By Mark C. Anderson
Monterey County WEEKLY
Mar 08, 2007

..........The 75-year-old poet had his suicide planned. By wrapping the extension cord of the Skilsaw around his leg, directing its exposed edge toward him, and falling into the whining blade, he would bury the steel into the main artery of his right thigh and bleed out his existence in seconds. A pile of wood surrounded him—he had been working for an hour in the courtyard of his hand-built home. It would surely appear an accident, sparing his wife immeasurable shame, and his children a reason to do it themselves.
..........Ric Masten had known for six years that he was terminally ill with prostate cancer. Of late, his mind had been twisted into terror by steroid imbalances and news of a stock market plunge that threatened his family’s security. The author of 18 books, a celebrated teacher, speaker and artist who had appeared at venues ranging from the Henry Miller Library to the White House Conference on Children, had recently reached what might have been a final goal: his 50th wedding anniversary. He was ready. After all, his favorite poets—Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath—both had ended their lives with suicide. And the saw was spinning, screaming, willing.

....................yesterday
....................I would have told you that depression
....................was simply the “downer” that follows
............. .....rejection or setback
....................a shallow moody dimple
....................difficult but manageable
....................bleak doldrums that usually respond
....................to: “Come on now! Snap out of it!”

....................at worst
....................depression would be a debilitating low
....................a slow turning whirlpool in which
....................one becomes trapped in the undertow
....................treading water
....................sapped of all enthusiasm
....................caught in a murky atmosphere
....................where darkness and apathy rule

................ . not so! — not so!
....................depression turns out to be
....................more like a violent brain storm
....................the cranium an electric arena
....................of unrelenting action
....................blackness charged with angst
....................unbridled thoughts stampeding
....................death — ill-health — poverty
....................like psychedelic film clips the subject matter

....................suddenly turns suicidal
....................and I see myself involved
....................with Skil-saws — carbon monoxide
....................X-acto knives — second story swan dives
....................hypnotic — demonic
....................psychotic suggestions taking aim

..........The irony, as Masten and the saw debated his death, was that he was supposed to be long dead already.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........The distance from Highway 1 to the mountaintop Masten home is less than three miles. But the wondrous stretch of road feels a lot longer as it slithers upward—from the coast, where the hungry Pacific licks the Big Sur shore into the striking shape of Rocky Point, up through the redwood-sheltered belly of the Palo Colorado Canyon, past the surreal house with only two walls, and up to the sunlit dirt roads that seem to scrape the sky.
..........The home is a singular cedar-shingled cabin befitting such a spot. Carved faces stare from various beams and shingles. Antique bottles sit on tables, their bellies filled with colored liquid. Cement walls shaped in earthen molds set off rooms already alive with sculpture, paintings and photos. Arresting views swoop from worn handmade redwood decks—from the kitchen, from the tower-like master bedroom, from the guest house—down the canyon and out to the pale blue suggestion of the western horizon.
..........The place is out there—but the old poet has always been an outlier. Long before he and his family moved to Big Sur from Carmel in 1963 and built the house—doubling the population at the top of their ridge above Palo Colorado—a 21-year-old Ric Masten lived as a painter in mid-century Paris, and hated it. He wrote scores of rock ‘n’ roll songs and made money at it, but quit because it felt like a lie. He ditched a blossoming folk-singing career because he couldn’t remember the lyrics. And then he became a full-time traveling Unitarian Universalist minister-by-poem, despite never having seen the inside of a seminary.
..........Today Masten, 77, is beloved for a spoken poetry unique in its delivery, its unrepentant honesty and its sly observational philosophy. His troubadour lifestyle remains equally bold and open, unchanged by the diagnosis of his terminal illness. If anything, that has only amplified it.
..........But before all of this, he was a failure. Programmed to be an optometrist by his mother, who sent him from their Wildcat Canyon home in Carmel to prepare to inherit his stepfather’s practice in downtown Monterey, he was derailed by dyslexia. Masten’s only passing grade at Pomona College came as an A in art; he flunked out in the first semester. He would go on to flunk three other colleges. To this day he still basks in that blessing.

....................learning disabled?
....................hell, I was learning advantaged
....................they say
....................“It’s all in the timing.” and I agree
....................because if the PC with “spell check”
....................had existed
....................back when my mother held sway
.............. ....I’d be trapped in the life
....................of an optometrist today
....................I did, however
....................wind up making a spectacle
....................of myself

..........His success in art class offered his mother enough impetus to pack him off, against his will, to Europe, to become a painter. As Masten mailed his artwork home, she proceeded to show it without his knowledge.
..........When Masten wrote home with tales of his adventures, she published his letters in the Carmel Pine Cone in a column called “Me and the Universe.” Masten wasn’t happy to find out. Hearing him tell the story, it’s clear how much his mother’s meddling hardened his resolve to live his own life, to be his own man, come what may.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........When he returned from Paris, Masten found work as a carpenter and printer. But he preferred writing lyrics for musicals at Carmel’s Forest Theater, where he met his bride, a young actress and artist named Billie Barbara.
When his mother again began insinuating herself in his theater work, Masten sought an antidote—and found it in the thing she hated most: rock ‘n’ roll. He made it his focus. Over the next 10 years, he had some 78 songs recorded, including “Turn the Key” by pop artist Jerry Wallace and “Teenage Creature” by Lord Luther, which cracked the top 100.
..........And yet he still didn’t feel authentic. Masten knew he was just parroting country and Motown music—and he grew increasingly intolerant of a profit-and-power-sick industry that he still derides as purely “payola.”
..........That’s when Bob Dylan, Pete Seger and Leonard Cohen began to speak to him. Folk music felt right.
..........Masten had a new dream: to make a living as a folk-singer. Unsurprisingly, he would need a final victory over his mom to claim the authorship he always sought.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........In 1960, the three Masten children successfully sued their mom for an inheritance she was blocking them from receiving. Masten’s $5,000 would allow him to buy the property in Palo Colorado for $10,000 and take a year to test his talents on tour. His act quickly covered the state—and was going national—when a spiritual crisis led the newly reborn folksinger in yet another direction. Convinced by a friend that his devoutly atheist ways would ultimately undo him, Masten sent his family on a trek to salvation every Sunday.
..........“We went through the Yellow Pages, starting with the Baptists, then we went to every Catholic church,” Masten recalls. “My poor kids had to attend a different Sunday school every week for three years.” They were into the Methodists when he stumbled across an ad for the local Unitarian church: Its simple philosophical question resonated: “Are we actors or are we authors?”
..........“Unitarians are the ones who approach a fork in the road that says ‘Heaven this way’ and ‘A discussion about whether there’s heaven, this way,’” he says, “and go to the discussion.”
It was the Unitarians who allowed Masten to become the full-time folk artist he longed to be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

....................I ain’t afraid to step in your bitter streets
....................And walk away from war.
....................I ain’t afraid though the boulevard’s full of heat
....................And hate—an open sore.
....................I ain’t afraid, I ain’t afraid
....................Ain’t afraid of the hate I see
....................But when I see all the hate in me — I’m afraid.

..........The Unitarians clicked with the content of Masten’s songs—the beat poet humanitarianism, the hippie social consciousness, the willingness to ask the questions that tugged at those paying attention. “Unitarians,” he says, “are the religious group that likes to burn a question mark on your lawn.”
..........They had him tour more and more. After the Unitarians merged with the Universalist church, he was able to accomplish something unprecedented for a layperson: fellowship as a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
..........“They called me a troubadour minister,” he says. “And the first guy to sing his way into the ministry.” His church contacts led to gigs at universities stretching from UCLA to Harvard. He started performing at schools, where he would stun younger audiences with his candor, and then coax them into believing in their own voice. He traveled half the year—Unitarian concerts and readings by weekend, middle and high schools during the week.
..........During this heady time, he also marched in Boston and Berkeley and sang with Joan Baez at the Big Sur Folk Festival. And he wrote.

....................is it not disturbing
....................to consider
....................that everything in and about
....................a nuclear power plant
....................will be furnished
....................by the lowest bidder

..........From 1968 on, he traveled the country, performing for upwards of several hundred Unitarians or several thousand students. In the process, a few things happened. For one, he neglected his family. He also discovered he wasn’t exactly cut out for performing music.
“I couldn’t remember my lyrics,” Masten says. “I was embarrassed to drag my big binders on stage to sing.”
..........Oddly enough, that became a main reason he took up the vocation that he still embraces. “I should be a poet,” he decided. “After all, they can carry their binders of poems around.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........Following an upcoming trip to North Dakota next month, Masten will have visited all 50 states in the Union, and every province in Canada. “That’ll look good on the obit,” he says.
..........He has found his own brand of success—but not the kind of success that comes with critical acclaim. The local poet and teacher Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts has known Masten and followed his work for a long time. Back in the late ‘60s, he occasionally invited his friend to MPC to talk to his students.
..........“One thing that is very clear, and bothers Ric tremendously: that he is out of the mainstream academic tradition,” Rushowitz-Roberts says. “When he does all these readings, it’s never the English department that invites him. They don’t give much weight to his work. It’s colloquial, folksy, direct, so generally they dismiss him as without much value.
..........“But the very thing he is vilified for makes him attractive: He is very accessible. Secondly, he’s very personal. He’s writing very much about his own life—kind of like making a public display of himself. What causes it to rise above ego-maniacal statement is that he is able to capture the universal in the particular of his own life.”
..........Masten points out that his favorite poets—Sexton and Plath—were confessional poets.
..........“I’m certainly a confessional poet—I’m not trying to impress you with the ways I push words around,” he says. “I’m trying to reach you with the experiences that have marked me, and the thing I know is that we aren’t that much different.”
..........While debate on the academic quality of Masten’s poetry continues, there is no real debate on how he went about it. “He made very clear he was going to go his own way,” Rushowitz-Roberts says. “He knew how he wanted to write, and he did.”
..........That same stubborn independent streak would help save Masten’s life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........The death sentence hit the old poet “like a punch in the stomach.”
..........“You have six months to live,” the doctor told Masten.
..........Vivian Sarubbi, an oncology nurse at Monterey Bay Oncology, was there from that moment.
..........“It was very grim,” she says. “The scale is one to four. One is least invasive. His cancer was Stage Four; it was the poorest prognosis. He was very frightened.” Advanced prostate cancer, Masten would quickly learn, is incurable.
..........Sarubbi says she’s seen a range of responses to the news: Anxiety cripples some people’s ability to retain basic information. Others plummet into shock and depression. Many direct anger at themselves, their family members or friends. Humor is a natural distraction for others.
..........While Masten did at first wade through a dark puddle saturated with emotional phone calls, he soon regained his bearings—and his health—with the tools that have long suited him.
..........“His recovery has been one part luck,” Sarubbi says. “The other part is that he has gone outside of the box. He went out and said, ‘I want information,’ asking, ‘Is that really true?’ Talking to people, exploring what’s out there, questioning his doctor and bringing in information.”
..........One of the people he found was Harry Pinchot, cancer survivor and program director for the Prostate Cancer Research Institute. At Pinchot’s urging, Masten convinced his doctor to take further tests, and obtained permission to start taking an eight-herb Chinese supplement called PC-SPES. Along with conventional treatments, it helped Masten knock down the levels of prostate cancer indicator dramatically.
..........“He’s just been assertive and his own advocate,” Pinchot says. “He doesn’t take no for an answer.
..........“He is the captain of his own ship. He’s going to live or die by that. The reality is he’s managed nine years. Other guys would long be gone.”
..........“I may choose the wrong way around the sink,” Masten says, “but it’s my choice, not some doctor’s.”
..........Masten has been off chemotherapy for three months. He trucks his way through regular mountain hikes with the help of a carved cane almost as old as he is. He whips the air in a frenzy of enthusiastic gesticulations when he drops into a story.
..........But when Sarubbi and Pinchot ascribe Masten’s unlikely survival to luck, aggressiveness and independent thinking, their evaluation is incomplete. Unsurprisingly, they’ve never attended any sessions of the Palo Colorado Monthly Neighborhood Poetry Reading to Keep Ric Masten Alive Society.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........The Society was founded six years ago on a simple understanding. The organizers figured if they gave Masten an audience, he’d have to stick around. So far they’ve met 53 times.
..........“Maybe that’s why I’m not dead,” Masten says. “Jeez, I can’t die before May 19, when I speak at CSU Monterey Bay [graduation]. I can’t die before the 27th of April—North Dakota is my last state.”
..........The need to put himself out there is basic for Masten.

....................me?
....................I am my writing — no more, no less
....................in the beginning was the word
....................but I wasn’t—
....................not until I began to type myself out

..........As Masten doesn’t much peddle in the market of complex metaphors, he means it when he says he is his writing: Sure, the chemo was effective in curbing his illness—but no poetry, no Ric to cure. He can’t even think without it. “I write to understand something,” he says. “If something’s bothering me, a pain or puzzlement, I’m going to write about it.”
..........And he’s going to share it. This is Masten’s ego, his identity, his existence. As his wife Billie Barbara, a talented poet in her own right, once wrote: “All he wants is for you and me to listen to him.”
..........“I could be tired as hell,” he says. “And what I do is generate energy for me with an audience. Billie gives and gives, she’s finished she has to go to bed. When I finish, I’m all fired up. It’s very selfish. I’m a user. And people have used me. I hope I use you well. And I hope people use me well.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........“To view Ric’s colon click HERE.” Click. A light shines where it normally never would, and there is Ric’s colon, glowing in vivid, fleshy detail. The spectacle is raw.
..........Elsewhere on Ric’s Ongoing Prostate Cancer Odyssey (at ric-masten.net) there are other artifacts from his ongoing treatment. There are down-the-milligram logs of the conventional and unconventional meds he’s taken. There are old and new poems and fresh commentary dripped from painful treatments and self-doubt. Masten updates it regularly with things like this play-by-play of some radiation treatment:
.........."Zap #3 [came] from an oblique angle (about 10 o’clock). For this one a female technician appeared at my elbow, ‘We’re going to tape your penis out of the way—so it won’t get burned.’ Sounds like I’m hung like a horse. Believe me I’m not! Just a tiny little button mushroom we don’t want to overcook.”
..........Masten’s cyber-mailer and cancer log have found the same reception online that his gigs have in person. His Words & One-liners—a spin-off of his elegant 2005 publication of single-line drawings paired with his poetry—goes out to 2,000 people each week and registers an additional 650 hits a month; fresh entries on his Cancer Odyssey, meanwhile, attract upwards of 700 visits a week.
..........Nurse Sarubbi, who has nearly 30 years of experience in the field, knows why he has received such a strong response from other cancer warriors. “He’s genuine,” she says. “It’s real. He tells the bad parts, tells the part where he sunk into his depression—where he’s in the dark forest where he could only see us way on the edges.
.........."Depression has no badge of courage in our society. For him to talk about that—it’s hard enough to live it. And he showed the warts. He showed his colon. We as humans like to protect the parts that aren’t as nice. He would say, ‘This is my bad part, some of the things that went wrong, this happened, said it like it is, and this is what I’m trying.’ ”
As he puts his story out there, right next to his phone number and his e-mail, Masten insists it’s not such a magnanimous thing he’s doing. “Sometimes the calls last for an hour. When I hang that phone up I feel way better than before the phone rang. When you’re helping people, you’re helping yourself.”
..........Each of the e-mails he gets from around the world—“They say everything from ‘Thank you for helping me understand,’ to ‘What was he on about?,’” he says—receives a heartfelt reply. In a redwood-plank home office that holds a pro’s array of recording equipment and computer technology, Masten admits, “This is my life now.”
..........“Some of my dearest friends I’ve never met,” he says. “I don’t know why some people knock the Internet. It is all minds and spirits here, no age or race getting in the way. This is the world for me.”
..........He says the fellow cancer survivors he talks to typically aren’t most interested in the medicine: “They want to talk about how to keep the spirit up.”

....................but think about it folks — think about it
....................we’re born — we live — we die
....................so what’s different now?  Not a thing!
....................except being blessed with a constant reminder
....................to never let another unexplored moment slip by
....................my condolences to those
....................who fall prey to the fatal surprise
....................the unexpected cardiac arrest
....................the sudden traffic casualty
....................forced to depart short of a conclusion
....................short of the all important “good byes.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

..........The old poet says we each have three birthdays. The first happens when we are born. The second happens when we discover we are going to die—and are granted a sense of self and a sense of time as a result. The third happens every time we choose to truly live.
..........Masten says he had two major third birthdays in the last decade: when he was diagnosed with cancer and when he decided to put the Skilsaw down.
..........“I spent my whole life thinking I was going to die but not believing it,” he says. “Now I’m spending every day as fully as I possibly can.”
..........Chemo once stole his cherished beard. Radiation destroyed his hip. Steroids tortured his mind. The cancer took his balls. But Ric Masten says discovering he was ill with terminal prostate cancer is one thing he would never change. Not for his life.

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