An innocence in lying
To say that the sun rises and know that it is only just a way of speaking because cold sun and solstice the gray light as yellow moon paper.
Robert Thurman, former monk and eminent scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, has passed from this world. We do not know where he has gone, but if this were Beirut, it would be somewhere off the Rue de Mexique.
Which begs the question: Where do the wandering ghosts of Ras Beirut go now that Bardo is closed?
To the gossipy, Godardian coincidental: Robert Thurman’s second wife, Nena, was Timothy Leary’s first wife. They met because the Dalai Lama sent Bob to meet with Leary to try to get Tim to cool it with all the acid. Bob ended up marrying Nena and having Uma. Tim, meanwhile, married Rosemary, which is when things started to really go off the rails for him, LSD-wise.
Which brings us back to Zayd Dohrn’s book, in that he provides fairly extensive details of the operation via which the Weather broke Leary out of the Men’s Colony prison near San Luis Obispo back in September 1970. (Because of Leary’s tenuous connection to Tibetan Buddhism, the Weather crew that sprung him used a statue of the Buddha to signal where he was supposed to meet them—the Buddha being, as it were, “on the path to enlightenment.”) After getting him out of California, they smuggled him across country and got him to Cuba, and from there to Algeria, where he ended up hanging out with Eldridge Cleaver, until both Eldridge and the FLN had had enough of his antics that he got kicked out of the country, which is how he ends up in Afghanistan, where is arrested in 1973.
The back half of that story comes from Elaine Mokhtefi who–as the American serving as FLN liaison with the Panthers in Algiers–has some choice things to say about both Leary and the Weather Underground.
The back back half that I can add is that the novelist Katherine Neville once told me that she remembered seeing Eldridge Cleaver and Leary quite regularly when she was living in Algiers; and that on at least one occasion, she saw them walking down the opposite side of the street, in the opposite direction, as Henry Kissinger.
What does it mean to live inside the remnants of a failed revolution? This is, I suppose, part of what Marx was worrying over in the Brumaire. And Freud, later, for different reasons.
But, up close, the new journalism is very old. And very annoying.
To that point, it is worth noting that Robert Thurman had the same literary agent as Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe.
If Lindsay Graham were finally outed, could we stop his reign of terror?
Thirty-nine