The Cosmic Lady Was Right

It s 2010! Standing in for the Lady is this guy Marshall Motz, her self-appointed spokesman and intermittent interpreter. It s a big year for him, for he s turning eighty--an old philosophy major who feels some Wisdom coming on. The result is this chronicle of his 27000-plus days lived out in the Cosmic Loony Bin. His conclusion, after having numbered his days? The Cosmic Lady was right. Right about Earth as the planetary loony bin, and right about the earthquake.In the seventies she was a highly entertaining and often prescient street person who used to hang out (where else?) in Santa Cruz, the somewhat flaky California beach town where the author ends up at the end of his American journey --a hamlet best known, in recent years perhaps, for having been brought low by the famous 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, centered nearby.Did she know it was coming? Was that what she meant when she warned everybody of disaster to come, daily on the Pacific Garden Mall and on occasional evenings at the Sash Mill Theatre, where her urchin entourage at the conclusion of the night s feature film cheered her on as she stood up to warn them: Mama Earth is tired of being the Cosmic Loony Bin, folks. Too many cosmic chickens in Santa Cruz--a town, she explained, that the Goddess had hoped would point the way to a rebirth of sanity in America. Chickens, though, cosmic or otherwise, tend to turn a deaf ear to such warnings, go right on clucking around the barnyard, too stupid to foresee their own coming destruction, never mind fighting back, or even paying attention.So now she s back again, having been right before, to warn us once more, bring us all up to date: Too many cosmic chickens, folks! Time s running out on your clown acts. Up and down the dial on the Tell-a-Vision, tellin all the wrong visions! Repugnuts and Dummocrats too, one tea-baggin, the other sandbaggin . All you cosmic chickens gotta get your shyte together.It seems in her view we re all cosmic chickens these days, ripe for another catastrophe.Sandwiched between these two epiphanies is the author s story, told as a gnostic parable of initiation, whimsical, humorous, highly sententious. If we can t save the country or the world, at least we can get our consciousness raised, as does he, painfully in these pages. This is all about women, folks, the announcement of a huge paradigm shift, the advent of a new Sophianic kingdom, the death of macho America, a plea for new spiritual androgynes to pave the way. Did we miss something somewhere?Not so fast with your dismissals, all you cosmic chickens. The Lady was right once before, so listen up.The narrator s voice, slogging through his perennially vivid memories, concerned as he is to convince us that s it s all been a crazy ride to the ultimate loony bin which is Sanity Cruz, will be more than faintly recognizable to some: Holden Caulfield is reincarnated as a senior citizen, promptly meets the Cosmic Lady, and goes right back to the loony bin. Only thing new here is that he now discovers that the whole planet is a vast loony bin, always has been, but voila! if one can only hang in there, work through it all and get to the other side, the loony bin itself leads to the Total Truth in fact, that s where he ends up again, at the end of life s journey. Didn t Blake say it somewhere? The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom. And is not the very definition of the word philosophy literally the love of Wisdom? Is not the Goddess very name Sophia, Greek for wisdom ?The Cosmic Lady keeps us guessing and laughing---right up to the final pages.