Hippie Days

As P.D. Ouspensky posited in A New Model of the Universe almost a hundred years ago, time has 3 dimensions, and moves in a spiral fashion. I'll leave it to you to read his argument.

But I believe his theorizing to be accurate because it matches my experience of life: while there is a mostly-linear continuum of events, there are also moments of transcendent presence, and there are the cycles, large and small, in which a turn of the spiral takes us back along a path in many ways familiar, but new. This cycling is a way of gauging one's progress (or lack of it) in life. 

This weekend, we came around a big circle, returning to a part of the world where the Fred & Marigold Odyssey became official in 1981, tying us into a world one might have thought vanished.

Hippie Days? Hippies don't exist any more -- do they?

As it turns out, and as one might have suspected, hippies have just found niches in off-the-beaten-track communities, where the cooperative spirit that animated this counterculture still thrives. Gardner, Colorado is one such place. Hippie Days isn't on the internet, but it is on the grapevine. And so we found out about it, months ago, and by some luck figured out when it was scheduled. We came down from Denver with optimism, copies of Karmafornia to hawk, and a 1970's era book about alternative communities, titled Shelter.

Fred's cousins lived at a commune in the vicinity of Gardner, where he visited them in maybe 1975. At the Hippie Days festival this historical artifact-book connected us with the denizens who shared space there, partied there, and in some cases still live nearby.

 The music was great: Middle Eastern, with belly dancing; a Grateful Dead tribute band; Cajun, with zydeco fun; and the guy in the green head-wrap is the impresario & drummer of the band Planet O which rocked the place with rock'n'roll, reggae and funk with his band: sax, trumpet, keyboards, vocals, lead guitar & bass.

 The festival rule was No Bad Vibes, and we encountered none. People of all descriptions, from gray and arthritic 60's flower children to toddlers, vaqueros to bikers, and even the cops, were having a fine time. The teenagers especially gave me hope for the future: these young-uns were cheery, dressing each with his or her personal flair without fear of the Style Police whose insistence on conformity is surely a major contributor to the typically dour & sour teenage state of mind.

Oh, and it was a good day for Karmafornia sales as well.
Fred and Marigold's big cycle tapped us back into the tribe, with a smile.

Call It Sleep

I picked up Call It Sleep at a used bookstore, knowing about it only that Henry Roth wrote it as a young man then didn't write again for forty years.

Set it New York in the 20's, it is an immigrant's tale - David, a 6-year-old boy, arrives with his mother, Genya, to join the father (Albert) he does not know, in Brooklyn then the Lower East Side. This is a Balkanized world - Jews crowd in here, Italians there, Irish over there, Poles in a different block. They don't mingle. David's fascination with images of crucified Christ is a response to novelty. He adores an older Polish Catholic boy not for his age nor ethnicity, but because he lives in a parent-free world and introduces David to the freedom of the rooftops where he flies his kite. That Leo uses and despises him is unimportant - this boy possesses roller skates, and his mobility and adventurousness are a welcome contrast to the cramped circumstances of David's days.

Freudian imagery abounds: David's obsessed association of cellars, closets and darkness with sex and animal urges recurs constantly. His mother is his safe haven from all he fears, beginning with his paranoid angry father but extending to his torment at the hands of bigger boys on the street. Certainly he longs for the Oedipal solution to his misery - for his father to be gone, never to come home, so he can have his mother all to himself. She, it would seem, feels the same way. She serves her husband as women did in a time when marriages were arranged and affection was incidental, but does she want to be with him? As a meal ticket Albert is erratic, getting fired from one job after another because his suspiciousness and volcanic moods alienate everyone around him.

A co-worker befriends Albert and shares tickets to the theater, and it seems this closed angry man will begin to enjoy his life. But Luter is more interested in David's mother, and while the novel never makes it explicit, we sense that Luter and Genya are having an affair. Later we learn that in Austria she had an extended affair with a goy organist, and was married off to Albert soon thereafter, almost as punishment for this transgression.

Her fragmented English traps her in their small Yiddish-speaking neighborhood, and so David is trapped as well. The few times he ventures further - once when he runs away, then cannot find his way back, another time when he wanders to the trash-piles by the trolley tracks and is manhandled by a couple of rough older boys - he senses freedom but is hemmed in by his fears. In the cheder he finds inspiration in a passage, and wants to know more, but cannot communicate his anguished curiosity to the rabbi.

Comic relief arrives in the person of his mother's sister Bertha, a loud aggressive red-head who matches Albert insult for insult, doing battle instead of meekly deferring. One day Bertha takes David to the Metropolitan Museum where, intimidated by the size of the place, they latch onto a pair of unsuspecting visitors they follow from room by room. Finally exhausted by this couple's seemingly endless trek among the exhibits, Bertha and David escape as from the jaws of death, dragging themselves home from the ordeal.

The inner being of a child is vividly evoked - David tries to fit in with other boys, insinuating himself into their games but hovering on the periphery, afraid to be rejected. When he is lost he longs to be in their midst despite their contempt, because they are the world he knows. And this world is a dangerous place: the electrical explosion on the trolley tracks where he drops a piece of metal that bridges one rail to the live wire, haunts his mind and needles him toward further experiment - which proves nearly fatal.

Much of the book is a gritty catalogue of sights, stenches, racket and rudeness - it is only after the halfway mark that a story arc emerges. This narrative builds in power, until in the end we have a very satisfying conclusion: David has survived his curiosity, Albert is humbled, and it seems life will improve in small ways. But the first half of the book is more an atmospheric memoir than a true novel in which character, plot, conflict and resolution play their parts.

FIRE!

Colorado is on fire this summer, a situation likely to worsen as light winter and early heat exacerbate our desert climate. This seems a good time to reflect on what wildfire does, good and bad.

This last week Fred and I went camping in an area where forest fires swept through ten years ago (2002 was as dry as 2012). Trappers Lake became popular in the 1930's and 40's with visitors escaping the summer heat of Texas and the Midwest. My parents started taking fishing vacations here in the 40's, and in 1999 celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a family trip to the lake.

I hadn't been back since, and my brother warned me the fire had changed everything.

Well, my first memory of Trappers is of the silvery sheen of dead trees, killed in the early 40's by the spruce beetle. Over time, live trees have greened up the area somewhat, but those dense stands of deadwood enabled the 2002 conflagration known as Big Fish Fire. Ten years later, what we see are bare trunks, standing or fallen, and among them new growth.

Few aspen grew around Trappers before, because the spruce formed what geographers call a "climax forest" - once certain vegetation dominate, they make an area inhospitable to other species by changing the soil acidity and forming a light-blocking overstory.
But now those spruce are out of the way. Oh sure, there are lots of dead trunks, but among them grow berry bushes, chaparral, abundant wildflowers - and aspen and Douglas fir are coming in. Birds are plentiful, along with mammals small and large. The plants thriving now will transform this forest into one which will over time be more beautiful, to many eyes.

Yes, those charred stands look like stubble, and it's difficult to walk through the burn areas where trees have fallen all directions. It's dangerous too, because any wind will knock down the standing trunks, and it's hot in the absence of shade. But in ten more years this will be a beautiful place again, a mixed forest. We'll see hillside meadows dappled with aspen, which in the autumn will shimmer gold against deep blue skies.

From that vantage, we may even be able to appreciate the fire.

Arthur Rex

I've long been a fan of tales about King Arthur, and I've read everything from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and T.H. White's magnificent The Once and Future King, to Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. In high school I wrote a research paper about Tintagel, the castle on the coast of Cornwall considered to be the model for Camelot.

So I'm pleased to report that Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex is a worthy addition to the pantheon. With a dash of humor (for example, telling us that the original name of Camelot was Cameliard) he spells out the philosophical and humanistic implications of Arthur's bold experiment of the Round Table, in which there is no hierarchy, and men-at-arms forswear combat for its own sake, adopting instead the rules of chivalry, setting aside blood-feuds. They pledge their lives and honor to defending the weak and upholding right, fighting fairly and holding no grudges.

Spoiler alert (if you know nothing of King Arthur and his knights): Here is a passage near the end, in which Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawaine fight each other to the death. Gawaine, having learned that Launcelot, defending Guinevere's honor, slew all his brothers, feels he must fight him:
  "And if Sir Gawaine was victorious, he had no brothers left but the vile Mordred, and the Round Table was shattered forever. And perhaps the best thing he could do for his sons was to give them an example by dying nobly. Now this was the first time that Sir Gawaine had ever thought in this fashion, for he had loved his life in all its phases.
  "Whereas Sir Launcelot, who had always hated life and wanted to die, now that he was bleeding to death he began to think otherwise, for actually dying is not so romantic as is thinking about death when one is invincible, and Launcelot had never been in real danger before in his life. Therefore he began to see himself in a new light, and he came to think that his invincibility might be a myth, and that he had previously overwhelmed his enemies because they were half-conquered by the myth before they met him."


Thus, even in the tragic circumstance of these two great knights battling to destroy one another, Berger makes tongue-in-cheek observations that set one to nodding over that most human of tendencies - to change one's mind.

Near the end of the battle against his bastard son Mordred, in which all his knights but one perish, Arthur laments to the Lady of the Lake:
  "I would ask why you attended me only in the beginning of my reign and thereafter no more? And methinks you led Merlin away as well, leaving me altogether without magical counsel. Lady, I could have used some! For 'twas reality that brought me down, and I had no defense against it."
  "King Arthur," said the Lady of the Lake, who was gleaming in white samite, "the passions are not real, but rather fantastic. Thou couldst not have done better than thou didst."
  "Yet," said King Arthur, "was I wise to tolerate the friendship between Launcelot and Guinevere for so many years? I know that I thereby connived in a Christian sin."
  "Address me not in Christian sentiments," said the Lady of the Lake, "the which I find too coarse for fine kings. Thine obligation was to maintain power in as decent a way as would be yet the most effective, and a Camelot without Guinevere, a Round Table without Launcelot, were inconceivable, as would be an Arthur who put to death his best friend and his queen. All human beings must perform according to their nature."
  Now King Arthur did wonder at this speech, and he said, "Then the will is not free? And can we not choose to be either good or evil, but are selected for whichever?"
  "This is the wrong question," said the Lady of the Lake, "being political and not concerned with the truth. And do not chide me for abandoning thee, my dear Arthur, for I am here now..." 

By upholding the traditions of otherworldly magic and all-too-worldly temptation and struggle, Berger has written a fair and humorous accounting of a beloved tale. Read and enjoy!

Faulkner's "The Bear"

Faulkner's "The Bear"

This not-so-short story contains the major players, history, longing and roots of the American South: slavery with its corruption of slaveholders; war and its aftermaths; the Indian lineage which predated and outlasted slavery and yet vanished into the maw of modernity; and wilderness itself, shrunk and compromised by greed and settlement yet still potent, still the strongest of all forces and entities.

Isaac (Ike) McCaslin links these worlds, straddles them all. As a boy his spirit father is the solitary Indian Sam Fathers, obtained as a slave yet never answering to anyone except at will, who teaches him wood-lore then releases him into wilderness where his understanding surpasses all other white men's and black men's, matched only by Sam Fathers himself.

The bear itself is a totem, predator and prey, of wilderness. The men hunt it because conquest is in their nature. The bear eludes them because it is wild, and wildness is stronger than civilization. As a boy Ike encounters it only after he leaves his rifle back at the hunting camp, then finally abandons his compass and watch too - they meet only on the bear's terms.

As a man he argues the history of the South with his cousin McCaslin (Cass) Edmonds, his father in the ways of his white race though not his equal in understanding the guilt they bear toward those once enslaved. Even after 1865, that burden of bondage and debt owns the generations and governs their acts. The blood between races, both in spilling and begetting, holds them in tense inseparability, as does their labor: "...cotton - the two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on..." (p 279, Go Down, Moses; Vintage Books c 1942).

He spins in generality the upsurgence of the KKK to preserve "the Southern way of life"; in specifics he gives us Ike's white uncle who held for safekeeping the boy's inheritance till he'd turn 21, at which point Ike unwraps the silver cup filled with gold pieces to discover a snowfall of IOU's and a shiny tin coffeepot holding a few coppers, his fortune eroded by the old man's vices. The black son of this constellation refuses to touch the money left to him instead of paternity; the white son receives his - except that it's been squandered. Sam Fathers too, with his slave mother, has been betrayed by his father, to Carothers McCaslin (the white patriarch): "for both of whom he had swapped an underbred trotting gelding to old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief from whom he had likewise bought the land..." (p. 249, ibid.). Belief in the greater value of money has trammeled the old deep patrimony of the land itself, the pride and dignity of those who toil (greater than those who reap the fruits), and the lineage that in Faulkner's world is one's true strength (and lacking it, fatal weakness).


The story completes its arc, back to the wilderness, burial site of Sam Fathers and Lion, the dog finally capable of cornering the patriarch of bears, the one so fearsome that only the foolishly brave fyce (terrier) and the huge impassive blue dog would hunt it to confrontation. Ike finds traces of the dog's burial but not Sam Fathers': ..."the knoll... was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again..." (p. 312, ibid.). This, not the works of man, is Faulkner's bedrock of faith.

Reading Faulkner

Reading Faulkner

A year ago, Fred and I read Moby Dick for the first time. We enjoyed our class of mostly fifty- and sixty-somethings, who brought life experience and perspective to a complex work unfairly loathed by generations forced to read it too soon.

Now we're reading a Faulkner novel, Go Down Moses, in four class sessions, and gaining a similar impression. Though not a long book, it spans generations. Tonight as we read a portion of "The Bear" aloud to each other, I remarked that the writer has Hemingway's macho love of hunting and male bonding, spun out in sentences that have more in common with Henry James's style.
I always thought Henry James couldn't have conveyed much without the comma, which he relies on as he accretes meaning phrase by phrase, until he lands, having circled his meaning completely, at the point - and you know exactly where you are and what he's telling you.

Faulkner is James without the commas. He's harder to read - you really have to pay attention, and multiple readings of a chapter are useful - but he does arrive where he's going, and if you stick with him, you'll get there too. Like any storyteller in the oral tradition, he digresses. He's not going to tell you about the hunting camp without telling you who's there, how many years they've been coming, who cooks, which game they're eating, and especially how the wilderness looms about them, watching with a sort of hungry indifference - in a single sentence. Archetypal creatures live here: the buck with fourteen points, invisible to the men who would shoot him but passing the boy and old Sam Fathers, who admire but would not kill him though they too are hunters. Sam Fathers, whose lineage runs as deep in time as this land's, raises a palm in greeting as the stag appears near them then vanishes again.

So we come to the bear, old and cunning, a terror to the hunting dogs which bay so heartily after deer and coons but hang back when they pick up his scent. The boy wants to see the bear, to witness his wild dominant existence, and one day he decides he must convince the bear to let himself be seen. By being unarmed. So he leaves behind first his rifle, at the camp, then after some hours going deeper into the forest, abandons also his compass and watch. By making himself defenseless, he pledges to the bear that he will bring back nothing but the sight of his own eyes. He will not only not shoot, he will not blaze a trail for those who would. He will not himself know where he is or has been as he wanders in the bear's realm. And through this homage, he is given a glimpse of the creature. Here's how Faulkner builds suspense:

"When he realised he was lost, he did as Sam had coached and drilled him: made a cast to cross his backtrack. He had not been going very fast for the last two or three hours, and he had gone even less fast since he left the compass and watch on the bush. So he went slower still now, since the tree could not be very far; in fact, he found it before he really expected to and turned and went to it. But there was no bush beneath it, no compass nor watch, so he did next as Sam had coached and drilled him: made this next circle in the opposite direction and much larger, so that the pattern of the two of them would bisect his track somewhere, but crossing no trace nor mark anywhere of his feet or any feet, and now he was going faster though still not panicked, his heart beating a little more rapidly but strong and steady enough, and this time it was not even the tree because there was a down log beside it which he had never seen before and beyond the log a little swamp, a seepage of moisture somewhere between earth and water, and he did what Sam had coached and drilled him as the next and the last, seeing as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the warped indentation in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill with water until it was level full and the water began to overflow and the sides of the print began to dissolve away. Even as he looked up he saw the next one, and, moving, the one beyond it; moving, not hurrying, running, but merely keeping pace with them as they appeared before him as though they were being shaped out of thin air just one constant pace short of where he would lose them forever and be lost forever himself, tireless, eager, without doubt or dread, panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his heart, emerging suddenly into a little glade and the wilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified - the tree, the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him." [from "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, Vintage Books c 1942, pp 197-8]

I was going to quote a shorter section but I couldn't start in the middle of a sentence. You see, what he's written makes sense. It has music and poetry, it has earth and blood. Faulkner's storytelling has a compelling life. You might wish his language was less convoluted but what would you have then? Hemingway.

What books make you happy?

We're approaching April Fools Day, the Taymes New Year, so I naturally turn to foolishness, silliness and laughter.
And I think about books I've read that have given me great delight - without the Angst!
Here's my list - send me yours:

Little, Big by John Crowley - I plug this book constantly. To me it has the perfect blend of wit, joie de vivre, magic and insight. If you haven't read it, you ought to, if you enjoy authors who take your hand and lead you places your mystic self remembers, that lighten your spirit.

Fame and Love in New York by Ed Sanders - I've read as much of Mr. Sanders' output as I can find, and this is his magnum opus. In his semi-mythic New York a group of writers recreate the conditions in which Balzac wrote so prolifically: they lock themselves in a room (accessed through the Duct Tape Boutique) with a gigantic coffee urn, and pound those typewriters. The book is replete with marginalia - what a fun read!

The Jamais Vu Papers by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin - a psychedelic excursion. Go find a copy!

A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan - in his melancholy way, Brautigan wrote many books that make me laugh. I cannot see a can of mackerel in the grocery store without recalling how, when there was nothing else to eat, his characters were unable to converse about philosophy. And the frogs drove them crazy.

A Graveyard for Lunatics by Ray Bradbury - in which this wizard of language romps through the special-effects movie creations of Ray Harryhausen. Bradbury has written many fine books and is one of our short story masters - who can fail to delight in "The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair" in which a few people hear the comedic pair's ghosts moving a piano up a long flight of steps on certain LA nights?

Giant Bones and The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle - he shares with us a fully imagined world with its own peoples and animal species - very down-to-earth magic here.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - the author's tongue-in-cheek asides to the reader are perfectly matched by the characters in Tony Richardson's movie addressing the camera - one April Fool's Day, Fred and I dined in swank at the Watergate then saw this fine movie - a stellar anniversary!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - I was in a book group that read this. Mostly older women, they were put off by the quantity of subplots. I told them it was just like a comic book: you get an installment of the cover story along with several one- or two-pagers and an extended lesser story or two. They liked it better after that. My only twinge of disappointment: alas, no pictures!

On the Road by Jack Kerouac - if you don't crack a smile reading this, you are taking life too seriously. Even if you've never driven somebody else's Cadillac across a cornfield, you can enjoy the ride of Sal Paradise, with Dean Moriarty at the wheel.

The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber - much of his writing hasn't aged well - his mocking of his black servants' language is jarring to the modern reader - but most of the stories in this collection are hilarious. His eccentric family stars in these short pieces, which may be fiction or what is now known as creative non-fiction. His other standout is "You Could Look it Up" - a midget is sent to pinch-hit in a major league baseball game. All he has to do is stand there with the bat on his shoulder while the pitcher misses his strike zone four times. But no, he has to swing. And make contact. And run on his short legs... For whatever reason, this piece seems to have evaded every Thurber anthology.

The California Book of the Dead by Tim Farrington - he has the ability to sketch a character in under a dozen words, which fills me with admiration.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe - this isn't a comedy but the writing is vivid and the punctuation trippy, and Kesey's Merry Band of Pranksters are a fun bunch to hang out with - at least, for a while.

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols - absurdity tweaks normalcy every chance it gets in this small New Mexico community.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman - I laughed most of the way through this autobiography. Feynman could never manage orthodoxy. His fearless curiosity leavened with blazing intelligence made him a titan in the world of physics. If you're even mildly interested in the Manhattan Project, read this book.

Well, that's a start. I'm sure I've left out some good ones. What are yours?