The Cultivation of A God

“One of the things I’ve learned over the years is,

Children Don’t Enjoy Lectures.”

— George Lucas

Wally Shawn :

Well, didn't George tell me that 

you were gonna do a play 

that was based on 

The Little Prince? 

Andre :

Hmm. Well, what happened, Wally... 

was that fall I was in New York, and I met 

this young Japanese Buddhist priest named Kozan;

and I thought he was Puck from the Midsummer Night's Dream.

 You know, he had this beautiful, delicate smile. 

I thought he was the Little Prince. 

So, naturally, I decided to go off to the Sahara desert,

to work on The Little Prince with two actors 

and this Japanese monk. 

Wally Shawn :

You did? 

Andre :

Well, I mean, I was still in a very peculiar state 

at that time, Wally. You know, I would look 

in the rearview mirror of my car. 

And see little birds flying out of my mouth. 

And I remember always being exhausted in that period. 

I always felt weak. You know, I really didn't know what was going on with me. I would just sit out there all alone in the country for days... and do nothing but write in my diary. And I was always thinking about death. 

But you went to the Sahara, Oh, yes, we went off into the desert.... and we rode through the desert on camels. And we rode and we rode. And then at night we would walk out under that enormous sky... and look at the stars. I just kept thinking about the same things that I was always thinking about at home... particularly about Chiquita. In fact, I thought about just about nothing but my marriage. And then I remember one incredibly dark night... being at an oasis, and there were palm trees moving in the wind... and I could hear Kozan singing far away in that beautiful bass voice. And I tried to follow his voice along the sand. You see, I thought he had something to teach me, Wally. And sometimes I would meditate with him. Sometimes I'd go off and meditate by myself. You know, I would see images of Chiquita. Once I actually saw her growing old... and her hair turning gray in front of my eyes. And I would just wail and yell my lungs out out there on the dunes. Anyway, the desert was pretty horrible. It was pretty cold. We were searching for something, but we couldn't tell if we were finding anything. You know that once Kozan and I... we were sitting on a dune, and we just ate sand. No, we weren't trying to be funny. I started, then he started. We just ate sand and threw up. That's how desperate we were. In other words, we didn't know why we were there. We didn't know what we were looking for. The entire thing seemed completely absurd, arid and empty. It was like, like a last chance or something. So what happened then? Well, in those days.... I went completely on impulse. So on impulse I brought Kozan back to stay with us in New York... after we got back from the Sahara, and he stayed for six months. - And he really sort of took over the whole family, in a way. - What do you mean? Well, there was certainly a center missing in the house at the time, There certainly wasn't a father, 'cause I was always thinking... about going off to Tibet or doing God knows what. And so he taught the whole family to meditate... and he told them all about Asia and the East and his monastery and everything. He really captivated everybody with an incredible bag of tricks. He had literally developed himself, Wally... so that he could push on his fingers and rise off out of his chair. I mean, he could literally go like this... You know, push on his fingers and go into like a headstand... and just hold himself there with two fingers. Or if Chiquita would suddenly get a little tension in her neck... well, he'd immediately have her down on the floor, he'd be walking up and down on her back... doing these unbelievable massages, you know. And the children found him amazing. I mean,you know, we'd visit friends who had children... and immediately he'd be playing with these children... in a way that, you know, we just can't do. I mean, those children... just giggles, giggles, giggles... about what this Japanese monk was doing in these holy robes. I mean, he was an acrobat, a ventriloquist... a magician, everything. You know, the amazing thing was that... I don't think he had any interest in children whatsoever. None at all. I don't think he liked them. I mean,you know, when he stayed with us... in the first week, really, the kids were just googly-eyed over him. But then a couple of weeks later, Chiquita and I could be out... and Marina could have flu or a temperature of 104... and he wouldn't even go in and say hello to her. But he was taking over more and more. I mean, his own habits had completely changed. You know, he started wearing these elegant Gucci shoes under his white monk's robes. He was eating huge amounts of food. I mean, he ate twice as much as Nicolas ate, you know? This tiny little Buddhist when I first met him, you know... was eating a little bowl of milk, hot milk with rice... was now eating huge beef. It was just very strange. You know, and we had tried working together, but really our work consisted mostly... of my trying to do these incredibly painful prostrations that they do in the monastery. You know, so really we hadn't been working very much. Anyway, we were out in the country, and we all went to Christmas mass together. You know, he was all dressed up in his Buddhist finery. And it was one of those awful, dreary Catholic churches on Long Island... where the priest talks about communism and birth control. 

And as I was sitting there in mass, I was wondering, "What in the world is going on?" 

I mean, here I am. I'm a grown man.. And there's this strange person living in the house, and I'm not working... You know, I was doing nothing but scribbling a little poetry in my diary. And I can't get a job teaching anymore, and I don't know what I want to do. When all of a sudden a huge creature appeared, looking at the congregation. It was about, I'd say, 6'8" something like that, you know... and it was half bull, half man... and its skin was blue. It had violets growing out of its eyelids and poppies growing out of its toenails. 

And it just stood there for the whole mass. 

I mean, I could not make that creature disappear. 

You know, I thought, "Oh, well. You know, I'm just seeing this 'cause I'm bored." You know, close my... I could not make that creature go away. Okay. Now, I didn't talk with people about it, because they'd think I was weird... but I felt that this creature was somehow coming to comfort me... that somehow he was appearing to say... "Well,you may feel low and you might not be able to create a play right now... but look at what can come to you on Christmas Eve. Hang on, old friend. I may seem weird to you, but on these weird voyages... weird creatures appear. It's part of the journey. You're okay. Hang in there." By the way, did you ever see... that play, The Violets are Blue? No. Oh, when you mentioned the violets, it reminded me of that. It was about people... being, strangled on a submarine. Well, so that was... that was Christmas. What happened after that? - Do you really want to hear about all this? - Yeah. Well, around that time... I was beginning to think about going to India. And Kozan suddenly left one day. I was beginning to get into a lot of very strange ideas around that time. Now, for example, I'd developed this. Well, I got this idea which I... Now, it was very appealing to me at the time, you know... which was that I would have a flag, a large flag... and that wherever I worked, this flag would fly. Or if we were outside, say, with a group, that the flag could be the thing we lay on at night... and that somehow, between working on this flag and lying on this flag... this flag flying over us... that the flag would pick up vibrations of a kind... that would still be in the flag when I brought it home. So I went down to meet this flag maker that I'd heard about. And you know, there was this very straightforward-looking guy. You know, very sweet, really healthy-looking and everything. Nice big, blond. And he had a beautiful, clean loft down in the village with lovely, happy flags. And I was all into The Little Prince, and I talked to him about The Little Prince... these adventures and everything, how I needed the flag and what the flag should be. He seemed to really connect with it. So, two weeks later, I came back. He showed me a flag that I thought was very odd, you know... 'cause I had, you know, well, you know... I had expected something gentle and lyrical. There was something about this that was so powerful... it was almost overwhelming. And it did include the Tibetan swastika. He put a swastika in your flag? No, it was the Tibetan swastika, not the Nazi swastika. It's one of the most ancient Tibetan symbols. And it was just strange, you know? But I brought it home, because my idea with this flag... was that before I left... you know, before I left for India... I wanted several people who were close to me to have this flag in the room for the night... to sleep with it, you know, and then in the morning to sew something into the flag. Sol took the flag into Marina, and I said, "Hey, look at this. What do you think of this?" And she said, "What is that? That's awful." I said, "It's a flag." And she said, "I don't like it." I said, "I kind of thought you might like to spend the night with it, you know." But she really thought the flag was awful. So then Chiquita threw this party for me before I left for India... and the apartment was filled with guests. And at one point Chiquita said, "The flag, the flag. Where's the flag?" And I said, "Oh, yeah. The flag." And I go and get the flag, and I open it up. Chiquita goes absolutely white and runs out of the room and vomits. So the party just comes to a halt and breaks up. And then the next day I gave it to this young woman... who'd been in my group in Poland, who was now in New York. I didn't tell her anything about any of this. At 5:00 in the morning, she called me up and she said... "I got to come and see you right away." I thought, "Oh, God." She came up, and she said, "I saw things. I saw things around this flag. Now, I know you're stubborn, and I know you want to take this thing with you... but if you'd follow my advice, you'd put it in a hole in the ground... and burn it and cover it with earth, cause the devil's in it." I never took the flag with me. In fact, I gave it to her, and, she had a ceremony with it... six months later, in France, with some friends... in which, they did burn it. God. That's really, really amazing. So, did you ever go to India? Oh, yes, I went to India in the spring, Wally... and I came back home feeling all wrong. I mean, you know, I'd been to India, and I'd just felt like a tourist. I'd found nothing. So I was spending, the summer on Long Island with my family... and I heard about this community in Scotland called Findhorn... where people sang and talked and meditated with plants. And it was founded by several rather middle-class English and Scottish eccentrics. Some of them intellectuals, and some of them not. And I'd heard that they'd grown things in soil... that supposedly nothing can grow in, 'cause it's almost beach soil... and that they'd built, not built, they'd grown the largest cauliflowers in the world... and there are sort of cabbages. And they've grown trees that can't grow in the British Isles. So I went there. I mean, it is an amazing place, Wally. I mean, if there are insects bothering the plants... they will talk with the insects and, you know, make an agreement... by which they'll set aside a special patch of vegetables just for the insects... and then the insects will leave the main part alone. - Huh. - Things like that. And everything they do they do beautifully. I mean, the buildings just shine. And I mean, for instance, the icebox, the stove, the car... they all have names. And since you wouldn't treat Helen, the icebox... with any less respect than you would Margaret, your wife... you know, you make sure that Helen is as clean as Margaret, or treated with equal respect. And when I was there, Wally, I remember being in the woods... and I would look at a leaf, and I would actually see that thing... that is alive in that leaf. And then I remember just running through the woods as fast as I could... with this incredible laugh coming out of me... and really being in that state, you know, where laughter and tears seem to merge, I mean, it absolutely blasted me open. When I came out of Findhorn, I was hallucinating nonstop. I was seeing clouds as creatures. The people on the airplane all had animals' faces. I mean, I was on a trip. It was like being in a William Blake world suddenly. Things were exploding. So immediately I went to Belgrade, 'cause I wanted to talk to Grotowski. Grotowski and I got together at midnight in my hotel room... and we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream... and we talked from midnight until 11:00 the next morning. - God. What did he say? - Nothing! I talked. He didn't say a word. And then I guess really... the last big experience of this kind took place that fall. It was out at Montauk on Long Island... and there were only about nine of us involved, mostly men. And we borrowed Dick Avedon's property out at Montauk. And the country out there is like Heathcliff country. It's absolutely wild. What we wanted to do was we wanted to take, you know... We wanted to take All Souls' Eve, Halloween... and use it as a point of departure for something. So each one of us prepared some sort of event for the others... somehow in the spirit of All Souls' Eve. But the biggest event was three of the people... kept disappearing in the middle of the night each night... and we knew they were preparing something big... but we didn't know what. And midnight on Halloween, under a dark moon, above these cliffs... we were all told to gather at the topmost cliff and that we would be taken somewhere. And we did. And we waited, and it was very, very cold. And then the three of them: Helen, Bill and Fred... showed up wearing white. You know, something they'd made out of sheets... looked a little spooky, not funny. And they took us into the basement of this house that had burned down on the property. And in this ruined basement, they had set up a table with benches they'd made. And on this table they had laid out paper, pencils, wine and glasses. And we were all asked to sit at the table and to make out our last will and testament. You know, to think about and write down whatever our last words were to the world... or to somebody we were very close to. And that's quite a task. I must have been there for about an hour and a half or so, maybe two. And then one at a time they would ask one of us to come with them... and I was one of the last. And they came for me, and they put a blindfold on me... and they ran me through these fields, two people. And they'd found a kind of potting shed, you know, a kind of shed, on the grounds... a little tiny room that had once had tools in it. And they took me down the steps, into this basement... and the room was just filled with harsh white light. Then they told me to get undressed and give them all my valuables. Then they put me on a table, and they sponged me down. Well, you know, I just started flashing on death camps and secret police. I don't know what happened to the other people, but I just started to cry uncontrollably. Uh, then they got me to my feet and they took photographs of me, naked. And then naked, again blindfolded, I was run through these forests... and we came to a kind of tent made of sheets, with sheets on the ground. And there were all these naked bodies... huddling together for warmth against the cold. Must have been left there for about an hour. And then again, one by one, one at a time, we were led out. The blindfold was put on... and I felt myself being lowered onto something like a stretcher. And the stretcher was carried a long way, very slowly, through these forests... and then I felt myself being lowered into the ground. They had, in fact, dug six graves... eight feet deep. And then I felt these pieces of wood being put on me. And I cannot tell you, Wally, what I was going through. And then the stretcher was lowered into the grave... and then this wood was put on me... and then my valuables were put on me, in my hands. And they'd taken, you know, a kind of sheet or canvas... and they'd stretched about this much above my head... and then they shoveled dirt into the grave... so that I really had the feeling of being buried alive. And after being in the grave for about half an hour... I mean, I didn't know how long I'd be in there... I was resurrected, lifted out of the grave... blindfold taken off, and run through these fields. And we came to a great circle of fire, with music and hot wine... and everyone danced until dawn. And then at dawn... to the best of our ability, we filled up the graves... and went back to New York. 

And that was really the last big event. 

I mean, that was the end. I mean,you know, I began to realize... I just didn't want to do these things anymore, you know? 

I felt sort of becalmed, you know, like that chapter in Moby Dick... 

where the wind goes out of the sails. 

And then last winter, 

without, thinking about it very much... 

I went to see this agent I know to tell him I was interested in directing plays again. 

Actually, he seemed a little surprised

to see that Rip Van Winkle was still alive. 

Mmm. God. I didn't know 

they were so small. 

Well, you know, frankly... I'm sort of repelled by the whole story, if you really want to know. 

What? 

Ah, you know... 

Who did I think I was, you know? 

I mean, that's The Story of some kind 

of spoiled princess, you know. 

Who did I think I was, the Shah of Iran? 

You know, I really wonder 

if people such as myself 

are really not Albert Speer, Wally. 

You know, Hitler's architect, Albert Speer? - What? No, I've been thinking a lot about him recently because, I think I am Speer. And I think it's time that I was caught and tried the way he was. 

What are you talking about? 

Well, you know, he was a very cultivated man, an architect, an artist, you know... 

so he thought the ordinary rules of life 

didn't apply to him either. 

I mean, I really feel that everything I've done... 

is horrific, just horrific. 

My God. But why? 

You see, I've seen a lot of Death 

in the last few years, Wally... 

and there's one thing 

that's for sure about Death... 

You do it alone, you see. 

That seems quite certain, you see. That I've seen. That the people around your bed mean nothing. Your reviews mean nothing. Whatever it is, you do it alone. And so the question is, when I get on my deathbed, what kind of a person am I gonna be? And I'm just very dubious about the kind of person who would have lived his life... those last few years the way I did. Why should you feel that way? You see, I've had a very rough time in the last few months, Wally. Three different people in my family were in the hospital at the same time. Then my mother died. Then Marina had something wrong with her back, and we were terribly worried about her. You know, so, I mean, I'm feeling very raw right now. I mean, I can't sleep, my nerves are shot. I mean, I'm affected by everything. You know, last week I had this really nice director from Norway over for dinner... and he's someone I've known for years and years... and he's somebody that I think I'm quite fond of. And I was sitting there just thinking that he was a pompous, defensive... conservative stuffed shirt who was only interested in the theater. 

He was talking and talking. 

His mother had been a famous Norwegian comedienne. 

I realised he had said "I remember my mother" at least 400 times during the evening. And he was telling story after story about his mother. You know, I'd heard these stories 20 times in the past. 

He was drinking this whole bottle 

of bourbon very quietly. 

His laugh was so horrible. 

You know, I could hear his laugh... the pain in that laugh, the hollowness. 

You know, what being that woman's son had done to him. You know, so at a certain point I just had to ask him to leave... nicely, you know. I told him I had to get up early the next morning, 'cause it was so horrible. It was just as if he had died in my living room. You know, then I went into the bathroom and cried 'cause I felt I'd lost a friend. And then after he'd gone, I turned the television on... and there was this guy who had just won the something. Some sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver bottle. And he, you know, he couldn't stuff the check in the bottle... and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face. He wasn't really listening to the guy who was interviewing him... but he was smiling malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I thought... "What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat." Then I thought, "That guy is me." Then last night actually, you know, it was our 20th wedding anniversary... and I took Chiquita to see this show about Billie Holiday. I looked at these show business people who know nothing about Billie Holiday, nothing. You see, they were really kind of, in a way, intellectual creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling. I mean, you know I was just sitting there, crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling I was just as creepy as they were... and that my whole life had been a sham... and I didn't have the guts to be Billie Holiday either. I mean, I really feel that I'm just washed up, wiped out. I feel I've just squandered my life. André, now, how can you say something like that? I mean, Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally... but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're living in... more and more upsetting. I mean, last week I went down to the Public Theater one afternoon. You know, when I walked in, I said hello to everybody... 'cause I know them all, and they all know me, they're always very friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked? And then one person, one, a woman who runs the casting office, said... "Gee, you look horrible. ls something wrong?" Now, she, you know, we started talking. Of course, I started telling her things. And she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers who's 80... whom she's very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which was solved. But the nurse was so sloppy, she didn't put the bed rails up... and so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple. So you know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because of who she is... You know, 'cause this had happened to her very, very recently. She could see me with complete clarity. She didn't know anything about what I'd been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt... or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan. So they said, "Gee, you look wonderful." Now, they're living in an insane dream world. They're not looking. That seems very strange to me. Right, because they just didn't see anything, somehow... except, the few little things that they wanted to see. Yeah, you know, it's like what happened just before my mother died. You know, we'd gone to the hospital to see my mother... and I went in to see her... and I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall sort of comforting my father... when a doctor who was a specialist in a problem she had with her arm... went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said, "Boy, don't we have a lot of reason to feel great? Isn't it wonderful how she's coming along?" Now, all he saw was the arm. That's all he saw. Now, here's another person who's existing in a dream. Who, on top of that, is a kind of butcher... who's committing a kind of familial murder... because when he comes out of that room, he psychically kills us... by taking us into a dream world... where we become confused and frightened... 'cause the moment before, we saw somebody who already looked dead... and now here comes a specialist who tells us they're in wonderful shape. I mean, they were literally driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here's an 82-year-old man who's very emotional... and you know, and if you go in one moment, and you see the person's dying... and you don't want them to die, and then a doctor comes out five minutes later... and tells you they're in wonderful shape... I mean, you know, you can go crazy. - Yeah. I know what you mean. - I mean, the doctor didn't see my mother. The people at the Public Theater didn't see me. I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance. We're walking around like zombies. I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things. We're just going around all day like unconscious machines... and meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness... just building up and building up inside us. 

That's right. lt just builds up... and then it just leaps out inappropriately. I mean, I remember when I was, acting in this play... based on The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. And I was playing the part of the cat. But they had trouble, making up my cat suit... so I didn't get it delivered to me till the night of the first performance. Particularly the head, I mean, I'd never even had a chance to try it on. And about four of my fellow actors actually came up to me... and they said these things which I just couldn't help thinking... were attempts to destroy me. 

You know, one of them said, "Oh, well, now that head... ...will totally change your hearing in the performance. ...You may hear everything completely differently... ...and it may be very upsetting. "Now, I was once in a performance where I was wearing earmuffs... and I couldn't hear anything anybody said." And then another one said, "Oh, you know, whenever I wear even a hat on stage... ...I tend to faint." I mean, those remarks were just full of hostility... because, I mean, if I'd listened to those people, I would have gone out there on stage... and I wouldn't have been able to hear anything, and I would have fainted. But the hostility was completely inappropriate... because, in fact, those people liked me. I mean, that hostility was just some feeling that was, you know... left over from some previous experience. Because somehow in our social existence today... we're only allowed to express our feelings. Weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly, everybody goes crazy. 

Well, did you express your feelings about what those people said to you? 

No. I mean, I didn't even know what I felt till I thought about it later. And I mean, at the most, you know, in a situation like that... even if I had known what I felt... I might say something, if I'm really annoyed... like, "Oh, yeah. Well, that's just fascinating... and, I probably will faint tonight, just as you did." 

I do just the same thing myself. 

We can't be direct, so we end up saying the weirdest things. 

I mean, I remember a night. It was a couple of weeks after my mother died. And I was in pretty bad shape. And I had dinner with three relatively close friends... two of whom had known my mother quite well... and all three of whom had known me for years. You know that we went through that entire evening without my being able to... for a moment, get anywhere near what... Not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary evening... in which I was talking about all this pain that I was going through and everything. Really, not at all. But the fact that nobody could say... "Gee, what a shame about your mother" or "How are you feeling?" It was just as if nothing had happened. They were all making these jokes and laughing. I got quite crazy, as a matter of fact. One of these people mentioned a certain man whom I don't like very much... and I started screeching about how he had just been found in the Bronx River... and his penis had dropped off from gonorrhea, and all kinds of insane things. And later, when I got home, I realized I'd just been desperate to break through this ice. Yeah. I mean, do you realize, Wally, if you brought that situation into a Tibetan home... That'd be just so far out. I mean, they wouldn't be able to understand it. That would be simply so weird, Wally. If four Tibetans came together, and tragedy had just struck one of the ones... and they spent the whole evening going... I mean, you know, Tibetans would have looked at that, and would have thought that was the most unimaginable behavior. But for us, that's common behavior. I mean, really, the Africans would have probably put their spears into all four of us... 'cause it would have driven them crazy. They would have thought we were dangerous animals or something like that. - Right. - I mean, that's absolutely abnormal behavior. Is everything all right, gentlemen? - Great. - Yeah. But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners and parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams... because people are talking in symbols. Everyone is sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they're really thinking about. Then people will start making these jokes that are really some sort of secret code. Right. Well, what often happens in some of these evenings... is that these really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know... and everyone will be talking at once and sort of saying... "Hey, wouldn't it be great if Frank Sinatra and Mrs. Nixon and blah-blah-blah... were in such and such a situation?" You know, always with famous people, and always sort of grotesque. Or people will be talking about some horrible thing... like, the death of that girl in the car with Ted Kennedy... and they'll just be roaring with laughter. I mean, it's really amazing. It's just unbelievable. That's the only way anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think that's why I never understand what's going on at a party. I'm always completely confused. You know, Debby once said, after one of these New York evenings... she thought she'd traveled a greater distance... just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago... to that New York evening... than her grandmother had traveled in, making her way... from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago. I think that's right. You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons... that we don't know what's going on... is that when we're there at a party, we're all too busy performing.

 That was one of the reasons that, Grotowski gave up the theatre. 

He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well

 that performance in the theatre was sort of superfluous... 

and, in a way, obscene. 

Wally Shawn :

Huh. Isn't it amazing how often a Doctor

will live up to our expectation of 

how A Doctor should look? 

When you see a terrorist on Television, 

he looks just like A Terrorist. 

Andre :

I mean, we live in a world in which 

Fathers or single people, or artists

are all trying to live up to someone's 

fantasy of how A Father, 

or A Single Person, or An Artist 

should look and behave. 

They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to 

conduct themselves at every single moment. 

And they all seem totally self-confident. 

Of course, privately people are very 

mixed up about themselves.

Wally Shawn :

 Yeah. They don't know what they 

should be doing with their lives. 

They're reading all these 

self-help books. 

Andre :

Oh, God! I mean, those books are just so touching, 

because they show how desperately curious we all are 

to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life,

even though, by performing these roles all the time,

we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else.

 I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. 

We usually don't know the things we'd like to know... 

even about our supposedly closest friends. 

I mean, you know.. 

Suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life. 

Well, you would love to know if your friends 

have experienced similar things. 

But we just don't dare to ask each other. 

Wally Shawn :

No. It would be like asking your 

friend to drop his role. I mean, 

we just put no value at all 

on perceiving reality. 

I mean, on the contrary, this incredible 

emphasis that we all place now... 

on our so-called careers, automatically makes 

perceiving reality a very low priority;

because if your life is organised around 

trying to be successful in a career... well,

 it just doesn't matter what you perceive 

or what you experience.

 You can really sort of shut your mind off 

for years ahead, in a way. 

You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot. 

You know, just the way your mother's doctor 

had on his automatic pilot... when he went in 

and he looked at the arm, and he totally 

failed to perceive anything else. 

Andre :

That's right. Our minds are just 

focused on these goals and plans 

which in themselves are not reality. 

Wally Shawn :

No. Goals and plans are not... 

I mean, they're fantasy. They're part of a dream life. 

I mean, you know, it always just does seem so ridiculous, 

somehow... that everybody has to have his little goal in life. 

I mean, it's so absurd, in a way, when you consider 

that it doesn't matter which one it is. 

Andre :

Right. And because people's concentration is on their goals... 

in Their Life they just live each moment by habit. 

Really, like the Norwegian telling 

the same stories over and over again. 

Life becomes habitual. And it is today. 

I mean, very few things happen now like that moment... 

when Marlon Brando sent the Indian woman 

to accept the Oscar, and everything went haywire. 

Things just very rarely go haywire now. 

And if you're just operating by habit, 

then you're not really Living. 

I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb 

"to be" is the same as "to grow" 

or "to make grow." 

Wally Shawn :

Huh.

Bloom

Okay. Um... But it's not 

only about flowers, right?

You have the crazy plant-nut guy?

He's funny. Right?

"There's not nearly 

enough of him

to fill a book."

So Orlean "digresses 

in long

passages." 

Blah, blah, blah.

"No narrative unites 

these passages." 

— New York Times 

Book Review.

I can't structure this.

It's that sprawling 

New Yorker-shit.

[Not Listening] Oh, man, 

I'd fuck her up the ass….

Sorry. 

The Book has No Story.

All right. Make one up.

I mean, nobody in this town

can make up a crazy story like you.

You're The KING of that.

No, I didn't want 

to do that this time.

It's someone else's material.

I have a responsibility 

to Susan...

Anyway, I wanted to 

grow as A Writer.

I wanted to do 

something simple.

Show people 

how amazing

flowers are.

….ARE they amazing?

…I don't know. 

I think they are….

I need you to get me out of this.

All right. Charlie, you've been stringing them along for months.

Not to give them anything at this

point would be a terrible career move.

“Hey, let's not get off The Subject.

This isn't a pissing contest.

The Point is, what's so wonderful 

is that all these flowers have a 

specific relationship with the 

insect that pollinates it.

There's a certain orchid looks 

exactly like a certain insect.

So the insect is drawn to this flower, 

its double, its soul mate, 

and wants nothing more 

than to make love to it.

After the insect flies off, 

it spots another soul-mate flower 

and makes love to it, pollinating it.

And neither The Flower 

nor The Insect will 

ever understand 

the significance of 

their lovemaking.

How could they know that 

because of their little dance, 

The World lives?

But it does.

By simply doing what they're designed to do 

something large

and magnificent happens.

In this sense, they show us

How to Live.

How the only barometer 

you have is Your Heart.

How when you spot Your Flower,

you can't let anything 

get in your way.

"You would have to want something very badly to go looking for it in the Fakahatchee Strand. The Fakahatchee is a preserve of sixty-three thousand coastal lowland acres in the southwestern corner of Florida, about twenty-five miles south of Naples, in that part of Collier County where satiny lawns and golf courses give way to an ocean of saw grass with edges as sharp as scythes. 

Part of the Fakahatchee is deep swamp, part is cypress stands, part is wet woods, part is estuarine tidal marsh, and part is parched prairie. The limestone underneath it is six million years old and is capped with hard rock and sand, silt and shell marls, and a grayish-greenish clay.

Overall, the Fakahatchee is as flat as a cracker. Ditches and dents fill up fast with oozing groundwater. The woods are dense and lightless. In the open stretches the land unrolls like a smooth grass mat and even small bumps and wrinkles are easy to see. Most of the land is at an elevation of only five or ten feet, and it slopes millimeter by millimeter until it is dead even with the sea. 

The Fakahatchee has a particular strange and exceptional beauty. The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk. The tall, straight palm trunks and the tall, straight cypress trunks shoot up out of the flat land like geysers. It is beautiful the way a Persian carpet is beautiful—thick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness. People live in the Fakahatchee and around it, but it is an unmistakably inhospitable place. In 1872 a surveyor made this entry in his field notes: "A pond, surrounded by bay and cypress swamp, impracticable. Pond full of monstrous alligators. Counted fifty and stopped." 

In fact, the hours I spent in the Fakahatchee retracing Laroche's footsteps were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part of the Fakahatchee is hot and wet and buggy and full of cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through about as easily as you could walk through a car wash. The sinkholes are filled with as much as seven feet of standing water, and around them the air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep a hold of them; if it fails it will settle for your shoes. The water in the swamp is stained black with tannin from the bark of cypress trees that is so corrosive it can cure leather. 

Whatever isn't wet in the Fakahatchee is blasted. The sun pounds the treeless prairies. The grass gets so dry that the friction from a car can set it on fire, and the burning grass can engulf the car in flames. The Fakahatchee used to be littered with burned-up cars that had been abandoned by panfried adventurers—a botanist who traveled through in the 1940s recalled in an interview that he was most impressed by the area's variety of squirrels and the number of charred Model T's. The swamp's stillness and darkness and thickness can rattle your nerves. In 1885 a sailor on a plume-collecting expedition wrote in his diary: "The place looked wild and lonely. About three o'clock it seemed to get on Henry's nerves and we saw him crying, he could not tell us why, he was just plain scared." 

Spooky places are usually full of death, but the Fakahatchee is crazy with living things. Birders used to come from as far away as Cuba and leave with enough plumes to decorate thousands of ladies' hats; in the 1800s one group of birders also took home eight tons of birds' eggs. One turn-of-the-century traveler wrote that on his journey he found the swamp's abundance marvelous—he caught two hundred pounds of lobsters, which he ate for breakfasts, and stumbled across a rookery where he gathered "quite a supply of cormorant and blue heron eggs, with which I intend to make omelets." That night he had a dinner of a fried blue heron and a cabbage-palm heart. 

In the Fakahatchee there used to be a carpet of lubber grasshoppers so deep that it made driving hazardous, and so many orchids that visitors described their heavy sweet smell as nauseating. 

On my first walk in the swamp I saw strap lilies and water willows and sumac and bladderwort, and resurrection ferns springing out of a fallen dead tree; I saw oaks and pines and cypress and pop ash and beauty-berry and elderberry and yellow-eyed grass and camphor weed. When I walked in, an owl gave me a lordly look, and when I walked out three tiny alligators skittered across my path. I wandered into a nook in the swamp that was girdled with tall cypress. 

The rangers call this nook The Cathedral. 

I closed my eyes and stood in the stillness for a moment hardly breathing, and when I opened my eyes and looked up I saw dozens of bromeliad plants roosting in the branches of almost every tree I could see. The bromeliads were bright red and green and shaped like fright wigs. Some were spider-sized and some were as big as me. The sun shooting through the swamp canopy glanced off their sheeny leaves. Hanging up there on the branches the bromeliads looked not quite like plants. They looked more like a crowd of animals, watching everything that passed their way. 

I had decided to go to the Fakahatchee after the hearing because I wanted to see what Laroche had wanted. I asked him to go with me, but because the judge had banned him from the swamp until the case was over I had to look around for someone else. I suppose I could have gone alone, but I had heard the Fakahatchee was a hard place and even a few brave-seeming botanists I'd talked to told me they didn't like to go in by themselves. At last I was introduced to a park ranger named Tony who said he would go with me. I then spent the next several days talking myself into being unafraid. 

A few days before we were supposed to go, Tony called and asked if I was really sure I wanted to make the trip. I said I was. I'm actually pretty tough. I've run a marathon and traveled by myself to weird places and engaged in conversations with a lot of strangers, and when my toughness runs out I can rely on a certain willful obliviousness to keep me going. 

On the other hand, my single most unfavorite thing in life so far has been to touch the mushy bottom of the lake during swimming lessons at summer camp and feel the weedy slime squeeze between my clenched toes, so the idea of walking through the swamp was a little bit extra-horrible to me. 

The next day Tony called and asked again if I was really ready for the Fakahatchee. At that point I gave up trying to be tough and let every moment in the lake at Camp Cardinal ooze back into my memory, and when I finally met Tony at the ranger station I almost started to cry. 

But I was determined to see orchids, so Tony and I went deep into the Fakahatchee to try to find them. 

We walked from morning until late in the afternoon with little luck. The light was hot and the air was airless. My legs ached and my head ached and I couldn't stand the sticky feel of my own skin. I began having the frantic, furtive thoughts of a deserter and started wondering what Tony would do if I suddenly sat down and refused to keep walking. He was a car-length ahead of me; from what I could tell he felt terrific. I mustered myself and caught up. 

As we marched along Tony told me about his life and mentioned that he was an orchid collector himself and that he had a little home orchid lab, where he was trying to produce a hybrid that would have the wraparound lip of an Encyclia but would be the color of a certain Cattleya that is maroon with small lime-green details. He said that he would find out if he had succeeded in seven or eight years, when the hybrid seedlings would bloom. 

I said nothing for the next mile or so. 

When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower. 

"Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose," he said, shrugging. "Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. 

I mean, no obvious meaning. 

You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. 

I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time." 

The orchid I really wanted to see was Polyrrhiza lindenii, the ghost orchid. Laroche had taken more of other orchid and bromeliad species when he went poaching, but he told me that the ghost orchids were the ones he had wanted the most. 

Polyrrhiza lindenii is the only really pretty orchid in the Fakahatchee. Technically it is an orchid of the Vandaneae tribe, Sarcanthinae subtribe; Polyrrhiza is its genus (the genus is sometimes also called Polyradicion). The ghost is a leafless species named in honor of the Belgian plantsman Jean-Jules Linden, who first discovered it in Cuba in 1844. It was seen for the first time in the United States in 1880 in Collier County 

The ghost orchid usually grows around the trunks of pop ash and pond apple and custard apple trees. It blooms once a year. It has no foliage—it is nothing but roots, a tangle of flat green roots about the width of linguine, wrapped around a tree. The roots are chlorophyllus; that is, they serve as both roots and leaves. The flower is a lovely papery white. It has the intricate lip that is characteristic of all orchids, but its lip is especially pronounced and pouty, and each corner tapers into a long, fluttery tail. In pictures the flower looks like the face of a man with a Fu Manchu mustache. These tails are so delicate that they tremble in a light breeze. The whiteness of the flower is as startling as a spotlight in the grayness and greenness of a swamp. Because the plant has no foliage and its roots are almost invisible against tree bark, the flower looks magically suspended in midair. People say a ghost orchid in bloom looks like a flying white frog — an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog. 

Carlyle Luer, the author of The Native Orchids of Florida, once wrote of the ghost orchid: "Should one be lucky enough to see a flower, all else will seem eclipsed." Near a large sinkhole Tony pointed out some little green straps on a young tree and said they were ghost orchids that were done blooming for the year. We walked for another hour, and he pointed out more green ghost-orchid roots on more trees. 

The light was flattening out and I was muddy and scratched and scorched. Finally we turned around and walked five thousand miles or so back to Tony's Jeep. It had been a hard day and I hadn't seen what I'd come to see. I kept my mind busy as we walked out by wondering if the hard-to-find, briefly seen, irresistibly beautiful, impossible-to-cultivate ghost orchid was just a fable and not a real flower at all. Maybe it really was a ghost. 

There are certainly ghosts in the Fakahatchee — ghosts of rangers who were murdered years ago by illegal plume hunters, and of loggers who were cut to pieces in fights and then left to cool and crumble into dirt, and for years there has been an apparition wandering the swamp, The Swamp Ape, which is said to be seven feet tall and weigh seven hundred pounds and have the physique of a human, the posture of an ape, the body odor of a skunk, and an appetite for lima beans. 

There is also an anonymous, ghostly human being whom the Fakahatchee rangers call the Ghost Grader, who brings real — not imaginary — construction equipment into the swamp every once in a while and clears off the vine-covered roads. 

If the ghost orchid was really only a phantom it was still such a bewitching one that it could seduce people to pursue it year after year and mile after miserable mile. If it was a real flower I wanted to keep coming back to Florida until I could see one. The reason was not that I love orchids. I don't even especially like orchids. What I wanted was to see this thing that people were drawn to in such a singular and powerful way. 

Everyone I was meeting connected to the orchid poaching had circled their lives around some great desire — Laroche had his crazy inspirations and orchid lovers had their intense devotion to their flowers and the Seminoles had their burning dedication to their history and culture — a desire that then answered questions for them about how to spend their time and their money and who their friends would be and where they would travel and what they did when they got there. It was religion. I wanted to want something as much as people wanted these plants, but it isn't part of my constitution. I think people my age are embarrassed by too much enthusiasm and believe that too much passion about anything is naive. 

I suppose I do have one un-embarrassing passion — I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately. 

That night I called Laroche and told him that I had just come back from looking for ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee but that I had seen nothing but bare roots. 

I said that I was wondering whether I had missed this year's flowers or whether perhaps the only place the ghost orchid bloomed was in the imagination of people who'd walked too long in the swamp. 

What I didn't say was that strong feelings always make me skeptical at first. What else I didn't say was that his life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid — wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic and fleeting and out of reach. 

I could hear a soft puckery gulp as he inhaled cigarette smoke. Then he said, "Jesus Christ, of course there are ghost orchids out there! I've stolen them, for Chrissake! I know exactly where they are." The phone was silent for a moment, and then he cleared his throat and said, "You should have gone with me." 

Orchid Fever 

The Orchidaceae is a large, ancient family of perennial plants with one fertile stamen and a three-petaled flower. One petal is unlike the other two. In most orchid species this petal is enlarged into a pouch or lip and is the most conspicuous part of the flower. There are more than sixty thousand known orchid species, and there may be thousands more that haven't yet been discovered and maybe thousands that once lived on earth and are now extinct. 

Humans have created another hundred thousand hybrids by cross-fertilizing one species with another or by crossing different hybrids to one another in plant-breeding labs. 

Orchids are considered the most highly evolved flowering plants on earth.