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Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

A Review of Sleeping in Caves, A Sixties Himalayan Memoir

By Marilyn Stablein

Monkfish Book Publishing Co.,
27 Lamoree Road, Rhinebeck, NY 12572
www.monkfishpublishing.com
2003, 198 pages, $16.00

Reviewed by Lilith Wood

Sleeping in Caves is the occasionally evocative, disjointed tale of an 18-year old Berkeley drop-out who runs off to India for seven years. The story is told not by the young woman who ran away in the sixties, but by the middle-aged woman she is. Perhaps it is Stablein's nostalgia that makes her book read like a loose list of smells, rituals, and colors. Stablein did a lot of painting and talked to some monks and lamas, and she tells us about that, too. But who was she, I wondered. Who was she when she left Berkeley eighteen, and how had she changed by the time she returned to California as a wife and mother? At the end of the book, I had no idea. Like Alice, she just fell down the rabbit hole.

Each chapter begins with a pillow book entry—two or three small, italicized paragraphs that contain dreams or rambling thoughts. These are the best, most honest parts of the book, possibly because they were written en media res, and not as recollection. The pillow book entries are documentary in a relaxed, phantasmagoric way. The body of the book seems more contrived. Stablein's descriptions of sensual detail are loaded too heavily with spiritual jargon. Everything is “ancient,” “sacred,” and “dreamlike.” It is hard to find any sort of narrative amid the paragraphs of regurgitated spiritual lore. I wanted her to be gritty and personal, and to reel her language down to a human scale for some contrast with the technicolor world she had stumbled into.

Stablein does have moments of clarity, when she seems to understand that speaking lucidly of small things can paint a better impressionistic picture than grand, sweeping generalizations. I enjoyed her clean, simple description of the habits of dung beetles. I also liked reading about her fear that leeches would attach themselves to her nether regions when she squatted to pee. I liked it when she recounted hearing a Janis Joplin song after several years in India and Tibet, and she feeling as if she had awoken from a meditative stupor. I liked it when she tries to meditate at the lip of a cave, early on in the seven years, and is disrupted by the sight of locals protesting in the street below her. I needed her to acknowledge, as she did in that passage, that there was an element of the dilettante in her spiritual pilgrimage.

Stablein meets and marries another American, and they have one baby and then quickly get pregnant again. Once she has kids, Stablein decides it's time to end the ascetic, Eastern phase of her life and go back to California where she will feel clean and safe, where there will be supermarkets and sophisticated medical technology on hand should anything go awry. She does not seem to have come of age in India so much as entered a long reverie. Her real coming of age is when she becomes a mother, and at that point it's time to go home to a Western, middle-class existence and leave the subcontinent to the locals.

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Lilith Wood was born and raised on an island in Southeast Alaska, where she spent many summers working in salmon canneries. She graduated from Princeton in 2000 with a degree in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Although she chose not to be an English major, she spent all her free time working on campus publications. Upon graduation, she received a fellowship to research and write a book. She spent several months bumbling from coastal town to coastal town, interviewing women who catch fish for a living. She turned the experience into what she hopes is a coherent piece of narrative non-fiction. After another summer in the cannery, she moved to Manhattan and got a job as an editorial assisstant. She kept that job for a year and a half before fleeing back to the Pacific Northwest, which is really more her style. Luckily, she landed a great literary agent before she left New York. Unluckily, this agent has not found her a publisher for her manuscript yet. Now Lilith is living in Ballard, working a retail job and doing as much writing and editing as possible.