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There's no question I strengthened my relation to Christ and God, all great spirits as a matter of fact. It was so harrowing to lose the past, the total past that I went and found all that was valuable and brought it into myself. It was like the old story of the future where they burn books so a small community of people starts to memorize favorite books and carry them around in their heads.

The pettiness in religion and politics was distressing to say the least. The pattern of human nature seemed to lead directly to conflict at a time when conflict implicated the future of the world. Pettiness became an enemy and I'm sure I alienated more than a few people.

Looking back I can see why this period of time had to end!

There were many, many other things going on during these years but that was like the white elephant in the room. No matter where I went I either saw it or smelled it.

I came to realize that inspiration is the key to the creative life. What inspires, helps build. If it doesn't inspire it is of no help. And what was so fantastic about Berkeley is that every resource, every example was present somewhere in that beautiful city. It didn't matter whether it was poetry, painting, music, architecture, sculpture, it was there, it was present in things and in books; in the people.

Berkeley was like a woman who you believe holds the secret to life. You practically worship her. And then you realize, no, she just wants something from you, even as innocuous a thing as live through you. There is a panic of realization. And then you step away and watch her as she lives out every odd, bad thing you perceived was there in her moment of mystery.

A provincial woman, then, who could not see the forest for the tress and yet had great inner beauty still lodged in her, somewhere in the folds of her hills and bad streets and run-down Victorians.

Berkeley was certainly one thing when I arrived and another when I left, about 10 years later. the post-60's period hit it hard. It went through a funky, pc period of time where the bums pissed in city hall and no one seemed to matter.

Berkeley is not an underground culture it is a series of them. There is a political underground, a counter culture sort of underground, a cultic underground, perhaps many more have sprouted up in the last 25 years.

Intelligent women with absolutely non-receptive souls. Manipulators therefore but who later would feel , if not sorry, resigned to the fact they couldn't manipulate anyone. I met them in every point of the city.

Berkeley, if nothing else, was vision. I saw the computer revolution, Internet, and solar power all in Berkeley. it was a fantastic manufacturer of vision and, on the negative end, fantasy. I discovered the difference between imagination and fantasy in Berkeley. That imagination was substance, it was something that had legs and could walk around the real people but that fantasy was something that belonged to boys rather than men. And for all of that reality counted. Reality was a big luscious thing filled with boats in the Marina and angry women, paper flying along the wonderful avenues, people pretending to be someone they were not and so on. It was the charm and aspect that one adapted to.

It nearly burnt down twice. Reagan sent old helicopters over it to bomb it and chase out the young rebels. it is full of boring smart people who say the same things and have the same outlook on everything imaginable. But, it is promise and quirky stuff here and there.

I discovered that the communists and socialists drink good wine and come from wealthy families. Their idealism is some kind of disguised hatred for the privilege they were born into and it destroyed more than a few. Well, what is a world without a few drunken, idealistic communists? Those, in other words, who have never grown up because their mothers paid them off not to enter the real world. This was plenty afoot in Berkeley.

They drank good wines and lived in houses that looked out over the whole bay area as though they were pro counselors in Rome and the Empire was at their feet. But they had nothing to do but be a proselyte on behalf of the poor and left-out; people they never associated with and whose lives had more meaning and fiber than their own. Yet, as the communist knows, money counts. Money is able to produce any sort of life the imagination conjures up.

There had been the generations of students. Activists and party types, that was the size of it. The scholarly types were usually ashamed of their passions and kept them hidden behind either activism or parties. It was always amazing to me how the smart guys denounced everything that was smart for things that were purely dumb. That happened quite a bit.

Coeds gazing out on the concrete, iron balcony toward the bay and islands in the bay, smoking, heads going nuts, zigging and zagging trying to physically remove themselves from the very spot where they smoked and gazed, petrified of where they had ended up and wanting to get out; either through a career or a man. They were undecided by it all.

The students were, generally, arrogant and full of themselves. Life was their oyster. They were going to cook in its pulp and come out smelling like a rose. Nothing seemed to bother the students; they laughed uproariously at any suggestion that life was not what it appeared to be; a vast moveable feast of good liquor, dope, sex, a kind of nutty world performing in front of them for their amusement.

Bookstores, restaurants, clubs, and apartments. These seemed to be the venues for myself. I also enjoyed buying chicken and pork bows at the Chinese stand on Shattuck Avenue by the BART station. Food became a major component of Berkeley. I lived a few blocks from Chez Panise and frequented more than few of the excellent restaurants that Berkeley seemed to thrive on in the 70's and early 80's. That and coffee shops. There was Peet's and one up along College Avenue I used to go to quite a bit.

It was a town of books and resources. I loved the feeling of reading book when many thought, even in Berkeley, that reading was passé. I always questioned this: Do you mean that thought and knowledge are passé? Those who downgraded reading usually went into money and wanted money more than anything and didn't relent until they had it. I read and researched all the bookstores and libraries of Berkeley because I was curious and I was angry at the state of the world, which, to a mind, seemed easy to figure out. The more complicated it got the more I read to try and figure it out.

I read anything that struck me as interesting, studious, or forbidden. It was a great joy. Many days and nights I spent at the university libraries reading on one, two, three levels of the building, going outside to smoke occasionally, sometimes the only person in the library. The books I read became a part of me, no question about it. I owe a lot to those days.

I was terrified often of the split between nihilistic types and stone frightened types. I didn't think anything generous would appear between these clashing rocks. The nihilist types were smart but empty; intelligent but superstitious and wanted nothing to do with the real world. They would destroy the real world given half the chance. The frightened types didn't recognize the historical changes going on, didn't move in the pathway of historic reality, couldn't control the vast fear of change and distance that permeated the culture at that time.