Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralich's life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

Blaming Japhy Rider

Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who SurvivedBy Philip A. Bralich

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2012 Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4051-1

Contents

1 Our Second Anniversary: Peace Corps—Togo, 1978.............................................................................12 Going to Go to Togo to Teach—1978..........................................................................................173 The Accident —December 7, 1978.............................................................................................444 Japan—1982.................................................................................................................625 Home from Japan—September 1982.............................................................................................746 Buddhism à la Trungpa Rinpoche, et alii.....................................................................................997 Graduate School—Hawaii, 1986...............................................................................................1168 Nepal—1990.................................................................................................................1319 PhD Matriculation and Running a Business—1991..............................................................................13810 Ergo Linguistic Technologies—1995-2000....................................................................................14711 Barnes and Noble and More Freud—2003......................................................................................17312 Blaming Japhy Rider—2010..................................................................................................206Colophon...........................................................................................................................217Appendix 1: Charts.................................................................................................................219Appendix 2: E-mails from Buddhist Email Discussion Lists and Letter from Alan Ginzberg Commenting on My Poetry.....................221A fable, some poems, and other projects by the author..............................................................................243

Chapter One

Our Second Anniversary: Peace Corps—Togo, 1978

It was 1978, and nearing Deb's and my second anniversary. October 30 was the exact date; we were planning a big reunion/anniversary celebration for the event, and we just wanted to aim for near that date. I cannot remember the exact day of the party. Our close friends new it was our anniversary, but for us the best way to celebrate our anniversary was to throw a reunion. This reunion was to be celebrated in the Peace Corps in West Africa—Lama Kara, Togo, to be exact. We weren't sure it was going to work out, but, little by little, we organized a party as an excuse to bring together all the other Peace Corps volunteers we could find in the area, or even from around the country, if they could make it. It would be a reunion of the volunteers from our two-month training, and also an opportunity to meet and get to know other volunteers in the area. In those days a good party included a theme, food, and lots of alcohol, and what we were planning was no different: Western-style beer, local millet beer, and a barbecue of an entire cow. The cow was the highlight and the theme. The 1970s also included lots of drug-taking, but neither Deb nor I was into that—and, besides, drugs were virtually nonexistent among the other volunteers, given the harsh penalties in the country and the unavailability of drugs in West Africa. This to me was a relief, because I didn't want to have to deal with the embarrassment or risks as a result of someone else's drug use at our party.

Stewart, an English teacher like I was, had a houseboy who was the son of a butcher. His father agreed to butcher the cow for us in exchange for the skin, brains, guts, bones, hooves, and so forth—all the things we didn't know what to do with. My understanding was that this was a very good deal for the butcher. The animal-traction volunteers were able to donate the cow, our houseboy and the boy across the street were able to dig a barbecue pit, and the construction volunteers came up with the rebar so that we could properly build a barbecue pit in our yard—and then cook up that cow.

The boys laughed at me when I offered to help dig the pit, which I actually thought would be fun. Trying those half-size poles and digging the pit for the barbecue appealed to me. They laughed because it was inappropriate for me to do that sort of work when kids were around to do it for me, and they also thought I could not handle the handheld, half-size hand plows they used for the job for more than a couple of minutes. A couple of the construction volunteers agreed to search out the best local millet beer, and I set up a deal with the SGGG to keep a huge refrigerator he had full of beer, and any of us with motorcycles would run the beer back and forth throughout the day so that we could keep it cold. We only had a half-size refrigerator, and that wouldn't be sufficient to provide cold beer for the thirty or forty volunteers we were expecting. We were lucky, though, in that we actually had electricity and an electric refrigerator—ours was much better than the kerosene frigos that many volunteers had to make do with, but it was still too small for the party.

The monks and nuns of Chaminade and Adele, our bosses, took care of us rather well. We had a large, one-story, two-bedroom cement-block house with a light in every room, and even wall switches. The house, which belonged to the monks of College Chaminade, was for housing "civilian" teachers. Changing a lightbulb one time tossed me about six feet across the room; after that, I remembered to be sure the electricity was off whenever I changed one. In any case, as I said, our refrigerator was too small to hold the beer and drinks necessary for the thirty-plus volunteers we were expecting, so the deal for the refrigerator with the SGGG was quite useful.

The volunteers who went to search out the best millet beer disappeared for three days. They turned up at Maureen's hut stone—drunk, stumbling, disheveled, and bearded—announcing triumphantly that three days of drinking millet beer had been successful: they had found the best in the area.

From the start, being in Africa was an adventure. "The best job you'll ever love" is more than just a sales pitch for the Peace Corps. It is every bit as challenging, adventurous, and enjoyable as any bunch of idealistic twenty-somethings could dream up. Deb and I both were twenty-five when we joined, perhaps just slightly older than the average age. We were the only married couple.

* * *

Getting to Africa was an adventure in itself. We were in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when we decided to join. We both had finished college about a year before: Deb with a degree in French, and I with one in linguistics. I was working for the Playboy Club as a food-and-beverage management trainee; she as a cashier ... I forget where. I remember talking to her at the counter, but I don't remember where it was. We were both getting sick of the corporate mentality.

Although I liked the Playboy Club philosophy in general, like all the other hotels, it was pervaded by a growing problem of reward for politics,...