The Winter Creek Declaimer

Volume 5, Number 2

Summer 2006

“We vouch for nothing and stand our ground.”

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We devote this special issue to the memory of a friend.  Readers of the Declaimer tasted his wit and wisdom in the most recent issue, in which we inaugurated his spiritual advice column, written under the nom de plume of Sri Shivalingum Biggum.  We hoped to make this column a regular feature of the Declaimer, but hope is as mortal as human flesh.  John Sterne was a remarkable man.  We offer this account of him and our friendship.

When I Lift Myself off the Ground
                                           
A Remembrance of John Sterne
May 19, 1948 – May 12, 2006

                           Men generally conceive of Spirit as a vague and distant entity.                                
                           Viewed from the distant canyon rim, the Colorado River may      
                           appear as such. But the river is overwhelmingly real and powerful    
                           by the thundering shores of Lava Rapids!

                                                                     —J.S., western Grand Canyon, August 1987

I don’t remember meeting Sterne.  Looking back forty-five years I find us in the drab hallways of junior high school in the Maryland outskirts of Washington, D.C., a couple of tall, reticent kids who studied too much.  A pair of Johns, our birthdays five days apart, he inclined toward math and science, me toward English and history.  We hung out at his house sometimes, drinking hard cider Sterne had fermented in his basement, throwing a Superball around the rooms of his comfortable suburban home until, a time or two, we broke a lamp or a vase
.
I wouldn’t call him a happy boy.  He spoke in later years about the cruelty school kids are capable of, the crushing loneliness of being a social outcast.  He put off potential friends by talking too much, but froze up when trying to talk to girls he was attracted to.  He thought they could read his carnal thoughts, and maybe they could.  Sterne compensated for these deficits the only way he knew—by being the smartest student in most of his classes.
          
His only worldliness was represented in the tall ham radio tower in his backyard.  I can still see his skinny shoulders hunched toward his array of equipment, his eyes alert as a cat’s behind his pop-bottle lenses as he spoke some formulaic rigamarole through screeching static to a conversant in, perhaps, Australia.  Even then his hands chronically trembled, as if his body could barely contain him.  He drank a six-pack a day of sixteen-ounce Coca-Colas, supporting his habit with a paper route.  His mother knew nothing of this addiction until she opened his closet one morning to a tumbling cascade of empty bottles.    
         
In high school, when Sterne fell out with a ham radio acquaintance in D.C., we had a source of beer.  The guy drank a lot and always cooled a case or two on his back porch.  I’d keep my mother’s Jeep idling as Sterne, under cover of darkness, reconnoitered and made the grab, then scuttled back into sight with his arms wrapped around a mostly-full case.  “Sc-o-o-o-o-re!” he’d shriek as I needlessly peeled out from the curb, and we would spend the rest of the evening ridiculing his ex-friend for being too drunk to know his beer was being stolen, until we were too drunk to remember what we’d been talking about.
         
And now, evidently, I’m too old to remember.  What did we say in those frenetic drunkalogues?  What did we give of ourselves?  I remember mainly the insistent tidal surge of his nasal tenor, the way he seemed to have to talk in order to belong to life at all.
         
I was less of a grind than Sterne and a bit more socially able.  I was capable of a date now and then, had an interest in athletics and a broader range of friends.  I changed high schools, too, when my mother moved into D.C.  I knew vaguely that Sterne was applying to Reed College, but I didn’t know for sure that he had chosen Reed—over Princeton—until there we were in the Old Dorm Block in the early fall of 1966, me in Quincy and he in Doyle.  Within a couple of months he had moved to Quincy.  Sterne and I and four others in that dorm—Mike Davitt, Victor Friedman, Ken Hyams, and Dan Patel, later joined by a fifth, Jim Jackson—bonded for life in our freshman year. 
         
We hit the books and kept our heads above water, but the seas were rough.  Like many of our Quincy brothers and other classmates, Sterne and I each took LSD several times that first year.  It was legal, it was alluring, and though trips could be harrowing they could also be transcendent.  Sterne learned in a religious way from dropping acid; he saw that normal consciousness is a kind of movie we project and become entangled in, and he sensed that being, beyond such illusion, is filled with divinity.  “For the first time I thought there might be a God,” he told me years later.  I had a similar awakening.  I remember standing half the night with Sterne in the old orchard by the Reed soccer field in a misting rain, blankets around our shoulders, each of us attempting on a big hit of acid to articulate the sacredness we perceived—we knew—in everything around us. 
         
And I remember sitting with him on a park bench in San Francisco, his narrow scholar’s face scrunched in anguish, his left hand repeatedly sweeping back his head of dark flowing hair, as he tried and tried to tell himself and me the meaning of Bob Dylan’s “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  She was Mary, he said, she was the Lady of Guadalupe, a spiritual woman who bore on her shoulders the colossal suffering of all humankind as men tried to use her and destroy her.  Sterne himself seemed to bear that weight as he struggled, tearfully, to speak of it.
         
My wakening led me to drop out of Reed in my sophomore year, seeking a life beyond the confines of academia.  Sterne, a more disciplined student, stayed on.  Turned off on physics by a professor he didn’t get along with, he developed a major in anthropology under the tutelage of David French.  He probably could have majored in anything and done well, but sorrows and depression hounded him, amplified by weekly, sometimes daily, acid trips.  (He estimated that he took psychedelics fifty to two hundred times in his sophomore year alone.)  Sterne’s friends knew his compassion and generosity, his essential sweetness, but he remained trapped within his personality, stymied by his own obsessive intellectualizing, his inability to listen well, and his uneasiness with the physical.  It didn’t help that his first sexual experience left him with a venereal disease.  By the time I wandered back to Portland in 1969, Sterne, a junior now, was shooting heroin and morphine.  This was no spiritual quest.  Unable to form the relationships he desired, it seemed that he had set out to quell the desires themselves.
         
Adrift and disconnected myself, I let Sterne initiate me into his pursuit of oblivion.  I loved the deliberate ritual of shooting up and the absolute sufficiency that followed.  Nothing needed doing, not even so much as scratching a vague itch somewhere on one’s body.  As Sterne said years later, “I could look at my shoes for four hours and have a great time.”  But we also shot speed, methamphetamine, which bestowed a boundless enthusiasm that made everything worth doing.  We roared our motorcycles down Portland streets as if we owned them, and afterward Sterne would talk at the same rpms like a cerebral Neal Cassady, raggedly splicing structural anthropology with William Burroughs’s novels with Buddhist and Hindu mythology with the soullessness of American capitalism with his own unhappy childhood….  I’d sit with him all night, smoking, listening more or less.  He couldn’t stop.  He was a puppet on the strings of his over-firing neurons.  By the time his rap wound down, usually with dawnlight in the windows, we’d both been emptied into the nameless dread of the meth crash.  It took hours for sleep to save us.
         
I had a psychotic freakout on speed one morning that sent me banging on the doors of strangers along Gladstone Street, certain that my heart was about to stop.  Sterne’s adventures with the needle took him much closer to actual death.  After injecting a third hit of heroin one night at Toad Hall—he’d gone on his motorcycle, three times, to purchase each one—he nodded off, stopped breathing, and began to turn blue.  His fellow users of the evening, mostly Reedies, slapped his face and gave him mouth to mouth, and eventually he revived.  He had other overdoses, and once was so strung out on speed that he began to spontaneously hemorrhage from the mouth.
         
In the fall of 1969 I tried Reed again, dropped out again, and retreated back east with mononucleosis and my tail between my legs.  Sterne, somehow, saw his education through, finishing his thesis under Gail Kelly (French having taken medical leave) and graduating with his classmates in 1970.  I stand in honest awe of this achievement.  There were periods that year when he couldn’t stop crying for days at a time.  As depressed and unstable and messed up on drugs as Sterne was, to graduate from Reed College took the will and discipline of a warrior.
          
He was aided by the glimmer of a salvation, or at least a direction.  He attended a lecture in his senior year by one Brother Anandamoy of the Self-Realization Fellowship, a Vedic monastic order in Southern California founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1920.  The fellowship accepted Sterne during spring semester, and, having tried and failed many times before, he quit drugs cold—another heroic achievement.  I remember him a year later, in a chair in the driveway of a Berkeley house where Ken Hyams and I were lodging, chanting with his fingers covering his eyes:  “I am a bubble, please make me the sea…”  Ken later teased Sterne about the portrait of long-haired Yogananda he had placed on the mantel:  “John, who’s that colored washer-woman?”  Sterne replied, “Watch it, man.  Your karma’s probably bad enough already.” 
          
I may have seen John once, at one of the SRF temples in Southern California, before he retired into seclusion as a renunciate monk.  He didn’t tell any friends of this intention—it would only have weakened his will, he told me later.  We in his Quincy circle joked about busting into the monastery and springing him.  They only wanted him for his money, we scoffed.  (His father had died and left him an inheritance, half of which he eventually gave to SRF.)  But I knew, and I suspect we all knew, that Sterne was doing what was best for Sterne.  He was too injured, and too susceptible to injury, to live in the world.  He could grit his way through college with his disciplined study habits, but his life was killing him.
          
It was ten years before I saw him again.  In the spring of 1980 he was still in the monastery but no longer incommunicado.  I stopped on my way home to Oregon from Mexico.  Sterne and I sat on a bench in a garden bower.  His hair had begun to gray and recede, and he had a slight paunch—a meditator’s physique, I kidded him.  He meditated four to five hours a day, skipping meals if necessary, because in meditation he found peace.  He told me that he lived in a golden cage—very, very difficult to enter and very, very easy to leave.  “I want to stay here until I die,” he said.  He missed old friends such as me, but was willing to pay that price.  “There’s always a price,” he said.  “But after all, I figure, it’s only a lifetime.”  And he flashed a smile.
          
His high-speed raps were briefer now, and muted.  Clearly he was better able to listen, and clearly his personality had settled in some essential way.  At that point in my life—we were both 32—I was just stumbling into what I hoped would be a vocation as a writer and poet; I could see that Sterne, after ten years of solitude, was well ahead of me in self-realization.  He had built his being into a viable vessel for his fragile and volatile spirit.  We spoke of the bad old days of hard drugs and promiscuous psychedelics.  “Could that have been us ten years ago?” he said.  “Are we the same people?”
          
It may have been after that visit, or it may have been earlier, thinking of him in his solitude and missing him, that I realized I loved John Sterne.  I was not in love with him, not physically attracted, but I loved him.  This seemed to me both remarkable and inevitable.
          
By 1987 Sterne had enough confidence, and was sufficiently attracted by the outside world, to leave the golden cage after all.  He emerged at age 39 with a vocation.  When his monastic order had needed a computer, the old ham radio whiz had up and built them one, even inventing a programmable wire-wrapping machine, a kind of robot, to assist him in the construction.  Well before he left the monastery, Korean high-tech execs were flying him to Asia, trying to entice him into joining their firms.  Sterne stayed home in Southern California, launching a successful career as a self-taught freelance software engineer.  Ken Hyams, who found a similar career in software, considers Sterne to have been a flat-out genius.

He set up housekeeping in a condominium with two orange tabby cats, which he named Lenora Lynx and Billy Puma.  The pedestrian zoological names notwithstanding, cats to Sterne were embodiments of the divine.  He loved them as sacred fools, admired their innocence, their blithe irresponsibility, their transcendence of the petty concerns that humans get mired in.  In letters and emails he spun his cats into a mythology by which he reminded himself of the balance between fun and self-discipline that life in the world demanded of him.  “Billy Puma keeps soaking dead baby mice in my Scotch,” he wrote once, perhaps after imbibing a bit too much.  (Alcohol was the one intoxicant he allowed himself in his post-monastic years.)  “I can’t take drugs anymore, but I can make up stories about it,” he told me in 1999.  “Billy and I, we meditate all day for our spiritual health, then we go out and get drunk and trash the bars…” 
          
Earlier in the 80s Sterne had taken up backpacking in the deserts of California, Arizona, and the slickrock country of southeast Utah.  Now, with a four-wheel-drive truck and an abiding thirst for solitude, he extended these outings, hiking for days and sometimes weeks at a time.  He became, over the years, probably the most knowledgeable person alive of the remote Shivwits Plateau region of the western Grand Canyon.  Hiking revved his spirit, and it was in the desert that he felt closest to the mystery of being.  There were moments, he told me, alone in the silence of stone and stars, that he heard an ineffable humming that made him calm and sure; he thought perhaps it was the cosmic Aum, the subtle resonance of all that is.
          
In later years Sterne tended more to hike with friends, both male and female, most of them accustomed to eating his dust as he charged ahead up the trail—or off the trail, bushwhacking through chaparral.  He also befriended several older men—an 85-year-old rancher who had once run cattle on the Shivwits, say, or an 81-year-old World War Two submarine vet he met by chance and visited several times.  He took up square dancing at senior centers, and more recently, as he got into making his own beer, he found new friends in the local home-brewing community.  Sterne was oversensitive, frequently too talkative, sometimes just a tad narcissistic in his attention to his own pains, but by and large his spirit was welcomingly warm and playful.  “I consider friendship the greatest good in life,” he told me once.  “Without my friends I might not have made it.”  Back in 1969, when he first saw Yogananda’s face on the cover of Autobiography of a Yogi, Sterne had understood instantly that “this man knew a great deal about the meaning of life, and none of it was learned intellectually.”  Sterne’s turbocharged mind had trapped him; his heart set him free.  
          
Luck in love, though, eluded him.  He told me that he hoped to marry, but his relations with girlfriends didn’t last.  It seemed that intimacy caused him to pull back, almost reflexively.  He had despondent periods, some over women, some over periods of unemployment, but his vessel now could weather those rough or listless waters.  “Sometimes I feel the weight of my years,” he emailed the Quincy group, “but when I lift myself off the ground it feels wonderful.”   A few of the demons that plagued my friend I’m aware of; no doubt there were some I didn’t know, some that no one knew.  He carried them bravely with his own peculiar grace.
          
We saw each other now and then, at Reed reunions, at his Calabasas condo, and later at the small house he was very proud to own in Westlake Village.  There was always the danger that we would argue.  Sterne was passionately opinionated, and launched his opinions in relentless barrages; I tend to be an irascible contrarian.  One night, after we’d gotten loud and angry over abortion, he almost threw me out of his house—instead he stormed off to bed, saying, “Good night.  I am in my own home and I don’t have to listen to this.”  In the morning we made up, acknowledging that each of us had baited the other into a free-fire zone.  We regretted the fight, but neither of us had changed our minds.
          
Mainly we hiked and talked, drove and talked, drank and talked, and we talked with a certain free closeness I haven’t known with any other friend.  Sterne of course talked more, but it was dialogue more than spiel.  At times it seemed we were one mind holding inner discourse.  In Calabasas once we talked all night, draining an entire bottle of Scotch and several beers between us.  Sterne riffed freely, drawing on his considerable knowledge of history, science, psychology, and the arts, but we always came back to things of the spirit.  I had been seeing a white light in my dreams now and then, indirectly, flickering around corners, and the light had given instant peace and assurance to my dream-self watching it.  Somewhere deep in our conversation I remembered this and was about to mention it to Sterne when he said, “I’ve been seeing this white light lately…”    
         
In mid-March of this year, Sterne emailed his Quincy circle and his brother Ted a poem, titled “How to Handle Old Age,” he had written three years before when he’d been out of work for months.  The persona of the poem hoped “to die abruptly and unexpectedly / Instead of slowly and excruciatingly,” and dreamed of “the bliss of death,” of climbing “the sacred mountain / To lie prostrate at the feet of my Destroyer.”  Death, I believe, sometimes casts a shadow before it, and a man as spiritually attuned as John Sterne would have been likely to sense that shadow.  I don’t think in his rational mind he expected to die soon—he and I had been happily emailing about a new four-wheel-drive pickup he had purchased, a four-door model that could carry several friends—but in his greater being he may have felt death near.
          
It did come abruptly.  In early May, waiting for the elevator at his Woodland Hills workplace, United Online, Sterne collapsed.  Despite receiving CPR, he never regained consciousness.  He had scheduled a doctor’s appointment for that afternoon, perhaps to discuss symptoms of the condition that would kill him.  His death was such a shock—I learned of it by email while traveling on the East Coast, and could speak of it to my wife only after many minutes frozen at my laptop—that it took me days to see the irony.  My friend died of an enlarged heart.  He also lived by one.
          
One of the forms of desire identified by the Greeks was pothos, which means divine longing, longing for that which is not to be found in this world.  It was the power of that longing that impelled John Sterne.  Through courage and self-discipline he lived an authentic human life within the troubled terms of his personhood, but this life was his bivouac, never his destination.  He was ready to climb the sacred mountain—better prepared for it, in fact, than anyone I know.  The Destroyer he wrote of in his poem is Shiva, the Hindu god who decays and dissolves all things, and thereby liberates the human soul from mortal ignorance and delusion.
  
Like his other Quincy brothers, like all his friends and family, I wanted Sterne for longer.  But he has hiked on, and it’s for us to play him some traveling music, lift a pint of good beer in his honor, and bid him Godspeed.
          
In my own greater being I expect to see John again one day, the same day I see that great white light full and clear.  Until then, as his ashes mingle with the sands of the Utah desert, I’ll remember him as I have known him.  I’ll hear the high-pitched laughter of his delight.  I’ll see his shambling gait, the pinched look of his face as he focused his fountaining thoughts into language.  I’ll see him in his dark-haired youth, in the dull-eyed desolation of his hard-drug days, in his robes on that bench in the monastery bower, but mostly I will see him in his accomplished age, a six-foot, bald-headed Mr. Natural with a zest for walking and a smile straight from his soul.  And when I am quiet and easy enough to smile that smile myself, I will sense him sitting with his silent cats in the adjoining room, his head bowed, hands still trembling, his candle burning late behind my closed eyes.         

                                           
                                           An aged man is but a paltry thing, 
                                           A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
                                           Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
                                           For every tatter in its mortal dress…
                                                                      
                                                                 —W. B. Yeats, from “Sailing to Byzantium”