MICHAEL MURPHY
Certain events may reflect the significant dimensions of all your life, mirroring your entire history in a passing moment. Have you ever had an experience like that? Have you been caught by an event that suddenly pulled the curtains back? Shivas Irons maintained that a round of golf sometimes took on that special power.
The archetypes of golf are amazingly varied, he said, that is the reason so many people gravitate to the game.
“ A round of golf, “ he said in his Journal notes, “partakes of the journey, and the journey is one of the central myths and signs of Western Man. It is built into his thoughts and dreams, into his genetic code. The Exodus, the Ascension, the Odyssey, the Crusades, the pilgrimages of Europe tand the Voyage of Columbus, Magellan’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, theDiscovery of Evolution and the March of Time, getting ahead and the ladder of perfection, the exploration of space and the Inner Trip: from the beginning our Western World has been on the move. We tend to see everything as part of the journey. But other men have not been so concerned to get somewhere else-take the Hindus with their endless cycles of time or the Chinese Tao. Getting somewhere else is not necessarily central to the human condition."
Perhaps we are so restless because like Moses we can never make it to the promised land. We tell ourselves that It is just over the next hill: just a little more time or a little more money or a little more struggle will get us there; . . . even our theology depends upon that Final Day, that Eschaton when the journey will finally arrive, to compel our belief in God."
The symbol of the journey reflects our state, for man is surely on the move toward something. Many of us sense that our human race is on a tightrope, that we must keep moving or fall into the abyss. "This world is for dyin'," he said that night. We must die to the old or pay more and more for remaining where we are.
Yes, there is no escaping the long march of our lives: that is part of the reason people re-enact it again and again on the golf course, my golfing teacher said. They are working out something built into their genes.
But there are other myths to govern our lives, other impulses lurking in our soul, "myths of arrival with our myths of the journey, something to tell us we are the target as well as the arrow."
So
Shivas Irons would have us learn to enjoy what is while seeking our treasure
of tomorrow. And-you might have guessed it-a round of golf is good for that,
". . . because if it is a journey, it is also a round: it always leads
back to the place you started from . . . golf is always a trip back to the
first tee, the more you play the more you realize you are staying where you
are." By playing golf, he said, "you re-enact that secret of the
journey. You may even get to enjoy it."' The
Whiteness o f the Ball
What the golf ball was to Shivas has been hinted; what it has come to mean for me remains unsaid. And for a reason. Its power as a symbol is so complex and labyrinthine, so capable of lending itself to the psyche of each and every player, that once an attempt like this has begun to comprehend its "inner meaning," all bearings may be. lost. For the golf ball is "an icon of Man the Multiple Amphibian, a smaller waffled version of the crystal ball, a mirror for the inner body; it is a lodestone, an old stone to polarize your psyche with." The more I ponder its ramifications the more I see that each and every bit of this world reflects the . whole.
A friend of mine sees it as a satellite revolving around our higher self, thus forming a tiny universe for us to govern-a marvelous image really when you think about it, one I am sure Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff would have approved of. Our relation to the ball is like the Highest Self's relation to all its instruments and powers; the paths of its orbits reflect those of the planets and suns. The ball is then a symbol of all our revolving parts, be they mental or
i I
have often thought that his sense of golf as the journey-round was deepened by
his memory that
the eighteenth green at Burningbush was built on a grave.
physical; for a while we re-enact the primal act of all creation: the One casting worlds in all directions for its extension and delight. Shivas anticipated the image in his notes: "For a while on the links we can lord it over our tiny solar system and pretend we are God: no wonder then that we suffer so deeply when our planet goes astray."
The ball is also a reflection, as Adam Greene said, of projectiles past and future, a reminder of our hunting history and our future powers of astral flight. We can then ponder the relation between projectile and planet, our being as hunter and our being as God; the hunter, the golfer, the astronaut, the yogi, and God all lined up in the symbol of the ball.
"The ball is ubiquitous," say the notes. "It is in flight at this very moment above every continent. Moreover, it is in flight every moment of the day and night. It may take flight one day on the moon, especially when you consider the potential prodigies of mile-long drives and the wonder they would bring to millions. Consider the symbolism inherent in that indubitable fact: a golf ball suspended in air at every moment!" There are so many golfers around the globe.
At rest, it is "like an egg, laid by man," for who can tell what prodigies the next shot will bring? In flight it brings that peculiar suspended pleasure which lies at the heart of the game; it is "a signal that we can fly-and the farther the better!"it is a symbol of our spirit's flight to the goal. It is perfectly round, for centuries of human ingenuity and labor have made it so, and "the meanings of roundness are easy to see." (Parmenides and other Greek philosophers said that Being itself was a globe, that we must therefore "circulate" our words in order to tell a "round truth.")
So the symbols and meanings are endless. But when all these are said and done, there is a fact about the ball that overpowers all the rest. It is the whiteness of the ball that disturbs me more than anything else. "Though in many natural objects whiteness enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own," said Herman Melville in a well-known passage, "and though certain nations have in some way recognized a certain pre-eminence to it, there yet lurks an elusive something in the color which strikes panic to the soul."
Only black so reminds us of the great unknown. Black and white, we throw them together in the old cliche, but somewhere deep in both there lies a hint of powers unforeseen. Do they remind us of the void, since they represent the absence of all ordinary hue?" Is it annihilation we fear when we encounter them? "All colors taken together congeal to whiteness, the greatest part of space is black," say the journal notes. "What would happen if someone introduced a golf ball painted black?"
The Mystery o f the Hole
In no other game is the ratio of playing field to goal so large. (Think of soccer, American football, lacrosse, basketball, billiards, bowling.) We are spread wide as we play, then brought to a tiny place.
The target then leads into the ground, leads
underground. I realized this once reaching into one of the exceptionally deep
holes our Salinas greenkeeper was cutting in 1949 (he had procured a new
hole-cutter). What a strange sensationreaching
so far into the ground. What was down there, underneath the ball? There was a
section in his notes entitled "The Psychology of Passageways," which
has a bearing on the hole's mystery. In it there was a list of "holes and
doorways in our ordinary life," which included a long paragraph about the
significance of looking through windows (something to the effect that windows
have a function other than letting us look outside,. that we build them to
simulate our essentially imprisoned state), another on the subject of toilets
and the draining away of our refuse (including some sentences about the need
to examine our stool whenever we feel disjointed), an essay on picture frames
and other boundaries on art objects, and a list of all the "significant
openings" in his own apartment (apparently, he had taken a careful
inventory of these). There was also a list of "Extraordinary
Openings." This included a constellation in the new zodiac he had made
(see "A Golfer's Zodiac," p. 153), various kinds of mystical
experience-an entire catalogue in fact of transports and ecstasies; a list of
historic figures (including Joan of Are, Pythagoras, Sri Ramakrishna, Seamus
MacDuff, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton, and a Dundee cobbler named Typhus
Magee); a list of historic events (including the outbreak of philosophy all
over the world during the sixth century B.C., the first flights at Kitty Hawk,
and a drive he had bit sometime during the summer of 1948) ; certain places in
Burningbush and its environs (I think he compared these to the points on the
body which are probed during treatments with acupuncture), a golf course in
Peru (perhaps the Tuctu golf course, which he had mentioned during our conversation
at the McNaughtons) ; certain phrases, philosophical terms, and lines of poetry
(including the word Atman, the
Isha
Upanishad, and a limerick by one
of his pupils) ; a list of coincidences in his life; and the unpublished
manuscript of his teacher.
Our
first passageways, he said, are the avenues of sense-our eyes, ears, nostrils,
and mouth. We build our houses and churches to simulate these, we relate to the
earth itself as if it were our body, for "we start as someone looking out,
and as soon as we look we think of escape."
"Life
is a long obsession with passageways," the notes go on, "we are ever
breaking through to the other side-of ignorance, isolation, imprisonment.
Memory, catharsis, travel, discovery, ecstasy are all ways of getting outside
our original skin."
He thought it significant that an entire fairway, with its green, rough,
hazards, and traps was called a "hole," that the tiny target was used
to characterize all the rest of the playing field. "'How many holes have
you played?' is the way the question is asked, not `how many fairways?' or `bow
many tees?"' He thought it had something to do with the fact that after
all our adventures, all our trials and triumphs on the journey-round we are
left with that final passage through; that the hole and what it leads to is
really what the game is all about.
As it turns out
some of the most original thinking on the subject has been done by Jean-Paul
Sartre, who ends Part Four of Being and Nothingness with a short essay on the hole and its
implications. I don't recall Shivas quoting Sartre but their thinking on the
subject has some extraordinary similarities. The French philosopher,
admittedly, is not an accomplished golfer, but his apparent grasp of the hole's
mystery suggests that he has had his problems and triumphs on thelinks.
"Thus to plug up a hole," he says, "means originally to make a
sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist." (How
we golfers can sympathize with that.) "Here at its origin we grasp one of
the most fundamental tendencies of human reality-the tendency to fill.... A
good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in filling empty places,
in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude." In establishing
a plenitude? Perhaps this is the most fundamental clue. And the comprehension
of that essential act of sacrifice involved in every disappearance of the ball
into the hole (sacrifice and inevitable rebirth)! For the journal notes say,
"In golf we throw ourselves away and find ourselves again and again.... A
ball is in flight somewhere at every moment. .. ." What are all these but
glimpses of plenitude! To fill the hole with our ball is to reaffirm that
fullness.
Replacing the Divot
Our green-loving
philosopher claimed there was no better way to deal with our existential guilt
than replacing a divot or repairing a friendship. "We act on friendship
every moment: with our fellows, our land, our tools, with the unseen spirits
and the Lord whose world we are tending."
"Golf is a game of blows and weapons. In order that the game
continue we must make amends for every single act of destruction. In a golf
club everyone knows the player who does not replace his divot. One can guess
how he leads the rest of his life."
Replacing the divot is "an exercise for the public good." It is
also a reminder that "we are all one golfer." There would simply be
no game if every golfer turned his back on the damage be did.
A Game for the Multiple
Amphibian
Bobby Jones and
other lovers of the game have attributed its widespread appeal to the fact that
it reflects so much of the human situation: comedy, tragedy, hard work, and
miracle; the agony and the ecstasy. There is something in it for almost
everyone. Shivas liked to quote the Religio Medici, especially the passage that described
man as ". .. that great and true Amphibian whose nature is disposed to
live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and
distinguished worlds." He believed that golf was uniquely suited to our
multiply amphibious nature. It gives us a chance to exercise so many physical
skills and so many aspects of our mind and character.
I need not catalogue the game's complexity to make my point: you know about all the long and the short shots; all the nuance of weather, air, and grass; all the emotion and vast resolution; all the schemes for success and delusions of grandeur, and the tall tales unnumbered; the trials of patience and fiendish frustrations; all the suicidal thoughts and glimpses of the Millennium. We all have a golfing friend we have had to nurse past a possible breakdown or listen to patiently while he expounded his latest theory .of the game. How often have we seen a round go from an episode out of the Three Stooges to the agonies of King Lear-perhaps in the space of one hole! I will never forget a friend whodeclared after his tee shot that he wanted to kill himself but when the hole was finished said with total sincerity that he had never been so happy in his entire life. No other game is more capable of evoking a person's total commitment.
This immense complexity delighted Shivas. In fact, he would add more complexity to the game, perhaps to satisfy his endlessly adventurous spirit. Running, for example, has been left out, as well as jumping and shouting; so he advocated your exercising basic functions sometime during the golfing day if you wanted to balance your mind and nerves. We must give these large needs adequate expression, he said, otherwise golf would "imprint too much of its necessarily limited nature on us." For ". . . every game must have its limits, simply to exist, just as every form and every culture does, but our bodies and our spirits suffer." So somewhere and somehow we should run and jump and sing and shout. (I don't want to give you any advice about this, especially when I think about some of the trouble I have had on golf courses when I have tried to follow his advice. Perhaps you should confine these more strenuous activities to your local schoolyard or gym. But you might find it interesting to see how your game fares when you exercise those muscles and functions that golf neglects.)
This is true for much more than running, jumping, and shouting though. For our golfing teacher maintained in his inexorable way that our "emotional and mental body" needed as much exercise as our physical body did. So "poetry, music, drama, prayer, and love" were essential to the game too. "There is no end to it," he said, "once you begin to take golf seriously."
Of n Golf Shot on the Moon
It can now be argued that golf was the first human game played on another planetary body. Those two shots Alan Shepard hit with a six iron at the "Fra Mauro Country Club" have brought a certain stature and gleam of the eye to golfers the world over. Coming as they did while I was writing this book, they appeared to me as synchronicity: the game has a mighty destiny, the event said; Shivas Irons was right. In the shock I felt when the news appeared (I had not seen the television show) I thought that in some inexplicable way those shots had been engineered by Shivas (from his worldly hiding place) or by Seamus MacDuff (from his hiding place on the other side). But the subsequent news that Shepard and his golf pro, Jack Harden, had planned the thing ruled out Shivas and restored some perspective to my hopeful speculations. Still, the meaning of it continued to loom before me. Golf on the moon! And the command module named Kitty Hawk! (Shivas had called Kitty Hawk an "extraordinary opening" in this unfolding world and had worked with Seamus all those years on the possibilities of flight with "the luminous body.") The event was a tangle of synchronicities.
I wonder how many other golfers have felt the same way. So many of us are alive to the other edge of possibility (perhaps because the game has tried us so sorely) and ever alert for the cosmic meaning. This event confirms our sense of mighty things ahead.
There are other implications, however, some less promising. A trusted friend of mine, someone with a quick keen eye for injustice and intrigue, saw an ugly side to the whole affair. It was, he said, an imperial Wasp statement, however unconscious, that this here moon is our little old country club for whites, thank you, and here goes a golf shot to prove it. I hated to hear that, for I wanted to dwell on the hopeful meanings. And I hated to think what Seamus would do, being half-black, if he were fiddling around with it all from his powerful vantage point. The Kitty Hawk might not make it back to earth! But the heroes are back and so far so good. Still, I am left wondering what latent imperialism lay behind that six-iron shot.
And I am left with other thoughts about the character of Alan Shepard. What could have led the man to design that faulty club, smuggle it on board with those "heat-resistant" balls and risk some billion-dollar disaster from flying divots or tears in his space suit? What could have led him to such monumental triviality amind the terrors and marvels of the Moon? The madness of the game had suffered again, I thought, as I pondered his motives.
Had NASA put him up to it for public relations reasons? Maybe they wanted some humor in the enterprise or the backing of certain rich and powerful golfing senators. Perhaps he would collect on some stupendous bet (after all, he was interested in money and had made a pile in his astronaut years). Or could it simply be that all his golfer's passion to hit the ball a mile now had a chance to express itself, indeed the chance of a lifetime, the chance of history! Perhaps the collective unconscious of all the golfing world was delivering itself at last, seizing him as instrument for the release of a million foiled hopes for the shot that would never come down. And indeed the cry came down from space, ". . . it's sailing for miles and miles and miles," Alan Shepard was giving the mad cry of golfers the world over who want to put a ball in orbit and reassume their god-like power.
Yes, indeed, indeed, Shivas was right; the game keeps giving us glimpses.