Why We Stayed

From the Institute of Social Experiments By Robert Navarro

Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated . . . there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul. – Epicurus

What made us “us” was the grand, democratic, capaciousness of the Institute – a home for the wayfaring, the nervous, the perpetually poor, and the sans souci rich, the charming and the painfully awkward, the garrulous and reticent. In other words, the wide world in a hand- me-down coffee cup, consciously unmoored from the ways of the self-conscious bourgeoisie world, celebrating our drift across the divide of acceptability.

All of us who stayed are asked, Why? Philosophy’s therapy is a hard art, and if it brings someone around to a wholeness she never had, she would be loathe to leave the therapeutic community where that conversion was won. A healing philosophy is not a theory, it is a practice, and practice can lead to that old fashioned notion, virtue. We were all mendicant practitioners of a philosophy whose practice bonded us in relations and friendships that still thrived even beneath the cheap mendacity of leadership, and thrive even to this moment.

We were – o, what we were – the baker who fell out of the tree he slept in, the journeyman who mesmerized with his recitation of I Sing the Body Electric, the child without a backbone who was the community’s child, the limping school night watchman who’d been a KKK accountant, the elegant woman with the tattooed serial number above her wrist, the professional and amateur musicians who swung us every Saturday, a boy who drowned, a grizzled electrician who rarely spoke, a psychologist who confronted a bully on the bus and got a black eye, a woman who could look through you so completely you would learn to see yourself, the priest turned lawyer, the artists who amazed us, the scolds, the truth tellers, the betrayers, the genius dopefiend who asked “who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down, who’s banging who, that’s what I want to know”, the collective genius of misfits and characters, a house where everyone was one-off, all the Wizard siblings from Coffeeville, the very witty blond Brit, the blind Jew from Mexico City, the Peruvian healer and the census taker, the old-timer who drank binged on mouth wash and cologne, the phone salesman racked up a hot streak talking to no one, the newcomer concert pianist who wasn’t when he sat down to play, newborns in the Hatchery, sex under the stairs, sweaty dancing in a juke joint called the Wood Shed, black and white and brown, the getting born and the dying, the wise fools and the fools who should have known better, the war wounded vet who learned philosophy in a nut house in Waco and drove through the desert all of one night to ask permission to change his life, the love we spread and all the demons we shared.

It was a calendar of storms and doldrums, it whispered and it howled like Ginsberg – “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”

Leaving all that – with even better than I can tell and far worse that I will not – left me on the floor of many a room for a long time, and that’s why.