. He was always too full of volatility and unconventional information for us to feel entirely at ease with—or about—him, so we simply let him go.

Until one day in August of 1971.

It was a hot Southern California afternoon; and, on my own, I was stretched out on a towel on the sand at Venice Beach, recklessly exposing my pallid surface to the burning sunshine while leafing through a copy of an underground newspaper called the Los Angeles Free Press.

Its pages were new and clean, with wide columns of black type stretching across broad white sheets and comfortably ample white space between the lines. I idly read passages here and there with no particular interest, holding the newspaper as close to my myopic eyes as possible without losing the ability to make my way from margin to margin, and then stopped at a work of fiction, part of a serialized novel. My attention had been caught by a scene involving a meeting in New York at an organization called the Foundation for Total Consciousness, which was run by a psychotherapist named Harvey Brustein. The passage in front of me struck me as ... well, familiar.

What follows is quoted with permission of the author of that story, Norman Spinrad:

“What’s this meeting supposed to be about, baby?” I asked Arlene as Harvey threaded his way through the crowd on the floor to his folding chair on the dais. We were sitting on folding chairs, too—in the row of chairs at the back of the room.
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “I suppose Harvey just calls a meeting when he senses something in the air.”
“Uh-huh. And five’ll get you ten I know what’s in the air tonight. San Francisco.”
Way across the carpet of people in front of us, Harvey had seated himself on the dais. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, exhaled and said: “I understand Ted would like to open this meeting. Ted?”
“Last meeting we kicked around the idea of what it would be like to have the Foundation in San Francisco,” Ted said. “Since then, everyone seems to be talking about it, but we really haven’t discussed it seriously yet. So I think it’s time we did. So to start off, I’m making a formal motion that the Foundation move itself to San Francisco as soon as possible.”
“Well,” Harvey said, carefully not gloating, “it looks like a formal motion to move the Foundation to San Francisco is now before the membership. So let’s chew it over. Since it was your idea, Ted, suppose you tell us why you’re in favor of the move.”
Ted flashed a big grin out over the room, rose to the balls of his feet, and man, did I recognize that look on his face: Ted the True Believer, fried to the eyeballs on adrenalin, panting to convert the whole world to his latest Big Answer. Ol Harv sure knew who to maneuver into playing his mouthpiece.

I stopped reading and, tenting the newspaper over my face, struggled to comprehend what seemed to be the convergence of fiction with a significant biographical element of my own life. First there was the proposed topic under discussion: A dozen or so years ago, my father had (in fact) moved his practice from New York to San Francisco—and furthermore had (in fact) been accompanied by 50 or so of his patients, people willing to pull up stakes and relocate with him. The Foundation for Total Consciousness bore a name not unlike that of the organization my dad had established in New York after he and my mother were divorced and he moved away. Moreover, Harvey Brustein was a name similar enough to Dad’s; at the very least, the Jewish heritage was obvious. And that ubiquitous cigarette!

I had the immensely disquieting perception that fiction was intruding on my life, and I made an effort to reason it through—which is to say, to reason it out of existence—yet I already understood that I was in the middle of an absolutely astonishing but unmistakable coincidence and that the story I was reading was not entirely a work of fiction: and who knew what convergence of forces had brought about my encounter with that particular newspaper on that particular day!

Although it has since been made clear by correspondence with that story’s author, and by further details in the book he eventually published (which he sardonically titled The Children of Hamelin), the portion of the story I happened to read that day was indeed a fictionalized version of my father, and the coincidental nature of my having come across it in the first place remains a staggering and inexplicable occurrence. But at the time of my first reading, unable to reason any of this through, I eventually lifted the flattened pages from my supine body and, hoping that the explanation for this coincidence would unfold by itself, read on.

Arlene was suddenly on her feet shouting: “This is crazy! Do you realize what you’re asking? We’ve all got lives of our own here, jobs, school, family, friends! Why the hell should we cut ourselves off from everything we care about to drag ourselves across the continent to some city most of us have never seen? It’s crazy!”
“Ah shit—" Ted began. But Harvey cut him off. “That’s a very good point. I don’t think you’ve really thought this through, Ted. ... Many of the members have careers, families, are going to college—we have deep ties to New York. You don’t seem to understand what moving to San Francisco would mean to them—they’d have to totally uproot their lives. And those that chose to stay behind would lose even more—the chance to develop their consciousness. You don’t seem to realize what this would mean to the Foundation members as individuals.”
Arlene sat down. “See?” she whispered to me. “You’ve got Harvey all wrong. This insane San Francisco thing can’t be his idea. You are paranoid about it.”
I shrugged. No point in trying to explain the ins and outs of the old Briar Patch Gambit. She’d have to see for herself.
“Just watch how the old worm turns,” I told her.

The old Briar Patch Gambit! The turning of the old worm! Here was a fictional work about a manipulative, dominating, chain-smoking psychotherapist seeking to bring about a migration of patients from New York to San Francisco for reasons that were never adequately explained. There was the hint of some evil being deliberately, but covertly, set in motion by the man in charge.

Setting aside the by-then familiar facts of my dad’s move to the West Coast with dozens of his patients and their families, of which I was well aware, such a portrait of my father’s covert motives was as damning as any negative conjecture I could ever have come up with, especially as, in the very next passage, “the old worm” does indeed turn:

Harvey sighed smoke. “You do seem to be making sense, Ted. What you’re really talking about is moving the Foundation to San Francisco as a community.”

(I could almost hear the serpentlike hiss as my fictional dad spouted smoke.)

Ted’s eyes seemed to suddenly get even brighter, like turning up a three-way bulb. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said. “Sure, if thirty or forty of us moved, as a community, like Harvey says, it’d be no sweat. ... "
Harvey nodded. “Yes, it’s this idea of the Foundation as a community that really appeals to me.”

There I remained, in the flesh, resting on a beach towel atop a renowned expanse of sand bordered by palm trees and the Pacific Ocean, while my mind wrestled with a seemingly impossible situation involving reality.

I still feel a certain awe as I write these words. The almost-beyond-the-bounds-of-possibility situation encompassed the convergence of three indisputable facts (which the reader presumably already understands; but it seems worth repeating):

First, that a professional writer of fiction, Norman Spinrad, who, in fact, later became a well-regarded science fiction writer, had chosen my dad—whom he had quite obviously encountered in person, as is readily deduced from Harvey’s physical description and locution as well as the plausibility of my father convening just such a meeting; not to mention the notable manner in which the psychoanalyst handled his omnipresent cigarettes)—as the model for the manipulative villain he portrayed in his serialized novel.

Second, that a local newspaper that was popular in Southern California—in the very region in which I lived, and in a paper that I rarely read—had published that story.

And third, and most incredible of all—that I had happened to pick up and to subsequently read what was arguably the most pertinent sequence in terms of the likelihood of my recognizing the model for the villain of the story; that is, the actual human who inspired the story, the modern-day Pied Piper himself; my dad!

And beyond the mere facts of that unsettling coincidence, the meaning behind my experience looms even larger. Because now, today, almost everything salient about Dad’s cross-country move from New York to San Francisco—which I had taken as a mere professional decision before that Free Press story came to my attention—still remains for me to resolve.

Was Ethan in fact a devious manipulator disguised as a kindly practitioner, which is how the author presented him? Had he manipulated for his own purposes the people in his care by convincing them to cross the continent with him under the guise of bowing to the will of the members?Or was he actually a benefactor so accomplished, so successful at what he was trained to give and more, that he had gathered around him a loyal following and provided them with an opportunity to relocate to a new city where they could build new, perhaps more successful, lives; thereby benefiting them and himself in numerous untold ways?

What kind of a mission had it been for him personally? I began to wonder. In other words, how had Ethan benefited?

Alas! It was a couple of years too late to ask him.

I stayed with my father on several occasions after his move to San Francisco. His offices in the city were spacious and orderly, consisting of a good-size meeting room plus several smaller therapy rooms, as well as a soundproof padded cubicle, slightly larger than an old fashioned phone booth, that I was told were there as a safe retreat for patients ingesting hallucinogenic drugs as part of the course of therapy. (The use of such substances as therapy was not uncommon in those transformative times; most importantly, they were not yet illegal.)

I had already met some of the people who helped his foundation function—most of them had been working for him in New York—but how the staff was organized, and precisely what kind of therapeutic work he was then doing, I didn’t ask and was not told. He seemed busy, challenged, enthusiastic about his work at that time. And he was generous with his money.

The apartment in which he spent his nights was spare and modern, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was obviously a solitary habitation: Furniture was sparse, and he kept his books stacked on the floor and along the walls of the living room. Many of these were works that bore on mystical or symbolic subjects: In Search of the Miraculous, by Ouspensky; Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Between their pages, and in small, untidy piles on various surfaces, I came across dozens of three-by-five cards scribbled over with notes in his own private shorthand.

Atop the nightstand in his bedroom, next to the bed, was a narrow box that held a jumble of notes about his nighttime dreams. And on a shelf in the belly of the nightstand rested Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

In it, I found this paragraph:

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself. You lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

I am unlikely to speak face-to-face with my father’s ghost, as Hamlet was unfortunate enough to have done. I will never need to plead for the value of his life in order to validate my own existence. Yet those fanciful, obscure, and, probably hysterical words of Friedrich Nietzsche’s are the closest I will ever come to touching Ethan, and Ethan’s singular mind, again.