I generally shy away from books with Jesus in the title. Everyone deserves their own trip, as they used to say in the sixties, and Jesus was never really mine. Not that I dislike Jesus, but I really don’t want to read someone’s rap about how Jesus saved them from heroin or prostitution and turned them into something else vaguely resembling extras in Dawn of the Dead. This is not one of those books.
So who knows why this book jumped out at me when I was browsing in the basement of the City Lights Bookstore last year. The subtitle was intriguing; mixing Jesus with science and surfing was worth a look. I picked it up and looked inside and saw a quote from one of my favorite writers, Charles Bowden: “This is the real world muchachos, and we are in it.”
Then I knew I was onto something.
I bought it and hardly put it down. I finished it, read it again, and now pick it up to read random passages. I try to describe it to friends and recommend it, but my synopsis is so disjointed it sounds like a book that only I, their crazy friend, would pick up and read. It is no easy book to put in a nutshell, which is why it is great.
“Uh huh,” they say. “Sounds interesting.” I know they will never seek it out. So let me tell you about Steven Kotler’s book and his own off-the-beaten path journey, which did not leave him a zombie extra nor a wild-eyed zealot. Perhaps I will have better luck with you. Trust me on this. This is the last book I loved.
Steven Kotler had Lyme disease. It wrecked havoc on his life for two years. He lost things. Jobs and girl friends. He spent too much time in bed and wondered about the stability of his own mind. His friends had lives that were moving on. There were marriages, job promotions, birthing children, all kinds of success. Things you want to do before you die, or are at least supposed to desire. It was then that Steven decide to travel to Mexico to go surfing, though it was the last thing he really felt physically up to.
“I went because the stories I told myself began to fail,” he wrote. He packed some of his favorite things, back issues of The Economist and New Scientist, along with a handful of books. “I took these things because I cared about things like economists, new scientists, tigers. I cared about what happened when the very things humans built myths around began to fail. My bag weighed a fucking ton.”
Thus begins Kotler’s trek, in search of waves, in search of ideas and people. This beginning takes him around the world for a three-year period. “If I chose to stay home and watch television, I was choosing to do something else. I once drove a car with a KILL YOUR TELEVISION bumper sticker on it. It felt like lifetimes ago.”
Kotler’s particular afflictions and concerns might not be yours, but they are tangible and equal in weight to what we all wrestle with — that pesky dilemma Sartre and other philosophers so aptly describe as the Human Condition. The bell tolls for all of us and, as Hank Williams put so wisely, we will never get out of this world alive.
This is a book you play ping-pong with, comparing notes with a fellow traveller, noting, debating, thinking and reflecting. Kotler saves you the footwork, though you may want to do it yourself one day. But when you open his pages, you won’t have to fuck with body screens, lost luggage and overpriced snacks. This is the kind of book I love. One that takes me places.
