I didn’t get to read the other contributors’ pieces before the book was put together, and editor Adam Parfrey took my own seven or eight vignettes and stitched them into one narrative of a dozen pages. So, when after three months of misadventures with Canada Post and Amazon.com (a truly Processean enactment of counter-intention!), I finally got my hands on a copy this Wednesday, I had a lot of reactions.
One key thing is, as another of the contributors remarked to me, we all seemed to be in our own Process. The experiences were that diverse. The inner core didn’t really believe all that neo-gnostic theology, and in particular, none was impressed with Robert DeGrimston, ‘the Teacher’ and putative (but not actual) leader. The later recruits like myself memorised great gobs of his prose, and made appropriately reverent noises about him, to ourselves as well as to others. He comes off poorly in this book, something he might have avoided had he made a contribution of his own beyond part of a letter he wrote 20 years ago that, I assume, was provided by someone other than him.
But I’m also struck by the sheer difficulty of being honest about something that happened forty years or more ago. Each of us who wrote for the book has pondered and analysed it all, and come to individual but similar conclusions. To try to step back, mentally, into those uniforms and routines, to recall those hymns and precepts and social norms isn’t impossible, but giving a sense of completeness about it all is.
Someone I know who was born and raised in Iran in the 1940s remarked to me that a visit to India felt very sentimental to her, because the smells in the two places were similar. Smell, she observed, is the most evocative of senses. Similarly, with The Process, I recall the smells as much or more than the images: of the sticks of Indian incense we used, the aromas of food in the London coffee house, or the dreary organic mush we ate ourselves most of the time. Add to that dogfood, dog excrement when they had had accidents overnight, (as they frequently did), and the first whiff of morning city air as we set out each day with an armload of magazines.
Following the scents come the sounds: of guitars and singing in the ceremonies, the rattle of El trains on cold days in downtown Chicago, the musical car-horns of rich young things in London’s West End on Friday nights, the rhythmic chinking of the hand-cymbals of the Hare Krishna conga line passing us on the other side of the street, or the hush usually present at the entrance of a chapter.
It’s from these, not images, that the more complete memories arise for me, and without these details the spirit of the thing doesn’t return. As I’ve stressed a score of times here, I’m glad it’s all behind me, but I’m also glad I have it to look back upon. Yet from reading the online reviews, it seems we’ve only partly succeeded in conveying the feeling of the entire business. The outside reader, not unsurprisingly, is bound to remain baffled by the why of it all, and the spell it continued to cast on us after the first flush of enthusiasm had died. Or, judging by our efforts in this book to come to final terms with it all, the spell, half wistful, half baneful, that it still casts upon us. Why do people follow through on something that to others seems like a warped obsession?
That, I think, is the easiest question to answer. Each of us has a madness, an obsession, and sanity lies not in repressing that, but giving it creative expression. The seemingly delirious elaborations the theology underwent made room for many private madnesses to emerge in a viable or creative way. The hunt for God in it all was really a hunt for Self. That quest never truly ends, but this intense, ill-starred little cult offered its adherents’ quests a viable beginning.