Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me Part 16

DURING THE TEN YEARS between between The Formula The Formula in 1979 and in 1979 and The Freshman The Freshman in 1989, I didn't make a movie except for my role in in 1989, I didn't make a movie except for my role in A Dry White Season A Dry White Season because I didn't need the money. I was content doing other things: traveling, searching, exploring, seeking. I spent a lot of time on Teti'aroa, read a lot and became interested in many things, including meditation, one of many interests the luxury of time and money allowed me to examine during the eighties and early nineties. because I didn't need the money. I was content doing other things: traveling, searching, exploring, seeking. I spent a lot of time on Teti'aroa, read a lot and became interested in many things, including meditation, one of many interests the luxury of time and money allowed me to examine during the eighties and early nineties.

Meditation was something I slipped into easily. I suppose it came out of acting. Because of the introspection that is a part of acting, I had developed a fairly strong sense of where my feelings were and how to gain access to them. I was fascinated by my ability to send an impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience different emotions, and thought it would be interesting to know more about how the process worked. I consulted an expert on biofeedback, the discipline of controlling your physiological responses by monitoring your body's inner dynamics and learning to modulate them accordingly. I told him about the trick I had learned as an actor and asked him if he could measure any physical manifestation of it using instruments that measured galvanic skin response, the electrical resistance on your fingertips that varies according to activity in your central nervous system. He confirmed that the mental exercises I thought of as sending an electrical current from my brain to my body in order to experience a certain emotion did in fact have a physical signature; as I tried to control my emotions, the needle on the biofeedback instrument s.h.i.+fted back and forth, proof of a linkage between the directions from my brain and my body's response. In a distant and primitive way, it was a process similar to that which yogis and swamis, after years of training and practice, use through the meditative process to produce virtually any pattern of brain waves they choose. They reach into their minds, and with refined, introspective techniques achieve tremendous control over their bodies in pursuit of religious enlightenment.

I bought my own instrument to measure galvanic skin response and began experimenting with it at a time of considerable stress in my life. A doctor giving me an insurance physical for a new movie told me that my blood pressure was too high: 170 over 114. When I told him about the stress I was under, he said, "Well, no wonder you've got high blood pressure." He prescribed medicine to lower it, but I decided to see if I could do it on my own by meditation. With practice, I discovered that it was a very effective way to relax and reduce stress. I consulted a Hindu swami and others versed in the practice, read more about it and eventually began meditating daily. After a while, I was able to lower my blood pressure simply by thinking about it: now, when I'm in a stressful situation and feel my blood pressure start to rise, I can usually turn it down at will to as low as 90 over 60. I don't meditate every time I feel under stress because some stress is positive; if I'm playing chess, for example, my stress level goes up, but it's a pleasant experience. Stress is also heightened during s.e.x, but it too is pleasurable. Negative stress occurs when you're stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the airport and realize you may miss your flight, or when you instinctively mistrust somebody who has just entered the room. When my stress increases in such circ.u.mstances, I now simply turn it off, as if it were a light switch.

During one of my first sessions with the biofeedback expert, I put on some headphones and he played a tape with sound waves recorded at the same frequency as my brain waves-though I didn't know this at the time. I lay back and relaxed, but before long I felt myself being pulled apart like a wad of chewing gum stretched until it was an invisible filament. That's what was happening to my mind: I was splitting in two, and it scared me. I felt panicked because I was losing control, and I started to resist it because I hate that feeling. When I was mentally back together, I asked myself, Why were you so frightened? Was it because you thought you were going to go mad? Was it going to make you die? Would it make you become a homicidal maniac? Or were you afraid you were going to slide into this state of mind and never return? None of these things was likely to happen, I decided, so I told myself to give in, surrender to it, experience the fear, let it take control of me, ride along with it and see what happens.

The next time I put on the headphones, I didn't resist and allowed myself to glide past the feelings that had made me so fearful the first time, and to travel along with them. After a few moments, I suddenly felt like a supersonic plane hurtling through the sound barrier. But once I was past the initial turbulence of that panic, everything became smooth and I was in a state of mind that can only be described as ecstasy. It lasted forty-five minutes, persisting even after the doctor returned and turned off the tape machine. I was in a dream talking to G.o.d. I felt peaceful, serene, utterly in repose, and I told the doctor, who seemed a thousand miles away, "I've never had such a sense of quietness or of beauty, tranquillity and peace in my entire life. I feel as if I had died and gone to nirvana."

The doctor said I had experienced satori satori, a state of consciousness that Zen masters consider one of sudden enlightenment. In diminis.h.i.+ng intensity, the experience continued for three days before I was again in a normal state of mind.

Now I try to meditate twice a day for an hour or more. On only three occasions have I ever again achieved the sensation of satori, but it is always a pleasant, comforting experience. During the past few years, meditation has helped me enormously in dealing with a number of problems in my life. Through repet.i.tion, old emotional habits are replaced, and instead of getting excited, angry or anxious, I become calm. Repet.i.tion is as important to meditation as it is to many religious rituals. Catholic priests may order their paris.h.i.+oners to say ten Hail Mary's after confession; in Africa, Haiti and other places, religious masters put their followers into trances by exposing them to the repeated rhythms of drums so intense that the sounds go right through their bodies to become a part of them, and people surrender to the rhythm as they do during meditation. The mental processes are too subtle for me to understand or even to identify, and scientists haven't been very successful at deciphering them either. But in the theater I've seen how susceptible the human mind is to suggestion, and have wondered if there are related forces at play. As already observed, one of the strongest features of the human personality is how easily given it is to suggestion. If he's in a well-written play that is performed skillfully, a good actor can affect the body chemistry of an audience. He can increase the flow of adrenaline, make people feel sad, make them cry, make them angry or apprehensive. As an actor, you try to use the power of suggestion to manipulate people's moods, and that's not a lot different from what happens during a religious ritual.

It took the Vatican more than three hundred years to admit that Galileo was right, and some things about the world haven't changed. I am constantly amazed at the depth of intellectual prejudice in Western culture. Nothing is a fact unless it comes out of a petri dish. A certain type of political correctness discourages inquiry beyond certain limits; prejudice against responsible scientific research in certain fields-parapsychology, for example-is appalling. But nothing beats the apathy and skepticism regarding the mental disciplines of the Eastern religions. For at least two thousand years, yogis and swamis have been certain of the power of the mind over the body, as demonstrated by their ability to put their bodies in a kind of suspended animation that enables them to survive being buried underground for hours or even days. Their accomplishments cry out for more research, but to many Western scientists these powers and the insight that the swamis, yogis and other students of the mind have attained are merely tricks or scientific oddities.

This hasn't changed since the first British colonials landed in India and observed the extraordinary yogic disciplines; they all but ignored them because they considered Western culture the font of all wisdom and knowledge. Even now, if a scientist such as Linus Pauling acknowledges that Eastern religions have developed extraordinary mind-body relations.h.i.+ps in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, he is considered a flake. This isn't surprising because that's what usually happens when bright people with achievements in one field challenge the status quo accepted by specialists in others. Even Einstein, when he expressed opinions in fields other than his own, was thought of as an eccentric; Arnold Toynbee was told to stick to history and not venture into areas of science he knew nothing about because his ideas didn't conform to concepts that were in vogue at the time. Still, during the next century, as science s.h.i.+fts from its twentieth-century preoccupation with exploring the physical world to the far more interesting world of the mind and neurogenetics, this att.i.tude will change. As Francis Crick has pointed out, brain chemistry is responsible for human thought, behavior and character-everything about us. I believe that we can control the mind, and that man will demonstrate a capacity to do things beyond his wildest imagination. I don't know yet what the limitations of my own mind are. I haven't reached them yet, but I won't stop searching for them until I die. It is territory different from anything I've ever explored before-uncharted waters-and I feel like an explorer. In many ways it is the most exciting expedition I've ever undertaken.

The more I have meditated, the more I have been able to control not only stress in my life, but pain. If I have a headache or stub my toe, I'm often able to locate the pain with my mind and will it away. So confident am I of this ability that when I decided a few years ago to be circ.u.mcised, I asked the doctor to do it without a pain-killer. I a.s.sured him that I could eliminate the pain using mind control during the operation. He was skeptical but said it would be an interesting medical experience, and he scheduled the operation. But when I arrived at the hospital, what seemed like its entire medical staff was waiting to witness the event. The prospect of seeing a movie star circ.u.mcised without anesthesia must have been a hot topic of discussion in the doctors' lounge. I didn't welcome the presence of uninvited guests, and since I go by instinct, I went home.

Later a different doctor agreed to do the operation without pain-killers, but he became frightened and an anesthetist was waiting for me when I kept my appointment. He said that because of medical ethics he couldn't circ.u.mcise me without using a pain-killer. Disappointed and angry but tired of the delays, I let the anesthetist give me a shot in my back. Nevertheless, I still wanted to show the doctors what I could do, and I told them to take my blood pressure. I had already meditated, brought my blood pressure down more than twenty points, and even put myself into one of those moments of satori that I rarely achieve. To this day, I'm sure that if they hadn't given me the shot, I would have felt no pain.

59.

THE NINE YEARS during which I didn't make a movie afforded me the luxury of time to get to know my children better, as well as myself. I was beginning to come to terms with myself with the help of Dr. Harrington, and I spent much of that time under the thatch roof of my hut on Teti'aroa with my feet sticking out the door, looking through the sh.e.l.l curtains at the vivid colors of the lagoon; like the sunsets on Teti'aroa, they change constantly, depending on the sun and clouds. I sat like that for hours at a time contemplating my life, a.s.sessing my values, examining every little bird of thought that flitted through my mind. during which I didn't make a movie afforded me the luxury of time to get to know my children better, as well as myself. I was beginning to come to terms with myself with the help of Dr. Harrington, and I spent much of that time under the thatch roof of my hut on Teti'aroa with my feet sticking out the door, looking through the sh.e.l.l curtains at the vivid colors of the lagoon; like the sunsets on Teti'aroa, they change constantly, depending on the sun and clouds. I sat like that for hours at a time contemplating my life, a.s.sessing my values, examining every little bird of thought that flitted through my mind.

My life on Teti'aroa is very simple-walking, swimming, fis.h.i.+ng, playing with the children, laughing, talking. I feel a tremendous sense of freedom there. At night there isn't much to do except look at the stars, which I love to do, and most days I don't wake up until about eleven, when I hear the fluttering of wings over my hut and birds plummet out of the sky, hit the lagoon in a quick splash and with the grace of ballerinas grab a fish for breakfast.

There is fresh fruit off the trees for my breakfast, then a walk on the beach. Or I may spend an hour or two with my ham radio, talking to strangers around the world, telling them that my name is Jim Ferguson-the name of my childhood playmate-and that I live alone in Tahiti. n.o.body knows I'm a movie star, and I can be like anyone else.

Once when I was on Teti'aroa, for two or three weeks I would be drunk every day by lunchtime. I'd go down to the pool hall, shoot a few games and have a wonderful time. But it was a momentary lapse; I've never come close to becoming an alcoholic. It's never taken more than a drink or two to put me into a tailspin, and that's usually when I stop. There has been a lot of alcoholism in my family, but fortunately those family genes pa.s.sed me by.

I've looked on Teti'aroa as a laboratory where I could experiment with solar power, aquaculture and innovative construction methods. I built one of the first sawmills in Polynesia that could turn coconut trees into lumber, and felt a great sense of accomplishment. I savor the smallest details on the island. Once I filled a hundred-foot-long piece of galvanized pipe with water, left it in the sun and produced steam through solar heating, which was very satisfying. Even the least achievement on Teti'aroa delights me. One of my most rewarding triumphs was to restore a rusted two-inch iron plug for a pipe. The salt air had corroded it so much that the threads seemed to be gone. I rubbed and rubbed it with a wire brush but couldn't dent the thick crust of oxidized metal. Then I remembered having read somewhere that lemon juice helped dissolve rust because of its high acid content. I picked a few limes off a tree, squeezed the juice, mixed it into a slurry with salt and rubbed it on the fitting. The acid ate through the rust and made the plug s.h.i.+ne, revealing the lost threads. What a wonderful feeling! It was a small thing that gave me great happiness.

In its prime the hotel had twenty-eight bungalows, a kitchen, a couple of bars, a dining room and reception area. Over the years I have spent millions on it, though it has never been profitable. Some of the money was lost because of hurricanes, some to wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams, some to projects started and never finished, some to thieves. A lot of people robbed me-a few who worked for me, others who were con men and came to the island promising to do things they never did, took my money and then disappeared. One operator promised to produce lobsters in the lagoon through aquaculture, and I invited about twenty scientists to the island with their wives. There was a lot of wonderful talk about harvesting lobsters that came to nothing. Storms frequently struck the island; every time we finished a new building, it seemed that another hurricane came along and damaged it. But I enjoyed all of it. Ever since I was a kid I've relished having projects, and I didn't want to spend all my time lying on the beach. We did a great deal on the island to protect the environment, including saving a lot of hawksbill turtles. They were depositing their eggs on the island, only to lose most of them to predators. We fenced the area, created a basin where the eggs could hatch safely, and fed the young turtles until they were large enough to have a chance of surviving at sea.

In that part of the world, I learned quickly, people fail at their peril to take hurricanes seriously. Shortly after the turn of the century, a glancing blow from one killed hundreds of Tahitians, and I was on my island in the early 1980s when meteorologists in Papeete sent a warning that a hurricane potentially as powerful as that earlier one was forming in a tropical depression near Bora Bora. Soon we were buffeted by stiff winds, the barometer fell, the surf outside the reef began to rise and the meteorologists predicted that the storm's main thrust would hit Teti'aroa within forty-eight hours. When the birds started to leave, we were told, it would be there soon. Then all of a sudden everything returned to normal; it became very peaceful, the winds died and the ocean was calm again. We thought the storm had pa.s.sed us by, until a ham radio operator on Bora Bora warned me not to relax because the winds appeared to be loitering off Bora Bora and gaining more strength.

A week later the storm slammed into Teti'aroa with the fury of an avenging angel, hitting us so suddenly that I didn't have time to call a plane from Papeete to evacuate people. Even the birds barely managed to escape in time. First there were high winds, then towering waves that smashed the reef with such force that it felt as if a thousand cannons were bombarding it from an armada of s.h.i.+ps just offsh.o.r.e. But it was the sound sound of the hurricane that made it most frightening. It was a Wagnerian opera, the thunderous roar of the waves pounding the reef and winds screaming through the trees like ten thousand Mongol warriors on horseback wailing a war cry behind Genghis Khan. of the hurricane that made it most frightening. It was a Wagnerian opera, the thunderous roar of the waves pounding the reef and winds screaming through the trees like ten thousand Mongol warriors on horseback wailing a war cry behind Genghis Khan.

The wind quickly knocked down the radio tower and made so much noise that we couldn't hear one another speak; we shouted, but the wind defeated us, and walking into it was like stumbling into the exhaust of a jet engine. I put on a sou'wester and told everybody they had nothing to worry about, but I had visions of a wave was.h.i.+ng over us and taking us all with it. I'd read a lot about hurricanes and cyclones in Tahiti and knew that they sometimes generated waves eighteen to twenty feet high, and we were in the middle of such a storm. As the waves got larger, rain started to fall in torrents and the lagoon began to wash over the beaches while the current in the channel became swifter and swifter until it must have been racing past us at twenty knots. On the main island the water level was soon up to our s.h.i.+ns, and furniture began floating past. I kept telling everyone to relax, that this was just an unusually powerful storm and wasn't it marvelous to be here and experience nature unleashed? I couldn't admit that I was terrified waiting for that one wave that would wash over us and take us out to sea.

At dawn the winds were still blowing hard when I left my hut to inspect the damage. Palm fronds strong enough to pull a truck were strewn all over the island. In places the water was still rising, but the worst seemed to be over. For another two days the storm continued to batter the island, and everybody huddled together, singing and praying. I slept in my sou'wester and tried to keep everyone calm, including a woman who was staying with me, a New Yorker whose most serious bout with inclement weather until then had been being snowed in at a country house in Connecticut. When the winds finally subsided, everybody, including her, pitched in and began the cleanup. A few hours later the weathermen in Papeete radioed that another hurricane was on the way. I called for a plane from Papeete to evacuate the island, but when it arrived, four or five of the Tahitians refused to leave; they said they trusted in G.o.d and if they left, it would insult him and risk his wrath.

I thought the Tahitians who wanted to be evacuated were leaving because they were frightened, but when they boarded the plane, I heard them joke about the fun they were going to have in Papeete, and realized that all they were thinking about was getting to town, having a day off, drinking beer, chasing girls and having fun. I had intended to leave on the plane, but when some people said they wouldn't leave, I couldn't either. I was captain of the s.h.i.+p and it wouldn't be right to let them fend for themselves.

The second storm was less severe than the first, but powerful nevertheless, and after it pa.s.sed, I sat down in the lagoon in shallow water up to my waist with my friend from New York, a bright lady with whom I had shared much from the time I was nineteen or twenty. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon and the sky was spectacular. Every cloud appeared to have been torn in half, but the sky no longer seemed ominous and there was no wind. I had never seen a sky like it, nor have I since. Then suddenly it was sunset. Tahitian sunsets defy any ability to describe them, but if you have never believed in G.o.d, you are tempted to think otherwise when you see one there. They are celestial symphonies, a concerto of colors that s.h.i.+ft in mood, tempo and color by the second: greens, grays, every shade of pink you can imagine, oranges, fiery reds and angel blues, while everything on the horizon changes constantly.

Once the sun sets, darkness arrives abruptly; you had better get home fast or you'll be groping around in the dark. There is no twilight in the tropics, though Tahitians tell me that if you are lucky, every once in a while you may see a sudden green flash in the sky just as the sun disappears. It's magic, they say. One of my favorite pastimes on Teti'aroa is to lie down on the gra.s.s at the end of the airstrip, wait for the sun to set and hope for a glimpse of that green flash. I never have, but many people I know have been luckier. A bright green light explodes in the sky, hangs there for an instant like a sudden, brief explosion of fireworks, then vanishes. Every time I go to Teti'aroa I wait for that magic, and someday I'll see it.

For half an hour after the sun goes down, the horizon continues to change color as the clouds reflect the unseen light. The tops of the clouds are always illuminated because they are the last to reflect the sun, sometimes at sixty or seventy thousand feet high. Once it's dark, you lie on the sand and wait for the first star. If you're with friends, there's a game to see who will spot it first. When it's completely dark, a celestial panorama begins unfolding above you: single lights turn on, then a string of them, then galaxies. I've never seen the heavens look so vast as they do from an atoll. The first light is usually a planet, Venus or Mars; then, very slowly, subtle, distant needle p.r.i.c.ks appear in s.p.a.ce, and as the last glow of the sunset ebbs away and it grows darker, the stars s.h.i.+ne more brightly. Finally the sky opens and the Milky Way and other constellations explode in a panoramic umbrella of lights that reaches from horizon to horizon.

As I sat up to my waist in shallow water with my friend from New York that afternoon following the second hurricane and watched the night come on, she asked me if I had ever seen a shooting star. I told her yes, that you usually see them "over there" and I pointed up to the sky. Just as I said this, we saw the flash of a shooting star exactly where I was pointing. It was as if somebody were striking a match across the sky, but there was no sound, just a streak of light.

As I've said, small things mean a lot on Teti'aroa.

There have been several important influences on my life. Philosophically I've felt closest to the American Indians; I sympathize with them, admire their culture, and have learned a great deal from them. Jews opened my mind and taught me to value knowledge and learning, and blacks also taught me a lot. But I think Polynesians have had the greatest influence because of how they live.

In Tahiti I learned how to live, though I discovered I could never be a Tahitian. When I first went there, I had illusions of becoming Polynesian. I wanted to fuse myself into the culture. However, eventually I realized that not only were my genes different, but the emotional algebra of my life was unsuited to becoming anything but who I am, so I gave up trying and instead simply learned to appreciate what they have. I suppose I was learning the same lessons that I did from Jews, blacks and American Indians: you can admire and love a culture, you can even attach yourself to the edges of it, but you can't ever become part of it. You have to be who you are.

When I discovered Tahiti in the pages of the National Geographic National Geographic in the library at Shattuck, what impressed me most was the serene expressions on the faces of its natives. They were happy faces, open maps of contentment. Living there has confirmed to me that Tahitians are the happiest people I've ever known. The differences between Polynesian and Western culture are deceptive. In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything-and I emphasize the word "think." We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I've traveled all over the world, and I've never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself. in the library at Shattuck, what impressed me most was the serene expressions on the faces of its natives. They were happy faces, open maps of contentment. Living there has confirmed to me that Tahitians are the happiest people I've ever known. The differences between Polynesian and Western culture are deceptive. In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything-and I emphasize the word "think." We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I've traveled all over the world, and I've never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself.

In Tahiti there are more laughing faces per acre than in any place I've ever been, whereas we've put a man on the moon but produce frustrated, angry people.

I can hear some readers say, "Why do you want to run America down, Marlon? You've had it pretty good!"

Well, America has has been good to me, but it wasn't a gift; rather, I've earned it by the sweat of my brow and my capacity to invent and sustain myself. If I hadn't been in the right circ.u.mstances and had a lot of luck, I don't know what I would have become. I might have been a con man and gone to jail, or if I'd been lucky enough to get a job without a high-school education, I might have spent my life on an a.s.sembly line, had three children, and then at fifty or fifty-five been cast off like yesterday's garbage, the way a lot of Americans have been recently. This doesn't happen in Tahiti because it is a cla.s.sless society, and this is probably the main reason I've gone there whenever I could during the past thirty years. In Tahiti I can always be myself. There's no fawning or kowtowing to people who consider themselves famous or more important than others. Tahitians have a quality I've never observed in any other large group: they have no envy. Of course, there are pretentious Tahitians who want to appear knowledgeable about the world and put on airs, but I've run into very few of them. What I admire about the people of Tahiti is that they are able to live in the moment, to enjoy what is going on been good to me, but it wasn't a gift; rather, I've earned it by the sweat of my brow and my capacity to invent and sustain myself. If I hadn't been in the right circ.u.mstances and had a lot of luck, I don't know what I would have become. I might have been a con man and gone to jail, or if I'd been lucky enough to get a job without a high-school education, I might have spent my life on an a.s.sembly line, had three children, and then at fifty or fifty-five been cast off like yesterday's garbage, the way a lot of Americans have been recently. This doesn't happen in Tahiti because it is a cla.s.sless society, and this is probably the main reason I've gone there whenever I could during the past thirty years. In Tahiti I can always be myself. There's no fawning or kowtowing to people who consider themselves famous or more important than others. Tahitians have a quality I've never observed in any other large group: they have no envy. Of course, there are pretentious Tahitians who want to appear knowledgeable about the world and put on airs, but I've run into very few of them. What I admire about the people of Tahiti is that they are able to live in the moment, to enjoy what is going on now now. There are no celebrities, movie stars, rich men or poor men; they laugh, dance, drink and make love, and they know how to relax. When we were making Mutiny on the Bounty Mutiny on the Bounty, a Tahitian girl in the cast missed her boyfriend and decided to go home. The producer said, "You can't quit; you signed a contract. If you do, we'll sue you." The girl said, "Well, I've got a dog and a couple of goats, and you can have them."

The producer said, "Then we'll have you arrested," and she said, "All right." Then she left and they had to rewrite the movie. Hollywood meant nothing to her.

When I wake up in Tahiti, my pulse is sometimes as low as 48; in America, it's nearer 60. Living in our so-called civilized society makes the difference. There are no homeless people in Tahiti because somebody will always take you in. If there's a shortage of anything, it's of children; they love kids. It's not perfect. There's crime, fighting, disorder and family conflicts, but by and large it is a society where people are internally quiet and outwardly full of laughter, gaiety and optimism, and they live each day as it comes. Unfortunately, life is changing there as outside forces try to improve, as well as exploit, what they regard as a primitive culture. In all of Polynesia, there are only about 200,000 people, and they are constantly under a.s.sault, from patronizing and condescending religious missionaries to fast-buck promoters who consider them simple and primitive. They are neither primitive nor simple, but sophisticated in their own way of experiencing life to the fullest. Outsiders who call them backward do so out of racial sn.o.bbery and a prejudice rooted in the foolish notion that equates technological advancement with civilization. Westerners seldom acknowledge the extraordinary feats of early Polynesian seafarers who, without compa.s.s, radar or navigational satellites, but only by dead reckoning and a knowledge of the winds, traversed thousands of miles of uncharted waters in open s.h.i.+ps. Along with the Micronesians, the Polynesians settled the Pacific, and their descendants enjoy life more than any people I know. Tahitian women are the toughest I've ever met. They are independent and have no inhibitions, about s.e.x or anything else. After falling in love and having children, they usually stay with the same man, but not always; sometimes two or three women move in with the same man. They feel jealousy, have fights and feuds like everyone else, and when a Tahitian woman takes against a man, she's likely to tell everything about him to everyone. No secrets are left untold.

Most of all, Tahitians love parties. Once, when Charles de Gaulle was scheduled to visit Tahiti while I was there, the word was pa.s.sed from village to village. Most people ignored his arrival until someone said there would be a party when he came. Then they flocked aboard buses, brought their drums and skirts and celebrated the joy of life, not De Gaulle; they didn't give a d.a.m.n about him and didn't even know who he was. But when he sailed into the harbor, people stood in the water up to their necks, there were thousands of them, with food, flowers, tears and singing. It was then that I fell in love with the Tahitian soul.

I still have many dreams for my island. My greatest hope is to return it to what Polynesia used to be. Considering the many incursions from the outside world that it has had to endure to sustain itself, it's remarkable how resilient Polynesian culture has been. It has been invaded repeatedly by alien cultures: the Spanish, English and French; missionaries, whalers, tourists, hucksters, human sharks; and now television, perhaps the most insidious influence of all. The pressures are enormous, and the Polynesians must face the reality that they are living in a technological age and that it will be impossible to go backward. Now there are television, satellite dishes, jet airplanes, insurance policies, bank accounts, cutthroat real estate promoters and a.s.sorted other highwaymen who want to exploit Tahitians down to their last buck.

If I have my way, Teti'aroa will remain forever a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were centuries ago-and what, I'm convinced, they still are today despite the missionaries and fast-buck artists, a place where they can recreate and procreate and find enjoyment without being exploited by outsiders. I would like the island to become a marine park with technological systems that can help provide its inhabitants with more food. Because the population is growing rapidly, they will have to find ways to increase the yield of their land and lagoons. If I can do this, it will give me more pleasure and satisfaction than any acting I have ever done.

60.

I CAN DRAW no conclusions about my life because it is a continually evolving and unfolding process. I don't know what is next. I am more surprised at how I turned out than I am about anything else. I don't ever remember trying to be successful. It just happened. I was only trying to survive. Much like a newly fertilized egg, I look now at some of the things I have done in life with astonishment. Fifty years ago, at a party at my home, I climbed out the window of my apartment in New York and clung to a bal.u.s.trade eleven stories above Seventy-second Street as a joke. I can't imagine myself ever having done that. I have difficulty reconciling the boy I was then with the man I am now. no conclusions about my life because it is a continually evolving and unfolding process. I don't know what is next. I am more surprised at how I turned out than I am about anything else. I don't ever remember trying to be successful. It just happened. I was only trying to survive. Much like a newly fertilized egg, I look now at some of the things I have done in life with astonishment. Fifty years ago, at a party at my home, I climbed out the window of my apartment in New York and clung to a bal.u.s.trade eleven stories above Seventy-second Street as a joke. I can't imagine myself ever having done that. I have difficulty reconciling the boy I was then with the man I am now.

I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligations, if I had any, to myself and my species. Who am I? What should I do with my life? Though I haven't found answers, it's been a painful odyssey, dappled with moments of joy and laughter. In one of my letters from Shattuck, I told my parents, "In a play written by Sophocles...the Antigone, there are lines that say: 'Let be the future: mind the present need and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns...present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest.' These words written two thousand years ago are just as applicable today as they were then. It seems incomprehensible that through the fifteen thousand years since our species came into being, we have not evolved."

At fifteen, I was already aware that we have learned little from our experiences, and that our proclivity is to leave the correction of wrongs and injustice to a future we are not accountable for. Yet I spent most of the next fifty-five years trying to do the opposite. Frustrated in my attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help Indians, blacks and Jews. I thought love, good intentions and positive action could alter injustice, prejudice, aggression and genocide. I was convinced that if I presented the facts-for example, show people a film that I made about starvation in India-they would be aroused and help me to alleviate that suffering. I felt a responsibility to create a better world, propelled by the certainty that compa.s.sion and love could solve its problems. I am no longer persuaded that any significant change through a course of behavior will make any difference of lasting importance. Late in life I learned something that sustains me: my suffering for other people doesn't help them. I still do what I can to be helpful, but I don't have to suffer for it. Previously I had empathized with people who were less fortunate. My sense of empathy remains undiminished, but I apply it in a different manner. Through meditation and self-examination I feel that I am coming closer to discovering what it means to be human, and that the things I feel are the same that everybody else feels. We are all capable of hatred and of love.

Curiosity about why people believe as they do is one of the most consistent features of my life. Still, I don't think any of us ever knows with certainty why we do some things or how our behavior is a product of our genes or our environment or a blend of each; it is impossible to answer the question with precision. I have not achieved the wisdom of why I am alive, and I take large comfort in the knowledge that I never will. The mist of misperception defeats all of us.

Still, I no longer feel that I have a mission to save the world. It can't be done, I've learned. I didn't realize it then, but I think my att.i.tude started to change when I made that film about the famine in India. On my way home, I stopped in Calcutta to visit Satyajit Ray, the Indian movie director, and we went out to lunch. When we left the restaurant, a sea of children in tattered clothing, broken, blinded, twisted and sick, engulfed us to ask for baksheesh. I was aware as we drifted through this swarm of broken kids that Satyajit was completely unconcerned, even unaware, and gently swept them aside absentmindedly. It was as though he were brus.h.i.+ng his way gently through a wheat field. I asked him how he was able to do it, and he replied, "If you live in India, you see this every day of your life. If I sold everything I had to help these children, it wouldn't amount to a billionth of one rupee for any one of them, and they would all be back tomorrow. There is nothing I can do to solve this problem; some problems are unsolvable."

All my life, I had been a do-gooder, but I finally learned that what Satyajit said about the children of Calcutta was true: there are some problems that I can't do anything about.

I've also changed some of my views about the nature of human behavior. When I was young, I embraced the Judeo-Christian concept of good and evil, and its corollary, that all of us were responsible for our deeds because of the choices we made. I don't believe this anymore. Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Kant and Spinoza have argued for millennia over the nature of free will, and of good and evil. Epicurus said that G.o.d was either uncaring and chose to ignore evil, or he was unable to prevent it and therefore not omnipotent. But Saint Augustine, trying to resolve the paradox that Christians face about how a supposedly benevolent G.o.d could allow evil to exist, rationalized it by arguing that evil was not a product of G.o.d but was the absence of good, and that what at first appeared to be evil might turn out to be good in the context of eternity. This is how events like the Holocaust and the slaughter of the Native Americans are explained. But I believe that the roots of the behavior we call "evil" are genetic. I've never found any system-religious, social, philosophical, ethical, political or economic-that was able to suppress man's innate animus and predilection to gather into groups dedicated to exterminating other groups for their beliefs, profit, hatred or frolic. More people have been killed in the name of religion and the defense of dogma than any other single cause. Genetically determined behavior affected by environmental features seems to be the final arbiter of human behavior. I believe our genetic impulses are so strong that we cannot overcome them. No matter how well equipped we are to cerebrate, our minds are in direct service to our emotions, and yet we cling to the outmoded myths of goodness and evil in the Bible and the Talmud. Neither money, religious zeal, political revolution or even knowledge can alter the basic nature of the human animal. Nothing has ever made people good. I may have given away millions of dollars, but I realize now that most of it didn't do any good for the people I intended it for.

For over fifty years, the Cold War dominated our lives like storm clouds, and communism was blamed for most of the evils of the world. Now that the Cold War is over, the world is fragmenting and ethnic warfare has erupted everywhere, including the streets of the United States, where poverty, murder, violence and injustice are endemic. Our preoccupation with communism camouflaged a rottenness within the political and economic system of which we were so proud. There has been an illusion throughout history that when man made "progress," advancing technology would help him to communicate better so that the barriers of conflict and misunderstanding between us would crumble. But now that we have satellite dishes, global coverage by CNN, interactive TV, instant telecommunications, the most sophisticated equipment and the forensic wisdom of the Rand Corporation, our situation is worse than ever.

Whatever grains of optimism survive in me about the evolution of mankind are centered in the belief that genetic alteration, however fraught with danger, is the only possible solution to what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ba.n.a.lity of evil. I don't think anything in the range of human existence since Neanderthal man-not fire or the invention of weapons or the wheel-equals in importance Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of the structure of DNA. It will have an incalculable effect on society, religion and our concept of ourselves. Within a few years, scientists will finish mapping the human genome based on Crick and Watson's discovery, and with it will come an opportunity to alter the nature of man. Already scientists are beginning to unravel the sources of the neural disorders that produce anger and frustration, the will to kill and the hostility that produces war. They have already linked some genetic defects to certain kinds of aggressive and violent behavior; they are starting to make extraordinary advances in biogenetics and neurogenetics, opening doors that will lead to a clearer understanding not only of how genes affect our behavior, but how to alter that behavior. In the science of behavioral genetics, we're on the cusp of enormous change. The time is approaching when the genes of a chimpanzee can be altered to give him the gift of speech. Genetic engineering of human behavior will advance on a parallel track. If the human race has a genetic fault that causes errant behavior or self-destruction, it will simply be removed.

A fantasy, you say? I think it is inevitable-and necessarily so if our species is ever to stop killing its own kind.

Of course there will be an uproar in the churches when scientists have the power to engineer human beings. It will be argued that the design of human beings is G.o.d's province alone. There may even be enough resistance to advancing the science of behavioral genetics to halt temporarily what is doable, but whenever something is possible, sooner or later it will be done. The world has always been in a state of revolution between the old and the new, and new discoveries are unstoppable. The twenty-first century will produce a far bigger revolution in the biological sciences than the twentieth century did in the physical sciences. It has taken me seventy years to refrain from doing certain things that were destructive to me and to other people, and to resolve emotional conflicts that produced errant social behavior. With genetic implants I probably would not have been burdened with the emotional disorders that caused me to spend most of my life in emotional disarray. In the future, specialists will recognize the kind of trouble I had as a child and be able to do something about it.

If I had been loved and cared for differently, I would have been a different person. I went through most of my life afraid of being rejected and ended up rejecting most of those who offered me love because I was unable to trust them. When the press made up lies about me, I used to try to maintain an image of indifference, but privately I sustained great injury. Now it truly doesn't matter to me what anyone says about me. I have achieved honest indifference to the opinions of others except for those I love and hold in high regard.

Clifford Odets once told me, "I never heard what Beethoven was saying until I was forty." You gain a great deal simply by living long enough. In some ways I haven't changed. I was always sensitive, always curious about myself and others, always had a good instinct for people, always loved a good book and any kind of joke, which I think I learned from my parents, because they were both good laughers. But in other ways I am a vastly different person from what I was like as a child. For most of my life I had to appear strong when I wasn't, and what I wanted most was control. If I was wronged or felt diminished, I wanted vengeance.

I don't anymore. I am still contemptuous of authority and of the kind of conformity that induces mediocrity, but I no longer feel a need to lash out at it. In my twenties I always wanted to be the best, but now I truly don't care. I've quit comparing myself with other people. I don't worry if somebody is more talented than I am or if people invent vicious stories about me; I understand that they're people not unlike myself who are just trying to pay the rent and who close their eyes to the vulgarity of their deeds. I realize they are doing it for their own reasons. Moreover, in telling the story of my life in this book, I must acknowledge that I am guilty of some of the sins for which I used to despise others.

I believe it is fortunate that my parents died when they did; otherwise, I would have probably wrecked what was left of their lives before I found a better way to live. Now I am happier than I've ever been. My sisters and I rode out the storm together with the help of one another. Both grew into wise, independent women who beat alcoholism and created new lives for themselves. Frannie died this year, leaving a void in my life that can never be filled. But before she died, she found happiness, too; in her late forties she went back to college and became a successful teacher. Tiddy, after one career as an actress and another in business, became a wonderful therapist and applied her extraordinary insight to helping others.

"It's a long climb up Fool's Hill," my grandmother used to say about life, but Tiddy, Frannie and I made it to the top.

This book, an outpouring of what was long contained, has been my declaration of liberty. I finally feel free and don't give a d.a.m.n anymore what people think about me. At seventy, I'm also having more fun than ever before. The smallest details bring me joy-building or inventing something, being with my children or playing with my dog, Tim, laughing with my friends or watching an ant crawl on his way in my bathroom. Thanks to Dr. Harrington, my own efforts and the simple pa.s.sage of time, I can finally be the child I never had a chance to be.

Recently I saw Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves Dances with Wolves, and midway through it I started crying. I didn't know why. Then the image of the young Indian boy on the screen gave me the answer: it was like a homecoming, because I realized that in the past few years I have rediscovered a part of me that was clean, pure and straight and had been hidden since I was a child. Somehow I had come full circle, and I felt free.

I also finally realized that I had to forgive my father or I would be entrapped by my hatred and anguish for the rest of my life. If I didn't forgive him for the things he had done to all of us, I would never be able to forgive myself for the things I have done and felt guilty about and responsible for. Now I have forgiven him and myself, though I realize that to forgive with your mind is not always to forgive in your heart.

There isn't any end to this story. I'd be happy to tell it to you if I knew it. Just as I cannot imagine where I was before I sat under that elm tree at the end of Thirty-second Street with my hand stretched wide for those magical pods, so I continue to be an enigma to myself in a world that still bewilders me. While life itself remains incomprehensible, there is no point in wondering where I will be in the "never-to-be-known after-time," but I am certain that when my breathing comes to an end, the change will find me no more astonished than I was back on Thirty-second Street.

My mind is always soothed when I imagine myself sitting on my South Sea island at night in a gentle chiffon wind, with my mouth open and my head way back, watching those twinkling points of light, waiting for that eerie, silent streak to spread across the black sky and stun me again. I don't stretch my hand out anymore, but I never get tired of waiting for the next magic.

ABOUT THE COAUTHOR.

ROBERT L LINDSEY, former chief West Coast correspondent for The New York Times The New York Times, is the author of The Falcon and the Snowman, A Gathering of Saints The Falcon and the Snowman, A Gathering of Saints and other books, and also collaborated with Ronald Reagan on his autobiography, and other books, and also collaborated with Ronald Reagan on his autobiography, An American Life An American Life.