Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.
DEC. 22, 2023 (NYtimes.com)
Sally Kempton with Swami Muktananda in the mid-1970s. Benno Friedman
Sally Kempton, born 1943
She was a feminist journalist covering the counterculture — then gave it all up to follow a guru.
By Sasha Weiss
In 1970, Sally Kempton published an article in Esquire that was the talk of the New York literary world. Since the 1960s, Kempton had been writing sardonic dispatches from the underground scene for The Village Voice, describing in one an antic show by the Velvet Underground at Andy Warhol’s bar. She was an elegant, wiry blonde, a sharp-tongued chain-smoker and, according to one friend, an “object of erotic obsession” for many men. So when her essay came out — with its furious, tormented account of growing up as a young woman trained to be pleasing to men and deny her own intellect, it piqued interest.
The essay’s tone is at once superior and pained; for many women at the time, it captured their contradictory feelings. “Once during my senior year in high school I let a boy rape me (that is not, whatever you may think, a contradiction in terms),” Kempton wrote. “Afterward I ran away down the stairs while he followed, shouting apologies which became more and more abject as he realized that my revulsion was genuine, and I felt an exhilaration which I clearly recognized as triumph. By letting him abuse me I had won the right to tell him I hated him; I had won the right to hurt him.”
Unsparing toward herself, she reserved her most cutting observations for the men closest to her. She described how her father, the renowned journalist Murray Kempton, had molded her like Pygmalion to soothe his own fragile ego. She charged her husband, Harrison Starr, a film producer, with thoughtlessly putting his career before hers. At night, she fantasized about smashing his head in with a frying pan. She didn’t dare, not because she was afraid of hurting him but because “I was afraid that if I cracked his head with a frying pan he would leave me.” Kempton’s marriage ended soon after. Her father was ultimately more forgiving, but the tensions between them simmered for years.
With a new boyfriend, Kempton began experimenting with LSD and meditation, seeking relief from persistent anxiety. A few years after the Esquire essay was published, she walked into a room where Swami Muktananda, an Indian master of Siddha yoga who was just bringing his practice to the United States, was leading a meditation. As soon as Kempton entered his presence, she later wrote, “I opened my eyes to a world scintillating with love and meaning.” She dropped everything to join Muktananda (who was also called Baba, meaning “Father”) on his tour across the country, took vows of poverty and celibacy, became a vegetarian and meditated for hours each day. She began living in the guru’s ashrams in upstate New York and in India, where she stayed in a dormitory with 40 other women, her few belongings stowed under her bed. Among the New York literary set, Kempton’s monastic turn was a source of wonder and occasional derision.
After years of rigorous training, Kempton was initiated as a monk, was given the name Durgananda (which means bliss of the divine mother) and began dressing in red from head to toe. She stayed on for decades — during which Muktananda’s organization became a multimillion-dollar enterprise — teaching, editing the guru’s books and, after he died, supporting his female successor.
A longtime friend, the writer Sara Davidson, interviewed her in 2001 and found Kempton unchanged in certain aspects from the sophisticated woman with the wicked sense of humor whom she remembered. But Kempton had a new equanimity and a palpable sense of joy — what she described as the “juicy, vibrant feeling” that was her primary state of being. When Davidson expressed her surprise that Kempton would surrender herself so thoroughly to the authority of a male guru, Kempton replied that she, too, had considered this: Was she running away from her problems by handing power to someone outside herself? But she eventually realized that her relationship with Baba allowed her to tap into the great love that undergirded all life. “I wasn’t in a state of surrender,” she told Davidson. “I was practicing surrender.”
Her devotion to her guru was complete. When Muktananda was accused of sexual misconduct toward female acolytes, Kempton stood by him, dismissing the accusations as “laughable” and “ridiculous” in a 1994 New Yorker investigation. (Muktananda did not publicly deny the claims.) In later interviews, Kempton was more circumspect, saying she really couldn’t know what happened. She was also close friends with, and publicly defended, Marc Gafni, a charismatic teacher who was dogged throughout his career by accusations of sexual misconduct. An ordained rabbi, he was renounced in 2015 by more than 100 leaders of the Jewish community and founded a center for spirituality, where Kempton taught. (Gafni says the claims were false, the result of a smear campaign.) When I asked her brother David Kempton about her capacity to accept Gafni, he told me that Kempton held a very broad spiritual perspective, believing that “everything is ultimately a manifestation of the divine in some way.” That didn’t mean that everything was good, he explained, but she was holding “the complexity of the world and all its realities and at the same time holding a space of compassion and love.”
Worldliness and transcendence, desire and mastery of desire: These were some of the paradoxes of meditative practice that Kempton wrote about and embodied. She was the author of several books, one of which, “Meditation for the Love of It,” is considered a classic guide. Her writing on meditation has the snap and intimacy of her early journalism, but all archness has been scrubbed away, and what’s left is a voice that is curious and confiding. “Meditation is like any other intimate relationship: It requires patience, commitment and deep tolerance,” she writes. “Just as our encounters with others can be wondrous but also baffling, scary and even irritating, our encounters with the self have their own moods and flavors.”
In the early 2000s, Kempton left the ashram. She was ready to rejoin the world and resume her old name. She became a beloved meditation teacher for tens of thousands of students. “She took the discipline and depth of ashram life and brought it to yoga studios across the U.S. and Europe,” Tara Judelle, a former student of Kempton’s and a spiritual teacher, told me. “She was like Jacques Cousteau of the meditative world.” In a video on her YouTube channel, Kempton sits in her Carmel Valley, Calif., home, talking in a stream about her ardent striving for self-knowledge, a striking woman with graying hair and twinkling eyes. She is witty and accessible, even when speaking about inner mysteries. “I’m really interested,” she says, smiling, with no trace of her old irony, “in full enlightenment.”
Sasha Weiss is a deputy editor for the magazine. She has written about Janet Malcolm’s unsparing journalism, Justin Peck’s choreography and Judy Chicago’s feminist art.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)