Not his type

Everything my husband finds physically appealing I am not. Is friendship enough to sustain a marriage?

By Cary Tennis

Apr 2, 2002 | Dear Readers,

Sunday was Easter and I didn't take acid. The coded messages of extreme urgency one receives in that locked ward of candy-colored psychosis were always good on Easter; the robed gentlemen handing out slips of paper on which were written the secrets of the universe never smiled with veiled malice on Easter, never intimated with a glance that catastrophe lay ahead, never turned into many-headed dragons as they sometimes did on other trips. It was a long time ago, and I don't recommend it -- who knows what I could have accomplished if I hadn't scrambled my brains! -- but that's what I used to do on Easter.

I was a dropout, not an activist. The best of the '60s activists were smart enough to enjoy the music and the free love but not to confuse the addlepated, pseudo-spiritual epiphanies acid provided with real-world political ideas and strategies.

One of those Easters on acid was spent in an immense sinkhole near Gainesville, Fla. In a state with no mountains, such enormous holes, made when underground rivers and streams eroded the limestone under our feet, provided, in the inverse, something like the thrill of steep, vertiginous cliffs, so flatlanders liked to go there.

Wandering barefoot the wet, sandy trails of the Gainesville sinkhole, I hallucinated myself as an ancient holy man in robes, complete with gnarled stick and sandals, walking outside the walls of a city, conversing with the younger representatives of two warring parties. "It is an ancient enmity," my thoughts proclaimed with all the solemnity of a sage from "Star Trek." "There is no human solution. It is up to the gods." As was typical of acid hallucinations, the sheer vividness of the recognition gave one the feeling of insight into it, when one had only seen the problem with a chemical vigor hard to achieve in a natural state: the tragic and ineluctable prison of ancient enmity, the sad, irretrievable waste.

That is a far cry from political insight. In fact, cut adrift from any social movement, it's the kind of pseudo-mythical thinking that became an element of New Age hedonism. Oddly enough, it also seems eerily like the hazy, fatalistic approach the Bush administration has taken to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While former President Clinton may have exhausted all efforts and failed to bring the two sides to agreement, his actions to the end represented a belief in the necessity of unrelenting political engagement. He never gave up. Bush was probably the kind of frat boy who would have been trying to buy acid from the hippies, while earnest Bill Clinton, though growing his hair moderately long, was trying to get into Yale, cop the Fullbright and take the reins of the system. And now Bush, in his neo-recovery reborn Christianity, seems to have confused accepting the things he cannot change with having the courage to change the things he can. He's a politician. It's his job to change things. Acting as though the Israelis and Palestinians were simply having a therapeutic moment in a long and immutable history of enmity belies the redress of real-world grievances that must form the foundation of any lasting peace.

So it was that over this most recent Easter weekend Israelis and Palestinians continued their battles with renewed savagery, and I did not take acid. I turned on the television to the shock and horror, and then turned away from it, dwarfed by its complexity and its ageless ire, and I played a little tennis with a renewed savagery of my own, and enjoyed yet another sunny day in a miraculous succession of brilliant blue Easters, lucky to be alive.

Though my passing acquaintance with prayer has served mainly as a program of personal impulse management, and may in fact be nothing more than a form of psychological self-programming, if ever there was a time it seemed appropriate for us onlookers to pray for a miracle in a far-off land, this seems like it.

While we resort to things like prayer, President Bush must wake up from his acid trip and salvage what he can of the machinery of negotiation.

There's still room for a miracle. After all, didn't miracles used to happen there all the time?

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