deaser26's Full Review: Richard Bach - The Bridge Across Forever
My buddy Kev sends me on a journey or two
Set the way-back machine for 1995, Clinton was in orifice, The Dallas Cowboys had been dominating pro football, the Seattle sound was dominating FM radio, and my wife decided to go find her roots in North Carolina, or was it just to find root. Either way, she bailed our shit-hole marriage and I was left in Tulsa with the bills, my precious son and a lot of confused and meandering emotions.
My dear friend Kevin spent months with me talking for hours on end, drinking gin, lifting weights and acting foolish in most general terms. He gave me two books to read during that strange summer after she left. One was Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda, the other The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach.
Kev is a firm believer in metaphysics, reincarnation and the almighty orgasm being at the heart of his mystical and often impractical belief system. He is a regular devotee of the Illuminatus books by Robert Anton Wilson, the scriptures and A Course in Miracles. Kev and I have discussed these things at exhaustive length, moving pieces in and out of the lifetime jigsaw of belief and existence, and this book by Bach was particularly important in my life education in some regards.
The New Age Look of Love is in your eyes
Richard Bach is maybe most famous for his mini-novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, also for his treatise Illusions. He is a poetic writer, leaving behind a lot of convention, and thriving in the I’m OK, You’re OK era in which he became famous. Growing up, I always remember JLS on the same shelf with The Prophet by Kahil Gilbran and Corn in Egypt by Warwick Deeping. Mom and dad were hippies after all – and our lives were influenced by some of the more interesting thinkers of that time.
This is part of Bach’s life story; a part that continues to grow apparently as there is a chaffing point in this entire chapter. Bach spends two books in a row discussing his soul mate, his forever partner. Both the books One and Bridge Across Forever are about finding and nurturing the relationship with your soul mate, that perfect partner who is sent from God before all times. In the Butchers Wife it was called your Split Apart, in Friends your Lobster. The concept is novel, and his writing is compelling, but it hurts my heart to know that he is no longer with the woman he was written about in these books. It just colors it all in a dark green.
Flying airplanes and feeding raccoons
Bach’s story starts out flying stunt bi-planes around the Midwest. He is not making a handsome living, just a small one, but he is content. He gives us a very Hemingwayesque beginning with a campfire, some delicious grubbery and a curious raccoon that he is throwing bites. You can smell the coffee, taste the hot bits coming out of the pan and just imagine the night and the stars. But there is a nagging feeling in his breast, where is she? He is longing, yearning for his soul mate, for whoever she is.
He begins to question his motives, his lifestyle and doing what he is supposed to be doing. He takes a lady for one of his stunt plane rides, and she is enjoying it, and they shout at each other over the plane engines – but he knows that it is not her, it couldn’t be her and that he is not likely to find her flying his bi-plane around Iowa. This is one of the strongest and most telling points in the entire biography. He stops and examines what he is doing with himself, and realizes that he is not likely to find her where he is, that he really is using the airplane and the tramping life to hide out. He decides to move on, to try to make his life something more fulfilling, and to start positioning himself to find her.
He works his way to a telephone, and calls his agent – who is frantic and has been looking for him for months, Bach had just about dropped off the face. His little book JLS is a humungous hit, and he is a wealthy man. He had no idea, no contact with the media, and no real contact with life on the planet. He has awakened that morning to find himself a millionaire, and realizes that his life as he knew it would never be the same. Here is the point in the book where we are doing the get-rich and didn’t know it story (Brewster’s Millions, Secrets of my Success, Maid to Order, Arthur) you name it there is a series of theme films.
He starts living differently then, buying airplanes, big houses and shuffling through a lot of women, always thinking about and looking for her.
Boffin’ his way from Florida to Hollywood
Bach goes through several progressions of thinking in his life about his soul mate, his perfect one. He believes that she is there, but then he is spending time with many different women at once and drawing life and inspiration from various parts of the various girls. He is spending time with one particular girl who is mentally stimulating, the conversations are amazing and the ideas flow. However, she doesn’t stiffen the old rod. The girls that do make his heart pound and his libido spasm are somewhat vacuous if you can believe that. Is it possible that there are beautiful girls in the world who are of no mental or spiritual substance? I find that hard to believe, what with all the reading of Cosmo and Oprah that is going on these days.
The girls that are spiritually stimulating are another world unto themselves, weird and flaky and mystical. And he begins to accept that in his searching he might not find such a girl, and so he settles on a couple of new concepts. One being that there is not a single woman that it is going to be a combination of them. He accepts this for a long time, taking mental, physical and spiritual stimulation and interaction from different women at different times, but never dedicating himself to any one girl – impossible to do so without it being the complete woman, the whole self of his dreams.
The exploration of our life’s armor
The next scenario in the world of Bach’s thought is the introspection of brutal honesty that he applies to himself about his armor. He realizes that a large part of the problem is that he is unlikely to find her as long as he has himself surrounded by an armor force field that will only let anyone so far in. He is paranoid that women just want him for his money, that they are users and takers. He realizes that he keeping all of his relationships at a far arms length, that he is protecting himself from real hurt and pain. This was not a huge revelation, the next logical progression in the story.
Who amongst us doesn’t hold back to try to save themselves from the pain of brutal relationships? At the time that I read this book, I was suffering horribly from a broken heart, and erecting great barrier reefs of armor. I was completely in the throes of that phase of my life, and it seemed amazing to me that it took him as long as it did to reach that conclusion.
Then he meets a real character, in Hollywood – an actress and a musician. She was an actress in some episodes of the original season of Star Trek (that should tell you something). She is a stunning blond, and a very strongly trained classical pianist. They meet while Richard is working on the screenplay for the movie version of JLS. They start to play chess, they start to hang out.
They go see Star Wars together, and they fall in love with it, and with some of the characters. She begins to introduce him to the depths of emotion possible if you really listen to classical music, to the movement and the chords. He feels himself drawn in, and breaks away with terror.
God Bless the IRS
One of the really horrible things that can happen to artists are money managers. This was particularly true of Bach. His manager took him for huge amounts of money, didn’t pay his taxes and spread bad cheer. The IRS decided that they needed their money, and took strong action against Bach. His financial picture was in a shambles.
She began to help him organize it, to try to help save his life. They spent weeks together sorting receipts, trying to piece together a chaotic life of parties, airplanes and focused hedonism. They do get it all put together eventually, and she and he begin to discuss the fact that she challenges him, doesn’t just take what he has to say at face value, and makes his brain hurt with her honesty and forcing him to look at himself.
The journey through his tax problems are just amazing. The IRS will not cut a deal with him, no matter how many different agents that he talks to, they just will not commit. This is a parallel in the book; he is acting much the same as the IRS. They eventually go to court, and the IRS takes his publishing rights away. He is later able to buy them all back at a fraction of the cost of their value. Bach originally offered to pay the IRS all that he owed them, a regular payment plan, that would have completely paid off the debt in a few short years. They refused on principle, and it cost them dearly.
When the IRS finally settled with him, it was for a fraction of what he owed them – and several years after he would have had them paid off completely, they did seizures, and they had their stupidity forever exposed in Bach’s book. They acted stupidly, it cost them and Richard had the last laugh.
Ultimately though, it drew he and his love together fighting it, and I realized that Bach saw himself in those curiously inept agents. It was costing Bach to refuse to commit, and he had his lifetime love right in front of his face.
The final commitment
Finally he realizes that the perfect woman for him would indeed be challenging, would force him out of his comfort zone, and would work together with him on his life and lifetime goals. Then at the end of the book, they get into a long series of strange and interesting phases of discussion about Astral travel, leaving their bodies and looking down on themselves, moving around in the air, across the country – always attached back to their bodies by a string of spirit, a metaphysical trail of crumbs if you will. They move to the country, buy a tractor, design and build a house and just move deeper and deeper into their life of love.
This book sent me on that journey, made me question what I was doing and how I was doing it. Was I ever going to find HER, the one, my lover and partner? It has taken a lifetime of searching for me as well, with periods of solitude, madness and experimenting with combinations of people as well.
A short time ago, last May I received an email from my friend LaNae. During high school we were inseparable, taking English and History classes together, sharing our favorite teachers, music and laughter. We lost each other over time though, she had to leave Mossyrock, and I did as well a year later. She and I have drifted around the stars looking and seeking (“tell me, did you find yourself out there?”). I even sought her a few times over the years, as she did me. We were living within a few hours of each other at a point as well.
She and I started talking about the things that matter, about things that we have talked about since we were children. We have known one another since it mattered, is the way her sister Jody describes it. She challenges my mind continuously, she makes my heart ache when we are apart, and she makes my heart race when she walks in the room. I wake up next to her every morning, and it makes me believe in a loving God. I see her lying there, soft and framed – I feel her warm against my back and I begin to accept that I have found HER. When we read at night sometimes, I get the trembly feeling like you had at camp growing up. It makes me shake my legs and laugh.
Bach opened my mind to the possibility that such a thing was possible. I had decidedly dismissed it, and there are still many occasions where I feel myself fitting the armor back onto my chest and legs, times when I have wondered if it was a ridiculous thought, but it is not. Am I discouraged that Bach was wrong about her? Not really, He always seemed a bit flighty, certainly thinking himself into patterns of pain. Do I think he found her, sure he probably did. It is possible to find our lost loves, our lifetime partners and hurt them drive them from us like Hawaiians from the lava flow, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t right, and that they were not sent. The love of a lifetime is there. Steve Martin said it at the end of L.A. Story; there is somebody for everybody, even if it takes a miner’s hat and a lot of digging to find them. I will spend the rest of my life thanking LaNae for her love, for finding me and taking a chance at the Bridge Across Forever.
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