Presentations: Charles Knott
The Man from Somewhere Else
The most culturally diverse man I ever knew was Michael Volin. I got to know him in 1972, at Lugano, Switzerland, and later, in l978, I moved to New York and lived in an apartment near him on Gedney Street in Nyack, where our friendship flourished.
I first saw Michael at the airport when we were waiting to fly out of New York on a chartered plane to Paris where we would then take a train to Switzerland; he appeared to be an expansive, rich middle-aged man in perfect health. Dressed in a costly, khaki-colored safari jacket and matching trousers that fit him perfectly, he was glowing with an abundance of health and well being, and he seemed full of good humor. On his arm was a sexy, olive-skinned, slender woman of about 30. My first guess was that they were Italian, and that Michael was a film director traveling with a starlet.
Our paths crossed because we were attending the same conference–a six weeks’ seminar held at Villa Negroni in Vezia, near Montagnola, a small town above Lugano--to discuss the works of Hermann Hesse, R.D. Laing and C.G. Jung. The conference was called Castalia, in honor of a spring that could inspire the genius of poetry in those who listened to the sound of her pouring fountain or who drank her waters. The spring was created by Apollo when the nymph Castalia eluded his pursuit until he transformed her and consecrated her to the muses. Castalia was also the name of a province in Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. Michael was a member of the distinguished faculty of the Castalia seminar.
I next saw Michael poolside at the Villa. He wore a brief bathing suit that made one think of a loin cloth; he walked about in the brilliant sunlight with great physical confidence, and he periodically dived into the water and swam the length of the pool with considerable athletic skill. He challenged a young man in his twenties to race him the length of the pool. When the challenge was accepted, Michael put swimming fins on his feet “out of deference to my advanced age.” He held his own against the younger man. Since he had mentioned his age, I asked if he would tell us how old he actually was. As if he had been asked this question many times, he parried with, “I am afraid my age is top military secret.” It turned out that he liked to be coy about his age, causing one to imagine that he was greatly advanced in years, which contrasted with the fact that he was still unaccountably youthful and vigorous. His smile was full of good humor, irony, and the joy of conversation. His voice was rather high pitched and I could not place his accent, but it was obvious that English was a second language for him. He spoke it very well, even though he often put a, an, and the in peculiar places and would frequently omit them entirely.
That evening we discovered that the first presentation of the conference would be given by Michael Volin, also known as Swami Karmananda. My “Italian film director” turned out to be a yogi, and his companion was Daphne, his wife and assistant. He had not been hired as a speaker; he had been hired to do an hour of yoga with our group before breakfast and before the evening meal each day. Because of an emergency cancellation, he was asked to replace the first speaker of the conference. I knew for a fact that the conference directors were holding their breaths, fearing that he would have no skill as a speaker and that the conference would be off to a terrible beginning. Their misgivings were unfounded. He was an utterly fascinating speaker who showed immediately that he could not only swim with unusual skill and energy; he could also hold his own at the podium.
I learned over time that he was a member of the pre-Bolshevik Russian aristocracy, a class of people who had been completely dispossessed by the Revolution. He said he had been raised by his grandfather, a Russian Tsarist general living in a castle in Harbin, China, and charged with defending the city during the Boxer Rebellion. His father had been a diplomat under the Tsar. When I asked Michael about life with his grandfather, he said he remembered that great wheels of caviar, which had dried up before they could be eaten, were burned in the castle’s fireplaces to blaze up and keep them warm. He remembered that his grandmother took pride in the fact that her hands had never touched money; that she had a friendship with Madame Blavatsky, an internationally known psychic, which he thought might have influenced his interest in yoga. He remembered that his grandfather had killed a man in a duel for insulting his uniform; that his grandfather fired off a cannon to announce Admiral’s Hour each day, which would be followed by much gentlemanly clicking of the heels, toasting, and drinking of champagne and vodka; that when the Bolshevik Revolution came along, the peasants in revolt had dispossessed his grandfather, who was then in his eighties and living in Russia, and sent him out into the world alone in a horse-drawn cart; that after the Revolution, the currency of the Russian aristocracy was as useless as Confederate money is today in America.
He said he had left his grandfather’s house when he was eighteen and joined the Chinese army. He fought in only one battle, and that battle took place deep in a Chinese forest against some primitive forest dwellers. He said he had a Chinese rifle with Japanese bullets (even his military equipment was culturally diverse) that were a little bit too small, so that when they left the muzzle of his rifle they tumbled and, at close range, had a devastating effect. He said that after this battle he was immediately promoted to the rank of Colonel and, being unimpressed, he deserted the next day.
He pursued his interest in athletics until he won the championship of North China in the hundred meter run and broadjump competitions. Then he began walking across China. He was greatly impressed by the Chinese art of storytelling. It was common for storytellers to be employed in drinking houses throughout the country. Because of his exposure to this culture early in his life, Michael became a master storyteller and reciter of poetry. He liked to describe the typical Chinese storyteller as a man with a Fu Man Chu mustache, wearing long robes and brandishing an extremely long nail on the little finger of one hand, which would be hidden in huge sleeves and then flourished dramatically during the climax of the story.
He traversed the Chinese countryside on foot, sought out yogis, asked their permission to sit in on their classes, and learned all he could from them. He then walked into Tibet, where he used the same method of educating himself: the “mouth to ear” dialogue between master and pupil. He walked from one master to another, often bartering the master's fee by exchanging what he had learned in China for what he could be taught in Tibet.
Eventually, he made his way to India. Using his method of barter, he was able to exchange what he had learned in China and Tibet for what he was taught in India. It was at this point that he became interested in retarding the aging processes, an interest which led him to master what he called avatara yoga, a practice that reveres youthfulness of the body. It seems that one of the crowning achievements of avatara yoga is its ability to create a “new body” for the aging yogi. Michael said he approached the yogis many times asking them to help him create a new body for himself. He said, “The avatara masters would wave me away like the annoying fly, telling me, 'You are far, far too young to consider a new body'.”
Michael explained to me that growing a new body is a difficult and involved process; for one thing, you must destroy the old body before creating the new one. So the yogi in pursuit of a new body would starve himself almost to death, being kept alive only by a small ball of herbs and honey which periodically would be placed against the roof of his mouth by the priests. Michael said that he met a yogi once who reported that he had achieved a new body. He said the man told him he was having trouble getting used to his new body because it seemed not to fit perfectly– and rubbed here and there.
In India he was ordained as a swami and given the name Karmananda, which, he said, means “happy in his work.” The ceremony took place beside the River Ganges. His swami robes were sanctified by being soaked in the holy river. As soon as the ceremony was over, hundreds of sick people, believing that newly ordained swamis have the power to heal, lined up to be touched and blessed by him.
The next part of Michael’s life story is unclear to me. I know he left India and, through some unfortunate or perhaps fortunate circumstance, was put with other deposed Russian aristocrats and labeled a displaced person. He was then transported to Singapore where he waited out the war years. In 1939, the year the Second World War began in Europe, he would have been perhaps twenty-five years old.
In Singapore, he made a scant living as an itinerant journalist. He told many wonderful stories of this period, but, basically, the situation was that all the Russian aristocrats were poor to the point of near starvation. The government gave them carefully measured survival rations of rice and molasses.
Living alongside the Russian community was a considerable population of rich Americans and Europeans. Michael remembered one American who had a Packard automobile with a hood of solid silver. He also remembered a man who, when his beloved mistress died, had his bar and the area around it glassed in and refrigerated. Then he dressed his dead, frozen mistress in an evening gown and posed her seated on a bar stool. That way, he could see her every day. He would say to his guests, in an exclamation of grief, "Look at her. Is she not lovely, even in death?" Periodically, the poor man would enter the cold glass vault to light a cigarette and place it in the beloved’s cigarette holder. Eventually, when there was a power failure, the beloved thawed out and had to be disposed of in the customary way.
During this period Michael put yoga aside and lived among his Russian friends as a bon vivant–a mad Russian poet/journalist. It seems there was always enough food to keep body and soul together, and, often enough, a bottle of vodka could be procured for an evening of poetry and comradeship.
At the end of the war, Michael immigrated to Australia. He soon was hired by a state-run television station to do a regular program demonstrating yogic practices. It was here that he met Daphne, the “starlet” of my imagination. The daughter of an Australian rancher, she became his student whom he later married. A skilled yogina, she helped him in his teaching by demonstrating yoga poses as he lectured. He became known as “The Father of Australian Yoga.”
After living in Australia for ten years, he immigrated to New York City, where he was living at the time I met him at the seminar in Switzerland. He had linked up with the deposed Russian aristocracy in New York, and he had many friends there. His primary reasons for coming to New York were both to enjoy American culture--he often said, “I like the pulse of this city”--and also because he was interested in writing and wanted to be near the publishing center of America.
Michael Volin exuded the mysteries of Far Eastern cultures, yet he was always earthy and unpretentious, and he loved American culture, especially the films noire of Humphrey Bogart. He took great delight in learning American slang. I enjoyed explaining the meaning of such sentences as "Yeah. Big Nose Louie's been sent up 'da river to 'da Big House, bum ticker an' all." Ominously, Michael confessed to me that, from time to time, he was worried about his own "ticker." He eventually died of heart failure, in 1993, after moving back to Australia in 1982.
Michael once told a famous American scholar that he wanted to write his autobiography. The scholar replied, “I have the perfect title for it: The Man from Somewhere Else.”
You can find references to his Australian career on Google, and his books are available on amazon.com.
One cannot be sure, but Michael was around 60 years old when I took the following photographs for him, and that is the lovely Daphne balancing on her hands:
