Marshall Motz

I didn't start out to be a professional student, but somehow that's the way it seems to have turned out. The sober side of that only slightly facetious remark, though, is that I really am committed to the proposition that learning is a lifelong project."Life is a school." as the Cosmic Lady used to say. (She became the subject matter of my first book, a memoir). I began this psychic hegira in the unlikely city of Akron, Ohio, back in Depression days, have pursued it right up to my present residential--even more unlikely--locale, the Magic City of Santa Cruz, California. I majored in Philosophy at the University here, the erstwhile student of such esoteric giants as Norman O. Brown and Gregory Bateson. Looking back at it all now--and still in the name-dropping mode--I can see that I've had some truly unusual teachers: Alan Freed, back in Akron, where we invented Rock n Roll (what? you hadn't heard about that?) the Reverends Carl Burnham, Dallas F. Billington and the Humbard Family, where, also back in Akron, we helped generate the first beginnings of the oncoming Megachurch movement. Chasing the Lady Sophia all the way to (where else?) California, along the way I knew Billy Graham (at Fuller Seminary) saw the spark of Dominionism first begin to glow, studied under Ayn Rand, became an atheist and then a Gnostic of sorts, fascinated with the horror of America's swing to the Far Right, echoing the collapse and the perversion of the original Akron Evangelicalism. Guess what I did at that point? I went back to school! Yes, it's all been... well, unlikely.