Skull session

Mel Ash talks about life after Zen and finding out "Who am I?"

by Bill Rodriguez

Mel Ash says that cops used to stop him for looking like a junkie when he lived on Smith Hill. Now, recently moved to the East Side, he says they probably think he looks like a Brown prof -- scraggly beard, torn jeans. Ah, life is change. Or all fluxed up. Depending on your perspective.

Ash's new book, Shaving the Inside of Your Skull, encompasses both perspectives as it applies insights he gleaned from the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Buddhism of Kwan Um School Zen. He's hoping it will be as successful as his The Zen of Recovery, which after three years is in its 10th printing. Come September, another self-help book, Beat Spirit, will come out. His agent is now marketing his first novel, Zaddik, which is about Jewish mysticism and the end of the world. Ash has given workshops around the country on his amalgam of Zen insights and 12-step techniques.

Come Wednesday, March 26 at 7 p.m., he will give a reading and book signing at Borders Book Shop in Cranston.

The art director of the Providence Phoenix's pre-risen incarnation, the NewPaper, he struggled through periods of drug and alcohol abuse until 14 years ago. Then Ash went to live at the Providence Zen Center for three years where, as a resident, he was authorized to teach meditation. He grew disenchanted with the regimentation there, and they in turn disapproved of his book on Zen.

In his new apartment near Wayland Square, where he lives with his wife Sarah Owens-Ash, a Boston DJ, he chatted amidst the clutter of unpacking. Here are some excerpts.

Q: The hardest habits to break are belief systems reinforced over a lifetime. What have been the most important changes in your beliefs, and how did you manage to change them?

A: Probably the belief that I couldn't be successful. My background to this is as a graphic artist, that was my training. Writing as well. And it wasn't until I was about 38 or 39 that I became who I really am. That's the last chapter in the book. And I did that through despair, reached a real bottom. The Zen practice had a lot to do with reaching the bottom. I was utterly transformed by it and I wrote the first book. At 39 I became a writer. At that age most men in this culture are shutting down, looking to retirement. So that just shocked the hell out of me.

The koan "Who am I? Who am I?" was a kind of deconstruction of self during meditation, taking away parents, taking away culture, taking away gender, taking away all this stuff. "Who am I?"

It wasn't a mystical, psychedelic thing, but I just emerged the next day as a writer. I hadn't written since high school and now I can't stop writing. So I know that change is possible, that transformation is possible, and that's what I try to write about. And the little [exercises] in the book that I suggest are things that I've actually done, and I know they work.

Q: So what was the reaction to The Zen of Recovery? Did the response of readers prompt you to do this book?

A: No. Because by the time I was done with Zen of Recovery I was done with Zen. I wrote my way out of it, as it were. I wrote my way out of prison, out of that belief system. And I was fairly done with recovery, too. I'm still not drinking and not drinking and not drugging, but I was done being so thrilled with that as well, the ideology of recovery just became another ideology to me. So I emerged after The Zen of Recovery as pretty much a spiritual anarchist. I mean, if you don't go to meetings you're supposed to drink, you're going to drink. So I'm a heretic in a lot of ways with that too. So what I found myself doing was going into an ideology, like Zen or AA, assimilating it and coming out the other end.

Q: What's your take on the spiritual materialism dimension of the appeal for spiritual self-help books?

A: Beat Spirit will be my last one, I hope. It'll be [in book stores] under "popular culture," because I think "spirituality" has become cheapened. It's used to sell things now. People think they can buy it in a book. It's the biggest selling category and it's just going to get more hysterical as the year 2000 approaches. I just heard John Gray is going to do a one-man show on Broadway the Men Are From Mars [Women Are From Venus] guy. These New Age psychobabble gurus have become like rock stars from the '60s.

Q: But you're cashing in on that same appeal of people.

Chump change! (laughs) Deepak's cashing in. [William] Burroughs says he's tried to write a best seller. He's not against selling out, but it's not in him. I've tried to write a Deepak Chopra, I can't do it. I don't believe in soul. I believe you might not ever be happy. Life might just be fucked for you. It is what it is. And people really don't want to hear that. Even Skull, I try to sugar-coat it in some ways, I suppose.

The Zen message can be a fairly bleak one: This is it, get used to it. Find every joy you can, or if you feeling pain then feel the pain. Because, like I said, that pain transforms you.

Q: One of the insidious thing s about the post-'70s I'm-OK-you're-OK self-acceptance is that you and I may be real assholes. How does your book discourage people from reinforcing bad habits as they discover themselves?

A: I'm getting used to this question. First of all, the assholes probably won't buy the book. And again and again in the book, a lot of these exercises are caring for others, being part of a group. Together-action, the Great Vow: save all beings from suffering. I think that's kind of woven throughout this book.

We get into sort of Oliver Stone, John Grisham territory: did Natural Born Killers cause people to commit murder? Will my book cause people to become better assholes? There is a warning in the book, a disclaimer: you are not to believe anything in the book.

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For a review of Skull

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