Biography
"Marty Glass," His Biography,
Written by Himself in His 0wn Hand
"Marty Glass" was born, so he was
subsequently informed, on January 27th, 1938, in New York City, the Big
Apple. He was raised and educated there, moved with vague but eager
anticipation to the Bay Area in l965, and in 1983, fallen among
back-to-the-lander hippies, moved 200 miles north to Humboldt County where
he presently lives with his wife in an owner-built home two miles up a
dirt road beyond the power and water lines. He has five children he loves
with all his heart who tease him with fearless and familiar skill and to
his great delight, the oldest of whom was born in l964 and the youngest in
1979: a boy, three girls, a boy again, all competent, level-headed and
earning money. Raising children turned out to be the major occupation and
dedication of his earthly life.
In his present dispensation he is at home
with his table saw, his rather imperfectly adjusted radial arm saw, his
skilsaw, his socket wrenches, his router, his pump mix, his chainsaws (Stihl,
soon to acquire a Husquevarna) and of course his brand-new 14.5 volt
cordless drill. Three years ago, in 1998, he stopped swinging a splitting
maul and went in on a hydraulic splitter with his equally weakening
neighbors on the hill; he had been warned -perhaps facetiously but he was
never certain- that "many a man has been found dead with a splitting
maul in his hands." The house is heated mainly with madrone and oak,
sometimes fir, occasionally bay which was very hard to split until the
hydraulic was purchased. He tinkers with and does his best to maintain two
generators, a pump, a weed-whacker and a large DR mower. He hauls firewood
and building materials and drives to the dump in a l965 Ford half-ton
pickup named Old Brown and drives a 1988 Volvo to town and work. He likes
to sit by the woodstove and stare thoughtfully at the embers and
compulsively counts the caws of the California ravens to see if he can
discern a pattern. He never watches television, hasn't owned one in thirty
years, and doesn't do e-mail. He eats two poached eggs for breakfast, 730
eggs a year.
"Marty" has been a college teacher
of English in New York and Oakland, always an hourly worker, a missile
fabricator in San Leandro, a warehouseman, a packer in a printing plant,
helped prevent and mop up oil spills in the Bay, occasionally pulling boom
underneath the pier at 2 AM where giant wharf rats were rumored to be
waiting to pounce, worked nine years as a janitor with the Oakland Public
Schools where he edited the union newsletter called The Clean Sweep, and
for the past fifteen years has been an Instructional Assistant in the
local elementary school, twelve years in the second grade and three years
in the sixth. He regards the presence of children and his great love for
them to be essential to the balance of his life, has seen hundreds pass
through his classroom, and brushes away a vagrant tear every year when the
whole lunchroom sings Happy Birthday to him.
"Marty' is a jazz piano player, playing
at parties and various gatherings with his good friend, Bill, a bass
player, and available singers. During "Music Weekend," always in
August, old friends drive up from the Bay Area, or fly in from Atlanta or
Wales, pitch their tents in the meadow, and sing, play instruments, and
enter the annual Horseshoe Tournament where Marty has usually added a
fresh 6oo pounds of sand to the pitch and reinforced the backstop.
"Marty" plays horseshoes poorly but with great style and verve;
he has, to his genuine but unwarranted surprise, never won the trophy. He
enjoys playing a two-handed card game called California Jack (trickier
than Casino or Cribbage) with his wife, a much better player; occasionally
he wins, but only through luck. (His present marriage is his second. He's
been there.) He also plays Tarot, a four-handed French card game much
harder than California Jack, with his neighbors; he appears to be getting
worse rather than better at this game, probably due to age - can't
remember what's void in what suit, how many trumps have been played, who's
trumping what - but he enjoys it as much as ever.
For the past thirty years or so, while all
this has been going on, "Marty" has been a deadly serious
practitioner of the religion of India. His spiritual practice is his real
life, as, in his confirmed opinion and in the Great Concensus we ignore or
doubt to our eternal peril, Spirit is the only Reality. Before the
children finally moved on and the mornings quieted down he rose at 5 AM,
trudged on icy ground or in pouring rain, by flashlight, down to the
ancient rickety chicken coop in which be built a shrine area and which is
amusedly referred to as "Marty's Cell," as the old precarious
outhouse nearby is with similar amusement referred to as the "monk's
dump.' There he meditates. (Once someone phoned during early evening
meditation, and his young son, upon being asked where his father was,
replied "in his cell," The caller never mentioned it.) In the
winter months, after visiting the outhouse - he is regular - he washed in
ice water, if the water wasn't entirely ice, and wore a "muff"
made from sweater sleeves in which he thrust his hands to keep them warm
enough to manipulate the beads of his mala. There, by candlelight, he
experienced fairly invariable bliss. "Marty" feels his
meditation was rewarded; but, skillfully evasive, aware of the danger and
mindful of the necessary respect, he never explains in what the reward
consists. When asked, a rare event, he replies, with mingled mock
belligerence and polite forbearance, that the answer can be found, more
clearly than he could expound it and with an authority some have contrived
to respect, in the sacred texts whose name, translator and publisher he
cheerfully supplies. His practice continues to be as central and intense
as it ever was - although he knows full well that "a Path there is,
but no one who treads it: Nirvana there is, but no one who attains
it." He is, as we all are, a figure of speech. But with very real
responsibilities.
"Marty" always thought of himself
as a guy who could write good. He won the Columbia University Poetry
Prize, where he earned his LA. in English, two years running. He has spent
a very great amount of time, throughout his life, reading and compiling a
world class bibliography, studying English Prose as it was engaged by the
Masters: J. Conrad on the semicolon and the adverb, H. James on the long
sentence, J. Joyce on pushing the limits, W. Faulkner on letting loose,
and so on. He is a "veteran of the sixties" - wasn't that a
times where "it was borne in upon him with a force of demonstration
no prejudice could resist nor sophistry dissemble" (Sir J.G. Frazer)
that Lenin, and very very many others of widely varying stature and
intelligence, were gravely misinformed in their indestructible conviction
that "the revolution is the truth." He learned, from direct
experience, that there were no workers: only people. Undismayed by veiled
accusations of petit-bourgeois individualism, with humble gratitude that
he had somehow been enabled to penetrate the rhetoric, with malice toward
none and charity for all, he left the organization and pursued a Truth he
had no doubt existed somewhere, passing rapidly through a vague
"humanism" to a spiritual exploration culminating in a moment on
a sunny afternoon in the back yard of his rented apartment in Oakland when
he looked up from the Upanishads, said to himself something like
"This is clearly and with no possibility of doubt the Truth,"
and calmly continued reading, the search ended once and for all, his life
forever changed. Over the years, the decades, he claims, Knowledge only
gets deeper, at the same tine as, paradoxically, the Infinite and Eternal
is encountered and entered repeatedly, the bliss of the Self and the love
of Krishna experienced whenever receptivity is given and rewarded by
Grace.
But all along "Marty" remembered
the sixties! Democracy, the oppressed and deceived, the people! The
enormous bibliography he was accumulating, both sacred and secular, the
inspired commentaries and the cultural studies, imposed a responsibility
to pass on what he had received to those without the inclination or
determination to duplicate such an effort. It takes all sorts. Having
cultivated a determined apprenticeship to English Prose - "one who
has been visited by the muse is haunted ever after," as Eliot
remarked somewhere - his task appeared clear and inescapable. His first
book, "The Sandstone Papers", was published in 1986 by Threshold
Books, "Eastern Light in Western Eyes" was completed in 1990,
and in l994 "YUGA: An Anatomy of our Fate," in which his goal
and. hope, among other intentions, was to carry the traditionalist legacy,
sufficiently inaccessible to nearly everyone in the world, tainted -
perhaps necessarily, in the nature of things, as an initial salvo - by a
punitive and elitist hauteur, to its wider, more down-to-earth
implications, and to a wider, more down-to-earth audience.
"Marty" is a very down-to-earth regular kind of guy. His speech
is peppered with pungencies of the vernacular; he is frequently accused,
in his humorous commentary, of "always going too far." He has no
intention of ever writing again, for the simple and sufficient reason that
he has nothing left to say. His work is done.
Throughout these years "Marty" kept
his spiritual practice and his writer's calling deep in the background of
his 1ife. He knew this was the right way. His devotion was to his family
and his friends, they came first, to most of whom his religious practice
was irrelevant if known at all and his writing some sort of private
fantasy for which he made no claims untinged with irony. From the
typewriter to the piano keyboard, from the exhausted bleary appraisal of
the text, the resigned confession that this has to be the final draft, no
point in wrestling with it anymore, can't make it any better, to the
delightful elusive mysteries of the chord changes and the improvised line
and the simple joy of the 12-bar blues and a glorious day of barbecue and
wine at the San Francisco Blues Festival. Wine and song with his friends
and family, lugging sacks of steer manure in the vineyard, struggling
doggedly in the classroom to make clear the connections between fractions,
decimals and percents. He would like to have published under a pen name
but was discouraged, probably rightly.
And all of this, of course, his life and the
world in which it is lived, and your life and your world, may we some day
know to be a divine Dream, the Dream we love, the unsurpassable Dream,
manifestation, according to the famous hadith, of the "hidden
treasure" who "wanted to be known," and created to that
end alone the world we love.
