The Year was 1965.

 8/14

The year of this musical hit, Prabhupada's Pattcha Tattva Mantra, was, and is,1965, at least in the sense of the year of his arrival in the U.S., from India, when he came to set up shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The same year The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction (I Can't Get No) hit the charts and dominated the airwaves and even the thinking of many a young man, once young, including me.  The depths of the heart were looking for the light, and along came Mick Jagger singing on TV, and the world, for better or worse, was hooked.  A spectacle.  Who knows that the older people thought at the time, they kept it to themselves.

Things that happen in the world on the year of our birth might be said to have a significance somehow.  Why did the great Divine send off a vibration of the great dream to look back at the Great Self of Creation, picking a particular and highly appropriate time and situation.

My mother was born in 1939, in March, the later half, the year Hitler ran the Nazis into Poland, the year Ted Williams came up from the Minors to take up playing for the Boston Red Sox, her hometown, and in fact her father, a chef, who may or may not have had some humble connections, brought her to his last game, in 1960, on a drizzly day, when he hit the greatest of towering home runs in his final at bat, circling the bases, and refusing the gesture of tipping his hat.

Philip Larkin, in England, in that famous year, 1965, was hitting his stride too.  Writing poems like Going Going Gone, considering the pollution of the marshes as the Northern England economy discovers consumer materialism, having left the small stone churches to rot and for bicycle rides, all of which too would be a part of the ethos and the realities of the world one lives in. Poems with a wry empathy for those doomed to sit on park benches, "nothing to love or link with..." And he was the perfect Egghead, a librarian bare to mockery in another society that would come, but did okay in his day.  

JFK had been shot down in the motorcade, a year, two months and few days before, a few days early, scrawny, with poor skinny legs, I was taken from my mother's womb by Cesarian Section on what I imagine was a cold morning of a cold day when the sky was deep blue purple that night in the small house up the quiet street with the Holyoke Range comforting us, the South Amherst Common with its ice rink.  Politics has never been the same since, his speech at Amherst College, about the corruption of power, and the healing offered by poetry and imagining and thinking, becoming part of the strange legacy of the Transcendental Town with its hills of Emily Dickinson's.  An Eden, of sorts.  My brother remembers Tommy James and the Shondells, Crystal Blue Persuasion, playing on the blue Volvo station wagon to go pick up dad from the science halls over at UMass.  Amongst the early words I tried to utter, to clarify the world, before we moved away, in 1968, was, turned out to be, Flower Car.  Apparently, somewhere around the Common, perhaps, or along one of the many fine old roads, there was a VW Bug with flower stickers on it. 

What else... 1965...  The Vietnam situation thickens, develops a kind of cancer, by human reaction to the action of other humans...  Politics, votes, the M'uhlutu'ary, which indeed had one the war against Facism, but now had less of a reason to exist in a productive fashion, after the Marshall Plan, I suppose, to give a quick and unnecessary sketch of History.  There were protests against the war in the old town, Amherst, where people gathered under the great trees of the Common near the churches, my aunt remembering them well.

The man, once a boy, who heard those songs, who was largely defeated by society and its shaping, not able to quite fit in, having played too well along with it, and given the many gifts and talents he could have developed, spent to far too long and too much on the fool songs of This World, as charming as they might be, to play upon a lyre and sing and laugh along to with friends growing up.

And finally, after 60, almost, years later... one discovers the songs he should have been listening to, as once Tibetan Buddhist Monks had come to the auditorium of the Musical Building and chanted, multiple notes, almost like a triad, deeply vibrant, came from the throats of their shaved head saffron robed faith.

From the year, of his birth, something one should not exactly ignore, if he's looking for meaning, if that would do him any good, 1965, the world having inherited much faith and literature and theater and a fine tradition of music.  One comes new to the world, innocent, a babe... and it can take a very long time to grow up, as I suppose he would listening to Jacques Brel, and less and less to the mind blowing moment in Pop Music when Keith Richards steps, with heavy click on a Fuzz Pedal, a new thing, to sound like the saxophone, plays that simple rhythmic three note riff, up, then back down again, while Charlie Watts clicks away almost with jazz beat, but driving, and the whole thing comes together, and Bill Wyman thumps away at the thick strings of the bass and Brian Jones plays perfect blues licks with tasteful and knowing interjection. 

One fine day comes, metaphorically, when you realize it's not about all that, Getting Satisfaction as opposed to No Satisfaction, when the song turns, and must honor the realities of old age, sickness and death, of the finite being who must go with all the grace he or she can muster to face such days.  The importance of the day itself rises, in addition to the original year, and the importance of the Mantras themselves, better in Sanskrit, for effect by the nature of how the language works on the body and the mind becomes a life boat, a way home.