Ken Kesey on his Oregon farm, November 1979.

Ken Kesey dead?

Who they tryin' to kid?

That can't be Kesey they wheeled away from Sacred Heart in Eugene, Oregon, last November, like hauling off the corpse of some lobotomized savior in a movie about lunatics. Kesey was much bigger than that. Younger. Louder. Handsomer too. Looked kind of like Paul Newman, some said, before Kesey lost his hair, and that middle-age spread set in. And those hands--folded like doves' wings as some orderly rolled him away, no doubt.

Listen up. I knew those hands. They contained worlds, man. They bled two novels onto the page that may never be surpassed.

Read 'em and weep. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. Brassy, voluptuous, tender and, yes, sometimes vulgar books, not what you'd call PC at all.

Yet subtle too. Subtle as voices of doves. Subtle as new moons and heat lightning.

Ah, what Kesey could do with voice and perspective. He proffered gifts and notions that made him a writer's writer. That first book--published in 1962--made you want to give up reading and writing, except for the haunting idea that lightning might strike again. Read on. Write on. Further. You read his later books wishing Kesey had turned out more classics, but he had nothing left to prove after all. He attained immortality with those early works, and if not with them, then with the movement he started. A movement that changed the world if the truth be admitted.

Kesey dead? You might as well say Captain America died that day. Or Santa Claus. Buddha. Jesus even. Tepid descriptions buried inside newspapers and magazines following Kesey's death scarcely resemble the man who once slew giant timber and hauled driftwood logs up off wild Oregon beaches, and midwifed dairy calves for most of sixty-six years. Such descriptions don't account for those hands, after all:

A wrestler's hands that grappled their way to a Big Ten crown and alternate on the U.S. Olympic team.

Hands that transformed a family barn into home for generations of Keseys and also a pilgrimage shrine--destination for seekers after truth of one sort or another.

Hands that dug a grave in 1984 for Kesey's own son, Jed, killed, understand, in a bus accident while on his way to compete in a college wrestling match.

Kesey's fingers were the thick, deft digits of a magician who could make coins disappear and who--take a deep breath now...

Wrestled the wheel of a 1930s-vintage psychedelic bus back and forth across this country several times in the sixties, with a little help from his friends.

Wired California warehouses and clubs into electrified palaces that conjured revolutions in music, fashion, art, lighting and social mores.

Clutched a microphone as Kesey carney-barkered the Grateful Dead and other bands into existence.

Grasped an iron ladder and heaved himself aboard a moving train one afternoon in Old Mexico, just before the authorities would have nabbed him in the middle of a desert.

Those hands hauled his brawny hide out of harm's way more than once while on the lam for drug charges both trumped up and real.

There's not space enough nor time to chronicle all the exploits of the man who, as a struggling grad student, hired on to take something called LSD for government-sponsored mind-control experiments at Stanford, then took the magic candy and ran, releasing it to the multitudes, for better or worse.

Imagine a pinhead speck of LSD rolling around in those meaty, over-sized palms. Imagine the furrowed brow as Kesey tries to figure how something so tiny could unfold, conjure and illuminate the whole crazy cosmos for you. How it could allow you to see clear to the wounded hearts behind the faces of those emotionally disturbed souls you tended in the mental wards to pay tuition at the Stanford writing program. How in the heck....

*

But there it is. Something to be faced. Our hero, Ken Kesey, was a drug-user. Even drug distributor.

Only that's like saying Einstein was a back-alley nuclear waste peddler. It's like calling Henry Ford a junk car dealer and ambulance chaser.

For Kesey, drug use was not escapist. For him the psychedelic experience was like America itself--a just-discovered continent that became setting or laboratory for exploring new conceptions of freedom, art, religion, science, personality, and some infinitely receding intersection where those things merge into evanescent metaphors and temporal paradigms for larger conceptions of reality.

No reductionist Kesey. No minimalist he.

Kesey was the ultimate expansionist, the maximalist, to coin a phrase. To read him is to entertain no precious personal authorial neurosis or conceit. Rather, it's to be baptized in notions of life, death, sacrifice, redemption, rebirth, creation, mythology, civilization, Jungian archetypes.

For Kesey, drug use provided a way of apprehending the big picture. It was an aid for writing great novels and establishing movements that would allow the human race to survive the nuclear age. When asked to define his movement, he tied it to an impulse old as history.

"It started the first time a caveman picked up a meat-bone and handed it to a stranger rather than hitting him in the head with it," Kesey said.

He reveled in bringing tribes together. Hippies, bikers, bankers, Jesus people, ministers, writers, artists, mountain girls, rockers, poets, soldiers, athletes, politicians and protesters--that whole crazy mix that was the sixties.

For better or worse, this alchemy led to events that led to the rise of rock bands like Santana, the Doors, the Grateful Dead and dozens more who brought the counter culture to the mainstream of American life. It led to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy.

That popular revolution either broke down a stifling conformity or unleashed demons, depending on your point of view. Eventually it reached the Beatles and popular culture generally. Finally it infiltrated the world's intelligentsia. There's evidence that John F. Kennedy--who gave us the moon--experimented with psychedelic drugs.

Even Dick Nixon and Brezhnev became actors for an international audience that was turned on, tuned in--if vicariously in many cases--an audience that yearned for peace and transcendence over hoary old ways of war and prejudice which we knew in our guts could kill us all... as the psychedelic movement went global.

Yes, Kesey proselytized for drug use, and doubtlessly was a proximate cause of suffering. It must be said that many have suffered and died because of drug abuse. Never mind that many lives were changed for the better in the 1960s, and that an expansive new worldview took center stage that doubtlessly saved millions. Never mind that LSD was legal back then, and that it was the CIA who introduced the drugs to Kesey, or that it was the government's own faulty drug policy that gave rise to unregulated use and the resulting cocaine wars in our inner cities. It must be admitted that Kesey was part of the mix that popularized drugs.

Still, I could draw that particular thread from the fabric of recent world history, would I? Not on your life. It just might be one of the threads by which the world hung on long enough to survive the Cold War.

I exaggerate? Perhaps so.

On the other hand, I once interviewed the engineer who designed the air-conditioning system used in Lenin's Tomb. The amiable Russian immigrant to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, told me that by the 1970s the elite of Moscow were listening to the Beatles and American jazz and reading writers such as Kesey. Even as they paid lip service to socialist dogma; even as they chilled Lenin out. I heard similar stories from a Russian interpreter.

Détente brought hiatus to a runaway arms race and international tensions that were goading us towards nuclear Armageddon. Changed hearts and minds made Détente possible, just as changed hearts and minds made it possible for Congress to vote into law the clean air and water bills and establish the EPA under Nixon, and give rise to a generation that decided the environment needed saving.

Not that Kesey alone saved us. No more than Vietnam vets or demonstrators in the streets or nuclear test ban treaties or Billy Graham or the Pope, or Nixon's overtures to Russia or pictures of the whole earth or Reagan's get-tough talk or rockets to the moon or Jerry Garcia saved us.

It took all of those elements and more to forge a detour around a bizarre intersection of history where our government--bristling with nuclear arms--played chicken with an enemy holding too many missiles to count.

Kesey was part of the mix, maybe its saving grace.

For him, drugs and writing (yes and music, art, magic tricks, storytelling, light shows and outrageous garb) were tools of a shaman on a life-long vision-quest.

Such quests were common in the sixties and seventies. Kesey's fellow- voyager, Stewart Brand--one of the original fourteen Merry Pranksters--took it upon himself to make the image of the whole Earth into the world's most visible icon. In the mid-to-late sixties, Brand went around the country passing out cards and pamphlets that asked the simple question, "Why haven't we seen a picture of the whole earth yet?"

The Merry Prankster Bus in 1979, when Kesey gave it shelter behind his Pleasant Hill, Oregon home.

Within a couple of years we had, and Brand plastered the picture everywhere, most notably on the cover of The Whole Earth Catalogue, a scruffy manual of sorts for living an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. Today the whole Earth is as ubiquitous as the crucifix. Some credit the psychedelic movement with spawning a new vision of the earth as a living entity and thereby contributing to the peace and environmental movements.

Others have taken it a step further, saying the new "global consciousness" marks the emergence of a new paradigm or new religion--one that is growing even now. If true, then Kesey is a founding prophet. Kesey never donned the crown and scepter of king or savior, as other sixties gurus did, even though his following was immense and loyal. He never scored status points by running down institutions such as the church or family or by advocating violence to fight violence.

"That's the oldest game in the world," he once said.

One of the few times he found himself on stage at a peace rally, he angered and befuddled the organizers by eschewing angry rhetoric, by declining to work the crowd into the desired frenzy. Instead, he simply blew into his harmonica and urged the following response to the Vietnam War, as though it were just another street brawl:

"Just walk away from it."

Read all about it in Tom Wolfe's 1968 new journalism classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. There's something of the real live Kesey captured there, though not the whole man.

No more than any facsimile corpse with a bum liver is the real Kesey.

Who they tryin' to kid?

*

Look, I knew Ken Kesey.

It was in 1972, one of those hurly-burly years that joined the sixties to the seventies that I had my introduction to him. I was hanging out at my Knoxville apartment upstairs in a student ghetto on Tenth Street--a hilly street of sturdy, wooden houses and a brick-factory and shops that would be sacrificed a decade later to a World's Fair.

My apartment had stains on the ceiling and sometimes at night my friends and I would lie back and decipher them like so many clouds.

"Look, there's a herd of buffalo; now it's turning into, oh m'gosh, Dick Nixon...."

One day, tired of listening to music and looking at the stains there, I picked up this book that belonged to my housemate. The cover featured a drawing of a red-haired anguished man struggling to free himself from a strait-jacket. On the cover in vibrant script were the words, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Normally put off by psycho dramas, I nevertheless opened the cover and read that first disquieting declaration.

They're out there.

I read on and fell into a black hole of sensation, imagery and ideas I would never escape. Those words led to words that led to books and ways that transformed me. I'm typing this sentence because in three words a sense of dread, paranoia and mystery was conjured. The voice of Chief Broom mesmerized me.

His is the voice of the classic unreliable narrator, in English Lit 101 jargon. Chief Broom is a storyteller who can't be trusted. He's paranoid, delusional, drug-addled, bigoted, unschooled and allegedly catatonic. Yet Chief Broom is also yearning, confessional, pathetic and hopeful. You don't know whether to believe his amazing story or not.

The Chief himself ups the ante by admitting such doubt at the end of the first chapter.

Here's Chief Broom's truth--maybe Kesey's: People are falling under control of The Combine, a vast organization that manipulates the world with pulleys, levers, pills, and by implanting eavesdropping devices and other control mechanisms into our very bodies and souls by night and generally sapping our free will.

Nurse Ratched is The Combine's agent inside the mental institution where the story takes place. A dictatorial and cold overseer, she has killed her very own womanly instincts in her drive to force herself and her ward to conform to a strict and sexless code. She rules an insular, claustrophobic world in microcosm. But it is a world that also glimmers with possibilities of cosmic wonder, of epic struggle, of redemption and death and life everlasting....

That shot at redemption comes by way of Randle P. McMurphy, maybe Kesey's greatest character. He's an unlikely modern day savior--a red-haired card-dealing outlaw of Irish descent, with a brash voice, tattoos, heeltaps that strike sparks from the tile when he walks, and larger-than-life hand gestures to go with a mission cosmic in scope.

*

I laid the book down seven or eight devastating and thrilling hours later, transfixed by Kesey's electric prose.

For an English major tired of reading Tennyson, this was mind-blowing stuff, to use a vernacular that might not exist without Kesey.

Later I discovered Kesey was this weird character who often traveled with the Grateful Dead and once led the FBI and other cops on a merry chase through California and Mexico in the late sixties.

He first started getting into trouble in 1964, after he and his friends took a school bus, painted it burnt orange, yellow, saffron, crimson, violet, mauve and other shades of psychedelia, wired it for sound and cameras inside and out, then set out across America with a group of like-minded friends to transfix the multitudes.

They called themselves Merry Pranksters, I learned from Wolfe. Later, others would chronicle the trip, including Kesey himself in The Further Inquiry, a coffee-table book jam-packed with photographs, movie stills and psychedelic art from that epic school bus ride.

A saying arose from that trip. "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus."

In the early seventies, like millions who had never even heard that expression, I was on the bus. At least on weekends. I wore sandals and patched jeans and grew my hair down over my shoulders. I wrote bad poetry and tried my hand at electric-flavored fiction in the Kesey style (I liked the way my thoughts seemed to swell and take hold of big questions, apprehend the great mysteries, permit appropriate awe at being alive in this crazy universe in certain states of mind). And I dreamed of one day taking a ride across America in a jazzed up hippie bus.

*

Ah, life on the road.

It was every weekend hipster's dream to trip out on America. To follow the white and yellow lines on the highway through as many states of the U.S.A. and of consciousness as you could conjure. I didn't get around to making my journey until 1979, a ridiculously late date to be nurturing such hippie pipedreams, but that's how powerfully Kesey had influenced me.

That year my then-pregnant wife Jeanne and I took a little 1965 VW bus with a split windshield that was held together on the passenger side with a plastic rainbow sticker. We painted the insides, hung curtains, built a sleeping platform over the engine compartment and christened it Jasmine, and henceforth it was a she.

With Jeanne and our collie-shep named Lady and the last-minute addition of my nubile and free-spirited sister Kathleen, we drove Jasmine out across America, traveling this country's secondary roads and interstates in a gigantic loop that took in some twenty western states in six weeks.

A parade of wonders marched across our windshield as we followed squiggly, multi-colored lines on a map from Knoxville, northward, then west. We walked the steel canyons of Chicago and toured the Art Institute with the gleeful sensation of having at last arrived in the larger world. We drove down Lin-coln Street and tasted pure blues music, unlike anything we'd known. We chased the sun across golden wheat fields of Wisconsin and South Dakota to the Badlands, a portion of the planet inhabited only by bleached bones, snakes, and spirits of the Sioux dead. A universe unrequited. It was a land of leaning bluffs and cracked, craggy canyons whose shadows constantly changed to evoke birds in flight and silhouettes of warriors. Pink and green rock strata ran throughout all the buttes and bluffs. After looking at them so long, all we saw when we looked away were pink and green stripes glowing in the sky, on Jasmine, on each other's faces, on one another's clothes and skin. We camped that night in the Black Hills against a cliff face--burning sticks and dried buffalo chips to keep the fire blazing beneath a star-spangled sky. The next morning we drove on.

By moonlight we walked around Devil's Tower in Wyoming. We stood on a gentle incline above the Snake River in Montana, studying the landscape where Crazy Horse defeated Custer. We raced heavy snowfalls across the Rockies, learning the next day that eighteen inches had fallen in our wake. Through Idaho we drove the route blazed by Lewis and Clarke across the Bitterroot Range, where Chief Joseph led his band of Nez Percé Indians while fleeing the U.S. Army in the late 1800s.

I drew a blue line on the map marking our travels, and watched as it grew, fascinated by the dimensions it embraced. Still fleeing the snow, we crossed Washington, drove to Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, then on to the Olympic Peninsula and its snow-capped peaks.

Jasmine on her journey west pauses at Mt. Rainier for rest.

Picking our way through unmarked gravel roads of an Indian reservation until we could drive no farther, we parked and hiked through a rain forest to the very tip of Cape Flattery, arriving at last at the farthest point we could get from Tennessee in the contiguous United States.

Before us, the not-so-peaceful Pacific flung frigid fists against bluffs; extended fingers among caves that pitted the stony coastline. Tantalizingly out of reach, a lighthouse beckoned from its perch on a little long island there in the unruly sea, representing in that moment everything I had ever yearned for that was beyond reach.

And in this wild and raw place Jeanne felt a quickening. She placed my hand and then Kathleen's on her belly and we felt it too--a gentle fluttering as our first child, Alexis, as she would become--serene and thoughtful Alexis--announced her presence in the world.

*

We drove down the coast of Washington that night and into Oregon swathed in notions of new life.

My sister, Kathleen, left, and wife, Jeanne, are startled by crashing waves on the beach at Kesey's coastal getaway.

In Eugene in early November we stopped one night at a pool hall and eatery to take a break from the road. Kathleen and Jeanne reminded me of a pledge. I had said years before, "If I ever get the chance, I'm going to shake Ken Kesey's hand."

As Jeanne slept in her warm nest in the van, Kathleen held me to it, shaming me into giving Kesey a call. His wife, Faye, told us to come by in the morning--a brisk Indian summer's morning, spangled by fading gold and russet leaves.

As we approached Kesey's Pleasant Hill house--a big, red, remodeled barn with a cut-out of a white star shining from a peak in the roof, doubts assailed me. Questions like, gosh, gulp, how do you even shake his hand? Is it in the cross-palmed hippie handshake of brotherhood or like my daddy taught me....

In the yard were metallic, Day-glo sculptures like giant masks--faces that glared and flashed toothy grins. Peacocks and goats inhabited a fenced-in lot, and through the open door of a severe, cement-block building we saw The Bus, its psychedelic swirls giving way to rust; its once transparent bubble-top command post now a milky white. We were gazing at it in dis-belief when this balding but handsome man strode out of the house. He looked like a lumberjack in his red-plaid flannel shirt, jeans and work boots.

"You must belong to that dog back there," he said in a quiet mid-register voice that conveyed Oregon wilderness.

I said hi, uh, gosh, good to meet you uh....

He smothered my hand in a fist thick as a catcher's mitt, then led us to the bus. He ran a hand along a fender.

"It died on the way to Woodstock," he said. "I think it died of a broken heart... or maybe a broken gizzard." He let us climb aboard and sit where legends had uh... left impressions, including Neal Cassady--a man made famous in the fifties as the inspiration for the fast-talking, fast-driving Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road.

Kesey led us around the grounds, showed us his workroom in a wooden shed out back, complete with desk and rustic furniture. Draped over the chair he seated himself in was a sheepskin vest--a gift from a medicine man, I believe. We shared notions and sacraments, then he led us from the shed and into his house. Upstairs he walked us through the terrain of his wall-sized relief map of Oregon with its hills and cascading rivers--settings for his second great novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (1964).

A sonic boom shook the walls and floors as we stood there. Kesey shrugged it off, muttered about military jets, then led us downstairs to see the giant pentagram and zodiac painted large upon his living room floor. The cover of this book is a detail from that painting.

This giant zodiac covered the floor of Kesey's Pleasant Hill home. Visible at far-right is Aquarius-- our cover art for this issue.

Back outside he set his peacocks loose, their iridescent plumage furled. How they hung back in the gateway, each posing with one claw held aloft on the threshold to freedom.

"They're testing the reality of it," Kesey said.

*

And so were we, walking cautiously, tiptoeing around questions like, "Why aren't you writing anymore?" "Is the bohemian life suited to a family?" "Are you a religious man?"

We met Faye and two of their children--maybe Jed and Sunshine--who rolled their eyes and acted bored by the visitors from Tennessee, and it struck me that for a former Merry Prankster, Kesey seemed quite settled into the good old American life.

As we stood in his driveway to say goodbye, Kesey said, "I'd consider it a favor if you would stop by my beach house and check on it for me. The key's above the garage door." Consider it a favor! We drove out of sight, then whooped and hollered at our good fortune.

*

A couple of unreal hours later we stood on the rugged Oregon coast and listened to the tide fire its howitzers, clatter sticks, beat percussion, in a barrage of sounds that demands mixed metaphors to describe.

We watched the ocean reveal her colors--turquoise and teal and mother-of-pearl--as they rocked endlessly in. We picked up driftwood souvenirs, etched with script from unknown hands.

The modest beach house was a treasure chest. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of movie reels lined wooden shelves along walls adorned with photographs of Cassady and other pranksters. I marveled that Kesey had entrusted such treasures to us, and I fought an urge to pick up and quietly steal a hardcover copy of Sometimes A Great Notion that lay on a table. Kesey had inscribed on the front flyleaf these words from Keats:

*

We emerged from Kesey's beach house three days later and continued an odyssey now tinged with magic. In northern California, the beams from Jasmine's headlights bounced off giant trunks of redwoods. We stopped and gawked up at trees that were old when the Roman Empire was young. We trundled on to San Francisco, with artists on the streets and sailboats in the bay. Out of money, we were rescued when synchronicity prevailed. Kathleen met an old friend from Nashville, a former chemist who had dropped out to juggle and tell jokes to tourists on a pier for a living. He put us up until we could wire home for paychecks.

It was as though in a dream that, still clutching our map, we drove down Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, played the slots in Vegas, stared into the Grand Canyon, and witnessed the Northern Lights fluttering and dancing across the skies as we drove snow-crested ridges of Arizona. We stood underground in Carlsbad Caverns, awed by byzantine formations. Everywhere was evidence of wild divinity in the world, hands of whimsy creating and destroying all in a motion.

It was as we drove again down off the Rockies--this time east towards Albuquerque--a galaxy expanding in the desert night, marking homes where families lived, worked and played, making lives together, making a town--that I realized, You can't stay on the bus forever.

With our trip across America coming to an end, with a child on the way and a dead-end job facing me, I quietly reconsidered those virtues I had been reared on--the same I had read about in Tennyson. Notions such as duty, work, responsibility... and quietly embraced them.

Two weeks later, I saw the mountains of home as a stranger must see them. Lines of undulating blue drawn on the sky--now waves of blue rolling in, piling up, waves to wash all horizons. Closer now becoming distinct giants, the peaks shouldered one another in the fog, straining to peer above the smoky mist that wreathed their brows to see... what? Boulders and river channels and valleys jumbled and gouged and suited for a flourishing of life... life upon life, life upon death... The lump in my throat, that swelling of life in my wife's belly, this my home, this my land for me for now, maybe for all time....

*

Flash forward to less recessive time, all the way to 1986. Still yet the near and distant past. I was writing an article for The Knoxville News-Sentinel about Kesey's just-released book, Demon Box, when I had occasion to look up the closing lines to Tennyson's epic poem, "Ulysses."

I quoted the poem in that article for the resonance it would have with Kesey. I pictured this aging hippie tripping over the gunwale as he tries to board his ship to test the wine-dark sea once more. Like bold Ulysses, Kesey too was venturing out again. He had created a replica of the old Merry Prankster bus in some heroic or pathetic effort to reclaim faded glory, and was taking it on the road to promote the new book. I wrote then that I hoped he would search for muses who'd inspired Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. If so, he never found them. None of his later books could match those two.

Demon Box is a compilation of articles and stories. It contains an emotionally devastating tribute to John Lennon, occasioned by his murder in 1980, the event that finally took the air out of the sails of the sixties. That essay is patterned after A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. It's about three ghostly visitors to Kesey's Oregon farm, including one seeker after truth who showed up on his doorstep unannounced... and packing a gun.

There is also an affecting account of the day Kesey learned Neal Cassady had died of exposure, stoned out and trying, on a dare, to count all the railroad ties between Puerto Sancto, Mexico, and the next town over. Cassady's last words? "Sixty-four-thousand-nine-hundred and twenty-eight...."

There's a sweet children's story in there as well, "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear," which I used to read to my children.

Despite such treasures, Demon Box isn't a miracle of literary creation like those first two books. Sadly, neither is Sailor Song (1992), a novel about Alaska; nor Last Go Round (1994), about a real Oregon rodeo a century ago, although they're charming enough tales.

The Further Inquiry (1990), the coffee-table book mentioned earlier, is a good read and a document of some importance, chronicling the days when Kesey was a lightning rod for change.

*

Kesey once said he'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph--cultural activist rather than chronicler. For much of his adult life, though, Kesey dropped out of both roles. In the late 1960s, he settled on a dairy farm, where he tended cattle, wrote sparingly, taught occasionally at Oregon U in Eugene, edited the Merry Prankster archive of film footage, hung out with the Grateful Dead, but mostly raised a family and served his community.

If lightning never struck again for Kesey it was largely by design. Likwise, if he never recorded anything very earth-shaking after those first two novels, it was his own call.

But oh what novels. Many a writer would give their entire body of work to have written just one book as good as either of these.

More than anything else I ever read... more than modern American icons The Catcher in the Rye, All the King's Men, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Rabbit Run... more than mossy old classics of world lit like Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamozov, The Odyssey... more than boyhood favorites Tarzan of the Apes by Burroughs and Tunnel In the Sky by Robert Heinlein and Expedition to Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and The Boy's King Arthur by Sidney Lanier... One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest made me want to be a writer.

I was into my second reading before I realized Kesey is retelling the Jesus story. Pick up the book or rent the Milos Forman film Kesey couldn't bring himself to watch, if you don't believe me. (O.K., Jack Nicholson is no Randle P. McMurphy. He may be an unforgettable version of McMurphy, but he is not Kesey's version, not the brassy flamboyant Irish-descended American Kesey imagined.)

Both the movie and the book struck chords that resonate still in our Americanized English. Nurse Ratched, The Combine, Chief Broom, They're out there, have all become shorthand for larger concepts.

But what resonates most, I believe, even for those not conscious of it as they read, is the subtle retelling of what may be the world's most powerful myth. For brooding in the background of this novel is the image of a man or God broken on a cross.

There is crucifixion, resurrection, a voyage on the sea in an open boat with twelve disciples. There are miracles in which the blind learn to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak. There are stones rolled away and a last supper and final communion of wine and bread in those pages. There's a microcosm redeemed and even a crown of thorns. Read it and weep.

Change it around, disguise it, turn it into a tale told by an idiot, inform it with psychedelic imagery and energy and still the Jungian power of the redeemer, the scapegoat, haunts us. Kesey knew that world-class archetypes reside under the twitching nerves of most every American, perhaps most every world citizen--Christian, Jew, Muslim or atheist--and that most of us, whether as children or adults, have taken part in the human compulsion to single out an individual to blame, shun or ridicule, or have become victims of such compulsions ourselves on some small scale. There is comfort to be had in such pitiable human acts--even redemption of sorts.

People respond to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, "it's the truth... even if it didn't happen."

But that's a different question....

*

Sometimes A Great Notion covers similar terrain. Hank Stamper--leader of a renegade strike-breaking family of Oregon loggers--is the man his suffering community loves to hate. The man they blame for all their woes. Like McMurphy, he is the strongest among them, always fighting attempts to be laid low by his weaker, more... yes, mortal, kith and kin.

Both books are miracles of perspective and voice. Sometimes A Great Notion, despite its slower start, may be the more daring, more accomplished book in some ways. Kesey writes several visceral and believable paragraphs from the point-of-view of a dog, and it's not uncommon to encounter three or four first-person voices intermingled in internal monologue on the same page, along with their external dialogue and the voice of a third-person omniscient narrator.

What pluck, what virtuosity, what fine sensibilities.

I was astounded once in a creative writing seminar to hear the instructor--author of twelve books himself--dismiss Kesey's technique as undisciplined and inconsistent. To me, Kesey's approach was a miracle of perception and technique.

Everytime I re-read those first two novels, I'm thrilled by the delicate... toughness of Kesey's craft and vision; his rendering of life's amazingly complex simplicity (or simply amazing complexity); the word-play; the love of living expressed; the awe at everything in the world; the daring leaps into minds and voices of others, especially in Sometimes A Great Notion. That whole sprawling contraption of a novel effuses divinity and deviltry in each line, and I never quite got it out of my system.

Whether Kesey changed the world or not is, I suppose, debatable. That he changed my world, for better or worse, I can never doubt. There's too much documented evidence among my files and souvenirs to believe otherwise.

*

Take this fragment from a letter I wrote on the night of June 30, 1997, asking Kesey for an interview....

I often wonder what direction my life would have taken had I not, in deep and droning lassitude, lifted the cover to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest one Saturday in 1972, and disappeared without a trace into a weekend of written wonders.

I know I wouldn't have driven to Eugene, Oregon in 1979 on the off-chance that you would allow me to shake your hand, and therefore wouldn't have had an awakening of sorts as I drove down out of the southern Rockies into the furling galaxy of lights that was Albuquerque and heard a voice tell me I could do damn near anything I pleased--despite my poverty at the time, pregnant bride and paucity of skills--if I would simply go home and get started.

It took years of work, worry and occasional awards to realize doing damn near anything is a lot tougher than voices in the night might make it sound. Still and all, it was in that spirit of boundless optimism you helped bequeath through your writing and hospitality (you've probably forgotten that November afternoon we came calling in the yellow Deadhead-style van) that I ventured to quit my job as feature writer at The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996 and follow yet another of my heart's true callings....

Need I add that it would make for a crowning kind of honor to feature an interview with you in some future New Millennium Writings.

Please let me know, Mr. Kesey, if you are up for this. I will gladly proceed in whatever manner you choose, whether submitting questions in advance or (what seems more practical) a simple Q&A session recorded by phone. I have enough background about you to fill in any missing colors.

Best regards, Don Williams, Editor.

P. S. I just got off the phone from talking with you, and you said to try back in a couple of weeks. I will give you a call mid-July in hopes of picking a date on which to interview you. Thanks for your consideration, and all that you have meant to so many.

When I phoned back, Kesey was hard at work, after all these years, editing video footage of the Merry Prankster bus ride. Faye was worried. He was working way too hard. Then came the stroke and one thing and another. The formal interview never took place.

Fate and coincidence--synchronicity--would bring us close together once more, however, just months before Kesey's death....

*

It's 1 p.m. Thursday May 11, 2001, and we've been in Manhattan about an hour when synchronicity strikes--the kind that raises chill bumps. We're sitting in a cafe taking refreshment, when my cousin Mike, who lives in New York, hands me the Times, and there on page one is a picture of Kesey talking to actor Gary Sinese--who's been starring in a revival of the Dale Wasserman play based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey has flown east from Oregon to visit his New York agent and dropped in to see it the night before. He rambles in the interview. He likes the production, but he liked Kirk Douglas, in 1964, better than Sinese. His favorite production was a high school version. Personally, he's doing well, save for a little liver ailment....

That evening, my brother Tim and I pick up tickets at a Times Square booth, and our party--including Kathleen, whose environmental group recently saved a whole gorgeous Tennessee mountain from development--attend the play. Sinese is a fine McMurphy. He's loud and brash, thumps his belly with his thumb for emphasis. The Combine is evoked through psychedelic machinations, trick lighting and good acting.

Whether The Combine really exists in any sense has been much debated, and New York is as good a place to debate it as any. Stand in Times Square and you feel the glowing ads crawl across the walls of skyscrapers, including one digital advertisement swarming over a space ten stories high to promote an Internet company. Corporate America is everywhere. On clothing, buses, subways and more. Moreover the triumph of unadorned architecture seems almost absolute. To look across Manhattan is to gaze upon glistening cubistic crystals of varying heights--almost as if they grew there chemically. Some of them, such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are elegant, crown jewels of the city. Most are unadorned slabs.

On the other hand, few cities have celebrated individuality like New York. To stop in Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon is to be serenaded by musicians--many adorned in tie-dyed clothing and other counter culture accouterments. It's also to be entertained by break dancers, acrobats and jugglers who draw crowds wherever they perform. To jog through Central Park is to witness all manner of athlete, actor, filmmaker and activist hawking their wares. The freedom of expression espoused by Kesey is alive and well in New York City. All of which makes viewing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on Broadway an anachronism. Ken Kesey flew--or drove--over the cuckoo's nest of American life nearly forty years ago, wreaking havoc with the system.

*

In November, 2001, almost exactly twenty-two years to the day after that memorable afternoon on Kesey's farm, a friend phoned to tell me the great man had died. I sat scarcely breathing, scarcely believing, as I absorbed and rejected at once the notion of his death. I thought of myself in 1972 when I picked up my first copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in that run-down Fort Sanders apartment. I thought of New York and Albuquerque and Jeanne and Kathleen and Cape Flattery where my daughter Alexis fluttered to life, and I thought of that yellow van and Kesey's peacocks--iridescent tails still furled, feet poised on the threshold of some freedom too great to imagine.

It was nearly impossible to imagine Kesey dead, so I quit trying. I felt like one of those reborn witnesses to Randle P. McMurphy's symbolic crucifixion at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when those inmates poised on the edge of freedom turn away in disbelief from their lobotomized savior.

Kesey dead? Joined to eternity?

Who they tryin' to kid?

He was joined to eternity in waking dreams and living words decades ago. Even now he stands on the threshold to some cosmic ocean, one foot poised to enter.

Testing the reality of it.