Grandpa Moses

Reassessing Old

He was mad. Was in and out of sanitariums … all his life. Went blind in the left eye … probably due to cataracts … and appeared like he was always squinting. Had a handle-bar mustache … completely white … on a face that was fashionably unshaven. Dressed completely in white … in the Indic veshti … with hair that had turned white. I was 12 years old … and I was getting my introduction … to the world from him.

I'm speaking of my grandpa … not the Prophet Moses of the old testament. But the expression … ' Grandpa Moses ' is applied in a generic manner to all senior citizens … who seem ancient and in some ways … lost to rational views. I'm not denying … that about my grandpa. It obviously originates from teen expressions … who are intent about their own place in the sun … and relegate anyone old … to a relic of the past … to be avoided … and not referred to as present experience.

He came to stay with us … after my father's passing. He was my mother's father … and it might have appeared to him … that she was burdened alone with 7 kids. We were similar in many ways … I was full of imagination … about all things … and he was managing … an experience of ' seeing things. ' That appeared strange to us kids … but we didn't think it awkward. We simply thought … he was more intuitive than most.

My mother had told us … he had killed a man … one time … in his young adult life. It added to the mystery about him … but he never spoke about it to us. He attended to farming on a plot of land … next to the house … where he grew groundnuts. Was quite a treat to us … in the harvest. Then there was the day … he chased a ' giant ' in the middle of the night … and we all woke … to see him shouting into the darkness … in the back porch. We didn't see anything.

On reflection … it appears to me that … I got along better with him … than I had my father. And the way I found that relation … was not on the basis of communication. It was in reference to my passions … and the internal dialogue … of a grandpa who shared in a kid's imagination … unlike my father … whose responsibilities for the family … imposed on him … a greater reticence. It was an experience … that stayed with me … long into my adult years.

As a result … I grew up … with a certain intimacy about the world … believing it to be old and wise … and I was its student. It saw me through my pre-adult years … but in connection with work … especially hard-core business orientation … I found it difficult to cope … and had to let grandpa go. In doing so … I lost my intrinsic and natural relation to the world … and was turning into a modern technocrat … joining the ranks … of the ' movers and shakers ' … of the world.

I've been returning to my early experiences … recently … and I'm getting a new take on the issue. It doesn't give easily … and it certainly is not a matter of self-gratifying imagination. It is however … a contact with ' the one ' … a place in which … there are no more questions. I used to think that it … was simply a matter … of being unschooled … untrained … and unaccustomed to the sophistication … of a civil society.

But as I approach it … with the vivid sense of my career and life … it appears to me as the ego. In crossing over into it … I still feel the physical world all around me … but in the ego … it feels like a ' field of all possibilities.' Its a term introduced by the Vasudeva … in the Bhagavad Gita. He described it … as the source of all knowledge … and associated it with the term ' the net of maya.' In the modern context … it creates a reference to … postulations based on logical thinking … and may refer to time periods … in the past or the future.

In Western legends … the celebrated story of Venus and her husband Hephaestus … makes reference to the use of a net … with which he discovered … that Venus was cheating with Aries. Obviously … its in reference to logical postulations … on the part of Hephaestus. Sometimes that takes place naturally … in the pre-adult years … when the individual realizes … that he knows less about the world … than he thought. Its experienced through the unconscious workings of the mind.

In a young mind … it closes off that part of the passions … in effect throwing us out into the physical world … in the experience of conscious understanding of … money … survival … and career. It blocks off … our past child-based inklings about possibilities … and narrows the focus of the mind … for greater physical achievement. It asks us to return … with a worldly view of life … and throws out all manner of imagination … we cultivate as youth.

My inclination is to say … its fair … and is the way of the world … but you wouldn't have heard me say that while I was engaging my career. It reminds me of a student of mine … who graduated and found work as a marketing executive. She dropped by at the college … some months later … and told me how she cried the first 6 months. Then she said … ' but when you find out that everyone has 5 faces and 6 tongues … you're alright.' She had a head for numbers … that one.

Indic folklore has Vishnu … reclining on Sesha … the serpent with 5 heads. His wife sits next to him. My grandpa had seemed pre-occupied … always … and I wondered if … he was into trying to figure that out. It is the great Indic pre-occupation. But I guess I'll never know. The man quarreled with my mother and left … and nobody we know … has seen him since. In retrospect … the mysticism that surrounded his personality … is nothing … compared to what I found in real life.