TRIPPING
In 1967, after dropping acid and then dropping out, Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert visited a yogi in India and became Ram Dass. In 1971 he published an account of that transformation, an illustrated guide to mindfulness called Be Here Now, that became a bestseller in the United States. The book offers a kind of everyday Zen: move beyond the physical, be your own self, approach everything with love, keep yourself grounded.
While the book’s tenets are no longer surprising, its graphics remain transgressive. Each of its 221 pages reproduces an original large-format cardboard artwork, crafted with rubber stamps, pen and ink by Dass’ commune-dwelling friends. The paper’s dark texture and rough edges, the wonky text alignment and kerning, the shifting font sizes and styles, and the eclectic sampling of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian iconographies, all shape a mood of happy, hippy unorthodoxy. It’s this lack of pretentiousness that makes the project difficult to dismiss or satirize; it’s entirely innocent.
The text is relaxed, conversational and repetitive, lit with flashes of
poetry. Dass describes the radiance of his guru, Meher Babu,
“. . he’s smiling at you/like the other Marx brother.”
But it’s the composition of each page, the dance of text and graphics, that conveys, in a flash, feeling, like a good graphic novel. The book’s stories, songs and musings bend, shrink and swell around the icons and images: dazzling mandalas, idyllic
landscapes, smiling sadhus, and naked ladies with long legs and long hair. Rather then religiosity, the mood is one of wonderment and gentle self-reflection. Dass observes, right at the beginning, “We watch the entire drama/That is our lives/ We watch this illusion/with/unbearable compassion.” And one really can’t disagree.