Noh Time

by Dennis Green

“No time left for me/no time left for you/no time! No time! No Time!” The Guess Who sang it. And I used to have a little sign underneath the clock on my office wall, in the Subject A Department in North Hall UCSB, that read, “Noh Time.” A little Zen riff on the song lyrics…

“Distant roads are calling me/no time left for you!”

And as we appreciate the end of the year, and that horrible decade, let us pause a moment to consider what captives we can become of time unless we pay attention. It’s a different sort of attention than what we’re trained to pay, to all those year-end sales and other consumer devices created to part us from our hard-earned money.

I subsist largely on two small pensions derived from my payments into the system, Social Security the main conduit of my meager income, and I appreciate the fact that I was forced, by deductions from my paychecks for those many years, to pay into what was devised as a way to keep geezers like me off the welfare rolls. But in the beginning, SS, like recent health care reform, was bogus at heart, since at that time, the average life span in America was well under age 65.

Ha-Ha! Gotcha! Just like today…

So don’t get yourself all worked up in either direction about today. Plus ça change, etc. See, instead, if you can get yourself into Noh Time, “Non-Ordinary Reality,” as Castaneda calls it in his books about the Yaqui way of knowledge. Be a brujo.

I read all those books many years ago, nearly 40 years ago now, when they first came out, and I even attended a talk by Castaneda himself behind the UCEN at UCSB sometime in the Seventies, when I was working as an editor at the U. After his brief talk, someone in the crowd challenged him, shouting out, “I am from the Yaqui tribe, and it’s very small and I know for sure that there is no such person there as your Don Juan!” This diatribe went on for several minutes.

After things had calmed down somewhat, I ventured to approach Castaneda and offer to shake his hand, which at that point was shaking already, all by itself. I thanked him for his books, and said something curious that I didn’t expect to say: “I don’t give a shit whether your tales are truth or fiction, because they’ve already changed my life.” He smiled.

And, yes, I’ve read all the debunking, and as I told him that day, I don’t care. Scholarship, as I learned in my 20 years at the University, is a very malleable thing. Even the physicists can cheat. But knowledge has its own way with us, and if it sticks, it sticks. Carlos Castaneda has stuck with me all these years, long after his death from cancer in L.A. in 1998 at the age of 72.

Three score and twenty. That, supposedly, is all we get.

But in Non-Ordinary Reality, which I call “EdgeCity,” anything is possible. Several of his disciples say that Castaneda appeared to them in visions after his death. Sounds as plausible as the tales of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, I’ll warrant you that.

If the Holiday Death March has been wearing you down, and all that Winter Solstice energy, try a little Noh Time. See if it doesn’t perk you right up. It always works miracles for me.

©2010 Dennis Green