Victory

by Michael Murphy

“The highest achievement of the spiritual life is within the full embrace of the ordinary. Our appetite for the big experience--sudden insight, dazzling vision, heart-stopping ecstasy— is what hides the true way from us.” These words head the dust jacket description of Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience,a memoir by James P. Carse, the director of religious studies at New York University.

The book is published by HarperSanFrancisco, and its first chapter centers on Ernie, the one-legged owner of the Victory Luncheonette in New York where Carse sometimes stopped to have coffee and bagels.“The cooking equipment of the luncheonette had been so arranged that Ernie could reach every part of it by pivoting on a single foot. Two huge coffee makers were against the wall; the sinks, cutting board, and toaster were tucked under the counter. Although he could get to either end of the counter with a single giant step, he delivered most of the food by spinning it along the counter, dangerously skirting open stacks of Jelly donuts and corn muffins”

The first time Carse ate at the Victory, he didn't know Ernie was one-legged, and was momentarily caught by his graceful movements. “Like a Sufi dervish, he was bobbing and sweeping in long, slow circles, cutting a bagel here, popping the toaster there, opening the coffee spigots on two cups at once, buttering a bagel with a single sweep, scrambling an egg in what looked like a dented aluminum helmet, brushing litter from the counter, cutting another bagel, flicking back the coffee spigots at the last possible moment--all the while contributing abbreviated comments to conversations with half a dozen customers.”

“Yastrzemski for MVP,” he said, pointing directly at Carse.

“Mantle,” Carse blurted back.

“Silvio, you hear that?” Ernie poked at someone's shoulder. “The professa says Mantle. Yaz is a bum. What'd I tell ya?” He turned again to Carse and asked,“You want something or you got all day?”

“Coffee and a buttered bagel.”

“Toasted?”

Carse wanted it untoasted, but by the time he could respond Ernie had sliced it, rammed it under the gas flames of the grill, and turned to another order.

“Yaz can hit,” Ernie said. “I'll give you that, Silvio.”

Silvio responded with a dubious shrug and squeezed mustard onto a reeking mass of fried pastrami.

No one had a sustained conversation with Ernie, though he seemed to follow every verbal exchange. “Truths, conclusions, absolutes,” Carse wrote, “had about the same permanence as the steamy smells that circulated in the Victory and drifted out onto the street. Endings were part of a larger formless tumble that started from who knows where, and would go on to who gives a damn. Buddhists have a name for it: samsara, the state of endless change from which nothing and no one ever escape.”

Reflecting on the remarkable good feelings--the lightness of being--most people felt at the luncheonette, Carse asked why, if the Victory was “samsaric,” was it at the same time so festive? “It was,” he answered, “because of the way Ernie spooned sugar into a paper cup and slammed change on the counter. Over the years his actions had been reduced to their minimum. Cutting and buttering a roll was a matter of a few effortless moves. There was no one hidden in it, doing it, as it were, from a distance. Tao-like, no one was doing anything and yet nothing remained to be done. The Victory had become what Ernie did without doing it. There was a center to all this activity; it was a center. It's no wonder that we overlooked it. We overlooked it because there was nothing to see. It was the nothing that made it mystical.”

Though Ernie wouldn't have described himself this way, he had learned to let the nothingness into his work.

Carse finds the mystical in other events in his life, some of which were joyous and others painful, including a particular round of golf. I thought of Shivas Irons when I read his book. Members of the Society will find affinities between Breakfast at the Victory and Golf in the Kingdom.