On My Shipmate

By Alan Watts

The following essay was written by Zen philosopher  Alan Watts for a symposium on the eccentric Sausalito artist Jean Varda:

I came to live in California because I was looking for the Mediterranean, and finally settled in Sausalito because it was the nearest thing in the United States to a small town of the Riviera. Then to gild the lily, I was able to acquire the ferryboat Vallejo from my old friend Gordon Onslow-Ford -- and Varda came with it. And with Varda comes all the color, the attitude, the tempo, and the very smell of that most civilized of seas. To be realistic, I suppose this is the dream of every imaginative Englishman sick to death with boiled beef and carrots, and the damp, bone-breaking cold of his country’s winters. Yet, also to be realistic, I got what I wanted.
I had, of course, been warned of Varda’s vagaries and limitations -- his supposedly total irresponsibility in matters of money and business, his alleged propensity for inviting hundreds of guests for all-night orgies, and his weekly habit of beguiling friends into dangerous voyages on the Bay in that lateen-rigged dhow from the Aegean fairyland which is suitably named Perfidia. Nevertheless, I found myself the neighbor and shipmate of a highly civilized person.
The external observer would never imagine that life on the Vallejo is civilized, for, on the outside she is a grey and dilapidated old hulk in an area of the waterfront which certain finicky outsiders consider a houseboat slum. In Europe, Americans are quick to recognize the “fascination that is frantic in a ruin that’s romantic,” but they don’t notice it at home -- where everything aged and feisty, like good cheese, is promptly doused with gallons of Clorox and buried under clean, flat concrete.
Yet every time I slip over to Varda’s end of the ferryboat there is a curious exaltation of the solar-plexus. His sculptures or “conceits” of old wine-bottles filled with vari-colored waters standing along the window suggest an archaic pharmacy or alchemist’s laboratory. The entrance to his studio, looking out over the water towards the hills of Belvedere and Angel Island, through a forest of masts, is planted with a potted pine tree, and with such vaguely heraldic objects as his own mysterious flags and inverted, face-like pots and bottles set on poles.
Varda himself “holds court” sitting at the end of a long table scratched and stained with the memories of innumerable banquets of minced lamb in vine-leaves, stuffed peppers, and fish cooked in herbs and wine. Above, hangs an enormous lantern in the form of an amphisbonic turtle, and along the wall opposite the window are always his most recent collages of celestial cities, courtly ladies, luminous fish, and plants from the gardens of paradise. This is somehow a place where the sun is out even on wet and foggy days.
I say that Varda is highly civilized because he is a true Bohemian, which is a European phenomenon distinct in style from the American beatnik or hippie. It is distinguished above all by what Montaigne called une certaine gaiete d’esprit, for which the recipe is a marvelous amalgamation of exuberance, sensuality, culture, and literacy, salted with that essential recognition of one’s own rascality which is the perfect preservative against stuffiness and lack of humanity.
Since the summer of 1961, when I first came to live on the Vallejo, Varda has been astoundingly productive for a man in the seventies. Knowing, as I do, that in these parts dawn is the most enchanted time of day, we are both up between 6:30 or 7, I in my library, and he in his workshop beyond the wall where I can hear the hammering, scratching, and rustling where-with he converts piles of scraps and debris into his glowing collages, which seem to come out by the hundreds. My wife is a late riser, so it is often that, after two hours or so of work, Varda and I get together in his studio for coffee and hilarious gossip. By this time, too, the first trickle of his endless stream of visitors, students, handymen-helpers, and local friends begins to arrive, and conversation around the table -- half in French and half in English -- gets under way with the cackling and guffawing that goes with Varda’s outrageous fantasies and anecdotes.
There are, of course, the more serious exchanges in which we try to figure out what we must do to keep the boat from collapsing into the mud, how to arrange mutual financial arrangements in which neither of us are interested, and what to do about the excess of callers who both boost our egos and interfere with our work.
Of Varda it is peculiarly true that le style, c’est l’homme meme, that his style is the man himself. Americans, who are apt to affect sincerity and naturalness, find this hard to understand. Americans are apt to see the foreign accent, the mischievous wit, and the many-colored effervescence of a Varda as a big act -- mere showmanship. Yet to maintain such an act — especially upon the diaphanous foundation of a, literally, floating life without any wealth or substance except sheer nerve and joie de vivre -- surely this is the same essential courage which keeps even God going on his own, with nothing to stand on and nowhere to go in emergency.


Alan Watts aboard the Vallejo.         
Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society

Comments

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12/21/2014: I never tire reading about Alan Watts and his friends like Jean Varda. Varda to an outsider like me appears to be everything Watts talked about. Someone simply alive for no other purpose than the living itself. Sadly for me, i am the product of self-abandonment and attended schools and achieved (or was given simply to get me out of there) assorted certificates and diplomas that would be best used in a bird cage or for puppy training. Up from Sausalito there is Druid Heights and a larger assortment of Bohemians like Roger Somers and the poet Elsa Gidlow. For people like me, they are a beacon to warn us to stay away from the shallows of blind conformity and the rocks that can cause us to go aground. Jean Varda: Thanks for being you. I enjoy your collages that anyone can view on the internet. Alan Watts: Thanks for sharing your experiences and letting us ALL know that there is possibility for each one of us to be fully alive and to enjoy everything in this life.