"… I've been amazed since taking notes on the events of my childhood and my life for this memoir, the pattern of being resistant to authority… I've been angry since I was about eight, I didn't realize until years later that it had seeped into my entire life. I got busted when I was 12 or 13, still in day school. I had two BB guns, and a friend of mine and I were shooting at cars going by on the Merritt Parkway. We had them in a crossfire. I was a bad, bad kid. I wouldn't have had me in the house for anything. My parents were saints. But I didn't think so at the time."..
For years, he and a group of friends crashed Long Island's private golf courses and played for free, getting caught only once. "Poaching adds a lot of tension to the game, especially when you're betting, which we were. I wasn't really welcome at home.” He dropped out of Hotchkiss and lied about his age to enlist in the Coast Guard near the end of World War II. His precarious status didn't inhibit his insubordination, such as "giving a sort of half-assed Hitler salute" to a captain he felt undeserving of respect. "He was an asshole,"..
“I needed a job after graduation, and my girlfriend was dying to go back to Paris," Yale's Pearson offered a solution… Might Matthiessen be interested in signing up for a patriotic new organization, the Central Intelligence Agency? “I didn't have any politics prior to that time in Paris. The CIA made a lefty out of me.”..
Peter Matthiessen did not do things halfheartedly. The first time he tried Zen meditation, he sat cross-legged for two straight days, 12 hours a day, "weeping in pure shock during the rest periods. We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping? It's really the sound of one hand. The clapping is extra.”..
Matthiessen's books, tend to explore: the exploitation of the poor by the rich and humanity's tragic stewardship of the natural world. In his last book, In Paradise, the protagonist foresees the day when even the pastures surrounding a concentration camp become more valuable as real estate than as reminders of humanity's capacity for evil. "What can I say – I tend to write dark. It's the old cliché: You win the skirmishes and you lose the war. We may win a water battle here and an air battle there. All those things are wonderful. There are too many of us. We're not talking about population anymore; have you noticed that? It's too intractable. We're not going to stop overpopulating. We're just a crazed species destroying our habitat. Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you. Absolutely on the button."..
Matthiessen's path to Zen Buddhism began with "a yearning for the lost paradise you have as a child, the innocence that gets crusted over with emotions or opinions or greed." The long road to enlightenment wound through a grand tour of mind-altering substances. Matthiessen experimented with the herbal psychedelic ayahuasca. "That was a powerful one," In 1962, an architect friend put him in contact with a "sort of renegade psychiatrist" known as Dr. John the Night Tripper, who had access to pharmaceutical LSD manufactured by Sandoz in Switzerland. "He gave me acid for the first time out in Palo Alto. I'll never forget really hearing Bob Dylan for the first time on that trip. 'Mr. Tambourine Man' did some capers that day."
He dabbled further in hallucinogens throughout the Sixties, with his then wife, Deborah Love, often coming along for the ride, "adrift on the same instinctive search, She had a horrible time." The day he returned home unannounced from a seven-month-long trip to Africa, Matthiessen said, "there were three Zen masters in my driveway," teachers from whom his wife was taking instruction. Soon he was as well. One Saturday, after an all-day meditation session in New York, he returned to their accommodations and Love opened the door. "Perhaps because I had been in meditation since daybreak and my mind was clear. I saw at once that she was dying."..
Matthiessen had mixed feelings about The Snow Leopard. “I think it's a good book, but it really put me in a pigeonhole I've never been able to get out of. Because it made me a travel writer–cum-explorer-cum-adventurer, and I wasn't any of those three things." Peter’s son, Alex Matthiessen, says he enjoyed reading The Snow Leopard much more as an adult than he had as a teenager. "I appreciated the nuances of what he was grappling with, spiritually and mentally and physically. My dad and I have a very close relationship, and we've had many candid conversations about parenting and family life and so on. There's no question, and my dad is the first to admit it, that as a writer, as an artist, his work came first. But I don't regret any of it, and on the whole, looking at a lifetime, he's been a terrific father and a very good friend. I'm very much a chip off the old block."..
One sunny Saturday morning when I called, Matthiessen picked up the phone in the midst of saying goodbye to his students after their session at the Zendo. "Hang on one second; I'm kicking them all out, all these beautiful people Zen has been a big help to me. I haven't been in trouble with the authorities since, well, the FBI and my big lawsuit. I'm much calmer. I'm calmer with my kids, more easygoing and reflective. I'm sure it's helped me through this illness. I've been really pretty cheerful." Beyond that, he preferred not to talk about Zen much, "because if you're going to talk about it, you really want to talk. And so you cut it short and you make it shallow and superficial, and afterward you feel like you've dirtied yourself."..
The Peacemakers' leader is Matthiessen's own roshi, Bernie Glassman. (Matthiessen was Glassman's dharma successor, meaning he had attained the same level of enlightenment as his teacher.) The title In Paradise comes from a variant of the famous conversation Jesus had with a thief while dying on the cross. Jesus instructs his fellow crucifee that he need not beg to be taken to paradise, for they are already there. "Much more truthful from a Zen point of view" than the New Testament telling.”..
In the final chapter of his final book, the cerebral protagonist Clements Olin, whom Matthiessen readily admitted was based on himself, reflects on the futility of words: "The Zen poet Ryokan wrote of a glad willingness to exchange the most magnificent metaphor about the sea for the immediacy, the pure reality, of one splash of cold surf full in the face."
Peter Matthiessen's great genius was that he never saw the need to choose between the two.”
~ Mark Adams, Men’s Journal
~ Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) studied Zen with Nakagawa Soen Roshi, Eido Shimano Roshi, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, and received Dharma Transmission from Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi in 1984. He is author of many books, including The Snow Leopard, Nine-Headed Dragon River, and East of Lo Monthang, and is a lifelong environmentalist and worker for social justice.
* 無量 Mu Ryō, “No Limit” or “Boundless,” from the third of the Four Vows: “The Dharma is boundless, I vow to perceive it —which I was chanting with Eido-roshi at the moment of my wife's death.”
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