An Encounter with the ancient Wisdom
“We’re going down to London to see a friend of mine. Want to come?” The speaker – Dave, an odd-looking man with a scraggly beard and extremely thick glasses – was a member of the Kabbalah group at Oxford to which I went faithfully every Wednesday evening. The year was 1978 or early’79.
I wasn’t particularly eager to take the trip, but in the interest of broaden-ing my horizons, I decided I would. And so that Saturday five of us piled precariously into Dave’s three-wheeled motorcycle, of the colour the French call caca d’oie, and made the hour’s drive from Oxford to London.
It was a day that burned itself into my mind for several reasons. To begin with, there was something quintes-sentially English about the experience. Our first stop was a large and seedy pub somewhere in northwest London – complete with all the stereotypi-cal trimmings: etched-glass windows, dark furniture, the hazy smell of stale beer and tobacco, and even a drunken old man singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to himself at full volume. Unwisely, I found myself drinking three pints of Guinness and cider in quick succession. Not an ideal preparation for an encounter that the I Ching calls “meeting with the great man,” but then I was unaware that I was about to have such an encounter.
Our motley assemblage proceeded to the neighbour-hood of Maida Vale, where we parked on a street lined with three-story brick buildings of flats and marched up to the top floor of one of them. When we were admitted, we went down the hall of a long, narrow flat and entered the kitchen, a room that I will always remember as both remarkably dingy and remarkably magical. The walls were a lifeless green, and the air was heavy with the smoke of roll-your-own cigarettes. A large image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with Tarot cards affixed to the tree’s paths, was painted on the near wall, half-hidden by a cluttered kitchen table. Seated in the corner, wearing a dark and not terribly clean sweater and producing the smoke that pervaded the room, was a man I shall never forget.
Although seated – he did not get up to greet us – it was clear that he was short and stocky. He had longish dark hair and a beard, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad face, kindly and shrewd to equal degrees, that somewhat resembled those in por-trait busts of Socrates. There was an air of impish wisdom about him that years later would lead me to wonder half-seriously, when I saw The Empire
Strikes Back, whether the character Yoda was not a cruel but very witty caricature of Glyn.
He was not, of course, rooted to that old armchair in the corner of his kitchen – over the years I would see him in any number of settings – but it was as if he were, as if he were a fixed and stable point around which the ever-changing world revolved. What he said to us all that afternoon is hope- lessly lost in the back chambers of my memory. The Guinness-and-ciders did their work, and I nodded off occasion-ally. If it was an inauspicious introduction to ancient wis-dom in the modern world, it nevertheless left an indelible mark on me.
Glyn – though it no doubt would have irked him to hear me say it – was the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met. In the nearly three decades in which I knew him, I did not see him often – there would be five- or six-year stretches after my return to America when I had no contact with him – but I would make a point of seeing him when-ever I went to England up to the time of his death in 2007.
More than once I went for that purpose alone.
I wasn’t particularly eager to take the trip, but in the interest of broaden-ing my horizons, I decided I would. And so that Saturday five of us piled precariously into Dave’s three-wheeled motorcycle, of the colour the French call caca d’oie, and made the hour’s drive from Oxford to London.
It was a day that burned itself into my mind for several reasons. To begin with, there was something quintes-sentially English about the experience. Our first stop was a large and seedy pub somewhere in northwest London – complete with all the stereotypi-cal trimmings: etched-glass windows, dark furniture, the hazy smell of stale beer and tobacco, and even a drunken old man singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to himself at full volume. Unwisely, I found myself drinking three pints of Guinness and cider in quick succession. Not an ideal preparation for an encounter that the I Ching calls “meeting with the great man,” but then I was unaware that I was about to have such an encounter.
Our motley assemblage proceeded to the neighbour-hood of Maida Vale, where we parked on a street lined with three-story brick buildings of flats and marched up to the top floor of one of them. When we were admitted, we went down the hall of a long, narrow flat and entered the kitchen, a room that I will always remember as both remarkably dingy and remarkably magical. The walls were a lifeless green, and the air was heavy with the smoke of roll-your-own cigarettes. A large image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with Tarot cards affixed to the tree’s paths, was painted on the near wall, half-hidden by a cluttered kitchen table. Seated in the corner, wearing a dark and not terribly clean sweater and producing the smoke that pervaded the room, was a man I shall never forget.
Although seated – he did not get up to greet us – it was clear that he was short and stocky. He had longish dark hair and a beard, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad face, kindly and shrewd to equal degrees, that somewhat resembled those in por-trait busts of Socrates. There was an air of impish wisdom about him that years later would lead me to wonder half-seriously, when I saw The Empire
Strikes Back, whether the character Yoda was not a cruel but very witty caricature of Glyn.
He was not, of course, rooted to that old armchair in the corner of his kitchen – over the years I would see him in any number of settings – but it was as if he were, as if he were a fixed and stable point around which the ever-changing world revolved. What he said to us all that afternoon is hope- lessly lost in the back chambers of my memory. The Guinness-and-ciders did their work, and I nodded off occasion-ally. If it was an inauspicious introduction to ancient wis-dom in the modern world, it nevertheless left an indelible mark on me.
Glyn – though it no doubt would have irked him to hear me say it – was the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met. In the nearly three decades in which I knew him, I did not see him often – there would be five- or six-year stretches after my return to America when I had no contact with him – but I would make a point of seeing him when-ever I went to England up to the time of his death in 2007.
More than once I went for that purpose alone.
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