A Ghost at the Banquet

At a lavish brunch with my co-workers on the deck of a beautiful modern house in Montclair, the sun moved very quickly, shading first one and then another of us as we sat under the Monterey pines and eucalyptus. Small flies masquerading as bees flew around trying to eat the food. It was August, very quiet on a weekday in the mountains of east Oakland. We ate off large chunks of cheese and loaves of crusty bread, pickled herring, salads topped with shrimp and crab. The normal vivacity of the group was a bit subdued. Our small company, Design Logic, was starting to implode.

People talked, as usual, of their travel plans, about restaurants and wines, their homes and habits. It had been some time since I had been able to explore restaurants in reality, as opposed to the Gourmet magazine. But it was not a high priority, I noticed. I loved good food and tagged along when I could, for the glimmers of serious conversation and the occasional cup of extraordinary coffee. Restaurants were glimpses of life. But I was too stunned and confused by my poverty to consider them my playground. When the other two blonde, childless women in my company discussed their cleaning women I was shocked! 

The architects were young, upwardly mobile professionals, sure it was their right to define current tastes. I had trouble talking in these sorts of groups. If attention turned toward me, I either said something out of context, or was too embarrassed to say anything at all. Should I tell them about the small, older Russian immigrant I stood in line next to at the grocery store? Pointing to a picture of Ronald Reagan on a magazine at the checkout counter, she said to me in heavily inflected English, “That man doesn’t like old and poor people.”

When I first got to San Francisco, we went to second-hand stores and looked for “little” restaurants. I had been among that young, taste-making group. We looked for political action, things that were “happening,” transcendence. Food had begun to be related to health, but hippie restaurants served grains and vegetables rather than European cheeses and culinary artistry. The organic movement began with brown and bruised produce showing up in small, eccentric stores.

By the 1980’s things had changed. What people talked about now was expensive. Pat, our founder and CEO, had lent me the minimum needed to participate as an employee partner at Design Logic and I was trying to pay it back. Money was so short for myself and my unemployed husband that I dreamed of food! I willingly ate up whatever share of the repast allotted me, but I was something of a ghost at this banquet. I had ridden too many buses next to desperately poor people to take the tastemakers’ banquet at its face value.

Design Logic was begun to offer technological innovations to the architectural profession. Burgeoning optimism in California in the 1980’s fueled many endeavors, including culinary and life-style projects. I enjoyed participating in what seemed to be “the leading edge” of cultural and economic power. It began well, surviving an energy-related recession in 1982 and continued until it became apparent that it was more cost effective for architects to buy their own computers. We had bought computer-aided drafting machines from France. To keep them paying for themselves, we ran three shifts. I was the second shift manager. Over a five-year period, I watched the long struggle over ideas, personalities and power. My small investment paid for a lot of education!

But I was reading Henry Miller during this time, my inner life thoroughly out of sync with the entrepreneurial spirit around me. It was Henry Miller who declared himself “a ghost at the banquet” of Paris when he first arrived, walking the streets, hungry and haunted by the writing career he wanted. 

Throughout my working life, while I always tried to give more value than I was paid for, I protected my inner thoughts from exposure to the economy. I worked in a material, quantity-based value system where my quick intelligence, strong sense of pattern and accuracy of input paid me enough to live on. Technical information was clean and light, a contrast to the powerful ideological belief systems I had grown up in. While I re-considered my beliefs, it was a safe haven. My own value system was qualitative in any case. I felt glad I didn’t have to use it to make money.

I understood that I was from pastors and teachers, the shaman class, those who respond to a calling to heal or create. This class of people can have careers in non-revolutionary times. They are needed by the merchants, workers and even the investment bankers to educate and point people toward their own transcendence, without which living can be pretty thin soup. But shamen don’t usually make it into the comfortable middle class. They often live at the behest of other, more wealthy people and make choices which show that their inner lives are more important than fine houses, clothing, cars and expensive vacations. Education of all kinds is high on their lists.

It is now almost 40 years on from that early venture in architecture. Little has changed on the economic front. Reagan set in motion the discrepancy in incomes that we feel so keenly today. California has retained its position on what is now sometimes called the “bleeding edge” of technology, though once we all got phones, what more do we need? And I am still so aware of the desperate poor that it is hard to enjoy high-end pleasures, though we can insist on authentic, quality food for ourselves.

And these are not ordinary times. As I write, most of us are in some degree of lockdown due to a world-pervasive pandemic. In the U.S., people are tearing up each other’s lawn signs in an election which, in many people’s eyes, will have life or death consequences. Wildfires have destroyed more than eight million acres of western forests this year alone. People without homes live in tents under our freeways and in the streets. And contrasting ideas about how to administrate our institutions roil young and old alike. 

Our many younger friends all have passions which give their lives meaning, but make it hard for more experienced people to talk to them. From “vegan rebels” to social justice warriors bent on getting rid of police to climate change activists. But we also know a couple of people whose sense of reality has been badly damaged, at least in part by living exclusively on Twitter and Instagram. And most of us find it difficult to avoid plugging in to the systems the top, monolithic tech companies provide. An increasing tide of plastic washes over us as well, not helped by the contagions around us.

More dangerous still are the teenagers I heard about recently who refuse to do anything, because they don’t want to compete. Others have made better art, music or food. It isn’t fair. Where do they start? They are too privileged to work, too scared to fail.

I have felt we were on the cusp of change from a romantic way of thinking about life to a more down-to-earth, disciplined and practical one for some time. More advocates for this point of view can be found every day, from E.O. Wilson to Jordan Peterson to Frederick Turner. It is reflected in thinking about the politics tearing our countries apart, in the re-examination of education and in understanding the kinds of work that are left to us. Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher, points out that people live by habit, habits can be changed and indeed, they must be. In You Must Change Your Life, he says that, in the face of global crisis, people must make the decision “to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises.”

Humility, service, acceptance of ourselves and authentic relationships loom. I look forward to a time when no one must feel like a ghost at the banquet.