CHAPTER I

Sanity Is Relative

The jet lurched as the landing gear went up. There was a disconcerting CLUNK, but no one suspected trouble until twenty minutes passed with no gain in altitude. It was a routine shuttle, New York to Washington, half empty. The doctor and I, raddled by a 26-hour flight from New Delhi, were stretched out by the emergency door where there was extra leg room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We’re having some trouble with the forward landing gear. The crew is trying to operate it manually, and we’re waiting to be told whether to fly on to Dulles or return to Kennedy. Meanwhile, the flight attendants will instruct you in emergency-landing procedures.”
Remove your shoes, place a pillow in your lap, clasp your hands behind your head, and put your head in the pillow. Nobody seemed to panic, though one trainee stewardess kept walking up and down the aisle drawling, “Why don’t y’all smile? Why don’t y’all smile?” The head stewardess tried showing the doctor how to work the emergency door, but he couldn’t focus.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “Just show me how.”
Air control turned us back to Kennedy. As the plane settled earthward, the doctor began flailing his arms, beseeching the head stewardess, “Do you think we’ll really crash? Do you think we’ll really crash?”
Unable to resist the irony, I pulled a vial from my pocket and offered, “Want a tranquilizer, Doc?”
“No,” he said, “I figure after a certain point a person is justified in losing control,” and resumed doing just that.
The crew had cranked the gear down manually, but couldn’t lock it. Nor could the plane be steered, but the pilot brought it to such a feathery landing you couldn’t feel wheels touch the ground.
“Boy,” the doctor marveled as we were towed to the terminal through a blaze of emergency-vehicle lights, “you were cool as a mule.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. To the doctor, it mattered whether we crashed. To me it didn’t, and that wasn’t sane. India had taken this normal American to a place where life and death blurred to a single, delirious continuum.
To an extent, all Peace Corps Volunteers unlearn their cultural sanity. Some of us unlearn it a bit too well, and find ourselves ushered home by a Peace Corps doctor.

* * *

We’re not born sane. We learn to become sane—each in our own peculiar way. As cultures are relative, so sanity is relative, and it’s relative for one simple reason: every culture in the world has its own ideas about what’s “normal.” That is the core of cultural relativity. In America, cultural relativity is under the same kind of siege today that the flat-earth mindset mounted on the sun-centered cosmos four centuries ago.
The sun-centered cosmos was hard to grasp because the reality is invisible—the sun doesn’t look stationary; we don’t feel like we’re moving. Cultural relativity is hard to get for the same reason: our own culture is invisible . . . to us. Others can see it, and we see theirs. But our behavior, and our vision of humanity’s place in the cosmos, feel so natural to us, so sane, that other cultures seem to be anything from not quite right to downright cracked. Ours is invisible to us because, like walking and talking, we learn it so young that we don’t remember learning it. It doesn’t even feel like we have culture. But we do. Grasping that culture is relative—not absolute—needs the same attitude shift that the sun-centered cosmos needed four centuries ago.
Robert Pirsig said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “To go outside the mythos is to become insane.” Culture gets its character largely from myth. It doesn’t matter whether we take our myths literally, as fairy tales, or dismiss them outright, they control us in many invisible ways. Control us—not just Hottentots and Eskimos but you and me, right here, right now in twenty-first century America. They order our universe and check the furies churning below the crust our conscious minds tread lightly on.
Anthropology says myth reflects reality. It does. But it doesn’t just reflect reality; it creates reality. It shapes the lens through which we view the world. We are products of the world not as it is, but as we have learned to see it.
How something so insubstantial as myth could dissolve the crust we walk on is the case this book will make. It took India nineteen months to unravel my sanity. It took me thirty-five years to figure out why. Here is the story from first to last. Judge for yourself whether it ends in a breakdown, or a breakthrough.