MY PORTABLE BOHEMIA (the opening chapters) by Galen Green

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My Portable Bohemia


by Galen Green



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There’s the weak and the strong
And the many stars that guide us,
We have some of them inside us.

-- Dar Williams
from “The Mercy of the Fallen” (2002)



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Contents


~ Book One ~

I. The Attic at the Center of . . . . . (1 – 13)

II. The Pied Piper of Perspective (14 – 35)

III. Gunfire Inside the Hourglass (36 – 40)

IV. Attic Snapshots (41 – 48)

V. Rhyming My Way Beyond “Hillside High” (49 – 60)

VI. Wichita’s New York School of Poetry (61 – 68)

VII. Adventures in Not-Knowing (69 – 74)


~ Book Two ~

VIII. Song Was Ever My Weather (75 – 84)

IX. The Arc of Human Destiny is a Tragic Arc (85 – 89)

X. The Birth of Mythoklastic Therapy in the
Breakdown of Neo-Feudalism (90 – 98)

XI. Are We But Sleepwalkers, Ghosts at a Séance? (99 – 103)

XII. Preliminary Conjectures on Recent
American Politics (104 – 108)


~ Book Three ~

XIII. An Autumn Evening in 1970 (109 – 111)

XIV. Ten Tiny Poems from Apple Grunt (112 – 121)

XV. Three Songs from Our Honeymoon Dungeon (122 – 128)


~ Book Four ~

XVI. Young Galen’s First Churching (129 – 133)

XVII. Saved and Re-Saved (134 – 136)

XVIII. Mixed-Message Methodistism (137 – 142)

XIX. “Don’t Ever Limit Yourself” (143 – 147)

XX. Some Quick Sketches (148 – 152)


~ Book Five ~

XXI. Returning to the First-Person Past (153 – 161)

XXII. Angels of Sweet Validation (162 – 169)

XXIII. Walking the Streets of Youth (170 – 177)

XXIV. In the Syllogism of My Becoming (178 – 185)

XXV. Semiconsciously Gestating within (186 – 194) the Womb of the World

XXVI. Emboldened to Know the Real to be Real (195 – 201)


~ Book Six ~

XXVII. You’re the Child You Were Sent Here to Save (202 – 209)

XXVIII. “What Do You People Want, Anyway?” (210 – 215)

XXIX. If You Want Peace, Work For Mythoklasm (216 – 222)

XXX. Joining in the Conversation (223 – 228)

XXXI. Three Books that have Brought Me Here (229 – 239)



~ Book Seven ~

XXXII. The Seminary: Notes for a Screenplay (240 – 249)
XXXIII. The Interview Begins (250 – 257)

XXXIV. The Interview Continues (258 – ff.)

XXXV.

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~ Prologue ~
And so, I set out to explain how it was that I came to be the way I am. The answer was perfectly obvious to me. But that’s because I was there at the time. Over the years, some folks who were not there have persisted in raising the question. (And not always in a neighborly, admiring way.) Of late, their curiosity has crescendoed into a clamor. Hence, the following…….




~ Book One ~



Chapter I

The Attic at the Center of . . . . .


1. Our Cave of Making

Let’s begin with an attic. Because our attic’s ceiling and walls consist of the underside of the sharply slanted roof of a two and a half-story wood-framed house, probably built sometime during the First World War or in the early 1920’s, they are very nearly one in the same – or, more precisely, several in the same. And because the whopper-jawed interior surfaces of much of our attic has been painted with a slightly yellowing rough-textured eggshell-white spackling, it would not be entirely unreasonable for the reader to imagine our attic’s interior as resembling the “closed set” for some World War I era silent German Expressionist film that’s set within the catawampus interior surfaces of an enormous Neo-Post-Cubist egg . . . The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as filmed from inside the mind of the cabinet, if you will.

Despite my aversion to stereotyping, I must admit that the attic I’m inviting the reader to picture in your mind’s theater might fairly be advertised as the quintessential bohemian attic. If Puccini had set his opera La Boheme in the attic of a rundown (pre-gentrified) old farmhouse with weather-worn white paint and creaking stairs, barely a stone’s throw from the edge of any of a thousand university campuses in the year 1970, then the attic in question would have done nicely as the setting for such an opera. Besides serving its young occupants as a “Cave of Making” (to borrow W.H. Auden’s apt metaphor), it also proved to be a cave of the winds. With windows facing all four directions and no storm windows nor recent calking nor insulation of any kind in the frames (nor even screens over most of its windows), our Vietnam-Era Pucciniesque attic might well have been the very cave of the winds which whatever reactionary wag first coined the quip had in mind when he (or she) asserted that “an open mind is a cave of the winds.”

As we’re all well aware, the truth of the matter, instead, is that an open mind is as indispensable a tool to anyone who wishes to effectively serve their community, family, country, planet or self as, say, moisture is indispensable to a red red rose. But let that be for now. Suffice it to say that our attic resembled a cave in several ways. It also resembled a womb; for, like a womb, it ended up giving birth to its young occupants’ future selves, who had to leave it behind in order to go forth and become themselves but who, paradoxically, took it with them wherever they went thenceforth, for the rest of their lives. In my own case, it became a kind of portable bohemia; for, ‘though I’ve spent a good deal of the ensuing forty years of my life in equally bohemian surroundings, that catawampus eggshell of a drafty cave of a womb of a poets’ attic studio I shared with Art Dunbar, from the middle of 1970 till the middle of 1971 (from June to June, as I recall) contained as much as any single place on earth could contain those moments and molecules which most succinctly explain how it is that I’ve come to be the way I am today.


2. Our Dramatis Personae

If, in your mind’s theater, Gentle Reader, the place in which our drama is set is that attic at 1725 North Fairmount, and the time is June of 1970 through June of 1971, who, then, might our principal characters (our dramatis personae) be? I’ve already named, of course, two of them: Art Dunbar (American philosopher and philanthropist; born 1947) and your humble servant, Galen Green (American philosopher and philanthropist; born 1949). Two more remain to be accounted for. The first is the young woman who happened to be my fiancée at the time, Kate Schulte (1951-2011; American philosopher and philanthropist). The fourth and final character in our drama is someone whom I’ve chosen to name Everybody Else. I’ve chosen this name not merely out of mental laziness (for which I am famous), but for the worthier reason that literally Everybody Else (both the quick and the dead) in the entire universe somehow managed to troop through the physical space of our attic within the twelve months we inhabited it. To save time and paper, however, I promise not to mention more than a dozen or so of this legion of many within the span of today’s brief discourse. Still, this is not to say that each and every one of them didn’t play his or her small but meaningful role in making me into the Monster of Mythoklasm that I’ve since become.


3. Our Historical Backdrop

Such then are the place, the time and the principal characters in our drama. What then ought one to say regarding the historical backdrop of the process under scrutiny here? If one were to think of our 360-odd days in our attic as standing in a row like books between a pair of bookends, then what would those bookends look like?

Well, I suppose that the one on the left might look like . . . the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings in which four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed and nine others wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen during a protest against America’s incursion into Cambodia . . . while the bookend on the right might look more like the May 3, 1971 maiden broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered. If this were someone else’s reminiscence, the bookends on either side of it – at its opening and at its closing – might look much different. But I’m the one doing the remembering here today; and these are my bookends; and this is what I remember as having happened during those 360-odd days standing in a row like books between the “bookends” I’ve just mentioned.

Of course, to color in the historical backdrop of our drama—for the sake of those too young to remember these events firsthand, it might not hurt to offer a tiny bit of further background. On April 29, 1970, the United States invaded Cambodia to hunt for the Viet Cong; and massive antiwar protests ensued throughout the U.S. Of equal significance to me, however, was the fact that the following day just so happened to be my twenty-first birthday, upon which occasion my parents, Harry & Margaret, presented me with the smallest, most rugged model of Brothers brand portable typewriter (manual, of course), on which I ended up writing most of my earliest poetry and prose. Then, the day after that, President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. forces to cross into neutral Cambodia, threatening to widen the Vietnam War, sparking nationwide riots and leading to the aforementioned Kent State shootings.

No generation ever chooses its own name – its label, its “brand name.” Myself, I would have much preferred to have my generation branded with any number of labels other than “Baby-boomers” or “The Woodstock Generation” or “The Vietnam Generation.” Of these three, however, I suppose I’ll have to admit that the label most fitting is, sad to say, “The Vietnam Generation.” Even so, there was always much more to us than that shabby label expresses. If circumstances allow me here today to paint from a broad enough palette, then maybe – just maybe – I’ll be able to share with you a little bit of what I mean by this.

First and foremost, however, I wish to keep my present focus on my initial goal of explaining how it was that I came to be the way that I am. One of the fundamental components of the way I am is my role as an historical anthropologist. It is a role I could never have come to with any measurable degree of success or satisfaction without the immeasurable support provided me by National Public Radio; so that, even ‘though I’m choosing here today to imagine the aforementioned May 3, 1971 maiden broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered as representing that bookend on the right side – the “closing” side – of those 360-odd days of sharing that attic with Art Dunbar, it would be impossible for me to overstate the degree to which my nearly four subsequent decades of daily exposure to NPR broadcasts have expedited the making of me into me; for, even ‘though my twelve months in the attic preceded the arrival of NPR in my hungry young life, the events of that attic year did much to whet my appetite for the banquet of nourishing information which All Things Considered served up to me – and to millions like me – every weekday afternoon at 5:00, way back before there was anything else of that sort available.

Specifically (since we’re on the subject of “historical backdrop”), I can remember following the daily horrors which beset the peoples of South Asia, beginning (if I recall correctly) with Bangladesh and eastern Bengal being flooded in late August of 1971, and thousands having to flee the area . . . then followed by a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal a month later, in Orissa State in India, which killed 10,000 . . . then followed on December 3rd by the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, with Pakistan attacking 9 Indian airbases and India launching a massive invasion of East Pakistan the next day. It wasn’t until considerably after the fact that most Americans – myself included – began to learn of some the war’s more outrageous atrocities, such the Pakistani Army’s December 14th killing of 1500 Bangladeshi intellectuals.

Anyway, these woes of the peoples of the Asian Subcontinent just so happened to constitute the first big story I had the opportunity to follow throughout those first few months of NPR’s arrival in my life, in those first few months following my “attic year” with Art Dunbar, that attic year which became the prototype for my portable bohemia.

The historical backdrop and cultural context surrounding the days and weeks immediately prior to Art’s and my each coming up with $25 to put together for the $50 monthly rent on our attic apartment at 1725 North Fairmount, in the late spring of 1970, provides an abundance of clues as to why our bohemia – which would later prove to be so amazingly portable – took on the flavor and hue that it did. For example, January 3rd of 1970 marked the very last studio performance by the Beatles. Then on February 2nd, British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell died. On April 10th, Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles had disbanded and that he was releasing his first solo album. April 22nd marked the very first Earth Day celebration in the U.S. And on May 8th (a mere four days after the aforementioned Kent State shootings), the Beatles released their twelfth and final record album Let It Be.



4. Our Soundtrack

Of course, many other things happened during that period, too. And, of those, many, of course, carried vastly graver historical importance that did any of these few I’ve just mentioned. My motive in mentioning these particular items of cultural context is that they provide me with a handy (albeit somewhat raggedy) segway to my talking about what I’ll call here (for lack of a better word) the “soundtrack” to Art’s and my attic year.

Just as everyone in the entire universe, at one time or another, trooped through our attic during the timeframe in question here, so it was that very nearly every sound in the universe which one peoples or another consider to be music was to be heard issuing from the leaky windows of our attic, at one time or another, during that twelvemonth. But I’d like to open my commentary on our bohemian prototype’s vast 1970-1971 “soundtrack” with a dinky discography which, for me, encapsulates and enshrines so incredibly many memory triggers that I have but to hear a few seconds of any one of the songs on any one of these three “record albums” (as we aging “Baby-boomers” called them, back in those twelve-inch black vinyl days), in order for my entire psyche to be transported in Great Nature’s “Way-Back Machine” to some vividly specific moment which I helplessly associate with that corresponding nano-sliver of “soundtrack.”

The dinky discography with such awesome power to enthrall my psyche is simply this: Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, Bob Dylan’s New Morning, and the Beatles’ Let It Be. Ironically, none of these three collections represents any of these three magnificent artists’ supreme artistry – although Ladies of the Canyon comes mighty close. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m like a giddy schoolgirl in my admiration for Dylan; but I personally would rate New Morning somewhere within the middle (i.e. mediocre) 1/3 of his oeuvres. “Sign on the Window” and “Time Passes Slowly” are the only two of the album’s dozen tracks that I really like, of which the latter ended up getting picked by Kate Schulte and me to be used as the bridal processional at our wedding in late June of 1971 (albeit our inspiration for this choice came not so much from Dylan’s own relatively choppy rendition as from Judy Collins’ silkier and more lilting cover of it on her Whales and Nightingales.)

As for Let It Be, the Beatles’ final album as the Beatles, it shares some shortcomings with New Morning. Nevertheless, Paul McCartney’s flawless piano and vocal rendering of his song, “Let It Be,” a truly classic mythologizing tribute to his mother, Mary McCartney, whom he lost to cancer when he was in his early teens, has always moved me deeply, as has his “The Long and Winding Road.” Moreover, besides this pair of undeniable hits, I’ve always harbored a secret fondness for “Two of Us” (the last great vocal duet between the Lennon & McCartney of every “Boomer’s” youth) and “Across the Universe” (arguably one of John Lennon’s penultimate masterpieces). The remaining eight songs in the Let It Be collection . . . not so much. As with the majority of the tracks on New Morning, they tend to strike me as relatively under-inspired “filler.” In the case of both these albums, well over half the songs on them don’t even come close to reflecting the level of breathtaking genius of which their creators had once been capable – and would eventually surpass. I mention these three albums here today only because of those aforementioned memory triggers which they all three possess. As I said earlier, I can’t listen to any part of any of these three albums without being carried back there to that attic year.

In sharp contrast to my feelings – both then and now – about New Morning and Let It Be, Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon does, at least for me, reflect breathtaking genius. Released in April of 1970, it was her third album. Far from being cluttered with any clinkers or filler, every one of its dozen songs is a dazzling gem – each track sparkling with a sparkle unique from the other eleven. When I said earlier that, as with New Morning and Let It Be, Ladies of the Canyon doesn’t represent its artist’s “supreme artistry,” I may have spoken too hastily. Granted, there’s an artistic maturity and a wizened sophistication to be found in Mitchell’s subsequent albums such as Blue (1971), For the Roses (1972), or Hejira (1976), which had not yet come into full flower in 1970, but I suppose that that in no way diminishes the brilliance manifest in Ladies of the Canyon. I’m particularly fond of “Blue Boy,” “Rainy Night House,” and “The Circle Game.” That fact, of course, tells you more about Galen Green than it tells you about Joni Mitchell. But then, of course, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

As I’ve said, the preceding dinky discography of these three record albums released in 1970, which nowadays have the power to enthrall my psyche into time travel, and which encapsulate and enshrine incredibly many memory triggers for me . . . are merely the most outstanding among the many musics blended within the “soundtrack” of Art Dunbar’s and Galen Green’s attic year. Besides the music we already owned or were lucky enough to borrow from friends, there was also the vast and yet to be explored discography awaiting us at the large downtown branch of the public library. If my memory serves me well, Art & I would drive the five miles or so there and back, maybe once a week, in his old gray & gray 1957 Ford, to . . . . .


5. How Galen Met Arthur

But before I go any further with my commentary on the cosmically eclectic background music wafting through that attic year, I want to backtrack to share with you what little I can recall of where and when I first met Art Dunbar. It had to have been in Dr. Nelson’s American Literature Class at Wichita State University, in the fall semester of 1968. Back then, it was trendy to divide undergraduate college students all across America into “Greeks & Freaks” – a false dichotomy if ever there was one. While the twin pigeonholes of this bogus construct tended to serve the purposes of those students who were members of “Greek” fraternities and sororities, it served equally the wholly unworthy purpose of “tarring with the same brush” those of us who would one day mature into America’s progressive intelligentsia and those of our classmates who would never mature into anything more than sleepwalkers. Within the Vietnam era’s fraudulent dichotomy of “Greeks & Freaks,” Art Dunbar and I were easily stereotyped as “Freaks,” ‘though I’m sure he would agree that neither of us lent so much as a moment’s credence to that slur.

Although I hadn’t even thought about it until this very minute – roughly forty years after the fact – it would probably have been a fairly accurate thumbnail characterization of the Arthur I first met in 1968 to say that the expression “still waters run deep” applied perfectly to the thoughtful, quiet young man he was back then. As a matter of fact, he was so taciturn throughout our undergraduate days at Wichita State that one of my less tactful friends from high school once quipped that Arthur was the quietest person he’d ever met “who wasn’t either asleep or dead.” While this was an unkind exaggeration, it is true that Arthur did appear to be surrounded by a force-field of stoic serenity which seemed to draw people to him as though it were an electromagnetic field.

Be that as it may, I seem to recall that weeks went by before Arthur and I got around even to nodding or grunting “hey” to one another. As nearly as either of us can recollect, our first conversation – such as it was – entailed my asking Arthur what day the 1968 World Series was scheduled to begin, a question with a built-in silliness to it, given the fluid nature of major league baseball championships. That obviousness notwithstanding, Arthur gave me one of those “wait, wait, don’t tell me” facial expressions and promptly replied that the World Series was set to begin on October 11th – so I knew that he had a sense of humor.

That, then, was the icebreaker. Every lifelong friendship has one. From that moment on, the conversation between us has never come to a stopping place, although we quickly moved past baseball and other such “guy” stuff. I believe that Arthur would concur with my theory that much of the reason he and I became such fast friends when we did is that each of us was “in the market for a best friend” at that particular moment in our life’s journey. Arthur had grown up mostly in the southwest quadrant of the Wichita, Kansas of the 1950’s and ‘60’s and had graduated from South High School in the spring of 1965. I, on the other hand, had grown up mostly in Wichita’s northeast quadrant and had graduated from East High School in the spring of 1967. By the time Arthur and I crossed paths in Dr. Nelson’s Am. Lit. Class in the fall of ’68, many of the friends we’d known from respective high school careers had either fallen away and/or drifted away to the four winds. Some had gone away to more prestigious universities. Others had gone to Vietnam. Still others had grown bored with us or we with them – or both.


6. Just a Little Background

In my own case, by the fall of 1968, I was quite clear within myself that five of the Top Ten “Things” I needed most urgently in life included the following:

1) A “girlfriend” (as we used to call them),
2) A “best friend” (long-term, if possible),
3) A more suitable on-campus “Work/Study” job (since neither the one as file clerk in WSU’s Admissions Office nor the one as janitor in WSU’s English and Sociology Departments felt like “a comfortable match”),
4) A more serious, mature social network, and
5) A viable long-term plan for moving out of my parents’ cramped and suffocating house while remaining a full-time student at Wichita State.

As for Arthur’s frame of mind in the fall of 1968, you’ll have to ask him; for, as has been my policy throughout the writing of the broader memoir, The Toolmaker’s Other Son, of which “My Portable Bohemia” represents only one chapter, respecting the privacy of my fellow subjects is paramount. (Well, “paramount” might be overstating it. Let me just say, instead, that what I’m writing here is intended to come closer to plain journalism than to fancy fiction.)

For now, I feel like saying this much and no more about Arthur’s life-circumstances at the time I met him:

Arthur Howard Dunbar was born on the 881st anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in the year 1947, the oldest of six children (three girls and three boys). Shortly after Art’s college career commenced (He was a math major, by the way.), his mother died of cancer, leaving Art’s widower father with . . . a handful. In order to garner sufficient family support in raising the younger children, Art’s father, Mel, moved the family from Wichita to Des Moines, leaving Art behind in Wichita to complete his undergraduate education at WSU. It wasn’t long after Art’s family’s move to Des Moines that he and I met. At that time, he was living in a dorm on the Wichita State campus.

That, then, is the shortest version I can offer of Arthur’s life-circumstances at the time I met him.

It couldn’t have been very long after my icebreaking baseball conversation with Art in the main lobby of Wichita State’s Ablah Library (perhaps it was even before that) that Art and I, each under his own steam and as a seeming coincidence) both landed “Work/Study” jobs as library assistants in the Circulation Department of Ablah Library. It had to have been right around that same time that I met Kate Schulte – probably in late February or early March of 1969 – at the home of Kate’s and my mutual friend, Becky Adams, with whom I sometimes got together to play guitars and harmonize on Dylan songs.


7. James Henry Nelson

And so it came to pass that, by the time the summer of 1969 rolled around, three of the five urgent needs listed above had been met – or as met as could be realistically hoped for. I had a girlfriend in the person of Kate Schulte. I had a best friend in the person of Art Dunbar. And I had a relatively tolerable Work/Study job in the university’s spacious, comfy and delicious library. The two urgent needs (of those in question) yet to be met, then, were my need for a more serious, mature social network and my need for an acceptable plan to get me out from under Harry & Margaret’s thumb while allowing me to stay in school. As the Sophoclean nature of Destiny’s geometry would have it, the medium through which (or, more accurately, “through whom”) these two remaining urgent needs ended up being met turned out to be in the person of one unassuming individual – none other than a young man named James Nelson. So, brace yourself: I’m about to introduce a new character into our plot.

As nearly as I can recall, I first met James Henry Nelson sometime around halfway through junior high school (as we used to call it back then). Nowadays, they usually call it “middle school.” Ten years from now, they’ll call it something else; no matter. Like the young Art Dunbar, James embodied those proverbial still waters which run deep – though perhaps not quite as still nor as deep. The year was probably 1962, so James and I were probably in the 8th grade – maybe 13 or 14 years old.

At Brooks Junior High School, it was customary for those students who’d finished eating their lunch in the school cafeteria – and who weren’t particularly inclined toward stirring up their adolescent flatulence by running around outside on the playing field in a game of kickball or such – to simply “hang out” in the school’s long entry hall between the cafeteria and the administrative offices. So, picture, if you will, maybe forty or fifty young men and women in their early teens (3/4 grown in height and weight), milling around in that longish well-lit hallway, exchanging pleasantries, killing time, waiting for the bell to ring to send them back to their after-lunch classes. Now, picture one young man in particular, of average height, weight, proportion, etc. for an 8th grader, who sort of hangs off to one side, his hands buried in his jeans pockets, mostly leaning against the wall next to the big glass double doors, alternately gazing out at the suburban school grounds, then back into this longish hallway of 1960’s architectural design at the chattering scattered smattering of his classmates. That seemingly quiet seeming loner is James Nelson.

After a few noontimes of observing him leaning there, I decided to saunter over and break the ice. That particular saunter turned out to be one of the luckiest investments of my early life, though I didn’t look at it as an investment at the time. To me, James looked like a bright guy who could use somebody unconventional and equally bright to shoot the breeze with; and I decided to volunteer to try out for the part.

A rough condensation of how James explained his life circumstances at that time to me would have gone something like this: James’ mother and father were divorced, so that James and his younger brother spent summers and some holidays with their mother in New York City – or visiting their mother’s mother in Florida. During the school year, James and his brother lived in Wichita with their father and his much younger second wife in a house not more than 7 or 8 blocks from where my own family lived back then.



8. Dr. F.W. (Bill) Nelson & Co.

As I say these words to you here today, I’m realizing more fully than ever that James Nelson deserves his own lengthy chapter in any truly comprehensive memoir I may ever be lucky enough to write before I die. For today’s purpose, however, I suppose I need to limit what I tell to the very shortest version possible of how it was that James ended up functioning as the medium through whom I was eventually able to become part of a more satisfactory social network (some six years after I first met him), as well as through whom I was eventually able to begin to escape from what was rapidly becoming Harry & Margaret’s “House of Not-OK.”

Throughout much of the first six years of our friendship, James Nelson and I more or less drifted in and out of one anther’s lives. There were periods of time throughout junior high and high school when we did things together and periods when we didn’t. We both had a wide variety of other friends of both genders who frequently monopolized either James’ attention and/or mine in a wide variety of other directions. That’s only natural; it goes with the territory. “Cutting to the chase” (as the overused cinematic expression goes), we met up again at Wichita State in early 1968, several months prior to my taking American Lit from James’ father, Dr. F.W. (“Bill”) Nelson – the very class in which I first met Art Dunbar in the fall of that year. (Small world – eh?)

By that time, however, I’d actually become somewhat closer friends with James’ aforementioned younger brother, Billy Paul (who is nowadays also known as “Dr. Nelson,” but to whom I shall herein persist in referring to by his boyhood name of “Billy Paul” to avoid confusing references to him with references to his/their esteemed father, F.W. In fact, on the very afternoon of the evening on which I first met Kate Schulte at the aforementioned get-together at our mutual friend, Becky Adams’ house, I’d taken a daytrip over to nearby Harper, Kansas with James and Billy Paul to satisfy our shared curiosity about a supposedly “genuine hippy chick” about whom a feature story had recently appeared in The Wichita Eagle-Beacon. (Once again, this would have been in mid-winter of 1969.) A few months before that, Billy Paul, while still a senior at East High School, had managed to get his hands on an old 16 mm movie camera and enough B&W 16 mm film to shoot an extremely abbreviated, extremely loose film adaptation of Herman Hesse’s novel, Journey to the East, with Galen Green as the lead character . . . and . . . well . . . nobody else. Tascar Huston, one of B.P.’s high school friends, co-produced it. I was invited to the film’s debut in the East High Auditorium. Reviews were mixed.

By this time, I was becoming a familiar face at the Nelson family’s spacious Mediterranean-style white stucco house with its red terra cotta tile roof, there on the southwest corner of First & Roosevelt in Wichita’s genteel old College Hill neighborhood. And once I’d become more personally acquainted with Dr. Nelson and his wife Susan, I found myself invited not only to chat sessions and hangings-out involving folks my own age, but also to Bill & Susan’s faculty parties and chat sessions. (And Bill & Susan really liked to entertain!) After that, it was pretty much a case of “one thing led to another,” which is, after all, what a social network is all about. Soon, I was having the types of conversations I’d been yearning to have – with university faculty members who could mentor me in the ways I felt I most urgently needed to be mentored.


9. Stopping by Antonya Nelson’s Girlhood Home

Speaking of urgent needs – immediately before (during) and after that all-important attic year – my fifth and final “urgent need” left to be met, as the year 1969 evolved into the year 1970, was, of course, my urgent need to escape from Harry & Margaret – without hurting their feelings irreparably. Looking back on that scenario now, from nearly a half century later, I suppose I must have subconsciously sensed all along that some precipitating event was going to be necessary to bring about the type of limited “conditional” breaking away for which I longed. That precipitating event bodied forth in middle-March of 1970, when Margaret came into my bedroom during my absence one afternoon and took it upon herself to rip up several abstract ink sketches of mind which I’d innocently enough left lying out on top of my desk – and then to complain to me later that they constituted what she herself termed “fornography.” (I kid you not: that’s the word she used: “fornography” – with an “f.”)

In all fairness, Margaret had had a very difficult menopause, and this incident was only the latest in a long series of both big and little episodes in which she displayed jarring signs of excessive imbalance. Bear in mind, too, that Galen Green has always been a loving and dutiful son; but, as the e.e. cummings poem says it: “There is some shit I will not eat.” As predictable words were exchanged among Margaret, myself and Harry, I made it clear that we’d be following up on this incident in the very near future. (Was I bluffing? Hell yes I was!)

I then left, to keep an appointment with the weather . . . for ‘twas one of those unseasonably warm afternoons in middle-March which only the gods and goddesses of Destiny can provide. The winter sun was smiling brightly in a robin’s-egg blue sky, as Art Dunbar came by for me – just in the nick of impeccable timing – and we drove to Fairmount Park, near the Wichita State campus to frisbee and walk around and lie on the dormant grass with Kate Schulte and a hundred or so our neighbors and friends.

And, as Destiny would also have it, among the members of that happy throng, basking in that rare meteorological hiatus between wintry blasts were James Nelson (and his recentest girlfriend) and none other than his father and stepmother, Bill & Susan. And, as would spontaneously happen in the normal course of events, we young folks sat apart from the faculty crowd for the first few minutes after our arrival, so as to catch up on personal gossip and so forth. Thus it was that I related to my little peer group, lollygagging there on the dormant grass of Fairmount Park, the gruesome details of my blow-up with Harry & Margaret that forenoon. And thus it was that I came to move in with the Nelson family.

The timing of this cosmic convergence of circumstances worked out for Susan & Dr. Nelson almost as harmoniously as it did for your humble servant. Without going into overmuch detail here today, I’ll say only this and no more for now:

First of all, Bill & Susan would be “closing up” their house there at 155 North Roosevelt and relocating to Telluride, Colorado for the summer – just as they did nearly every year in those days. That would put an automatic and irrevocable deadline on my tenure with them – namely one week after the end of the school year. Secondly, the young lady – a graduate student who’d been living in Billy Paul’s room while he was away at Brown University, had recently moved out, leaving a bit of a gap in the child-sitting and kitchen clean-up departments. Having had considerable experience in both cleaning up kitchens and in attending to the needs of small children – as well as to sleeping in other people’s beds – I provided a reasonable replacement.

I guess I’ve neglected to mention that Bill Nelson had three children with his second wife Susan. At the time of my three-month tenure in their household, Tony, the eldest, was around 9 years old. That would have made David perhaps 7, and little Julie around 4. All three were absolutely adorable kids – attractive, smart, and well-behaved. Incidentally, the only reason I’m fairly certain of how old “Tony” was in 1970 is that I just now looked her up on Wikipedia. You see, she’s become famous under her full name, Antonya Nelson (born 1961). You’ve undoubtedly seen her many many many short-stories in The New Yorker and perhaps even read some her fine novels, which include Living to Tell, Nobody’s Girl, and Talking in Bed.


10. My Escape from “The House of Not-OK”

Thus it was that James Nelson did, indeed, end up functioning as the primary medium through whom I was able to “achieve liftoff” from the Planet of Doom which my parents’ house had become, long before my lucky liftoff was finally achieved. Part of the irony involved with James turning out to be such an incredibly valuable “social connection” is that, if an opportunistic observer were to have taken a quick glance at every single one of those kids milling around outside the Brooks Junior High cafeteria with me that noontime in 1962 (the day I took that fateful saunter), with an opportunistic observer’s eye toward whom among those youngsters they would vote “Most Valuable Social Connection,” the unassuming, seemingly quiet seeming loner, James Henry Nelson, would likely not have been among their top ten opportunistic picks.

Which leads me to an even more profound irony; and that is that, of all my male friends, buddies, pals, etc. from my youth, James Nelson drew a fuller, hotter measure of my mother’s scorn than did any ten runners-up put together. The truth of the matter, however, was that James always showed both Harry & Margaret the utmost respect. Among the many friends I brought home with me in the years before I made my escape, got married to Kate Schulte and moved as far away from Margaret as I could get without drowning (Boston, 1972) . . . among all those young folks, both male and female, Art Dunbar and James Nelson were the most polite, respectful and compassionate.


11. Destiny’s Needle Pulling the Threads

As for Art Dunbar . . . what can I say? He was always there. Certainly, from the summer of 1969, which is where I departed from my narrative to fill you in on how I escaped from my parents and how I stumbled amongst such a wealth of mentors . . . from the summer of 1969 – and even a bit before that – Arthur was always there. So that, when I moved into Billy Paul Nelson’s spacious bedroom with its generous southwest windows letting in the friendly light of that middle-March of 1970, reminding me that I’d be needing to find another “situation” at the end of the spring semester, Art Dunbar remained constantly in my thoughts, applying his marvelously superior mathematical skills to the problem of how he and I, on our measly incomes from the university library, might somehow manage to cobble together some sort of apartment-sharing arrangement to get us each safely across that twelvemonth chasm to the far side – i.e. to June of 1971, when Art would be receiving his Bachelor’s Degree and moving to Des Moines, and I’d (hopefully) be marrying Kate Schulte.

It being a small world, after all – small enough to fit into this story – none other than Becky Adams (q.v.) heard on the grapevine of an attic apartment at 1725 North Fairmount that was about to be vacated by J.L McClure and Steve McCaskey. And that brings us – as the song says – “back to doe.” Destiny’s needle pulling the threads of our lives, as though ‘twould sew, Art and I moved in, between the spring and summer semesters of 1970.



12. J.L. McClure

Looking backward over those threads, it may or mayn’t be worth noting here today that the spring of 1970 was hardly my first path-crossing with either J.L. McClure or Steve McCaskey. Specifically, if you were to resurrect from the ashes of misfortune the B&W snapshot my mother took (before foul menopause felled her better angels) of my 7th birthday party, you would see me standing next to a somewhat younger J.L McClure, who’d been a classmate of mine at Fairmount (Notice how that name keeps popping up?) Elementary School.

It’s always struck me as strange that, even though J.L. and I were fairly close friends as little boys, our paths diverged somewhere around the 4th grade – and yet we appear to have continued on almost parallel courses, like railroad tracks winding through hill and dale. Junior year in high school, for example, when the students in our shared English class were assigned to write research papers using recent periodical sources, J.L and I (unbeknownst to each other) both chose “Bob Dylan” as our topic – and evidently for similar reasons. That would have been in 1965, so that, out of what was then the state of Kansas’s most populous high school, there’d have been no more than perhaps 5% of the student body who’d have even heard of the (then) 24-year-old enfant terrible from Hibbing, Minnesota. At that point, however, the statistical probability of a classmate I’d known since kindergarten and whose attic apartment Art and I ended up taking over in June of 1970, and who, like me, had, by that time, evolved into a young folk-guitarist and singer/songwriter . . . the statistical probability of that same high school classmate picking the very same research topic I picked . . . well . . . maybe it wasn’t that improbable, after all. Parallel destinies, perhaps. Who knows? I haven’t seen J.L. McClure in decades. However, he could be living right down the street from me, here in Kansas City, Missouri, for all I know.


13. Steve McCaskey

My previous acquaintance with Steve McCaskey, J.L.’s apartment-mate in the attic into which Arthur and I moved in June of 1970, was of an entirely different order. I first met Steve when he and his (then) singing/songwriting partner, Steve Amos, were performing several nights a week at The Cedar, a bar (what used to be called a “3.2 bar” back in those days) on 13th Street, not far from the WSU campus. (I ended up performing there myself, for several weeks during the autumn of 1968, along with my two singing partners at that time, a high school friend named Diana Freeman and a 5-string banjo guy from Tennessee named Gwinn Walker. We were billed as “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” having named ourselves after a song by Gordon Lightfoot.) Steve Amos and Steve McCaskey were billed as “Newstead Abby.” They were light-years ahead of my little trio, both in musical virtuosity and creative focus. Sometime during my freshman year at Wichita State, I went out with Wanda McCaskey, Steve’s younger sister, a few times. She was nice. I believe she later became a cheerleader. Last I heard, Wanda was a dentist here in the Greater Kansas City area.

Besides dating his sister, admiring his musicianship and taking over the attic apartment he and J.L. had vacated, I had yet another connection to Steve McCaskey. In early 1968, through a stroke of incredibly good fortune, someone (who’ll remain anonymous for the time being) gave me $50 to purchase for myself the best used nylon-string classical-style acoustic guitar I could find. As I recall, yet another friend from high school, Greg Washburn, drove me downtown to Jenkins’ Music Store where Destiny had placed in the locked glass showcase of reasonably decent used guitars (for me to find) the extremely well-worn faded brown Harmony (brand) guitar which I purchased for $50 exactly – and which I still own. It turned out to be one of the luckiest investments of my entire life, having helped me earn a living, from time to time, thus paying for itself in that and numerous other ways, hundreds of times over. My point in telling you this is that, as Greg Washburn and I were examining that well-worn Harmony acoustic, there, in back area at Jenkins’, that afternoon in 1968, Greg suddenly noticed the name “McCaskey” penciled lightly on the guitar’s faded inside paper label, and pointed it out to me with understandable excitement.

“Do you suppose this is an omen?” I asked Greg.

“Probably,” he grinned. “Besides, there’s always a chance that some of McCaskey’s talent will rub off on you.”

Whether it was McCaskey’s talent or something else, it did feel to me as though there was, indeed, an energizing pagan spirit of some sort inhabiting the worn wood of that old guitar McCaskey had evidently unloaded on the sales people at Jenkins’ when he’d “traded up” prior to my arrival. Whatever Orphean wood sprite it actually was, I’ll always be grateful for its help in composing the hundred or so songs I’ve thus far composed on that haunted guitar.

The duo of Amos & McCaskey dissolved abruptly when Steve Amos got drafted into the military. (At least, that’s how I heard the story.) Although an abundance of candidates to replace the unfortunate Mr. Amos existed at that time, in various niches of Wichita’s vibrant folk music community, McCaskey soon partnered up with McClure. Greg Washburn suggested to me that they were thinking of billing themselves as the “New, Improved-stead Abby,” but that may have only been one of Greg’s crass witticisms. In any event, whatever magic emanated from McClure & McCaskey’s collaboration seems to have been at least partially absorbed into the hardwood floorboards of that attic where they partly lived and partly rehearsed between 1969 and 1970, as well as into the molecules of those sharply slanted catawampus German Expressionist ceiling-walls where Arthur and Galen began, in June of 1970, to collaborate in the bittersweet music of our humble bohemian struggle.


Chapter II

The Pied Piper of Perspective


14. Jack Whitesell, Bookseller

That creaky, drafty old “farmhouse” at 1725 North Fairmount, where we spent our attic year, was still standing, the last time I looked (which was 2002). By then, however, both the house itself and the neighborhood surrounding it had been gentrified – the house with a bright new coat of paint and other obvious signs of renovation, and the neighborhood with – among other dramatic changes – the demolition of several landmarks of our youth to make way for a huge . . . parking lot. (Hey! Wait a minute! Wasn’t there a song on Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon album about that?)

During Arthur’s and my college days – and, indeed, for as far back as I can remember into my grade school days at Fairmount Elementary – the modest little building which housed KMUW-FM, the university’s low-wattage, pre-NPR radio station, stood on the southwest corner of 17th & Fairmount. Next door to KMUW, perhaps 20 feet to the south, stood a dilapidated little cottage whose front had been altered – probably in the 1950’s – with the installation of a pair of picture windows. This was the Pied Piper bookstore. Someday I’d love to write a few thousand words on all that that little used book shop meant to me during my formative years – beginning in 1960, when I was in the 5th grade, and my best friend, Steve Sowards, first took me there one afternoon when he and I were out walking. The Pied Piper’s sole proprietor, sole employee, and often sole soul was one Jack Whitesell. Even though Jack and I engaged in dozens of conversations throughout the 1960’s and ‘70’s, none was of a sufficiently personal nature for me to do more than speculate here as to his background. If what you’re reading at this moment were authentic journalism rather than just another of those millions of personal memoirs being cranked out these days, in which the rememberer works up an existential sweat trying to piece together enough of the shards of his or her past so as to explain how it was that they came to be the way they are . . . , then I’d be endowed with much too much journalistic integrity to say what I’m about to say.

According to the fragmented version of the legend of Jack Whitesell (pronounced: “Whyt’ sl”) which trickled down to me over the years from a number of wholly unreliable sources: Jack purchased The Pied Piper Bookstore, “lock, stock and barrel,” from its original owner, in the early 1950’s, using the money he’d won playing poker in the Navy during World War II. Except for the faded maritime tattoos on his muscular, hairy arms (I never saw him in anything but short-sleeves, no matter what the weather outside.), I have no particular reason for subscribing to this version of “Jack the Bookseller, other than the tattoos and his 1950’s flat-top-style Navy crewcut, defining his short salt & pepper hair. Jack evidently lived with his aging mother (up until the time of her death) – and evidently not many blocks away, as he could be seen walking to and from the Pied Piper, in mid-morning and in late evening. (Store hours were something like 10 a.m. till 8 p.m.) My own theory is that Jack’s mother had founded, owned and operated the Pied Piper, perhaps as early as the 1930’s, and that, when Jack got out of the Navy, she simply turned it over to him – with lots of strings attached . But that, too, is only a theory.


15. Our Wintry Afternoon Visit to Jack’s Curiosity Shop

Long before that dinky dilapidated cottage, two doors down from the attic at the center of our story, evolved into what we all knew as the Pied Piper bookstore when we were all much younger, it had, of course, been somebody’s house; though hopefully, not too many somebodies at a time. For, verily verily, it was quite dinky. Stepping over its threshold for the 37th or 51st time, one wintry afternoon during my college days, it was tempting for me to imagine it as having originally served as some junior professor’s honeymoon cottage, back in those years following the First World War, back before WSU was even a university, but simply Fairmount College, positioned there on the highest point (relatively speaking) overlooking those iconic fields of waving wheat.

Stepping over the threshold of the quirky little shop jammed with used books and old magazines, which I’d known and loved since childhood, was like stepping out of that wintry afternoon in (let’s say) 1971 and into an almost indescribably different world. And yet if I were to take you with me through that very ordinary looking doorway and into the understated phantasmagoria that was the Pied Piper bookstore of my youth, I would definitely wish for it to be on just such a snowy, blustery, wintry afternoon as the one I’m remembering at this particular moment.

Because our ears and fingers and noses (yours & mine) are frozen, the first thing we notice is the warmth. Even though its origin is within the modest natural gas floor furnace further back in the store (the very same type of floor furnace my brother, Kevin, and I grew up with, in a somewhat less dinky cottage a few blocks west of the Pied Piper), the bookstore’s small heat source buried in its thoroughly worn hardwood floorboards has lent its mother-love to the molecules of every one of the hundreds of books and magazines jammed into, under, and around Jack’s little shop’s shelves. Thus it is that what you and I are greeted by as we step from Wichita’s winter into the Pied Piper’s summer is not so much the welcoming warmth of a mere floor furnace as it is the enveloping aura of a womb of words . . . except that most wombs with which you and I are familiar aren’t infused with the blended fragrances of aging paper and a litter box in the backroom for Jack’s dozen or so cats and kittens and – most unavoidable of all – the cigarette smoke wafting upward from the half-smoked Camel dangling from Jack’s lips, as he smiles his trademark half-smile and greets us with his trademark half-nod, while the cigarette’s droop of ashen residue rivets our attention more breathlessly than might the stumble of a circus tightrope walker.

Closing the front door behind us to the tune of its friendly little brass bell, we shut winter behind us and begin to take a look around. Being the way we are, we can never entirely clear our minds of the fact that we are standing inside the front entrance of what used to be someone’s home – except for the shelves and shelves and shelves of used books and old magazines wrapped around and around the cottage’s moldering walls, as though to add an extra layer of book-thick insulation against the winter’s chill, as well as assuring us that the business of this fragrant sanctum has less to do with gazing into lived moments than with reflecting upon reflected moments.

Spine-scanning our way toward this old curiosity shop’s center, we begin to hear the hushed metallic crackling from down among the floorboards, as the gas furnace rekindles to do its work.


16. A Flashback within a Flashback

Then, as though awash in a wistful trance, I find myself turning full-round to gaze out the anachronistic picture windows, onto the afternoon traffic crawling through the gathering blizzard, up and down the quaint old red bricks of Fairmount Street – and find myself transported to another, much earlier, visit here to pied piping Jack and his old curiosities. Not that very first visit, way back when I was eleven and Professor Sowards’ son Steve – my school chum and “best bud” – first introduced me to this most extraordinarily other of other worlds. No. Not that visit. Where this wintry tableau out on Fairmount Street seems to be transporting me, instead, is to a moonlit summer’s evening located somewhere within my 13th year, when Harry & Margaret & Kevin & I were still living in that gray shingle two-bedroom ticky-tacky bungalow at 1737 North Lorraine.

Thirteen was a rather special age for me to have been that evening in 1962. That’s partly because it was the age at which my parents first allowed me to go out walking alone in the neighborhood through the purple twilight – though certainly not past 9 p.m. On that particular summer’s evening to which this wintry tableau outside this bookstore window is transporting me, I had asked my dad for and was granted his permission to go for just such a solo ramble through the neighborhood – as soon as the dinner table had been cleared and the dishes had been washed and dried and put away.

When I informed my dad that my intended destination that evening was the Pied Piper, he took a few seconds to think about it before he assented. It would take a very long time for me to list for you here all of the reasons for my dad’s brief hesitancy. Instead, let me abbreviate by mentioning only these few facts:

1. My parents had both been brought up as rural (and small-town) Kansas fundamentalists. (None of their parents had ever smoked, drunk, danced, played cards or voted for a Democrat.)

2. Wichita had fostered a relatively robust “Beat” (aka “beatnik”) culture and community in the 1950’s, with which the Pied Piper had been associated. (Beat Generation writers Michael McClure and Charley Plymell had both been from Wichita. Years later, I was to cross paths with both of them.)

3. My parents were both familiar enough with Robert Browning’s famous poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” to be wary of any person, place or thing calling itself a “Pied Piper.”

These three factors notwithstanding, the Pied Piper was, after all, a bookstore – and one frequented by the offspring of some of the more highly respected university faculty. So, off I went, ambling merrily up 17th Street, through the gathering purple twilight.

Whatever the reader may or mayn’t wish to make of the fact that I grew up on the edge of a vibrant university community, a mere three residential blocks’ stroll from the Pied Piper bookstore and, thus, from the attic at the center of our story, it was, in fact, the case that that other world contained within Jack Whitesell’s little curiosity shop’s walls was a mere ten-minute walk, on that particular summer’s evening in 1962, from the house where I’d been living out much of my childhood. From my family’s little house at 1737 North Lorraine, I had only to walk four houses north, to 17th Street, then the three short blocks to the Pied Piper – crossing Hillside and then Holyoke, as I headed east to Fairmount Street, where . . .


17. Awash in a Wistful Trance

. . . I’m standing here next to you now, in 1971 – nine years later. And I’m now a junior at Wichita State University (just across the street, to the north), and I’m living in an attic (a cave of the winds, a cave of making) at 1725 North Fairmount, with one Arthur Dunbar. And there’s a snowy tableau out there on Fairmount Street, as I gaze out at it through this bookshop’s twin picture windows, as though I were . . . as though I am awash in a wistful trance.


18. Like Some Tragic Human Fish Drowning in the Air

In several astonishing ways the Pied Piper bookstore in which you & I are now standing, in the winter of 1971, and the Pied Piper bookstore I strolled through the purple twilight to visit as a boy of thirteen in the summer of 1962, are practically identical. What I’m saying is that, in those nine years during which I found my self changing almost too rapidly to keep up with myself (that is to say, from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty-one), Jack Whitesell’s jam-packed, understated phantasmagoria – and the dilapidated little cottage containing its blended aromas – appeared, at least, to remain as unchanged as my Aunt May’s tidy, museum-like front parlor.

What had changed, however, was Jack himself. The flat-top crew-cut, the half-grin, the half-nod, the droop of ashen residue from his dangling cigarette . . . were still there, albeit much the worse for wear. Jack’s amiable laughter at even the slightest hint of witticism from a customer – which, in 1962, was often followed by the barb of a smoker’s hack – had, by 1971, degenerated into an asphyxiational quasi-gasping for air, during which episodes his face would often turn red and then purple as he would bend at the waist almost in half, while the customer (I, for instance) would stand there in helpless horror, not knowing whether it was more appropriate to politely avert my gaze or to watch Jack’s distress with humane concern.

One afternoon, toward the end of my undergraduate career, when I happened to be the sole customer in the Pied Piper, I watched and didn’t watch, out of the corner of my eye (all the while pretending to thumb through an autographed copy of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), as one of Jack’s opened-mouthed not-breathing spells went on for at least a two full minutes. During those two full minutes, he didn’t so much gasp for air (like a swimmer bobbing to the surface after an exhausting lap) as he simply stood there in his little corner behind his ancient cash register, bent almost in half, purple-faced, open-mouthed, like some tragic human fish drowning in the air. Nowadays, in the course of the work that’s chosen me, I’ve watched several people die. I mean that one minute their eyes are filled with fire as they struggle with Mr. Death, and the very next instant, the fire has gone out. As a young undergraduate that afternoon, that’s what I feared I was about to see – except that, at the age of twenty-three, I did not yet feel ready to see it. As it turned out, though, Jack somehow miraculously caught his breath, came back to life, straightened back up, lit another cigarette, and turned away to gaze out the window as if nothing had happened.


19. The Hazards of Time-Travel

But . . . it does, in fact, happen again – this very afternoon in 1971, in fact, while you and I are standing here scanning the spines of these thousands of used books and old magazines lining the Pied Piper’s shelves.

I, having returned to myself from that moonlit summer’s evening in 1962 – that memory to which this wintry tableau out on Fairmount Street had momentarily transported me . . . I have likewise returned here to your side to continue to serve as your eager tour guide through this past which once was so present. In your innocent affability (a perfectly healthy trait among time-travelers), you make some offhanded quip to Jack from over your shoulder, to which he responds with his amiable trademark chuckle, followed by the barb of his smoker’s hack, which quickly morphs into all of the aforementioned etc. etc. and ends as I described earlier, in his somehow miraculously catching his breath, coming back to life, straightening back up, lighting another cigarette, and turning away to gaze out the window as if nothing had happened.

You & I, Gentle Reader, instantly exchange a furtive glance, as if to signal to one another simultaneously: “Let’s get the hell out of here before that happens again!”

To mask our horror, as we ease our way back toward the bookstore’s front door with an affected nonchalance, I pull down from its shelf that signed paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice that I mentioned earlier (and had, indeed, been considering purchasing for its value as a conversation piece, ever since I’d discovered it during that earlier visit [which won’t actually occur for another year and a half]). And you . . . you play along by picking up one of the few remaining copies of Galen Green’s very first chapbook of poetry and abstract ink sketches, entitled Apple Grunt, which Jack has generously allowed me to display right next to the cash register at the Pied Piper – on consignment. Jack nods in my direction and comments to you that the saddle-stitched (saddle-stapled) volume you now hold in your hands was produced by one of Wichita’s up-and-coming local poets. You start to remove your wallet to pay him for the chapbook when Jack abruptly holds up one hand to stop you with a gentle reminder that Apple Grunt won’t be published for nearly another year. (Such are the hazards of time-travel – and the hazards of writing about it.)

After another minute or two of idle banter with Jack, we (you & I, Gentle Reader) take our leave of dear old Jack Whitesell and of his Pied Piper bookstore and step back out into the snowy bluster of this waning Wichita afternoon in early winter of 1971.



20. Coda: The Recycled Pied Piper

I suppose that I might as well go ahead and tell you (although I’m sure that you’ve already guessed it several pages ago) that Jack Whitesell didn’t live all that much longer. Arthur and I had both moved away from Wichita by then (Arthur to Des Moines, Iowa and I to Columbus, Ohio), so that neither of us got the news of Jack’s passing until quite a few months after the fact. I shan’t bore you here with the gruesome details. Several of Art’s & Jack’s & my mutual friends toyed with the notion of purchasing the Pied Piper from his estate, but then thought better of it. Obviously, there’d have literally been no percentage in it.

Again, I was far away in another life when all his happened, but what trickled down to me – secondhand, so to speak – was that Jack’s “inventory” was sold in toto to someone who’d come up with a scheme to move the entire hodge-podge into a much larger retail space on 13th Street – in the very same shopping strip as The Cedar (q.v.) to blend it in with other similar pre-owned inventory and to recycle the Pied Piper name as a customer draw. I have no idea how that “coda” to Jack’s legend turned out. By then, I guess I felt as though I’d already lived that part of Jack’s story that I’d been destined to live.


21. The Forgotten Headshop

Before we continue with our guided tour of the neighborhood surrounding that attic where Art & I lived and suffered and learned during Wichita State’s 1970-71 academic year, I need to make a correction to something I said earlier. In my explanation, several pages back, of the proximity of the Pied Piper bookstore to the old (now demolished) studios of Wichita State’s low-wattage, pre-NPR radio station, KMUW-FM, I stated that the Pied Piper stood “twenty feet to the south” of KMUW. In saying this, I misspoke. “Back in the day” (as the current expression goes), there was another little building which stood on the lot between KMUW and the Pied Piper. The trouble is that I cannot, for the life of me, seem to get a clear picture of that little middle building in my mind. All I seem to be able to remember about it, as of this writing, is that, during Art’s & my attic year – and for a few years on either side of that timeframe – it was a “head shop.”

All across America, back then, what the term “head shop” generally connoted was a cozy little boutique which sold – in addition to illegal drug paraphernalia – beads, incense, candles, tied-dyed apparel and fabrics, tarot cards, astrological literature, and other such what a friend of ours referred to as “hippy shit.” Perhaps, for our purposes here today, we might simply define it as a hippy supply outlet. Traveling across the country from Cambridge to Berkeley, let’s say, any time between 1968 and 1978, one was likely to encounter at least two or three head shops in most any self-respecting college town north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The one thing which most sticks in my mind about that particular head shop that was housed in what I’m pretty sure was a dinky dilapidated cottage similar to its neighbor twenty feet further to the south, the Pied Piper . . . is that there was a sitar stretched out on top of one of the store’s glass display cases. This was the heyday of Ravi Shankar, whose work with George Harrison of the Beatles had proved beneficial to the careers of both the sitar master and his famous pupil. Like millions of other occidentals, I was spellbound by the music of the sitar, so that that genuine (up close and personal) sitar resting there on the counter where customers could actually touch it, strum it lightly, eyeball it in minute detail, etc. . . . was all that was necessary to pull me in that hippy supply store’s front door – even though I wasn’t in the market for lovebeads, a hash pipe or a bong.

I wish I could recall the name of that place. It seems as though it may have been called something like “Sgt. Pepper’s Parlor” or some such rip-off of the absolute mania for Edwardian imagery and fashion which swept through the zeitgeist following the 1967 release of the Beatles’ most superbly creative album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Even as late as Arthur’s & my attic year, anything associated with the Beatles or with the late British Empire or India or abundant facial hair or psychotropic substances – or anything made of leather – could be fobbed off on pop culture fanatics for at least five times its reasonable value. The vast majority of these trappings from “The 60’s Culture” (meaning 70’s culture) could later be found for sale at drastically reduced prices at tens of thousands of garage sales and yard sales across America throughout the 1990’s.

So now I think that I’ve finally got it straight. KMUW sat on the southwest corner of 17th & Fairmount. Twenty feet to the south sat the hippy supply shop that I’ve just described. And twenty feet to the south of that sat the Pied Piper bookstore. And, as I’ve already stated, all this has been demolished in the intervening years to “put up a parking lot” (as the Joni Mitchell song puts it). The same is the case with The Hourglass. Another twenty feet or so to the south of the Pied Piper sat a fairly typical campus bar of that period called The Hourglass. If my memory serves me well, there may have been some sort of off-street parking area for patrons, to one side or other of the bar itself, but it seems as though the majority of patrons had to park either along the curb, out on Fairmount Street, or in what served as an overflow lot across the street from The Hourglass – to the east. (Please try to forgive any inaccuracies here, as I’m flying relatively blind on the autopilot of my fuzzy memory. It’s been almost a half century ago, after all – and I had a lot on my mind at the time.


22. The Hourglass

For me – and, I suspect, for Art Dunbar and Kate Schulte and hundreds (if not thousands) of our contemporaries – that very ordinary, very typical campus bar known as The Hourglass will forever be associated with one particular summer’s night in 1970 when The Hourglass (and I’m not making that name up just because it makes for such a perfect metaphor) . . . became the setting for a tragic confrontation which did (and does), indeed, serve as a vivid metaphor dramatizing the convergence and collision of several of the key historical forces operating within the zeitgeist of those turbulent times. But, before I spin for you my “unreliable narrator’s” version of that tragic summer night’s events, please be so kind as to indulge me while I back up even further in time, so as to texturize and contextualize how it was that Art’s and my living out our attic year in such close proximity to The Hourglass held yet more special meaning for me (and still does – and always will) vis-à-vis our melody line here today of how it was that I came to be the way I am.


23. A Saturday Morning in the Spring of 1960

Everything used to be something else. The Hourglass was no exception to this rule. Just as the Pied Piper bookstore and the head shop next door to it on the north had each once been somebody’s home, so the modest box-shaped building in which The Hourglass was housed had once been one of those quaint off-campus diners, lunch counters, juke joints, “greasy spoons,” soda fountains, burger joints, malt shops (or whatever – and/or some of the above). The memory movie which electrified that little off-campus diner with such special meaning for me throughout its later incarnation as The Hourglass is a very short feature, indeed, yet one I’ve enjoyed replaying for myself thousand of times on my inner movie screen, over the years. Its plot is deceptively simple. It’s set in the middle of a Saturday morning in the spring of 1960. I’m about to finish up the 5th grade at Fairmount Elementary, and Jeff Corbin, Walter Reed and Bobby Christian are all about to finish up the 6th grade there.


24. Jeff Corbin

But this memory movie from 1960, so short and yet so indelible, which I’ve so much enjoyed playing over and over again for my own amusement, does not take place at school, but rather inside that little diner which would later morph into The Hourglass. (If I could remember the name of that place, I’d tell you, but I can’t, so I won’t.) Jeff Corbin is a strikingly handsome youth, with radiant blond hair, rosy cheeks and his father’s aristocratic Caroline Kennedy eyes. Because his father is Harry Corbin, president of what is about to become Wichita State University, Jeff and his family live in the president’s residence, a thoroughly elegant and roomy mansion done in a variation on the Georgian style (more or less), nestled within a fairytale forest of protective shrubbery and set back a tasteful distance from the northeast corner of the busy intersection of 17th Street & Hillside.

In point of mythopoetic fact, if some bored god or goddess were to have taken an imaginary ruler and pencil and drawn an imaginary straight line from the president’s residence where handsome young Jeff Corbin dwelt with his family to – and directly through – the busy intersection of 17th Street & Hillside – and then were to have extended that imaginary straight line in a continuation of its southwesterly plumb another hundred meters or so – it would pass through the tiny gray-shingled cracker box at 1737 North Lorraine where Galen Green, then age 10, dwelt with his family. It is for this reason alone that Jeff and I became friends; for, in nice weather, when Jeff’s parents would occasionally allow their princeling to walk to school at Fairmount Elementary (rather than to be chauffeured by his mother or older sister in the family’s “second car,” a 1959 Renault Dauphine, as was the custom in less nice weather), Jeff would then find himself strolling past our family’s peasant hovel. It was pretty much statistically inevitable, therefore, that little Galen, your humble servant, would be striding out the door for school, one bright morning after another, as Jeff would be passing by on his merry way up Lorraine Street.

So it was that, in the fullness of time, I ended up being invited to lunch, one noontide in 1960, at the mansion of the president of what was (back then) still known as Wichita University, an upscale municipal university to which my parents could never in a million years have been able to afford to send me.


25. A Rearranging of My Molecules

I suppose that I could choose, at this juncture, to persist through the velvet rut of my fairytale conceit, as I share with you my impressions of my fairytale lunch at Jeff Corbin’s castle. However, I’m going to make every effort now to resist that temptation and to focus, instead, on the three specific images which came closest to permanently rearranging my molecules. The first was the image of an ornately hand-crafted camel saddle which Jeff’s father, the university president, had brought back with him from a recent visit to a place called Afghanistan. Even at the age of 10, I’d seen a wide variety of saddles, so that the visual image, per se, of the camel saddle sitting proudly on the floor of the university president’s spacious and elegant personal library was not, in and of itself, what lit up the interior of my hungry young mind, so much as did the name of the country it came from. Of course, as would have been the case with most any 10-year-old boy growing up in Wichita’s working class (the “upper-lower class,” as another affluent friend would later label it), there in the final year of the Eisenhower Administration, the name Afghanistan was exactly as unknown to me as names like Vietnam, Iraq or Cambodia were, so that, despite the fact that I could have named and located on a map more countries than probably could 90% of America’s high school graduates in 1960, I still had never in my life heard spoken that strange sounding name, Afghanistan. Thus it was that the image of that Afghani camel saddle sitting there on the plush carpet of Harry Corbin’s personal study has been forever etched into my memory as representing fresh possibilities. Each time it swims back into my conscious mind, I’m refreshed by the fleeting breath of a renewed realization that the world is much wider than even I can readily grasp.


26. Tracings

The second of the three images which came very close to rearranging my molecules, on that enchanted noontide visit to Jeff Corbin’s family’s home in 1960, was the image of a set of tracings Jeff had recently done at his grandfather’s request. At first, I was a bit befuddled when Jeff – as he and I were sitting together on the carpet in his father’s library – fetched down a huge world atlas and opened it up to the countries of Europe to show me several sheets of onionskin upon which he’d meticulously traced the outlines of France, Germany, Italy, etc., along with their principal cities and waterways. It just so happened, however, that, whilst Jeff was showing me his map tracings of the countries of Europe, his mother stepped through the doorway to see how we were doing – and it was she who provided me with the key I needed to understand what Jeff’s project with the atlas, the sheets of onionskin and the colored pencils was all about. Evidently, her father (Jeff’s maternal grandfather) was providing Jeff with some sort of reward as an incentive for producing these colorful tracings of every country in the world. Even though I was only in the 5th grade and from conspicuously humble roots, I knew enough of the ways of the world to deduce from what I was seeing and hearing that Mrs. Corbin’s father had envisioned a future for young Jeff in which a demonstrably superior facility with world geography would be essential.

Up until that epiphanal moment, my mind had been imprisoned inside the tragically limiting notion that to trace a picture – or any flat two-dimensional image, for that matter – constituted a kind of cheating – a form of dishonesty. I confess this “hang-up” to you here today, Gentle Reader, with the full realization of just how daffy it sounds. It’s because it’s so daffy that I confess it – so as to emphasize how extensive the rearrangement of my molecules was on that very special day in 1960. Needless to say, I found myself imitating, at my earliest opportunity, Jeff Corbin’s imitations of the topography of Europe. And while that particular enthusiasm distracted me for only as long as my mother’s few sheets of onionskin held out, a much deeper enthusiasm that was kindled within me that day for the process of learning to create newnesses by tracing, imitating, copying out, memorizing and/or mimicking oldnesses . . . has been fanned into a lifelong passion. I suppose that it would be fair to say that I was yielding to that very passion when I found myself, a few years later, copying out some of my favorite poems by Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost and William Shakespeare (for example), in my own handwriting, simply to feel what it was like to have their genius – someone else’s genius – flow from out of the pen I held in my adolescent hand.


27. From Harry Corbin's Library Window, 1960

The third of the three images which came closest to permanently rearranging my molecules, on that visit to Jeff Corbin’s family’s home when I was 10 and Jeff was 11 and John F. Kennedy was on his way to defeating Richard M. Nixon for the U.S. Presidency, was a somewhat different type of image from the first two. I’m talking here about that image which filled my field of vision when Jeff and I stood up from the carpet in his father’s library where we’d been sitting with the Afghani camel saddle, the huge atlas of the world and Jeff’s meticulous, colorful onionskin map tracings . . . stood to repair to a sort of breakfast nook, just off the spacious kitchen, where the maid (a pretty young university student) served us our soup and sandwich. As I was getting to my feet, there was an instant – and only an instant – when I happened to glance out the window nearest to where we’d been sitting. This window faced west, so that I could see out over the manicured lawn of the president’s residence, out over the busy intersection of 17th & Hillside, and down into the neighborhood where I’d been busy growing up since we’d moved there in 1952 and where I’d continue being busy growing up until we moved three miles to the south, to a somewhat similar – yet significantly different – neighborhood, in 1965. With my x-ray vision, I could see right through the Texaco station on the southwest corner of the busy intersection, all the way to the little gray-shingle cracker box where I would soon return to carry on the tenure of my childhood and early adolescence.

Of these three molecule-restructuring images, this last one proved, by far, to have had the most profound impact on my becoming whatever it is that I’ve become. But as I’ve said, there was only that fleeting moment, as Jeff and I were getting to our feet, that I just so happened to catch that snapshot of my world from the vantage point of that other world. The closest comparison I can offer you here today, Gentle Reader, to illustrate just how profound was the impact of that image upon my molecular structure would have to be a comparison to the impact made upon the molecular structure of each and every one of us earthbound human creatures, a few years later (at the other end of that revolutionary decade), when we got our first jaw-dropping glimpse of our planet, our home, our “neighborhood,” as photographed and beamed back to us from the moon. That image of our shining blue bowling ball (or cat’s-eye marble), hanging there in the darkness of space, and upon which all six or eight billion of us reside . . . was light-years (if you will) away from the dull bleakness upon which I found myself gazing, for that fleeting instant, from the university president’s library window, in 1960.



28. Our Texaco Station's Exotic New Proprietor

I need to hurry up and get back to telling you about this memory movie which I have within me here (he says, cupping his hands, Hamlet-like, around his cranium) – this movie involving Jeff Corbin, the aforementioned very short feature that’s set in the middle of a Saturday morning in the spring of 1960, inside that little diner which would later morph into The Hourglass. But before I get back to that, I want to say just a quick word about that Texaco service station I mentioned a while ago – the one that used to sit on the southwest corner of 17th & Hillside, the one right through which I had to employ my x-ray vision to see in a direct, unobstructed line the little gray-shingle cracker box where I partly grew up, as I glanced for that flickering instant from the window of Harry Corbin’s library, in 1960.

Sometimes, on an especially hot Kansas summer afternoon when I was a boy, my mother would give me a nickel so that I could walk up to the corner to buy myself a frosty bottle of soda pop from out of the big humming metal cooler, there at the Texaco station. Thus it happened that, one such summer afternoon in 1960, I braved the prairie heat with my nickel in my pocket, to walk up to the Texaco station for my frosty bottle of soda pop. Upon my arrival, however, I was surprised to discover the service station to be under new management – an aristocratic looking middle-aged gentleman with an uncharacteristically fine bone structure, a golden complexion and a slight Spanish accent. The day being hot, the shade being cool and business at the service station being slow, this intriguing new arrival bought us each a bottle of soda pop and stood in the shade to keep me company while we each rehydrated ourselves. (Even as a child, I could never pass up the opportunity to interview a subject – and still can’t – especially a subject with such an obviously fascinating story.

It turns out that our neighborhood Texaco station’s exotic new proprietor had only recently fled Cuba, following Fidel Castro’s takeover there the year before. The information which passed between us next – this distinguished looking middle-aged Cuban refugee and the kid that was me – while not exactly coming terribly close to rearranging my molecules – did, in fact, open my thirsty young mind to a whole new realm of possibilities – a realm which has only continued to open and open, as I’ve grown through adolescence and manhood, into this autumn of my life wherein you’ve now caught up with me here today. Naturally, I began our interview by asking my new acquaintance about what “it” was like in Cuba, confessing that the only person from Cuba I’d ever seen before had been on TV, and that that had been Lucille Ball’s Cuban-American husband, the famous comic actor and Latin bandleader, Desi Arnez, whom I understood – even in my provincial youth – to be merely a comedic caricature of what actual Cubans must be like. In telling him this, I suppose I was lying by omission, since I did, in fact, know one other Cuban from watching TV – and that was, of course, Fidel Castro. But something told me that this bit of information was better left unsaid.

Organically, our conversation gradually grew more personal. He asked me a few innocuous questions about where I went to school and what grade I’d be in in the fall . . . and what my father did for a living and so forth. It turned out to be his unexpected answer to my next question, however, which switched on a lightbulb over my head – like in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon – a lightbulb which has only continued to brighten and brighten as the decades have continued to swallow me. The question I asked him next was this: “Did you also run a service station when you lived in Cuba?” This naïve question caused him to laugh so hard that, being a gentleman, he had to turn his head away from me for a brief moment. When he regained his composure, he turned back toward me and, gazing down at me with the most paternal gravitas, replied: “No, my young friend. In Cuba, I was a doctor, a physician.”

The remainder of our conversation focused entirely on my questions and his answers concerning how it was that such a marvelously educated professional as a Cuban physician ended up pumping gas and fixing flat tires at a Texaco service station, fewer than a hundred steps away from where I’d found myself growing up in that little house on the prairie. Inasmuch as that was then this is now, I’m guessing that the reader can easily guess his answer, considering the steady stream of similarly displaced professionals who have flooded into our country throughout the ensuing half century. A reasonable paraphrase of his answer would be to say that he was in the process of doing some background reading in preparation to pass the examinations necessary for him to practice medicine in the United States . . . and that he’d chosen to buy into the proprietorship of our neighborhood’s Texaco station as a stop-gap source of income, primarily because, as a young man growing up in Cuba, he’d had a passion for automobiles and for things automotive – which passion had endowed him with sufficient skills to make a living while “cramming for his boards.”


29. Anatomy of the Machine Itself

Just as this unforgettable, inadvertent interview with this refugee Cuban physician running the service station on the southwest corner of 17th & Hillside in the summer of 1960 served to spark my young imagination with insights theretofore undreamt, so it was that my imagination was equally – but differently – sparked by the experience of standing around in that aforementioned little off-campus diner, along with Walter Reed and Bobby Christian – watching Jeff Corbin play pinball.

Now, for the sake of those of my readers born after, let’s say, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, perhaps some slight bit of background explanation would be in order, with regard to what, precisely, pinball was. While there may well be many students of American pop culture as manifested within that era between the end of World War II in 1945 and the ascendency of the age of video games (coinciding chronologically with the ascendency of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970’s) – many students of American pop culture who would take exception to my anthropological analysis in this area – I feel comfortable voicing here my view that the common ancestor of many of today’s video games is the pinball machine of the 1950’s & 60’s.

As for what a pinball machine was, what it looked like, how it functioned, etc., I’m going to say something here that you won’t hear me say very often, and that is that you either know or you don’t. I hope that the reader is familiar with the basics of the pinball machine and of pinball culture. If not, however, allow me here to shamelessly oversimplify by asking the reader to picture in your mind’s eye, a garishly painted wooden box, approximately 2 feet wide, 4 feet long, and 8 inches deep. This fancy wooden box would have been supported on four legs like a table which stood approximately 3 feet off the floor at the “near” end and perhaps 3.5 feet off the floor at the “far” end, such that the box itself (containing the main functioning components of the pinball machine) would have been slanted downward at a gentle angle toward the player. Later variations on this design pattern abound.

At the “far” end of the pinball machine would been a much shallower box, affixed to the “table-like” box just described and positioned exactly perpendicular to it – in other words, straight up and down. This shallower, perpendicular box at the “far” end of the machine would have been approximately 2 feet wide, 2 feet high and 4 inches deep. Both the slanted box and the upright box would have been covered with glass, and both would have been brightly illuminated from within. The glass cover on the upright box would have been facing the player (and passers-by) and would have incorporated the electronic scoring mechanism for the pinball player(s) into some genre or other of wild, exotic, exciting, enticing, frightening and/or otherwise ridiculously overstimulating picture painted brightly onto the illuminated glass, thereby giving it the appearance of a circus poster or movie poster.

The slanted table-like box (i.e. the “playing field” of the pinball machine itself) was a far more complicated affair. Because I don’t want either of us (you or me) to get bogged down in the technical details of all that would have been involved with the 1950’s model of pinball machine which Jeff Corbin was “playing against” on the Saturday morning in 1960 which I’m hoping to recount for you here shortly, I’m going to simply ask that you research that on your own. Personally, I recommend your interviewing an older person on the subject. Any such interview ought, in and of itself, to suffice, since pinball machines were virtually ubiquitous throughout the United States during the aforementioned period between 1945 and 1980 – practically unavoidable. It seemed to me, as a distractible boy at the time, that there was at least one pinball machine – and often three or four – blinking and/or flashing its siren song to the coins in my little pocket, in some corner or other of every drugstore, grocery store, malt shop, dime store, bus station, train station, pool hall, bowling alley, movie theater lobby, diner, amusement park and penny arcade,” back then – and even one in the “Youth Center” at the relatively progressive Methodist church my family attended in downtown Wichita.


30. From Point A to Point B

Had it not been for some trees blocking our line of sight, Arthur Dunbar and I could have stepped out onto the attic landing of the rickety wooden “fire escape” (Now, there’s a misnomer!), running down the rear (west) side of that subdivided old farmhouse at 1725 N. Fairmount in 1970 . . . and peered down to our north onto the flat roof of The Hourglass, which had once been that little malt shop or diner where Walter Reed and Bobby Christian and I spent the middle part of a Saturday morning in the spring of 1960 watching Jeff Corbin play pinball. The physical distance between where we stood as boys, there at the end of the Eisenhower years, and the attic I shared with Arthur, smack-dab in the bull’s-eye center of the Nixon years, could not have been more than 80 feet apart, had some bored god or goddess bothered to take out an imaginary tape measure and stretched it from point A to point B.


31. Pinball Wizard

Late one night last week, I found myself scribbling on a little yellow square (3”x 3”) posty-note these few words:

These questions are all that we have.

Each night since, when I come home from work and turn on the kitchen light, I see that little yellow posty-note stuck to the calendar where I deposited it for the time being. When I scribbled those seven words last week, I was thinking about something entirely other than what I’m about to say. But now, I’m thinking, instead, about what I’m about to say. Here’s what I’m about to say:

The time that I spent, standing with Walter Reed and Bobby Christian in that little diner on that Saturday morning in the spring of 1960, sipping on a cherry-coke while watching Jeff Corbin competing against . . . slapping and shaking – dancing and wrestling with . . . a flashing, dinging, blinking, buzzing, flashing, clattering, flashing, ringing, flashing, rumbling . . . pinball machine . . . was one of those times in one’s life when one comes away with more questions than answers, more gaps than lessons . . . yet, paradoxically, embracing those gaps . . . and carrying each of their itchy questions back home with one, in one’s internal specimen container, to be examined later, under one’s mental microscope, over and over again, for the rest of one’s years of lucidity.

“What the hell is this that I’m watching, and why in the hell am I standing here watching it?” To the best of my recollection (it now having been a half century since that Saturday morning), these resonate as the two most dominant (the two “itchiest”) questions I carried back home with me that morning in my internal specimen container. And while it’s true that I did examine these questions under my mental microscope at the time, I’m going to confess to you here and now that I prefer the itchy questions to any of the unsatisfying “answers” which have ever begun to form inside my understanding, over the course of the ensuing half-century.


32. Where Questions Come From

The way that it came about that I found myself standing there on that long-ago Saturday morning was simply that Jeff had invited me, a few days earlier, to meet him at the malt shop, at around 9:00 o’clock on the following Saturday morning “to play pinball.” I explained to Jeff at the time of his invitation that I hadn’t had much experience playing pinball and that what little money I’d been able to save out of my allowance of 25 cents per week wasn’t going to allow me to play very many games of pinball. Jeff’s response to me at the time was to flash his movie star smile and assure me that neither of those circumstances would present a problem. I had warrant for my optimistic misinterpretation of this sunny response from Jeff, as he’d already displayed considerable generosity toward me by taking time to patiently instruct me in the rudiments of both the pastime bowling and that of pocket billiards. These private lessons, however, had taken place in the basement of the university’s (then) ultramodern Campus Activities Center (CAC) and had, therefore, involved (though this point was lost on me at the time) no outlay of money on Jeff’s part, since he had – as the highly recognizable young son of the university’s esteemed president – “the run of the campus.” (Carte blanche, if you will.)

On the other hand, the pinball machine just inside the front door of the malt shop across 17th Street from the Wichita University campus, there on Fairmount Street, housed in that little box of a flat-topped building, wedged in between the Pied Piper Bookstore and that “farmhouse” at 1725 North Fairmount where Art Dunbar & I (exactly a decade later) would spend our memorable year in that Neo-Post-Cubist egg of an attic, which would later become my portable bohemia . . . that nickel-a-game pinball machine . . . was a different matter entirely. What I beheld, that Saturday morning in 1960, as I sauntered through the front door of that modest little malt shop, was Jeff Corbin, as I’ve already described him – competing against (etc. etc.) that flashing, dinging, buzzing (etc. etc.) pinball machine – dancing and wrestling with it (etc. etc.), like a princeling possessed. As with Bobby & Walter & I that morning, Jeff was still wearing his lightweight windbreaker, but unzipped, with his jacket’s tail swinging back and forth and to and fro, in Newtonian opposition to his ¾-grown body’s frenzied two-step, as he played (no; he performed) pinball for us for nearly an hour, before stopping to catch his breath and to sip on his cherry-coke (the extracurricular stimulant of preference for our peer group at Fairmount Elementary).

At the point at which I sauntered through the front door of the malt shop, three rolls of nickels lay in a row on the inside sill of the plate-glass front window, only one of them having been cracked open and halfway depleted in the pinball machine’s coin slot. By the time my fascination with Jeff’s solo performance had worn thin, an hour later, and I glanced up at the clock on the malt shop wall, pretending to suddenly remember that I had somewhere else I needed to be, two of those three rolls of nickels had been completely burned up inside that pinball machine’s ravenous gizzard – nickel by nickel by nickel – to fuel the mechanical music of its savage dance with handsome young Jeff; and the remaining roll of coins had already been cracked open to bring Jeff’s performance with the machine and its silver balls to a climax.

What Bobby & Walter made of that morning’s puzzling spectacle I’ll never know. Certainly, none of us spoke a word, throughout the entirely of that hour I “hung out” with the other three boys that Saturday morning in 1960. Although all three were a grade ahead of me in school, Bobby was actually the same age as me and had gone through first grade with me under the kindly tutelage of dear old Miss Robertson, but had “skipped” a grade shortly thereafter, and I lost track of him completely by the time we reached high school. Walter, on the other hand, was a young demigod whose tall, square-jawed, clever and charismatic personage I was destined to trail all the way through high school and on into our undergraduate years at Wichita State University. This fact notwithstanding, Walter & I never got around to reflecting together upon “what the hell” we were watching that pinball Saturday morning in 1960 nor “why in the hell” we were standing there watching it.


33. All That We Have

The reader will probably not be at all surprised to learn that Jeff Corbin went on in later years to gain a considerable reputation as – among other things – a tennis champion. Unfortunately, I’m aware of this only because of that reputation, since, by 1963, he and I had also lost track of each other completely, thus leaving me with still more of these itchy questions, which, in the end, appear to be all that I have.


34. This Summer I Hear the Drumming

Of course, the only reason I allowed myself to get sidetracked by these reminiscences of little Galen’s “prince & the pauper” friendship with young Jeff Corbin was to color in a bit of historical background vis-à-vis that little box-shaped building where once, in 1960, a pinball machine flashed and clattered (etc. etc.), while little Galen and a few of his boyhood school chums sipped their cherry-cokes, and the jukebox belted out such hits of the day as Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” . . . that little box of a building which had, by the summer of 1970, evolved into a fairly typical off-campus bar of that period, which called itself The Hourglass – where undergraduate Arthur and undergraduate Galen might have been observed on an occasional Friday or Saturday night with a few of their college friends, sipping a glass or two of what was known back then as “three-two” beer – while a different jukebox belted out such hits of the day as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.”

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio . . . . .

I’m told that that song was recorded a mere ten days after the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings. It will remain, for millions of Arthur’s and my generation, nothing less than a profoundly moving anthem, aswarm with our million mixed memories of that cataclysmic period in our nation’s history (circa 1965-1975), when the lines of philosophical configuration were drawn much differently than they are today – and yet, not altogether differently.


35. And Spread All of Our Itchy Questions Out

Several pages back, before I sidetracked our guided tour of the neighborhood surrounding the attic at the center of the universe with my recollections of Jeff Corbin and the malt shop (or diner or whatever) which would later morph into The Hourglass, you may recall that I had said something about how, for me – and, I suspect, for Art Dunbar and Kate Schulte and hundreds (if not thousands) of our contemporaries – The Hourglass will forever be associated with one particular summer’s evening in 1970 when The Hourglass became the setting for a tragic confrontation which did (and always will) serve as a vivid metaphor dramatizing the convergence and collision of several of the key historical forces operating within the zeitgeist of those turbulent times.

When I first made mention of the tragic confrontation in question, several pages back, right before I got sidetracked by my intense fascination with . . .

“Everything used to be something else.”

. . . you’ll perhaps recall that I half-jokingly referred to myself as an “unreliable narrator.” Perhaps I ought to clarify that by explaining that it’s only my memory that’s unreliable. As much as I’d love to be able to spin a yarn for you here today in what I’ve come to think of as “the unreliable narrator tradition of American storytelling,” I confess that I just don’t have it in me – that I simply lack the imagination and the narrative talent to create such a voice. So, you’re stuck with me and my memory movies, all full of itchy questions. Unreliable as this old memory vault of mine might be, however, I’ll try not to pretend to remember what I was never all that sure of in the first place. If, perchance, this process happens to leave you with as many itchy questions as it has left me with, well, then, perhaps, we can get together some blustery winter’s night – let’s say, up in the attic at the center of the universe – and spread all of our itchy questions out on the old threadbare 1940’s magic carpet I brought with me from Harry & Margaret’s to cover the cold, bare hardwood floor of our memorable attic, when Arthur & I moved in there a few weeks after the Kent State shootings.

And after you & I have spread all of our itchy questions out on the floor of that attic, and after we’ve arranged them there as one might a child’s plastic building blocks (for, indeed, questions do tend to be plastic, howsoever itchy they also may be), and after we’ve sat there on the floor, for an hour or two, staring over our mugs of steaming hot cocoa at our jumbled arrangement of combined itchy questions spread out, jumbled, arranged and rearranged and rearranged, there in front of us on Harry & Margaret’s old threadbare 1940’s magic carpet, listening to the winter wind howling through the bare branches outside our attic’s east window, and to the rattling of the window pane inside the dried-out putty which once held it in its rotting wooden frame . . . then perhaps we might be so fortunate (you & I) as to begin to discern some pattern within our combined jumble of itchy questions. Perhaps.


Chapter III

Gunfire Inside the Hourglass


36. Gaps


But I’m getting ahead of myself. That blustery winter’s night of playing on the floor with our questions will simply have to wait, because the time has come for me to tell you about the tragic confrontation which occurred on the aforementioned summer’s night in 1970 inside The Hourglass. But rather than begin by telling you everything I know, I’m going to begin by telling you several key components that I don’t know. Here, then, are a few of the gaps in my recollection of the events of that night:

First of all, I never learned the name of the barmaid who was shot – or even where the police officer’s bullet struck her. All I know is that, one minute she was working the weekend crowd, waiting on customers in The Hourglass, and in the next instant she was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. Accounts I heard later from reputed witnesses had the bullet from his service revolver striking her in the lower back or buttocks. The officer was, after all, firing upwards from the floor, where he lay on his back, after someone (or several someones) had allegedly knocked him down. Accounts vary. The Wichita Eagle-Beacon probably carried the story within a day or two of the incident, but I’m too lazy and inept to track it down.

Which brings us to the second big gap in my ability to tell the story of that summer’s night in the way that it deserves to be told. The best way that I can think of to describe that second gap is this: I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of the movie that Kate and I had gone to see that evening – nor why it was that Arthur didn’t go with us, even though he did let us borrow his old gray 1957 Ford, per our understanding that we’d be sure to put some gasoline in its thirsty tank. I believe that it might have been that documentary film about the making of the Beatles’ last album, Let It Be. Then again, I seem to recall that it was right around that same period that Disney re-re-released in movie theaters around the country some sort of “remastered” version of their animated classic, Fantasia, which Kate & I had both seen during our very separate childhoods, back in the 1950’s, but which we couldn’t resist revisiting through our young adult eyes and experiences, there in the churning eye of the Vietnam years. For that matter, however, it’s possible that Kate and I had only gone to see whatever second-run movie was being screened that week in the CAC Theater on campus, at what was commonly known as “The Two-Bit Flick” (even though, by 1970, the price of admission had risen from 25 cents to 50 cents).

While the fact of the matter is that I could make here for you today a pathetically long list of other gaps in my recollection of that cataclysmic night in that cataclysmic summer of 1970, when a barmaid down the street at The Hourglass was shot in her lower spine and paralyzed by some poorly trained rooky cop’s panic-driven potshot, while Kate Schulte & I were away at some cinematic event or other . . . I won’t. I could, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to burden you with just one more. And that third noteworthy gap in my understanding of what happened that night has to do with the exactitude of the “when” part of our equation. Had I known that I was going to have to submit to a “pop quiz” on this stuff, I’d have written some of it down at the time it was happening. As it was, I was rather busy at the time – busy soaking up as much wisdom as I could afford – wisdom mostly in the form of itchy questions.


37. Preliminary Thoughts Concerning Not Knowing

Not knowing is part & parcel of the human condition. Perhaps the most empowering three-word phrase in the English language is “I don’t know.” In point of fact, I tend to believe that “I don’t know” may be only about .037% less empowering than that other magical three-word phrase: “I was wrong.” In any event, now that I’ve shared with you what I consider to be the three most noteworthy “I don’t know” gaps in my understanding of the events of that night of tragic confrontation, here’s what I do remember:

Earlier that evening, I had borrowed Arthur’s old gray 1957 Ford and picked up Kate at her parents’ house at 6015 East 17th Street, and the two of us went to see some movie or other. I can’t remember whether Arthur had been working at the library earlier that evening or if he’d simply decided to stay home (i.e. in our attic apartment) and study. When he & I were recently (circa 2009) trying to piece together our memory fragments from that night, what seemed to stick most vividly in his mind was the helicopter.

I’m going to guess that it was somewhere around 9:30 that evening that Art was there in our attic apartment, enjoying the peaceful solitude, when the peaceful solitude came to an abrupt halt with the sudden deafening “whompatuh, whompatuh, whompatuh . . . ” of a police helicopter right outside our attic window. I’m also going to guess that that east window’s thin glass pane commenced to rattling (inside the dried-out putty which had once held it firmly in its rotting wooden frame) with far greater ferocity (and at a hundred times more rapid frequency) than it had rattled in my fantasy in which you & I, Gentle Reader, were sitting on the attic floor with our questions, on that imaginary winter’s night. Needless to say, Arthur ran to that rattling east window to try to make out what was happening down below. By that time, the police helicopter had practically nested in the topmost branches of the big tree which stood in the front yard of the old “farmhouse” we lived above. Nowadays, this wouldn’t be perceived with overmuch astonishment. On a summer’s night in 1970, however, it was definitely “something to write home about” (as we used to say, back when Americans still wrote home).

Meanwhile, Kate & I were just then coming out of some movie theater and walking across some parking lot for the drive back to 1725 North Fairmount. Imagine our surprise as we pulled around the corner off of 17th Street onto Fairmount! To reiterate: that was then and this is now. Therefore, even in the turbulent 60’s & 70’s, a “crime scene” of the sort we drive past on a daily basis, here in the Kansas City area in this first decade of the 21st century, was, by contrast, an astonishing sight on that otherwise quiet, Midwestern, “Middle American”, Bible Belt summer’s night in 1970. Both sides of Fairmount Street were lined with squad cars. People were milling around everywhere – mostly college-age young folks and lots of uniformed police officers. The majority of the young folks appeared to be dispersing pretty rapidly, however, in every direction, away from The Hourglass. A few of them – of both genders – were muttering variations on this theme: “Kill the f---ing pigs . . . somebody oughta . . . goddamned pigs . . . somebody oughta kill all the f---ing pigs . . .” Or words to that effect.

As I steered Art’s old Ford onto Fairmount, a police officer who was directing traffic flagged me over. I explained that Kate & I were simply headed home to the big white house – and then pointed. He let us through and I parked Arthur’s car in its usual spot at the curb in front of 1725. Arthur was standing in the front yard, talking with a young man I didn’t recognize and watching in bewilderment (as were we) the parade of young folks walking more briskly than usual, down our street and sidewalk and across our lawn, toward the south, away from The Hourglass and from the gradually dissipating mayhem which had obviously been more densely focused there, only a few minutes earlier. As I’ve already intimated, some of those trooping past 1725 could be heard to mutter those variations on the “kill the f---ing pigs” theme aforementioned.

In comparing recently (circa 2009) our individual recollections of that night, Arthur & I found that we’d each separately made some strikingly similar observations. Among them was the fact that the young men and women most vociferous in their venting about “killing the f---ing pigs” appeared to be the youngest in the crowd. To me, this was only logical, since the rest of us had the advantage of a few extra years of living and of having put into its proper perspective the realpolitk relationship operating between governmental forces such as the WPD (Wichita Police Department) and “the general public,” which – all of the colorful, romanticized labels flying at us in those days notwithstanding – included us. Of those of us standing out on Fairmount Street that night, amidst the scent of a gradually dissipating teargas cloud and the gradual thinning out of WPD walkie-talkie squawks, most were old enough to remember watching on television the Birmingham police dogs and fire hoses of the early 60’s, as well as the Chicago police riots of 1968. The more clear-minded among us were, therefore, equipped to distinguish between “pigs” (sic) and this “mere anarchy” which was here being loosed (a la W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”) upon our peaceful neighborhood.

That said, there was no excuse for what had happened inside The Hourglass, an hour or so earlier. What was abundantly clear to me at the time, and what remains equally abundantly clear to me here today, as I say these words to you, a lifetime after the fact, is that that innocent young woman who was so tragically caught in the crossfire of other people’s agendas that night was the victim of what I’ve been known, on occasion, to refer to as “systemic evil.” But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Furthermore, I promised myself at the outset of this “Portable Bohemia” project that I’d force myself to refrain from excessive editorializing. Let’s now turn our attention, instead, to my sharing with you, in the very briefest form I’m able, the bare outline of what evidently occurred in the mere minute or so after the two poorly-trained rookie cops walked through the door of The Hourglass that night.

However, before I share with you my hypothesized outline, let’s back up just one more remove so that I can reveal my semi-reliable sources. As I’ve said, I parked Arthur’s old Ford along the curb in front of 1725, and Kate & I got out and immediately began asking Art what he could tell us about what the hell was going on. Before he could answer, however, a young man whom I can most easily describe as having been right out of Central Casting when the call went out to “send me a stereotypical long-haired hippy freak,” went rushing past in the retreating crowd and loudly announcing his version of events thus: “The f---ing pigs just killed some chick!” And then he was gone. And then a group of a half dozen or so unusually well-dressed young women who seemed to have been out together for a night of harmless frolic came hurrying our way with tears rolling down their pretty cheeks.

“Do you guys live here?” the “alpha-chick” asked me. It seems that they’d been caught, not so literally in the crossfire as simply downwind from the WPD’s teargas cloud, and asked if they could use our bathroom sink to rinse their pretty eyes out. So Kate & Art & I led them up onto the big wooden front porch of 1725, up the creaky wooden staircase to the second floor, and on into the disgracefully unhygienic bathroom which Art & I shared with three or four other collegiate tenants, all of whom had evidently been raised by wolves in Hell.

It was from this dainty clutch of teargassed female visitors, therefore, that we received our initial whiff of semi-reliable information as to the forever semi-knowable truth of the matter. Synthesizing their version with those from numerous other sources – including purported eyewitnesses and the accounts released by official WPD spokespersons – and then filtered through my personal knowledge of the personalities and cultures involved in this unfortunate incident, here’s what I believe to have happened inside The Hourglass that night (bearing in mind that the central action evidently took place in less than three minutes – 180 seconds):

Evidently, a pair of armed, poorly-trained, uniformed rookie cops walks through the front door of The Hourglass at around 8:30 p.m. The atmosphere inside is virtually indistinguishable from the atmosphere (noise level, air quality, patrons per square inch, etc.) inside a thousand other campus bars across America that night. The two rookies have no particular reason for being there, aside from the fact that it’s a pleasant summer night, that they find themselves assigned to the Wichita State campus neighborhood, that there’s an abundance of female eye-candy on the loose, that there’s always the off chance that they’ll detect a whiff of marijuana smoke in the air and thereby get a chance to make a drug bust, and – most importantly of all – the fact that they themselves are two healthy young males – bored, curious and . . . poorly-trained.

Arrogantly shouldering their way among the patrons jammed into The Hourglass like wriggling sardines, they obviously expect the young men and women – who are not that much younger than themselves – to step aside for the swaggering has-been high school jocks with their uniforms and guns. And most of the bar’s patrons do make way for the interlopers, despite the rarity of such arbitrary visits by uniformed WPD officers in any Wichita establishment serving alcohol – even “three-two” beer. But the floor turns out to be a tiny bit slippery from some spilt liquid, so that one of the rookies slips in it and falls, knocking his partner down, as he himself tumbles to the floor. His partner, unaware of the physics of the mishap – and being poorly-trained (in both sociology and the use of deadly force) – misreads the situation entirely. Believing himself to be under attack by drug-crazed hippy freaks (1970 having been many years prior to the implementation of intensive psychological testing and cultural sensitivity training now required by nearly all U.S. law enforcement agencies) . . . the second poorly-trained rookie panics, draws his service revolver and fires into the crowd of stunned Hourglass patrons. The upward path of one of his rounds enters the hapless barmaid’s buttocks, travels upwards into her lower spine and does sufficient damage to (let’s not mince words here) ruin her life.

“Once the lead starts flying” (as Barney Fife would have stated it), the bar clears out right quick-like. A handful of young male patrons, however, emboldened by a misguided sense of chivalry (and a few beers) remain behind to protect the fallen damsel from what they perceive to be stupidity-crazed rookie cops. Mayhem ensues.


38. Editorial Note

Admittedly, this is only an educated guess – an hypothesis, if you will. But I’m comfortable with it, so you might as well be comfortable with it, too. Fair ‘nuf? If, however, someone within the sound of my telling has a more accurate version to tell, I’m always open and eager to be set straight about such things. Please be advised that I can always be contacted through my publisher.


39. Susan Nelson

The main reason I’ve troubled you with my tedious recounting of this incident – this tragic confrontation – has been because it does provide as vivid a metaphor as I can come up with, in the context of this “Portable Bohemia” reminiscence, to dramatize the convergence and collision of some of the key historical forces operating within the zeitgeist during that twelvemonth when Arthur & I shared that attic apartment. Moreover, at the risk of trying your patience even further, Gentle Reader, I’d like to take a moment to color outside the lines by backing up in time to a few weeks prior to the police shooting at The Hourglass – and even prior to Art’s and my moving into the attic above that old farmhouse two doors south of The Hourglass.

All it is that I want to take this moment to share with you now is . . . a moment – a different moment, one which flickered for a few heartbeats, nearly a lifetime ago. All it is is something Susan Nelson once said to me. It’s the afternoon of May 5, 1970 – a Tuesday. The Kent State shooting took place less than 36 hours earlier. It was when I stepped out onto the Nelsons’ big Mediterranean-style front porch that morning to fill my lungs with the cool springtime air and to enjoy the bright morning sunshine pouring down upon the trees and lawns and houses up and down Roosevelt Street, that I bent down to pick up the morning paper and, thus, to receive the news of that more famous “tragic confrontation” by way of The Wichita Eagle-Beacon’s banner headline.

Later that morning and all through the afternoon, before and after each of my classes and especially at lunch – I found myself meandering in and out of fragmented conversations about Kent State . . . Kent State . . . Kent State. It was probably somewhere around 4:30 that afternoon, shortly after I arrived back at the Nelsons’, while 9-year-old Antonya Nelson (who, according to NPR’s Scott Simon is nowadays [circa 2009] “considered perhaps the pre-eminent short story writer in America”) was upstairs playing with her younger siblings, David & Julie, that I found myself alone with Susan in the serving pantry between the dining room and the kitchen. She was preparing supper and I was setting the table. It was as we were each walking back and forth, getting done what had to be done so that everyone could eat on time, all the while conversing about the shootings and about what we’d been hearing folks on campus saying about the shootings, as she and I had each gone about our business throughout the morning and early afternoon. (I just realized that I forgot to mention earlier that Susan holds a master’s degree in English and taught a half load nearly every semester in the English Department back in those days. Thus it was that, besides being a kind of big sister to me, she’d also taught me Chaucer, Milton, Pope and Swift.)

Anyway, this indelible flickering moment is framed with the context I’ve just described. And in that serving pantry, off the Nelson’s kitchen, there’s a window above the serving table. And that window (if my memory serves me well) provides a western exposure with a view of the big multi-car garage, out beyond the broad paved loading area with its long driveway leading out onto both Roosevelt Street and First Street – all of which is generously garnished with the arboreal splendor of springtime. And so the clock time is now 4:37 (Central Time) on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 5th, and Susan Nelson & I are framed in the frame of this enlightening west-facing window, as we pass one another, heading in opposite directions, doing what needs to be done, while discussing the day’s events. And so the moment flickers when I ask Susan if she believes that the Kent State shootings of the day before might possibly have been part of some sort of conspiracy. (I’m basing this question, not so much upon my own theories as I am upon those I’ve heard bandied about throughout the day.) And so the moment flickers indelibly in my memory when Susan lifts both hands and curves those long lovely fingers of hers the way she does when she’s making some particularly profound point about, say, Paradise Lost, as she fixes my gaze with hers and replies with all the deliberation and gravity of a seasoned social reformer:

“No, Galen. I believe that it’s much worse than a conspiracy. I believe that it’s an attitude.”

And that was it. Susan handed me that sparkling insight, and then the moment was gone. It flickered, and we each continued going about doing what we’d been in the middle of doing before the question was asked and so aptly answered.


Chapter IV

Attic Snapshots


40. History and National Stupidity

Gazing backward through the rearview mirror of these past four decades, I see that it doesn’t take a Susan Jacoby or a Susan Nelson to deduce that neither the Kent State shootings nor the shooting inside The Hourglass a few weeks later was the product of a conspiracy. At the time, however, it was much too early in the game for your average twenty-one-year-old Wichita State University junior to figure that out without the help of someone like Susan Nelson. (Moreover, to complicate matters even further, there is a very real sense in which an attitude is itself a kind of product of a kind of conspiracy. But I’m going to leave that dynamic alone for the time being.)

As for Susan Jacoby: I cannot leave her alone nowadays. The Susan Jacoby (born 1945) to whom I’m referring here is the author of The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008; 356 pp.) – and it is, of course, her book that I can’t seem to get enough of nowadays. I snarfed it up shortly after it first hit the shelves in hardcover several months ago and am now on my third read-through. What’s the reason for my admitted obsession with Ms. Jacoby’s latest book, you might understandably be asking me. The shortest answer I can think to offer is that Ms. Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason is one of the few recent works of non-fiction which I earnestly wish that I myself had written. Even though I’m not its author, please feel invited to consider it to be my Rosetta Stone, my magic decoder ring, the key to me, in a sense which I myself simply do not have time or talent to carve out in such intricate accurate detail. That is to say that if – even after I’ve come to the stopping point of whatever I’m going to get around to sharing with you here today, Gentle Reader – if you still feel as though I’ve failed to make adequate connection between the slice of my world I’m depicting for you here (1970-71), which I’m calling “My Portable Bohemia,” and the person I’ve become – and continue to become – as I arrive at my 60th birthday . . . if you’d still appreciate a bit of extra help in finding that connection (and I wouldn’t blame you if you did), then Ms. Jacoby’s excellent book is probably your best bet.

The first I ever heard of The Age of American Unreason was when I saw Ms. Jacoby interviewed on Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS several months ago. Although it’s a delightful interview to watch (and I highly recommend it to anyone reading what I’m writing here today), it doesn’t come close to her book itself in offering up a penetrating analysis of America’s current culture wars, of their roots, and of several realistically hopeful remedies. In her book, Ms. Jacoby asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, that’s precisely what led me to found the Mythoklastic Therapy Institute back in 1999 – exactly ten years ago, as of this writing. Therefore, it strikes me as only natural that Ms. J’s Age of American Unreason serve as a nearly perfect Rosetta Stone for decoding my own writings in the field of Mythoklastic Therapy.

Beyond what I’ve just said about Ms. Jacoby’s most recent book, it’s not my intention to “review” it for you here. I would, however, beg your indulgence in allowing me to share with you a couple of my favorite quotations. The first appears in the final chapter, on page 313, and is actually the first part of a long quotation from historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine. Here’s part of what Dr. Schlesinger poignantly observed in one of his very last essays, entitled “History and National Stupidity”:


Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity – the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat – fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing. . . . Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity.

(from: New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006)


For me, as a member of what well might forever be stigmatized as “The Vietnam Generation,” however, Dr. Schlesinger’s observation here touches upon but one of the more glaring symptoms of our national stupidity – upon merely the tip of the iceberg. (I’m going to try with all my might to resist the temptation to mention the Titanic here.)

The other quote I’d like to share with you is near the beginning of Ms. Jacoby’s insightful book, on page 21, and is built around a timely remark by Thomas Jefferson. My motive in sharing it now is that I intend to refer back to it later on – in a wide variety of contexts. Here’s how Ms. J contextualizes the Jefferson quote:


One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith – an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions. Both the Constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society enjoin us to respect our fellow citizens’ right to believe whatever they want – as long as their belief, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But many Americans have misinterpreted this sensible laissez-faire principle to mean that respect must be accorded the beliefs themselves.


Ms. Jacoby concludes this important paragraph with a splendid example from out of America’s infamous inventory of “dangerous fallacies that really do pick pockets and break legs.” Scattered throughout my own writing on the subject of Mythoklastic Therapy, I myself have cited a damnation army of similar examples of religious fanaticism, homicidal superstition, killer myths, toxic lies, etc. This is, therefore, a theme to which I’m likely to return often, for as long as these arthritic fingers of mine can draw breath.


41. From Out of Grooved Vinyl

Lest we linger longer here in time present, however, and thereby become even more addicted to it than we already are, let us hurry, now, back to the past, where I might keep on trying my hand at making sense for you out of the lives we were living as undergraduate college students, back then.

When I say that Arthur & I “shared” that attic apartment at the center of our story, it gets me to thinking of how the sense in which we “shared” it was utterly distinct from any other sense in which I’ve found myself sharing quarters with anybody else of either gender, either before or since that memorable twelvemonth of 1970-71. The mishmash of impressions and sketchy memories with which I’m left tend to lead me to say that any “sharing” that took place during that period was generally of a random and haphazard nature. Not that that was a bad thing. We were, after all, two very busy young male university students, two unique individuals from significantly different (yet strikingly similar) backgrounds, each headed in his own direction in later adult life, yet ultimately destined to fulfill such symmetrically intertwining paths between then and now as to invite volumes of lyrical comparison with certain of history’s other legendary male friendships.

Throughout much of our attic year, however, there were a few things Arthur & I managed to find time to do together on a fairly regular basis. Of these few, the one which sticks most firmly – and most delightfully – in my mind would have to be our trips to the big downtown Central Branch of the Wichita Public Library. Both of us being, back then, card-carrying members of the WSU student body, we had at our fingertips, right there on campus, practically any book or other print publication that any wannabe cosmopolitan polymath could possibly have hoped for. It was, therefore, not the books which drew us to the hallowed stacks of the downtown public library, but rather the grooved vinyl.

When I say “grooved vinyl,” I’m referring, of course, to the sounds microscopically codified into the nearly-microscopic spiral of grooves on the 12” black vinyl circular flat surface of each and every one of what were known, back then, as LP’s (or long-playing phonograph records) in the library’s exceptional audio collection. When one of these thousands of LP’s or “record albums” was lain flat on top of a “turntable,” rotating @ 33 1/3 RPM’s (revolutions per minute), and a specially crafted “needle,” connected to highly sensitive electronic gadgetry, was set down gently upon this grooved vinyl phonograph record’s circular flat surface as it rotated upon the turntable, then sounds would issue forth from out of the phonograph’s speakers – sounds from other times and other places. Thus, it might be more to the point to say that it was not so much the grooved vinyl itself, but rather what the vinyl grooves contained – i.e. the distant sounds which could be coaxed from out of those nearly-microscopic vinyl grooves – which beckoned to Arthur & me with their siren song, from a full five miles away, throughout our attic year – and long before and long after.


42. Our Other Attic Soundtrack

As I started to say, way back near the beginning of this chapter (in Section 4, I believe it was), Arthur & I would pile into his old gray & gray 1957 Ford, every week or two – almost always on a Friday afternoon after classes had ended for the week – to drive the five miles or so downtown, to invite the boldly eclectic taste of the wannabe Renaissance Man within each of us to interface with the boldly eclectic collection of distant sounds microscopically nestled within those thousand of spirals of vinyl grooves, awaiting only the lover’s kiss from the needle of our hungry young senses to coax them into issuing forth from out of the speakers of the inexpensive stereo phonograph I’d brought with me when we’d moved into that attic apartment.

Among the distant sounds thus coaxed forth from out of the grooved vinyl LP’s which Arthur & I got around to picking out and checking out of the downtown library and hauling home to our attic apartment to play their various roles in transforming us into better men were such notables as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Vachel Lindsay, Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Auden, Eliot and Stevens, as I recall, were particularly frequent guests in our humble drafty attic.

But these were only the poets – hidden within the vinyl grooves of their respective “spoken arts” phonograph albums. Even more frequent guests were the makers of the world’s various & sundry musics – some, more than others. It was during that memorable twelvemonth that Arthur & I both fell in love with the Late String Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich (in which I can still, to this day, feel the striving, angst and self-contradictions of the mid-20th century zeitgeist), as well as with the Late String Quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven (in which I can still, to this day, feel the spirit of the Age of Darwin & Lincoln sluffing off the last castings of dead skin from the Age of Voltaire & Jefferson). Of the DWEM’s (dead white European males) whose music I now associate, in retrospect, with angular interior of that bohemian time & place, however, Johann Sebastian Bach has undoubtedly earned the most cherished spot in both Arthur’s heart and my own with his Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello (BWV 1007-1012).


43. Grooving on Dead White European Males

Traveling each in our separate trajectories, in the twenty-odd years before those trajectories crossed in the late 1960’s on the campus of Wichita State University and eventually intertwined, Arthur & I were each separately fortunate enough to have received an exposure to Classical Music, Literature, History and Philosophy which could safely have been rated as significantly above the national average. But neither of us knew that at the time – which was all for the best. What we did know was that our hometown of Wichita, Kansas was almost universally derided by our generation of Wichitans as being – as the cliché went: “either the biggest small town or the smallest city in America.” Moreover, we each looked around us, as were growing up there – Arthur in the southwest part, I in the northeast part – and saw a vast quantity of what we didn’t want to grow up to be or to be like or to own or to do . . . along side of a very precious little of its opposite. Arriving, therefore, contemporaneously, if not quite simultaneously, as undergraduate students on the WSU campus in the mid-1960’s, he and I each perceived rightly, through the cracked and smudged lenses of our working-class circumstances, that we were the “fortunate sons,” indeed, assigned by Destiny to revel and to struggle within the timeframe of a frighteningly tiny window of opportunity.

I hope that Arthur won’t mind if I presume to speak for both of us here, when I say that one of the many things which he & I had in common back then was, as I’ve already suggested, a personal drive toward becoming as much as our talents and limitations would allow us to eventually become – each in his own way – the Renaissance Man, a pair of “cosmopolitan polymaths.” (This latter term I stole from Susan Jacoby’s wonderful book, but I suspect that Arthur would agree with the term’s characterization of his and my shared aspiration – both then & now.)

All of this is by way of partial explanation for why it was that our frequent reconnaissance missions to Wichita’s huge-ish, newish downtown library found us focusing so doggedly upon whatever audio recordings – musical or otherwise – would most effectively serve to fill in the gaps in our inner cosmos of understanding of the whole big entirety of the human cosmos. In the area of music – besides the examples I’ve just mentioned (and before I broaden the scope of my sharing beyond the realm of DWEM’s) – this process of filling in the gaps meant checking out, taking home to our attic apartment, and listening to – with open-minded ears – phonograph recordings of the works of such composers as Berg, Schoenberg, Poulenc, Stravinsky, Faure, Bartok, Bernstein, Mahler, Prokofiev, Ives, Hindemith, etc. etc. . . . and nearly every other major 20th century classical composer – in other words, whatever we were least familiar with. Second only to that of Shostakovich, I seem to recall that it was the music of Bela Bartok which excited our interest the most. I believe that it would be fair to say that, during our attic period, Arthur & I got around to listening to over ¾ of the available commercially recorded works of our three favorite 20th century DWEM’s: Bartok, Stravinsky and Shostakovich – two of whom were, at that time, not even “D” yet. (Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, i.e. toward the end of our attic period.)


44. Listening in the Attic

And that brings us finally to the single genre of recorded music which I will always associate most closely in my mind (most closely, though not necessarily most endearingly) with the attic at the center of our story. When Arthur & I were boys growing up in the 1950’s & 60’s, the music to which I’m about to refer here was simply called “Primitive Music” – and nobody seemed to be the least bit offended by the adjectival application of the word “primitive.” English-speaking people (particularly certain mediocre academics who had nothing else to recommend them beyond their trendy pseudo-liberalism [with the accent on the “pseudo—“]) have stirred up, in recent decades, a dust storm of lucrative controversy over the appropriateness of the formerly standard application of the word “primitive.” Given my own unimpeachable credentials as a lifelong human rights activist (from the school of Stanton, Sanger & Stowe), I’m going to choose to “buck the hip” (in Joni Mitchell’s words) and use the word “primitive” here in its original sense (countless centuries of colonial exploitation of the world’s pre-industrial indigenous peoples notwithstanding).

(Whew!) As I was about to say before I went all self-conscious on you there: What I’m going to call “Primitive Music” (because that’s what we primitive people called it back then) is the type of recorded music which I will always associate most closely in my mind with the attic at the center of the universe. Over the course of our numerous forays to the big downtown library that year, Arthur & I were able to track down a healthy abundance of primitive music to drag home to our rented attic as an ongoing feast for our open-minded ears. In telling you this, I find myself again confronted with that persistent nuisance of a stumbling block which you keep hearing me name thusly: “That was then, and this is now.” For, the obvious fact of the matter is that what I’m referring to here as primitive music is nowadays (circa 2009) as ubiquitous as elevator music was, back during the Age of Nixon. Be that as it may, I shall be forever grateful to those few intrepid cultural anthropologists who went to the trouble – way back in the 1920’s, 30’s & 40’s – to capture on their wire-recorders and whatnot the music of some of the world’s indigenous, pre-industrial, primitive, etc. etc. cultures. Anyone bothering to read this piece of “liberal drivel” I’m scribbling here today (and, yes, that includes you, Gentle Reader) is surely sufficiently familiar with these sounds – most of which Arthur & I first heard on the library’s boxed sets compiled by the fine folks at Folkways Records – sufficiently familiar as to make any attempt on my part to describe said sounds seem like overkill – so I won’t even try.

The totality of the electronic audiovisual (A/V) equipment that Arthur & I had with us that year in our cramped little attic apartment was nothing more than the 13” portable black & white television set (with rabbit ears which picked up only three or four channels – fuzzily), which Arthur had had in his dorm room on campus the year before, along with the aforementioned inexpensive phonograph, and a cheap little Radio Shack brand combination AM-FM radio with built-in audio cassette tape player and recorder. But I almost left out what was perhaps the most important item of all, and that would be Arthur’s approximately 10” x 5” x 2” (what we used to call) “portable table-top “ cassette player/recorder – most likely also from Radio Shack. It was this indispensible piece of equipment, along with its little black plastic “remote” microphone in its little black plastic microphone holder-upper, which allowed us to capture on K-Mart brand cassette tapes (3 for 97 cents) our personal favorites from among the sounds issuing forth from out of my phonograph’s speakers. The process by which we accomplished this quaint feat of copyright infringement was both delicate and (here we go again!) primitive. We would simply position Arthur’s tape recorder, with its microphone in its microphone holder-upper, exactly two feet away from the phonograph’s speakers, then set the phonograph’s volume knob at precisely the volume which would cause the phonographically recorded Native American chants or T.S. Eliot’s reading of his Four Quartets (for example) to issue forth into the angular cavernous air of our attic’s makeshift “living room” at exactly the same volume as the average adult would speak conversationally. Any louder and it would cause “blare” (distortion) on the cassette recording we were making; any softer and it would cause our cassette recording to be too faint to be of any value to us.


45. Very Much Reality

Over the ensuing decades, the value to both Arthur & me of those twenty or thirty cassette tapes of “spoken arts” and music (both primitive and otherwise) which we were thus able to copy with Arthur’s modest little tape recorder that year has turned out to be . . . immeasurable. Some of those tapes have actually held up amazingly well and are still in either Arthur’s or my possession, even as he & I head off into our sunset years.

For the younger reader here to make any sense of why we would go to all that bother, back there during our attic period, of recording all of those 33-cent cassette tape copies of all that music and poetry, it might not be such a bad idea, at this juncture for me to remind us all that, back then, there was no Internet and there were no personal computers nor compact discs (CD’s) and no pocket calculators, cell phones, Walkmans nor iPods – nor any of thousands of tools, technologies, products and systems which we all take for granted, here today, in this opening decade of the 21st century, these “Roaring Zeros,” as I like to call them. What this fact translated into for Arthur & me, forty years ago, was that, if we wanted to listen to W.H. Auden reading “The Cave of Making” or Wallace Stevens reading “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” or to any of J.S. Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello (for example), while strolling through the park or driving down the street or – as was most frequently the case with both Arthur & myself – riding our one old shared bicycle around the Wichita State campus with a floppy brown suede shoulder bag, specially designed and handcrafted for that purpose by Kate Schulte (who just so happened to be an art major back then) slung diagonally over our shoulder & neck . . . that is to say that, if either Arthur or I wanted to listen to anything other than commercial AM-FM radio, while away from our attic home, we were forced to resort to what may nowadays strike the reader here as desperate artifice.

Picture, for instance, a 23-year-old Art Dunbar, pedaling that old bicycle we shared (and normally kept chain-locked to the front porch railing of our pre-gentrified farmhouse back then) . . . pedaling that old bicycle leisurely up and down the quiet tree-lined Sunday morning streets of our neighborhood, then around Fairmount Park, and finally back and forth across the university’s peacefully unpeopled green campus, listening all the while through a set of earphones, clamped over the top of his head, to the resonant voice of T.S. Eliot reading his Four Quartets:

. . . Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present . . .

If you can picture this tableau, Gentle Reader, then you are most likely ready to understand how it has been that the unconventional juxtapositions more often associated with mid-20th-century Surrealism (Magritte, Ernst, Dali, de Chirico, Tanguy, etc.) than with any ordinary daily life on or near your average Midwestern university campus at the height of the Vietnam War . . . how it has been that such unconventional juxtapositions as that of the gliding along one’s field of vision of quiet tree-lined Sunday morning streets or of a university’s peaceful green unpeopled Sunday morning campus . . . with the resonant beauty and wisdom of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets . . . how it has been that such unconventional juxtapositions “trigger a new kind of awareness, one that is normally buried under the predictability of conventional usage.”


46. Donald Barthelme Re-re-reconsidered

The last seventeen words of the previous sentence are quoted from a book review in the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, “Saved from Drowning (Barthelme Reconsidered),” in which Louis Menand provides what I consider to be exceptionally useful insight into Tracy Daugherty’s recent biography of my very favorite short story writer from the period in question, Donald Barthelme (1931-1989). The year before we moved into the attic at the center of our story, Arthur Dunbar (who else!) “turned me onto” (as our drug-soaked generation used to say, back then) Barthelme’s surrealistic, post-modernist short prose pieces which were appearing every week or two in the pages of The New Yorker. That would have been in 1969, and I’d have been twenty years old at the time. In Barthelme, I discovered a kindred spirit with whom I could internally share my own heretical interpretation of the world around me – particularly the world of human society. Equally important to me at the time, however, was the fact that Barthelme’s nightmarishly comical quasi-Kafkaesque vision of the human universe matched my own so closely that the thrill of reading his latest New Yorker piece, week after week, had the cumulative effect of emboldening me, as a budding young poet, to fly farther and farther out toward the edge of verbal experimentation, giving me his grown-up permission to think and to write in the ways I’d wanted to think and write, ever since I’d made up my mind, way back in the 9th grade, that I was going to try my hand at being a writer.

Here, in it’s entirely, is the sentence from Louis Menand’s review of Hiding Man from which I excerpted the seventeen words I’d stolen earlier to finish the sentence with which I segued into talking here about Donald B:

Barthelme shared the surrealists’ faith that, by an intuition operating below the threshold of consciousness – he called this the faculty of “not-knowing” – the juxtaposition of unlike to unlike could trigger a new kind of awareness, one that is normally buried under the predictability of conventional usage.

(from “Saved from Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered” in The New Yorker; February 23, 2009; page 75)


At the height of the Vietnam War, which coincided symmetrically with the years during which either Arthur Dunbar and/or I found ourselves striving mightily to get a college education (1965-1975), the world of human interactions struck many members of our generation (Arthur & myself foremost) as being an hideously Kafkaesque place. Perhaps it was as much for this reason as it was for any of the other reasons which one’s memory might readily “put its finger on,” that so many Americans sharing Arthur’s & my grim outlook found Barthelme’s brand of surrealism so refreshing – like a breath of cool mountain air in a stuffy dungeon. Why was that? After all, Don B. was not, like so many other writers of that period, making stern pronouncements condemning the war. Instead, he was simply sharing glimpses of the world as it was – or as he and we suspected it to be, once the thin veneer of bullshit which most folks called “reality” was stripped away by means of Barthelme’s (for lack of a better word) surrealistic vision.

All I know is that, by reading Don B’s brilliant little pieces in The New Yorker on a fairly regular basis, throughout those final awful years of the Vietnam War (though, in actuality, either Arthur or Kate would often read them out loud to all three of us) . . . by entering into the surrealistic lens through which Barthelme transformed the hellish world we were all trapped in, back then, into a comically tolerable verbally experimental fluid collage, we (his fans) were paradoxically empowered to make better sense of what had previously made no sense at all. Another way of expressing this might be to say that Barthelme’s art functioned – for me, at least – as the proverbial “lie” which makes us realize the truth. I remember thinking at the time that Don B’s writings were somehow politically subversive, but I couldn’t even begin to explain how that worked. Obviously, I still can’t. I can, however, confuse the reader even further by confessing that, in trying and failing to explain Don B’s politically subversive dimension to you just now, that great old Waylon Jennings song kept popping into my head: “I’ve Always Been Crazy (But It’s Kept Me from Going Insane).” Actually, I think that it’s the title, more than the song itself, which would seem to apply to our topic.


47. Surrealism as a Subversive Activity

Be all that as it may, Arthur & I, along with millions of our fellow Americans, back in the early 1970’s, could sense that we were being bullshat. And, coincidence or not, if one were to have drawn a Venn diagram, back in 1970, in which one circle represented all the Americans who sensed that they were being bullshat, and the other circle represented all the Americans who were avid readers of “The Teachings of Don B.” (or of practically any works of surrealist, post-modernist, experimentalist, avant-garde . . . fiction of that era), I’m personally convinced that the second circle (of the readers of Barthelme and other surrealists) would fit comfortably into the first circle (of the sniffers-out of bullshittery) – with plenty of room left over. It was, in fact, during the attic year of 1970-71 that I made my first feeble attempt to understand and describe the mysterious dynamics of the relationship between art and politics. Forty years later, I feel as though I’m about halfway toward achieving that goal.

One possible clue to making clearer sense of the mysterious dynamics of that relationship may (or may not) be inherent in one particular sentence which jumped out at me from Lorrie Moore’s equally insightful review of Hiding Man entitled “How He Wrote His Songs,” which appears on page 25 of the March 25, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books:

The placement of unexpected things side by side is not only the spirit of surrealism but also the beating heart of both comedy and nightmare, and Barthelme’s work, despite its seemingly offhand oddness and its flouting of conventional storytelling, was capable of suddenly cohering in the marvelous way of Kafka.

I suppose that this is as appropriate a place as any for me to interject the fact that I don’t hold Donald Barthelme responsible for “radicalizing” me (a term of which I’m not especially fond). In the sense in which that term is most often used, I’d been “radicalized” by everything I’d experienced and observed, even before I turned 18 and graduated from high school in the spring of 1967. Rather, what reading Don B. did for me was to make the living of “Life among the Bullshat” considerably more tolerable than it would have been otherwise. This sense of solidarity and consolation, along with his implicit affirmation of my own world view, was augmented many fold, once I began buying his books, the earliest anthologies of his prose pieces.

I was both embarrassed and thrilled to discover, during the attic year, that all the time I’d been in high school (1964-1967), fretting and sweating over keeping up with my more sophisticated peers (mostly with one William Cyrus Daniels, now that I think about it) in some self-imposed false competition to see who could read the hippest, latest, trendiest prose fiction . . . Donald Barthelme was – unbeknownst to anyone in my peer group of the Wichita High School East intelligentsia – off in a much hipper universe, writing and publishing the most enviably hyper-hip surrealist short fiction to be found anywhere on Planet Earth. Thus it was that, as soon as I could existentially process my embarrassment, I set about pursuing the thrill of getting my hands on all of Don B’s work from the 1960’s that was available in book form.

My personal favorite pieces of early Barthelme are about what you’d expect, since they are among the most frequently anthologized. For instance, from his 1964 collection entitled Come Back, Dr. Caligari, I’m rather crazy about “Me and Miss Mandible.” Equally predictable (as my literary taste so often is, to those who know me), the pieces collected in his Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) which seem to have found the greatest longevity in my heart include “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning” (published while RFK was still with us), as well as a Cold War spoof with the deceptively short title of “Game.” (This latter piece held a very special place in my heart, since Wichita, Kansas – at least in the 1960’s & 70’s – was ringed by a network of more than a dozen underground missile silos whose ICBM’s were each armed with nuclear warheads, each capable of vaporizing Moscow, Leningrad or Vladivostok many times over.)

In case you’re interested, I do happen to have a #1 favorite Donald Barthelme story. It’s called “A City of Churches” and appears in his 1972 collection entitled Sadness, and again in his more readily available “best hits” collection entitled 60 Stories (1982). If anyone reading this feels sufficiently curious as to track down some of Don B’s finest prose pieces, my personal recommendation as a starting place would definitely be 60 Stories. It’s widely available in paperback and could prove to be one of the most prudent investments the reader could feasibly make these days, here in the midst of our current global economic crisis.


48. From the Small World Department

Before we return now to the attic year, please indulge me while I make note of just this one additional item from the “small world” department. On page 76 of the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, the entire left-hand column, adjacent to the final two columns of Louis Menand’s review of Hiding Man, is taken up by an ad for Antonya Nelson’s latest book, entitled Nothing Right. The
ad includes a photograph of Tony’s short story collection’s cover, which is, itself dominated by a photograph of a woman’s outstretched hand, reaching for the thorny beauty of a potted “red top” cactus on a window sill. Above and below the photo of her latest book’s cover are several glowing comments regarding the quality of Tony’s writing, from the likes of Michael Chabon and Francine Prose – as well as this one from Dave Eggers: “Her voice is sure, her wit is quick, her observations continually resonate, and her honesty is unwavering.”

As I sit here telling you about this particular item from the “small world” department, it starts to occur to me that a considerable portion of everything that I’ve told you here so far – indeed, of everything I’ve ever written – might fairly be said to come from the “small world” department. Verily, verily, the “small world” department is a very big department. Why is that, anyway?


Chapter V

Rhyming My Way Out of Hillside High


49. You Play the Hand You're Dealt

Meanwhile, let’s return to the attic year and to an imaginary place called “Hillside High.” When Arthur & I were undergraduate students at Wichita State University, it was commonplace to hear it referred to an “Hillside High,” since the north-south thoroughfare of Hillside Street made up the WSU campus’s westernmost boundary – and since WSU had then (and probably still has) a reputation for being a more or less third-rate school. The aforementioned Wichita High School East intelligentsia, who constituted a goodly portion of my social circle at the time our graduation from high school in the spring of 1967, were among the worst offenders, when it came to deriding Wichita State, the only fully accredited university to which we and our families could afford to send us for a higher education. It was out of some of their mouths that I first heard the nickname “Hillside High” uttered, and it wasn’t long at all before the aptness which I myself perceived in the slur had me employing it on a regular basis.

In my case – and, I suspect, in the case of those of my high school social circle who entered Wichita State with me as freshmen in the late summer of 1967 – bitter disappointment provided the primary impetus in our liberal use of “Hillside High” as a pejorative. We had hoped for better. This is not meant as a criticism of the many excellent WSU faculty members of that period – nor even of the few mediocre ones I tripped over in the course of jogging my way through my five-year (double major) career there.

But the cold, hard fact of the matter was that the hopes and dreams and ambitions which had propelled my friends and myself through the drudgery of high school were clearly not going to be adequately fulfilled on the campus of Wichita State University, which struck most of us as little more than a glorified trade school – a diploma mill for training school teachers, mechanical engineers, police officers, nurses, insurance salesmen, glorified bean-counters, dial-watchers and the like. This is not to take away one iota of the dignity of such professions as professions. It is only to say that my friends and I – each in his or her own unique way – secretly longed for a fairy godmother who could wave her magic wand to instantly transport us to some “real” university campus – perhaps Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, Washington, or even KU in Lawrence. For reasons too numerous to list for you here, I personally had set my sights (and my heart) on KU (the University of Kansas). Even these forty-plus years later, it remains one of the great disappointments of my life that I was robbed of the opportunity to do my undergrad work at KU, but was forced, instead, to settle for WSU.

I realize that, in confessing this disappointment to you here today – especially in this particular context – I’m running the risk of coming across as having been either snobbish or ungrateful. In fact, I was neither. But “the life of the mind” for which I’d been preparing myself, ever since I was old enough to comprehend what the university experience, at its best, could be, was clearly going to end up being very different at Wichita State, in the late 1960’s, than that “life of the mind” I’d preconceived and yearned for. So be it. You play the hand you’re dealt. Right?


50. Creative Awakening -- or Whatever

Much to my relief, the Kafkaesquely nightmarish sensation that I, as a freshman and then as a sophomore at Wichita State, was trapped, for at least part of every school day, back at East High School, being force-fed the same old cliché slop that I’d already processed and regurgitated on cue, way back then . . . that going-nowhere sensation began to subside, by the middle of my sophomore year. That would have been around the time of the flipping over of the calendar page from 1968 to 1969. As I’ve already indicated here, many pages ago, the gradual dissipation of my “Hillside High” nightmare coincided chronologically – but not entirely coincidentally, of course – with my becoming friends with Art Dunbar, along with my becoming intimately acquainted with Kate Schulte (whom I would eventually marry, in the spring of 1971), as well as with my landing that more suitable “work/study” position as a library assistant, and with the warm reception I was accorded into Bill & Susan Nelson’s circle of left-leaning literati.

Other factors, however, equally important, each played their various roles in seeing to it that young Galen Green, as he approached what was, back then, the age of majority (21), was gradually rescued from that (admittedly imaginary) place called “Hillside High.” Foremost among these benevolent elements was the mundane circumstance that the classes I had been required to take each semester in order to fulfill the prescribed requirements within the fairly arbitrary framework of what was called the “core curriculum,” unavoidably prerequisite to my being allowed to take even one of the far more interesting “upper division” classes within my chosen “major” (eventually both English and Creative Writing) . . . that these “lower division” classes were becoming less and less “Mickey Mouse.”

(For the existential nadir of the colloquial innuendo of “Mickey Mouse” within the zeitgeist of the Vietnam Generation, I commend the reader to one unforgettably disturbing scene in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick motion picture entitled Full Metal Jacket. Once you’ve watched that surrealistic scene, I guarantee that you’ll never again hear the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme song without your mind flashing back to that film’s arresting juxtaposition of the insipid “Mickey Mouse” jingle with Vietnam War imagery – not unlike the evocative audiovisual juxtapositions to be found in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now.)

Besides my having gotten my most nightmarishly “Mickey Mouse” classes out of the way, by the middle of my sophomore year at Wichita State, near the end of the 1968 calendar year, one other factor worth mentioning in relation to my eventual escape from my grim confinement within the (admittedly imaginary) walls of “Hillside High” seems to have been a sort of multidimensional paradigm shift or molecular rearrangement within the depths of my own psyche – within my imagination, if you will. I was then, and I am now, enough of a science-based fellow, however, that it strikes me as perfectly warranted to infer that the convergence and synthesis of those several factors already mentioned here (I mean: Art Dunbar, the Nelsons, the library gig, and the movement beyond that which had made “Hillside High” so horribly “Mickey Mouse”) . . . that the convergence and synthesis of those liberating elements probably deserves most of the credit for what happened next.

And what shall I call what happened next? Did it bear a closer resemblance to an epiphany, a creative awakening or just a stroke of luck? Probably a bit of each. Whatever its name, it felt good.


51. Gazing Off Through the Alpine Haze

Divine inspiration. That’s the closest approximation I’m able to offer the reader, in my trying to describe what that period of creative awakening felt like at the time. To gaze backward over these forty years that I’ve journeyed since that period of awakening is like standing on a mountaintop which we’ll call “time present” and gazing backward at a faraway mountaintop which we’ll call our “period of creative awakening,” a mountaintop where once we stood, two-score years ago, gazing off through the alpine haze, into the future, which has become time present. And, in between this mountaintop of “now” and that faraway mountaintop of “then,” we can gaze and gaze down into the haze.


52. To Begin At the Ending

I’ve decided to tell the next part of our story backwards. I’m going to begin by sharing with you a poem I composed during the period of creative awakening in question. Then, after I’ve shared my little poem with you, I’m going to give you enough of the background on the poem’s substance and on the process whereby I composed it that you’ll be invited to more fully understand what was happening inside me at the time. So, to begin at the ending, here’s the poem we’re going to be talking about. It’s a sonnet:



For Concha

by Galen Green
copyright 1969


Now that we are spring (amo, amas)
And the window fan draws memories soft and cool,
Once more the city park lies on its bed of moss
And for this morning, Time is April’s fool;
While the laundry basket hurries from the showers,
El Niño yawns and rubs his heavy eyes,
Regarding her whose busy songs ascend the hours,
Drifting from a heart of lullabies,
Whose fetching eyes turn all men to lovers,
Whose loving fingers teach all maids their charms,
Whose charming strophes turn all maids to mothers,
Whose motherings turn us all to babes in arms,
And whose candied kiss reminds his heart once more
No se puede vivir sin amor.


53. Visiting Rick Craycraft in Denver

In March of 1969, a close friend from high school, one Rick Craycraft, who was attending the University of Denver for a while, generously invited me to visit him for a few days, over spring break, in the modest off-campus apartment where he was living with several other male undergraduate roommates. The general outline of my travel plan was to take a cross-country bus from Wichita to Denver, to hang out with Rick and his girlfriend for a couple of days and see a little of Denver and then to take a city bus to the eastern outskirts of Denver, from which point I’d hitchhike back home to Wichita. (Please remember that I was still living at my parents’ house at 621 South Lorraine at that time – that infamous “House of Not-OK.”)

The Continental Trailways bus ride from Wichita to Denver went smoothly enough. I’d brought a copy of J.P. Donleavy’s overrated novel, The Ginger Man, which distracted me part of the time. For the rest of the time, I conversed with one seatmate or another or napped or gazed out the big bus windows at the barren flatlands of Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado, while munching on one of the raw carrots I was so notorious for carrying in my knapsack, back in those days, as to have earned me the nickname of “The Rabbit.” (Although I much preferred – and still do – the nickname bestowed upon me by another WSU student, one Larry Stephen Perry, who decided to playfully rebrand me after his mathematical interpretation of my first and last initials [G.G.], invariably addressing me as “G-squared.”)

My visit with Rick and Dee Dee also went smoothly. Actually . . . far better than smoothly . . . but let’s leave that be. The mile-high weather proved as warmly welcoming as the citizenry. Springtime was in the air – if not quite yet on the calendar – with all its usual birdsong, sweet smells, sunshine, and . . . well, maybe a few friendly snowflakes after sundown. I mention this now only as an awkward means of foreshadowing what will be coming up in the next paragraph. The fact of Rick’s being busy with his own part-time job at the campus library gave me the opportunity to lollygag in the spare bunk in his shared apartment and thus to peruse his impressively wide-ranging collection of poetry books. I was at that stage in life – and so was Rick (we were both still only 19 years old that winter) – when one is hopelessly open to sampling almost anything aesthetically new or exotic that might swim into one’s broadly-cast nets. And because I had made up my mind, even then, that I would be making every effort to become one of those truly original writers who steals and borrows so eclectically as to make it look like an accident, my preconscious mind had kicked into hyperdrive, as it set about inhaling all that it found to be aesthetically new or exotic, there in Rick’s apartment, as I thumbed the pages of his poetry collection.


54. My Near-Fatal Miscalculation

My homeward hitchhiking started out auspiciously enough, giving me every sign that it meant to do me no harm. As I stepped down from the city bus, as close as it would carry me to Denver’s eastern outskirts, the sky above was reasonably blue and friendly, and the illusion of springtime was still on the morning breeze. Even as I approached the Colorado-Kansas border, along toward suppertime, all reliable indicators pointed toward smooth sailing ahead. It wasn’t long afterward, however, that a troubling darkling density began to obscure the sinking sun in the rearview mirrors, so that no further than thirty or forty miles inside Western Kansas, the unmistakable portents of the sort of deadly blizzard for which that region is famous were enveloping the entire landscape – and all who were dwelling therein. It was my fervent wish at that point not to be dwelling therein, but rather to have my ride (a rural physician) continue to speed us eastward and out of danger – at least until we’d reached some little town big enough to have a cheap motel.

Alas, this wish was not to come true. Instead, the good doctor informed me that he’d be turning off a few miles up ahead and heading north to some tiny hamlet or other which was nearly a country mile off the main highway. By this time, it had begun to snow, and full night had fallen over the barren flatness that stretched beyond the far horizon in every direction. It was clear to me that I had to think fast. Having quizzed my doctor driver enough to conclude that riding any further with him would only defeat my purpose of thumbing down a diesel at first light – thus allowing me to reach Wichita in time for the first day of spring semester classes – I embraced what amounted to a “Hobson’s choice.”

At the crossroads where he turned off the main highway, the only light still shining, there in the snowy nightscape, was coming from inside a lone service station; and even they had already turned off their outside display lighting and were clearly closing down for the night. In fact, the first words out of the surly attendant’s mouth, as he saw me coming thr0ugh his front door, were: “Sorry. We’re closed.” I could tell from his body language that he was worn to a frazzle and in no mood to hear the details of my plight. I therefore simply asked his permission to spend the night in the service station men’s room, which was accessible only through an outside door, around to the side of the building. (After all, what else could I do? That’s why I referred earlier to my course of action as a “Hobson’s choice.” It was either that men’s room floor or the killer blizzard that was closing in fast.)

Making my way around the side of building and slipping into the relatively warm, well-lighted men’s room, I could see that it had, at least, been cleaned within the last day or two. However, no sooner had I stowed my little backpack in the cleanest looking corner and helped myself to a couple dozen paper towels from the wall dispenser to spread out on the floor as a makeshift sleeping mat than the lights went off; the room went pitch black – and suddenly silent. The attendant had obviously shut off the electricity. Instantly, I realized the gravity of my dilemma. Outside, the blizzard was worsening in intensity: the temperature was dropping fast, the snowfall was growing much heavier, and the wind was beginning to howl through the road signs and power lines.


55. How I Kept from Freezing to Death

As I lay down in darkness on my paper towel mat on the filthy tile floor, to commence my attempt to rest – if not exactly to sleep – I pulled my parka hood in tight around my face, all the while remembering what I’d learned in Boy Scouts and from reading various stories of survival – and of nonsurvival – relating to what to do and what not to do, when one finds oneself trapped in this type of situation.

By and by, the room grew chilly . . . then chillier . . . then chillier still . . . then downright uncomfortable. The only reason I’m alive today to relate this painful and somewhat embarrassing learning experience to you is that I just so happened to have three lifesaving items with me that fateful night. The first was a book of matches. The second was a grotesquely insipid paperback novel about “the hippy scene,” given to me earlier that day by one of the drivers who’d picked me up hitchhiking along the highway east of Denver. (Pulp fiction, if you will – manufactured from the utmost flammable pulp.) The third of the three lifesaving items I had with me, that excruciatingly cold night on the frozen tundra was a ruthless sense of self-preservation. Despite the fact of my parents having brought me up to (nearly) always be a grateful guest, I could ill afford to give a rat’s ass about the condition in which I left that particular service station restroom at the break of day.

Thus it was that, every hour or so throughout that seemingly endless night (the truly dangerously frigid timespan of which probably only lasted, in all honesty, from perhaps 2 a.m. until 6 a.m.), I would uncoil my bundled up body from its fetal position on the men’s room floor to rip a handful of pages from my pulp fiction fuel supply, then strike a match to build a small, carefully contained fire in the restroom sink – just enough to take some of the chill out of the air and to warm my fingers to prevent frostbite.

Ironically, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, each of these hourly little survival fires consumed enough oxygen and produced enough smoke that I was compelled to open the restroom door afterwards – though just long enough each time to let the air clear. Part of the tradeoff involved here was that the fresh air entering from outside was blizzard air. Another part of the tradeoff, however, was that, each time I stuck my head out into the blizzard, I could discern, in the glow of a security lamp mounted high on the service station’s exterior wall, the progress of the storm. Thus, when roughly half-spent was the night, I poked my head out of the men’s room for a few seconds to behold a lovely silent white nightscape and an even lovelier flake-free starry sky overhead.

And so it went, until an hour or so before sunrise, when a familiar faint purple glow began to illumine the vast flat snowscape, and I was able to make out the distant shape of what I took to be a ranch-style farmhouse, surrounded by several out-buildings, including a barn and a silo, not more than 300 yards from the open men’s room door where I was then standing, squinting, shivering. What form of welcome or cold shoulder might await me there I knew not – nor cared much. What filled my entire being, at that moment, was what a more noteworthy author than myself has since referred to as “the audacity of hope.” Screwing up my chutzpah, therefore, with all the torque which that audacity could muster, I quickly gather up my things – that is to say, my humble little knapsack – and set out across the new-fallen snow.

The service station, in whose pitch-black, unheated cavern of a men’s room I had just spent much of the night, sat about 150 yards off the main highway. As I’ve said, the late winter’s sun was not yet above the horizon, as I ventured out into the prairie stillness, considering myself lucky to have made my escape before the service station attendant returned to reopen the place and so to discover the men’s room sink full of burnt pages of pulp fiction, which had kept me from freezing to death. From my perspective, that little mess of ashes was a small price to pay for Galen Green’s being allowed to go on breathing for another forty years; but the sheriff might not have looked at it exactly that way. Naturally, I felt somewhat guilty about leaving those ashes behind me for someone else to clean up – but measurably less guilty when I considered the callous disregard for my life that had been shown by the one doing the cleaning up. Was I rationalizing? Am I rationalizing now? Does it matter?


56. Rescued & Fed

As I crossed the highway and gingerly ambled up the long gravel driveway leading to the ranch-style farmhouse, I noticed a shiny stainless steel medium-sized late-model milk truck parked at the far end of the drive. It turned out to belong to the dairy company for which the man of the house was employed. In another hour or so, he’d have driven that truck off to begin his daily milk route to local dairy farmers, in which event (I was informed later), it was highly doubtful that his wife, at home alone with two preschoolers, would have dared to answer my desperate ringing of their doorbell . . . in which case, our story might have had a much less happy outcome. As it was, this young couple proved to be the very incarnation of Christian charity (Christianity being their cultural ground-wire). After the briefest of apologetic petitioning from me for mere warmth, as I stood in the front entryway to their cheery little home, I was treated to a degree of hospitality beyond my most optimistic expectations. A brief outline of how I spent the next hour (before the husband had to leave for work) might be sketched thus:

For approximately the first ten minutes, I literally sat down on top of the forced-air heat register on their living room carpet, thawing out. I even left my parka on and zipped up to my chin, so that the warm air could fill it up like a comfy little tent. For approximately the next ten minutes, I accepted their gracious invitation to borrow their bathroom to “freshen up a bit,” as the euphemism goes. After that, the wife fed me breakfast. Nothing fancy – bacon, eggs, toast, cold milk and hot coffee. But it was, most assuredly, one of the best breakfasts of my life. Following that pleasant repast and another quick stop in their bathroom, I thanked them as profusely as was seemly and exited out the front door directly in front of the man of the house, on his way to work.


57. The Big Rig from out of the Blizzard

The sun was completely up by then, and, although the snowfall was over with, having left no more than a couple of inches of accumulation (except for the usual foot-high drifts along the fence lines and in the ditches) the wind-chill was still highly problematic for an eastward-bound hitchhiker compelled to walk backwards much of the time, with the brutal west wind clawing at his bespectacled eyes. Add to that the billions of razor-sharp grains of frozen snow that sandblasted my face with each strong gust blowing out of the Rockies, and the half-hour or so that I walked and waited and walked and waited, before I was finally rescued, had my poor body frozen worse than it had been when I’d shown up at that farmhouse door earlier that morning.

When my rescuer finally pulled over onto the shoulder of that desolate highway to pick me up, he took the form of a burly middle-aged trucker at the helm of an 18-wheeler loaded with the hopes and fears of all the years – theretofore and thereafter. I asked him if he’d think me terribly rude if I were to simply slump over against the passenger-side door and fall into a long-overdue deep, deep sleep.


58. Arthur’s Recent Poem about my Deliverance

That was forty years ago. The night I nearly froze to death on the floor of an unheated, unlighted service station men’s room during a sudden blizzard in the middle of Western Kansas happened in March of 1969 – the same month in which Golda Meir became the first female prime minister of Israel and Dwight D. Eisenhower went to his final reward. It was also the same month in which James Earl Ray pled guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. and Sirhan Sirhan (officially) admitted killing Robert F. Kennedy . . . and in which Operation Breakfast, the secret bombing of Cambodia, began.

At that particular moment in history, my lifelong friendship with Arthur Dunbar was still in its infancy. It consisted almost entirely of an occasional inspiring conversation here and there, perhaps over lunch in the Campus Activities Center or simply while walking across campus between classes. Therefore, when I arrived back in Wichita, following my harrowing ordeal out on the frozen tundra, Arthur would probably not have been the first – nor even the tenth – person in whose ear I’d have poured the hot news of my chilling adventure. Over the years, however, I did have ample opportunity to practice on him the telling you’ve just heard here, but never in a very polished form. So, when I showed him the rough draft of the preceding few pages, just a couple of days ago, I guess that it must been the first time he’d actually heard the entire narrative from start to finish. In any event, he evidently felt sufficiently inspired to sit right down and dash off a rather dazzling little gem of a haiku (or variation on a haiku) amounting to a sort of distillation of my 1969 story of survival. This is what he wrote:

burning book’s word flames
warm shivering hitchhiker
stranded by blizzard

Personally, I find it to be absolutely brilliant. Art’s own comment on it was “more of a headline than a haiku,” which, I suppose, is true enough. Whatever you wish to call it, I was flattered that he wrote it – and impressed that he was able to come up with it so spontaneously. Which brings us back to that concept of “divine inspiration” that I threw out there several pages ago – right before I shared with you my 1969 sonnet entitled “For Concha.” In fact, I seem to recall that the only reason I took the time to tell the story of my trip to and from Denver in March of 1969 was in order to begin contextualizing “For Concha.”

I say “to begin contextualizing” because there’s more contextualizing to be done before I’ve made as much sense as I hope to make of the creative awakening I began to experience almost immediately, upon my return to Wichita, following my brush with Fate while hitchhiking across the frozen tundra. Admittedly, it would be a cartoonish oversimplification of the complex facts in the matter for me to say that I returned home and immediately embarked upon a period of creative output the likes of which I’d never before experienced nor have experienced since. Even so, it felt as though something beyond naming had been shaken loose as a result of my symbolic rebirth from out of the womb of that winter’s night – something so deep inside me that my only reasonable response was to yield myself to its benevolent unreasonableness.


59. The Key to Concha

Let’s take a moment now to focus on the social context within which my sonnet entitled “For Concha” was composed. You’ll recall my mentioning much earlier (way back in Section 13, when I was explaining my connection to Steve McCaskey, who, along with J.L. McClure, had previously occupied the attic at the center of our story) . . . . my mentioning that I’d sung and played guitar in a folk trio whose other members had been “a high school friend named Diana Freeman and 5-string banjo guy from Tennessee named Gwinn Walker.” Well, “Concha” was Gwinn Walker’s wife at that time. Besides serving as her husband’s fan club and #1 cheerleader, she mostly kept house and looked after their two small children. Without going into overmuch detail here, I’ll just say that the mere fact of my musical partnership with her husband in our little Canadian Railroad Trilogy, beginning in the summer of 1968, brought me into frequent close proximity to their everyday domestic life and, therefore, to Concha and the children. All this frequent close proximity notwithstanding, I believe that it would be less accurate to say that Concha Walker inspired my sonnet entitled “For Concha” than that she – along with snatches of imagery from her family’s rather ordinary working-class life – provided my poem’s guiding system of metaphor.


60. The Key to Phoebe

In the spring of 1972, I graduated from Wichita State University with a double major in English Literature & Creative Writing. During the second half of my undergraduate career there (1970-72), when I’d finally accumulated enough of the right kind of credit hours to be allowed to actively participate in the university’s creative writing program, the director of that program was its long-time poet-in-residence, Bruce Cutler. Not to be confused with mob boss John Gotti’s famously creative attorney, WSU’s Bruce Cutler was a mild-mannered and relatively obscure middle-aged poet, originally from the Chicago area. I’ll probably talk more about Bruce later on, but for now, I’m introducing him to you here for the sole purpose of relating to you the fact that, years after I’d gone through his program and graduated, Bruce told me that, in his opinion, “For Concha” was the best poem I’d ever written. While I was flattered that he even remembered my humble little sonnet, I was somewhat inwardly chagrined at the thought that, in Bruce’s opinion at least, there was a sense in which the wave of my poetic talent had crested in 1969, when I was only 20 years old. In point of fact, the reason I never again composed anything in that vein was that I was then – and have been ever since – writing poetry in a wide variety of styles and forms in order to experiment and to challenge myself to create word objects which are entirely original. In retrospect, I’m not so sure that that lust for innovation was always (or ever) such a prudent impulse to follow. It’s led me to give birth to some ghastly monstrosities, as well as to a few interesting little pieces.

The very instant after he first read “For Concha,” Bruce Cutler urged me to submit it for publication to The Kansas Quarterly. Thus, it became one of my earliest acceptances in anything resembling a legitimate literary journal, when KQ published it a couple of years later. By that time, I’d moved far beyond sonnets. Before making that series of stylistic quantum moves, however, I did, indeed, play around just a bit more with the sonnet form. Of these lesser efforts, I’m still fond of one in particular, which originally appeared in The Wichita Free Press (of all places). It was our local radical rag, back in those turbulent times, and for a while, had its office – such as it was – in the apartment directly below Arthur’s and my attic, consisting of one large rectangular room, well-lighted by a row of curtainless windows fronting Fairmount Street. I’m going to guess that this had been the master bedroom, back before World War II, when 1725 North Fairmount had been some sizable family’s comfy home. (Everything used to be something else.)

The sonnet I tricked the staff of The Wichita Free Press into publishing in their lively, enjoyable weekly tabloid was entitled “For Phoebe” and was whimsically addressed to my mother’s mother, Phoebe Evans McCall, who turned 80 years old in the autumn of 1969 (and who never saw the poem). When I say that I “tricked” them into publishing it, what I mean is that – because I knew that they’d never publish a recognizably “scannable” sonnet (with its fourteen lines with five beats per line) – I broke each line in half, so that it was shaped like the “free verse” which every respectable poet in America was enslaved into sticking to, back then. For good measure, I spelled the “For” in the title with a “Ph,” so as to lend it an even more fashionably irreverent flavor. After all, the young Philip Roth, whose outrageously irreverent novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, came out during this same period, had dubbed the ‘60’s “The Demythologizing Decade.” I’ll let you decide whether “For Phoebe” is sufficiently demythologizing – or merely self-consciously cute:



For Phoebe

by Galen Green
copyright 1970, All Rights Reserved



The dickey-bird on your window sill is singing
A lusty lyric to the simmering sun,
Who slyly peeks into the flower bed,
Where a daisy spreads herself, all undone,
Beneath the weight of a pandering honey bee,
While in another corner of the lawn,
A very young and rakish wild oat
Sows himself into the yielding ground.
But above it all, your piety reigns supreme
From the wooden back porch rail on which you lean
And shake your finger at each wicked creature
For its particular sin against God and Nature -
While the easy earth is mounted by the sky
And Summer runs His finger up your thigh.


I beg you to bear in mind that I adored my grandmother. Anyone who knows me will attest to this. Ironically, it was partly from her that I acquired (at a rather tender age) the seeds of the very irony inherent within this bit of sexual whimsy.


Chapter VI

Wichita’s New York School of Poetry


61. Mechem, Vogelsang, Katz, Sobin & Co.

Had Bruce Cutler’s sense of taste in poetry and sense of things in general been my only guide to how it was done, then I’m quite sure that I’d never have ended up composing a substantial body of poetry in the style of “Slice of Light.” I’m not much of an expert on “schools” of poetry, but those who claim to be have linked my poems written in this style to what used to be called the “New York School of Poetry,” evidently springing from such writers as John Ashbery or spiraling outward from St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery (which I was not able to physically visit until 1977) – or perhaps rippling outward from these two – among many – epicenters. I’m afraid that fashion – whether aesthetic or political – has never been my strong suit. I hope you’ll forgive me.

Gazing backward through the haze, the simplest explanation with which I can provide you here today, Gentle Reader, is that I composed this collection of dry nonsense (or consciousness-raising dream-babble, depending on your perspective) . . . one by one by one . . . between 1971 & 1973, primarily to baffle and amuse a small circle of friends who comprised the core participants in a sort of floating poetry workshop. This informal circle of Wichita’s literary avant-garde, in those days, included Arthur Vogelsang, A.G. (Tony) Sobin, Jonathan Katz, James Mechem and myself. Sobin & Vogelsang each held an MFA from the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop and appeared to be loosely modeling their mode of critiquing on some what they’d experienced there a few years earlier. I’ll probably have more to say about them later – as well as about the other fascinating members of our little group. Suffice it to say for the time being, however, that while none of the other poets in our circle chose to experiment with either the form or sense of language quite as radically as I was doing in those days, most of them proved receptive and interested – most of the time. If any of them is reading this, I would like to tell them how much I’ve always appreciated the kindness and patience they showed me, back there in my attic days. How much better a place this world would be if every aspiring young poet were accorded the same degree of warmth, acceptance and forgiveness as that group of accomplished writers and critics accorded the impetuous young upstart crow, Galen Green.

My reason for choosing “Slice of Light” as a fairly OK example of what I think of as my “Abstract Expressionist” (as in the spirit of Willem de Kooning [1904-1997]) accumulation of poetic experiments from the early 1970’s is that Vogelsang, Sobin & Katz thrilled and honored me by publishing it in the very first issue of their splendid little saddle-stitched literary magazine which they christened the Ark River Review. (“A.R.R.,” as we all referred to it, ended up providing Kate Schulte & me with our primary inspiration and role model, when, in 1975, she & I decided to start up our own little literary quarterly which we named Fireweed. It ran for eight issues, one of which we published as a packet of handsome postcards. More about Fireweed, later.)





Slice of Light


By Galen Green
Copyright 1971, All Rights Reserved


A

1) Two, leading another upstairs,
walk down the living room.

2) Ready to hold on to fulfillment,
you do it.

3) The whole thing never gets
wings of being.


B

1) Let us take any question at
all about pain.

2) Can you amaze medication to ask
how most come to choose more “yes”?

C

1) Multiple problems are responsible
for how we know alike.

2) Two mirrors stand side-by-side
in identical hearts.

3) Hands never were all over
the world joined.

4) The separation blends mountains
to represent the most-controversial-
ever-developed (very weak) paint,
approved for an afternoon call.





62. What I Learned from Reading “Two Hunters” on KMUW

As I suggested earlier, I stopped composing poetry in this Abstract Expressionist idiom in 1973. More specifically, I threw in the towel on that style one warm summer’s evening in 1973, after hearing myself read a cycle of Abstract Expressionist pieces of mine on public radio (KMUW-FM in Wichita). That particular cycle was entitled “Two Hunters” and was extremely loosely based on the story of Diana & Acteon, as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 3). I had thought “Two Hunters” to be brilliant. For the rest of the audience that evening . . . well, not so much. That moment marked a turning point for me – not merely stylistically, but also in terms of my understanding of “audience.” I quickly came to realize that – as cheerful and clear-minded a person as I was – I was nonetheless capable of composing a species of poetry that was all but inaccessible . . . so that, like a political candidate who needs to get elected before they can begin to govern, I (or, more accurately, my poems) needed to penetrate the “market” of my audience’s hearts and taste buds, before they/I (my poems) could begin to communicate. To put it another way, I began to relearn the perfectly obvious lesson that a person can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.


63. Nothing to Be Done

Meanwhile, back at the attic, I was by no means monogamously married to one idiom or style of writing over another. Quite the contrary, within the timeframe of Arthur’s & my twelvemonth in our drafty cave of making, I found myself writing in (or trying to write in) several styles at once – or at least alternately. Out of this caldron of promiscuous experimentation were born some dozen or two or three offspring worth preserving. In my opinion, a little poem entitled “Nothing to Be Done” is one of these. (The title, of course, is a line lifted from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot.) Although composed using a technique and with a mindset not unlike the technique & mindset I called upon when writing “Slice of Light” & “Two Hunters,” I seem to have managed to transcend the glass coffin of inaccessibility when I sat down to compose “Nothing to Be Done.” I’ll let you decide:





Nothing to Be Done

by Galen Green
copyright 1971, All Rights Reserved

standing among hay stacks mown that same while,
he watches her coming

going
he inquires after her:
“please tell her that later another wagon
will carry the one who should have had
a conversation with her who has disappeared . . .”

only one this morning:
one, her lips of light,
eyes of sky,
birds, full, like her
heart, her body, as
that other wagon continues far




64. By the Crooked, Crippled Light

When I say that I found myself writing in (or trying to write in) several styles, idioms, poetic forms (or whatever) alternately, up in that attic, that year, I mean that I was all over the map. Sometimes, late at night, when Arthur was in his room reading, and our drafty garret was quiet, and I’d done all the homework I was going to do, I’d sit alone at our one little table or prop myself up on a pillow in the little old worn-out twin-sized mattress that served as my bed, there beneath the low-slanting ceiling which was, of course, the inside of that old farmhouse’s cross-gabled roof . . . would prop myself up in bed or sit at the table or perhaps rock back in the well-worn rocking chair I’d bought for $5 at a thrift store and brought with me from my parents’ house . . . would perhaps sit and rock and let my mind relax and drift out our cross-gabled garret’s east window into the darkness that had settled over Fairmount Street. By the crooked, crippled light of my parents’ discarded 1940’s floor lamp, throwing spooky German Expressionist shadows across the looming ceiling I might manage to steal an hour or two before clicking the whole place dark and drifting into sleep.


65. Juvenilia: Writing Songs for Extra Credit at Old East High

Nowadays, it seems that every other volume of someone’s posthumous Complete Poems I open contains a section of “Juvenilia,” usually at the back, following the good stuff, often in the form of an “Appendix.” As for my own juvenilia, some critics have labeled 75% of the poetry I composed throughout my undergraduate years as such. I personally would set my mediocrity rate during those years closer to 37%. Let me qualify that number, however, by confessing that, when all of the stillbirths and euthanizings are factored in, my rookie batting average was roughly the same as that of your average bush league rookie.

In truth, I tend to think of my real juvenilia as being the 30 or 40 song lyrics I composed way back during my junior year (1965-66) at East High School, in pragmatic response to three distinct stimuli. The first of these was Mrs. Logan’s giving units of extra credit to students in her English class (the one I shared with J.L. McClure, Paul Murphy & Carl [“Richard”] Mar). By turning in a dozen or so original song lyrics each semester, I managed to bring my final grade in Mrs. Logan’s class up from a B+ to an A. The second goad to my adolescent creative output was my desire to impress girls. I’d always been a pretty good singer and was in the process of teaching myself to play the guitar, so that, while I couldn’t hope to come close to passing myself off as another Pete Isaacson (Wichita’s #1 folksinger at that time), I could provide sufficient house-party entertainment to compensate for my unsightly facial acne and my peasant roots, and thus to get my scrawny little self invited to places which would otherwise have been socially beyond my reach. The third impetus to my earliest poetizing was that it simply felt good. I thoroughly enjoyed writing what I’m calling here my real juvenilia.

Having been vaccinated with a phonograph needle and then thoroughly brainwashed thrice weekly at Wichita’s huge downtown First Methodist Church, from pre-school thru mythoklasm (i.e. up to the age of 17, when I escaped by sacking groceries at Mr. D’s I.G.A. store on Sunday mornings), Song was ever my weather. I suppose that this fact, as much as any, accounts for why I write the way I do. Even as I blab this unpaved prose at you here today, I feel Song’s cadences flowing through this pen, and I hear its muted melodies somewhere, far off in my blood. Nowadays, I even find it necessary to have playing, on the nightstand next to my bed, some dulcet adagio or other, to lull me to sleep, lest the ten thousand songs echoing in my head keep me up all night. So, it’s no wonder that when, by that crooked, crippled attic light, I was so lucky as to steal an hour or two of quiet solitude to invoke the Muse to lead me all over the map and into our caldron of promiscuous experimentation, Song was ever with me and ever within me.


66. Formalism’s Warm, Fragrant Arms

I’ve told you all this just now in order to explain, as coherently as I know how to explain, how it was that I came to revert continually to Song – to the “formalism” of rhyme and meter – and hence, how it was that I came to compose a flurry of limericks and double dactyls, right smack-dab in the middle of the Vietnam War and of the countercultural revolution which that March of Folly spawned. Please remember that I was, after all, an undergraduate English & Creative Writing major at a middling state university at the time, and was intensely focused on my goal of getting admitted to a respectable graduate writers’ workshop, upon receiving my B.A. in the spring of 1972. I have no idea of how such things work nowadays, but back in the 20th century, I was made keenly aware of the need for me to be producing a presentable body of conventional, inoffensive, apolitical, sexless, innocuous, bland, safe (orthodox!) “free verse” to submit, along with my GRE scores and standard grad school application, if I intended to be admitted to even the lowliest of writers’ workshops. Although no one came right out and said as much, it was telegraphed to me in a hundred vocal inflections, winks, half-nods, raised eyebrows and figurative nudges that nothing good was ever going to come from my submitting even the most excellent of limericks, double dactyls, song lyrics, humorous parodies, etc. in my grad school application packet. So I didn’t.

But that didn’t mean that I intended to deny my deeply-felt emotional need to experiment promiscuously in the warm, fragrant arms of the aforementioned taboo verse forms. As for the Vietnam War and the countercultural revolution which that March of Folly (see Barbara W. Tuchman’s insightful book by that name) spawned . . . it was not so much in spite of all that, but rather because of all that that your humble servant, when in my early twenties, desperately needed the creative outlet which scribbling verse in taboo forms provided. Whatever the nuances in the chain of causation, that flurry of limericks and double dactyls fluttered forth. Here’s one of them now:


There was a young Dunbar named Art
Who possessed the wisdom of Sartre;
When asked how to train
Such a marvelous brain,
He replied: First you teach it to fart.


It may or may not be of interest to the reader to learn that the esteemed, white-bearded Arthur Dunbar of today concurs with my own opinion that this remains one of the more durable of the limericks I was divinely inspired to compose back in 1970. The poem’s aesthetic quality or lack thereof notwithstanding, however, it’s more important to me that the reader understand the basics of the existential dynamic that’s at work here. (Relax! I’m not going to bore you with any tedious analysis of that dynamic – not here, anyway – not today.) Part of what “dates” any poem is the almost inevitable co-opting of its most uniquely quirky images or wordplays by a mainstream culture which floods in to engulf it, as a natural byproduct of the flow of time. In the case of this little limerick, it’s a noteworthy fact that the now-common colloquial expression “brainfart” was wholly unknown in 1970. Fortunately for me, the use of the expression “brainfart” still has a relatively low incidence within such polite company as tends to make up my readership. (I believe that it was in his Paris Review interview, back in the 1990’s, that Garrison Keillor made a similar point that humor is doomed to a comparatively short shelf-life.)

In contrast to that first limerick from 1970, which might be seen as a kind of ode to its subject (Arthur), the other one with which I’m going to bother you here today might be seen as a kind of thumbnail critique of organized religion. At least, that was how I intended it at the time:


A clever messiah named Christ
Masterminded the world’s greatest heist;
With his high potheses on
He shoplifted Reason (Even though it was reasonably priced).


What “dates” this particular poem is its author’s conflation of the historical Jesus and/or literary Christ with the hyper-mythologized God-Man concocted by the church, over the past two millennia, for its own mercenary purposes. Fortunately for me, however, even in the 21st century, the pseudo-Christian “Christian Right” (sic) , orgasmic in its greed, persists in its even more muddle-headed conflation of the real with the mythical than the conflation I inadvertently committed forty years ago, when I dashed off this limerick, thereby bestowing upon it the glorious hope of life eternal.


67. Limericks & Double Dactyls

For those of you unfamiliar with double dactyls, let me begin by assuring you that you’re probably more familiar with them than you realize. As with limericks, my own first exposure to verse forms very like double dactyls was in early childhood, when my mother and her mother would read aloud to me from Mother Goose and other such Eurogenic nursery rhymes. Later, when I was a senior in high school, my friend Bill Daniels brought to my attention a magazine article about an intriguing new book by poets Anthony Hecht & John Hollander. It was a collection of double dactyls, none of which bore any thematic resemblance whatsoever to Mother Goose. Instead, each little poem, each double dactyl, struck me as being something of cross between a miniature political commentary and a highbrow in-joke. I was thoroughly smitten by their wit – just as Bill Daniels had known I would be.

It was, therefore, only a matter of time (and not very much time at all, given my impetuosity at age 18) before I began attempting a few “higgledy-piggledy” witticisms of my own. The two I’ve picked out to share with you here today are not especially characteristic, but will, I hope, give you a slightly clearer picture of where my head was at when I jotted them down in the midst of all that turmoil:


Higgledy-piggledy
Uncle Sam’s children
Singing their anthem
in sweet notes of irony;
Their freedom proclaim
Before every ballgame,
Though the one note
they never can reach
is “free”.


That one was inspired by a “Pogo” cartoon in which one of the cartoon characters is singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the last line of which (as sung at a wide variety of sporting events, of course) includes the word “free,” sung on such an excruciatingly high note that even accomplished vocalists often find it difficult to hit clearly. This other double dactyl probably speaks for itself. Please bear in mind that it was composed a couple of years prior to the Watergate scandal, so that its young author’s assessment of Richard M. Nixon was based entirely upon other factors:


Higgledy-piggledy
President Nixon,
When ask how to govern
a nation of sheep,
Scratched his capable head
And soberly said:
“One must learn to
let lying dogs sleep.”



68. A Brief Note on Free Verse

If I’ve left the reader with the impression that I’m somehow morally or aesthetically opposed to free verse, I apologize. It’s just that I feel that I myself have never quite gotten the hang of it. Nevertheless, some of my favorite poems of all time were written in free verse. In fact, if Good Fortune allows, I hope to talk a little bit about some of my favorite poems, sometime before our wonderful day together here – yours and mine, Gentle Reader – comes to a close. For now, however, in acknowledgement of the perfectly natural fact that too much talk of literature in one long stretch can dull even the keenest interest, I’m feeling like it’s probably just about time for us to switch to another subject for a while. (Don’t’ you agree?)

Before we do, though, I beg your indulgence, while I share with you just one more pair of poems from the early 1970’s. Both were composed during my time at the writers’ workshop at The University of Utah, where I received my M.A. in 1974 (the same summer President Nixon resigned and my beautiful niece Jennifer was born). By sheer dumb luck, I happened to submit “Killing Father” to the Western Humanities Review and had it accepted for publication immediately. “Quicksilver in October,” too, was picked up by one of the more prestigious literary journals. Within the year, it was published in Epoch, which comes out of Cornell University. I chose these two in particular to share with you here today because each represents a type of free verse (what I call “broken-line prose”) which my mentors back in Wichita had been so zealously nudging me toward, throughout my attic year and then throughout the year after that, when I was putting together my 20-poem portfolio for graduate school applications:



Quicksilver in October


by Galen Green
copyright 1973, All Rights Reserved



Lay a shiny 1972 American silver dollar
flat on the back of your
thumbnail and flip it.

Repeat this often as you stroll
along a sidewalk.

As the coin rotates upon one of its
infinity of diameters above your head
and into that perfect blue you call
the sky, above that orange you call
October, into a more perfect radiance,
you will ponder (depending upon the
angle of light) three dominant patterns
unwinding as it flashes
up into the day:

1) Eisenhower’s head rolls
end-over-end from a seventh-story
window and down the side of
an apartment building. Or

2) That eagle planting its talons
in the moon dives head tail head tail
head through the blue like Icarus
out of control. Or

3) Eisenhower’s head is blended with
the outstretched left wing of the eagle
to create the illusion that a wing is
sprouting just over the left ear
on Ike’s stern profile.

As you look up to see
(as you sometimes did in 1958)
Eisenhower’s metallic face
suspended momentarily in the sycamore
limbs, the angle of sunlight
seems to turn the face into that
of Mercury, god of commerce
and media, who drops like
manna into your palm.



Another way of getting at what I was trying to say in introducing this pair of relatively conventional free verse pieces is that the fact that they were snapped up so unhesitatingly by two of the most reputable literary journals in which any of my writing has ever appeared indicates to me that I’d evidently given the literary establishment what it wanted. On the down side, I suppose it could be said that, even after enduring the pricey rigors of the Utah Writers’ Workshop, I was still falling short, most of the time, of the glory of Major League Poetry – not that I’d know what that league would look like nowadays, in this, our post-literate era.


Killing Father

By Galen Green
Copyright 1973, All Rights Reserved


the shaft had entered my father’s eye
continued through that gray mystery inside
smashed out the back of his skull
and lodged several inches down into the mire

still gripping the handle of his broken sword
(the blade of which now sang from inside my heart)
my father complained that he couldn’t raise his head
was pinned

I wanted to help you to see I said
resting my foot on his heaving chest

and I wanted only to teach you to sing he replied
raising his blunted handle and
with a dying stroke
smashing my big toe

which is only to ask that when we meet
you pardon please my awkwardly protruding song
my limp
and my empty bow


Chapter VII

Adventures in Not-Knowing


69. When, What to Arthur’s Wondering Eyes . . . . .

Meanwhile, back in 1970, Arthur Dunbar was sitting alone in our attic one summer’s afternoon, trying to get some serious homework done, while I was at work at the WSU library. (Ed Carraway, our supervisor, knew better than to schedule Arthur & me to work the circulation desk at the same time: too much existential whimsy per square inch.) As I’ve poorly explained already, our attic was of a generally cross-gabled design – although even that aspect of its layout was fundamentally crooked, broken, uneven, asymmetrical. Taking all of this into account, one of what we might call the “sub-caverns” comprising of one of the four rather tent-shaped gables – the one toward the back of the house, at the west end of our attic – that sub-cavern or slanted chamber was what I referred to earlier as Arthur’s “room.” It was there that he sprawled across his unmade bed, with one of our old floor fans blowing on him for all it was worth, while he sweated his way through a ton or two of higher mathematics, his textbooks and notebooks scattered around him on that old makeshift bed – which was, in truth, more of a cheap cot than a real bed. We were, after all, bohemians, and this was, after all, our eponymous bohemia.

What happened next puts me in mind of a slight variation on a line from “The Night Before Christmas”:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from bed to see what was the matter.

Except that what to Arthur’s wondering eyes did appear was about as thematically opposite a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer as any sane mind can conceive.


70. The Kappa Sig House across the Street

But let’s pause here a moment and take a step back. Before I let the cat out of the bag, as to what to Arthur’s wondering eyes did appear, let the reader be forewarned that we are about to enter together, once more, into that twilight zone where: “These questions are all that we have.”

The other preface which needs to be presented here touches upon the subject of race. At the risk of either oversimplifying or understating the nature of race relations within the student population at Wichita State in the summer of 1970, let me say only that – as I personally observed and experienced them – they were complicated, confusing and of concern only to a few dozen of us liberals or members of the Black community. Specific to what Arthur beheld from our attic’s east window, that summer’s afternoon in 1970, was what I still find to be the frankly appalling fact that white fraternities and sororities were, it seems, still getting away with denying membership to African-American students, back then. My source for this disquieting factoid is a well-researched book which has served me faithfully in preparing to write whatever this is you’ve been reading here today. That handy little history is Gretchen Cassel Eick’s Dissent in Wichita (The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72), which was published by the University of Illinois Press, with a grant from Friends University, where Eick is an associate professor of history. If things go at all according to plan (and they seldom do), I’ll be citing Eick’s book often, as our story progresses.

On any other summer’s afternoon in 1970, what you or I or Kate Schulte or Arthur Dunbar would have beheld, as we stood at our attic’s east window, looking out, is this: In the immediate lower foreground, a gently outward-sloping tar-shingled canopy stretches out over our old farmhouse’s rambling front porch, supporting the mandatory wooden loveseat porch swing, and supported by Edwardian-style wooden columns. (Was there some sort of law that said that the ceilings of all such early 20th-century rambling front porches had to be painted sky-blue?) Out beyond the edge of this tar-shingled porch canopy, our attic window’s view takes us into the leaf-shadows playing among the limbs, branches and twigs of an elm tree that was most likely planted out there in the dead center of our little lawn to commemorate the end of World War I in 1918 (an elm long-since cut down). From this refreshing verdancy, our attention is drawn downward to the bicycle traffic, the pedestrians and the vehicles bumping amiably up and down the time-polished red bricks of Fairmount Street. (I’m told that the street has since been paved over with concrete.)

Directly across that street, stands the unassuming white wood-frame house of the Kappa Sigs. I myself, having been born into that stigmatized caste which was called “Freaks,” back in 1970 (and “Nerds” in more recent years), must plead total ignorance on the background and true nature of that particular fraternity. On the one hand, they had a reputation for being “a bunch of goons, dumb jocks” and sundry such ilk as might have answered a casting call for either National Lampoon’s Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds. One the other hand, however, three of the nicest guys I had the privilege of making friends with in elementary school and junior high just so happened to be Kappa Sigs. Those would be Steve Sowards, Tom Glenn & Bill Cecil. This fact alone was enough to tell me that the Kappa Sigs’ negative image was not entirely deserved.

The Kappa Sigma house itself, at 1724 North Fairmount, bore a striking resemblance to 1725 North Fairmount, where Arthur & I lived out our attic year and from whose attic’s east window we were able to observe the full spectrum of comings and goings behind the lush foliage surrounding that unassuming frat house. In all that we were able to observe, nothing gave us any indication of the sort of conflict which had to have been brewing somewhere beneath the surface or behind the scenes in order to have precipitated the seemingly well-coordinated violent attack which a small platoon of young Black men pulled off, on the summer’s afternoon in question. Whatever its circumstantial context, it was that almost paramilitary-style attack which roused Arthur from his bed of intensive scholarship that afternoon.


71. In the Street Theater of Self-Defeat

I wish that I could offer you something approaching an omniscient narrator’s version of what Arthur’s wondering eyes beheld when he made his way to our attic’s east window. But I can’t. For one thing, most of the frontal assault, which evidently included the frat house’s front door being essentially battered down and the front porch window being smashed, had already taken place by the time Arthur arrived at the window to see what there was to see. Absolutely everything that I know – or think I know – or know that I don’t know but can formulate a coherent question concerning . . . has been pieced together from the several pieced-together pieces of semi-reliable information from the sorts of semi-reliable sources you’d guess.

Because it was summertime, there weren’t a great many frat guys hanging out in the Kappa Sig house that afternoon – and those few who were were, indeed, just hanging out. Some were napping. Three or four were watching TV or grabbing a quick bite – or both. One or two were studying. According to my sources – from both inside and outside the fraternity – when the boom, boom, booming of the fire axe or the battering ram (renditions vary) began to beat the Kappa Sig house’s wooden front door to splinters, it was every man for himself, as the building’s dozen or so young white male occupants tore out the back door and (so I’m told) through an open side window. Even so, one or two of the groggy nappers got left behind. The fact that no one received any bodily injury, even though a good deal of baseball-bat smashing, whacking and property breakage was committed by the invaders, once they’d breached the fortress walls, suggests that – as violent, self-defeating and illegal as their actions that afternoon most certainly were – they were mostly symbolic – intended to make a sociopolitical point, rather than to harm any individual fraternity members who may have found themselves caught haplessly in the crossfire (so to speak) of a much larger historical conflict.

As for my three Kappa Sigma friends from boyhood, I’m given to understand that none of them was involved in this rare display of misguided (so-called) “Black Power” (sic). We need to remember that 1970 was in the midst of the heyday of the Black Panther movement – one of a long list of the causes for Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential Election. (Beware the backlash, dear friends.) Steve Sowards was in Europe that afternoon, his illustrious father, the author and history professor, J. Kelly Sowards, having taken his family with him there on sabbatical. Strange as it may seem to us nowadays, I’m told that Steve first heard about the mysterious assault on his frat house back home as a miscellaneous news item, broadcast over Armed Forces Radio. (It must have been an extremely slow news day. Eh?)

As I was suggesting earlier, by the time Arthur got to the window – roused by the boom, boom, booming of the axe or the ram or whatever – the main action had moved inside the frat house. What to Arthur’s wondering eyes did appear, as he looked out of our attic’s east window, across Fairmount Street and through the foliage, was therefore, pretty hard to make out. The shouting of an angry mob was about all that he could make out. So to try to get a better view, Arthur hurried down the two flights of creaking stairs and out the front door of 1725 to stand on the front porch. But in the few minutes which had elapsed between the commencement of the boom, boom, booming against the frat house door and Arthur’s arrival on our front porch, the anger of the mob of young Black men who’d stormed the Kappa Sig house seemed to have spent itself, so that they were merely milling about out on the frat house lawn, like a company of confused actors who’d suddenly all forgotten their lines. By the time the police arrived, the mob had evaporated.


72. To Construct a Philosophy of Not-Knowing

Similar to the situation with the aftermath of the shooting at The Hourglass that same summer, Arthur & Kate & I were still picking up bits & pieces of bits & pieces of semi-reliable information concerning the storming of the Kappa Sig house, for weeks following the incident itself. According to several purported eyewitnesses, one of the members of the mob had taken an axe to one of the wooden pillars holding up the frat house’s front porch’s canopy. No serious structural damage was done, however, lending credence to the theory that the intent of the attackers was to perform their own particular version of Vietnam-era street theater.

But please be assured that I’m not here today to judge or forgive any of the parties involved on either side of this mysterious incident; because, in order to do so, I would need to be in possession of a great many more verifiable facts than I can ever hope to be in possession of. Just as with the Hourglass shooting, hardly any of the pertinent facts in this matter were ever made known to those of us in the general public – not even to those few of us who really wanted to be in the know. And while it may not make sense to most people for someone (myself, for instance) to construct a philosophy around this problem of our never being able to lay our hands on enough of the facts in the matters of the myriad realities which are swirling phantasmagorically around us constantly, I can feel myself growing tempteder and tempteder to do just that – I mean, to construct just such a philosophy of not-knowing.


73. I Corinthians 13:12 vs. Faulkner’s Joe Christmas

One of my favorite passages of scripture from the King James bible (KJV) appears somewhere near the end of the 13th chapter of First Corinthians – that well-known prose-poem about the nature of love (agape, charity). Due to racial tension in and around Fairmount Elementary School, when I was eleven years old in 1960, Harry & Margaret decided to send my younger brother, Kevin, and me to an all-white Southern Baptist (K thru 8) day school across town, called the Wichita Christian Academy. It was there that I was induced (with gold stars and such) to memorize a number of scriptural passages, I Corinthians 13 being among them – and being by far my favorite. So here’s my favorite verse (12) from that favorite chapter:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Someday, I’d like to write a very long book in which I might reflect expansively upon all the levels of meaning which that magnificently deep, dense passage of twenty-nine little words in English holds for me. But until that someday comes, suffice it to say that – depending on one’s interpretation of the word “then” – I Corinthians 13:12 is surely either one of the most optimistic or one of the most pessimistic passages in all of literature – epistemologically speaking. If one believes in an afterlife, such as a Pauline Heaven, for instance (as advertised by Paul), then Paul’s “then” means “after I die and go to Heaven.” If, on the other hand, one believes, as most of us believe (whether we admit it publicly or not) that this earthly life is all there is . . . well, then Paul’s “then” means “never.”

This was one jagged little pill I personally had to swallow very early on in life’s game – this jagged little pill of never knowing. That’s because, like the comic book character named Clark Kent – raised by a pair of elderly strangers somewhere in Kansas – I not only didn’t know who my biological parents (and hence, my “real” family) were, but I knew from earliest childhood that I would never know them or even know who they were or where they were or anything meaningful about them whatsoever. The reason for the certainty of my uncertainty had to do with Missouri’s infant adoption laws in 1949. That’s the year I was born in Kansas City in what was, back then, commonly referred to as a “hospital for unwed mothers” called The Willows. By law, my adoption records were sealed, and when The Willows was demolished in the 1960’s to “put up a parking lot” (as Joni Mitchell might say it), all of the adoption records of all of the babies ever born there were ceremoniously destroyed in a huge bonfire.

I’ve taken us on this brief detour, not to solicit your sympathy for my status as an orphan boy, but rather to attempt to shed some light on one possible root cause of my idiosyncratic fascination with not-knowing. I’m aware of the fact that I’m not alone in having had to carry inside me all my life a big box of question marks concerning my true origins. In fact, after reading William Faulkner’s 1932 novel, Light in August, several years back, I came away feeling as though a mid-20th-century adoptee in my position has definitely gotten off easy, when compared with the unenviable circumstances of the enigmatic and ill-fated character named Joe Christmas. Even if I don’t know precisely where I originally came from, at least I’ve got a pretty good idea of who and where I am now.


74. Barthelme & Literature’s Ethical Dimension

The late Donald Barthelme, as it turns out, had a thing or two to say about not-knowing. I was recently browsing the shelves of a used book store, when I ran across a dusty, yellowing paperback copy of Don B’s posthumous 1997 collection of essays and interviews, published by Vintage Books and edited by Kim Herzinger, with an introduction by John Barth. The book’s title is Not-Knowing. Until I began telling the story of the attack on the Kappa Sig house, and thereby began to sense that that telling was gravitating toward my sharing with you some reflections on the frustrations of Arthur’s & my not-knowing . . . until then, I’d forgotten all about Barthelme’s Not-Knowing collection. I’d brought it home from the used book store, thumbed through it for half an hour or so, skimmed through the title essay, “Not-Knowing” (which is one of a pair of essays on writing), and shelved it for future attention, as I was already occupied then with a handful of more pressing reading projects. Earlier today, however, in the middle of writing what I was writing, it dawned on me that it might not hurt to take the Barthelme book down from the shelf to see if he possibly had something to add to these reflections. It was then that I noticed that I’d marked a short passage at the end of his “Not-Knowing” essay, which might, indeed, add some textual perspective to what I’ve been talking to you about here. It’s worth noting that this particular essay is dated 1987, which would have been after Don B had been diagnosed with cancer. Here’s the passage I’d marked:



But if I have anything unorthodox to offer here, it’s that I think art’s project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world. It is the meliorative aspect of literature that provides its ethical dimension. (p. 24)



It was gratifying to me – to say the least – to hear Barthelme say this. That’s because I’ve been struggling for decades now – with myself & others – to justify my own compulsion to wed art & politics. Indeed, for me, the daily burden has never been to commingle the two, but rather to distinguish between the two. I realize that my saying this here may come across to some readers as tantamount to an insanity plea. If it does, it’s because I’m not saying it right. What I mean to say is more like this:

In college, I wrote a lot. Then, when various of my mentors – folks like Bruce Cutler, Bill & Susan Nelson, Arthur Vogelsang, Tony Sobin, Jonathan Katz, James Mechem, Richard Yates, Robert Mezey & Judith Hemschemeyer – would read what I’d written, their critiques would sometimes (but not always) include a splash of the pejorative about its being too political. In retrospect, I believe that what this particular concern sometimes (but not always) meant was that they were uncomfortable with the nature of its “ethical dimension” (as Barthelme calls it).





~ Book Two ~



Chapter VIII

Song Was Ever My Weather


75. A Scatter of Leaves

Because it’s getting on toward time for us to move forward chronologically, from out of the summer of 1970 and on into the autumn, I think I’ll share with you a short untitled poem that I jotted down during that period of my life upon which we’ve been focusing here. It was inspired by a split second of epiphany which flashed through me – a slice of light, if you will – as I was hurrying across campus between classes, one blustery autumn day:



A scatter of leaves,
Like cornflakes from a box,
Leaves each of me a little more
Sophisticated to what these rocks
And books would tell me
If only they could hold my attention
And share my limitation
For just these final days
Before the scattering bitterness.

(Copyright Galen Green, 1970
All Rights Reserved)



This little poem was never accepted for publication by any of the many periodicals to which I submitted it at the time – probably because it’s not very good. But I like it. I suppose my feelings toward it are somewhat analogous to a father’s sentimental attachment to a favorite underachieving child. For one thing, it reminds me of that moment of epiphany which inspired it. Perhaps this only goes to show that sometimes even the most splendid epiphanies can be clumsily ground into course verse. Another thing I like about it, though, is the way in which it actually does manage to capture – for its author, at least – the spirit of college life, as one young poet was experiencing it, during the Vietnam War – and my generation’s perfectly natural reaction to it.


76. Another Part of Art’s Project

But I had started to say something more about not-knowing and about how it is that “art’s project” (as Barthelme called it) is fundamentally meliorative. “The aim of meditating about the world,” he said, “is finally to change the world.” In truth, art cannot but change the world – because everything changes the world. The key issue, of course, has always been whether our mediating about the world ends up changing the world for better or for worse. If we would have our art improve the world, how do we go about that project? I think that we all know the answer to that question – at least on some level, we do. For the purpose of our meditation here today, I’m going to call it “honesty.” We go about the project of improving the world by exercising honesty. Moreover, for our purposes here today, I’m going to factor in our need to be as honest about what we don’t know as we are about what we do know.

To come at the same question from a different direction, let’s begin with one of the most hackneyed axioms of the writer’s craft, the one which instructs every fledgling writer to “write about what you know.” That’s all well and good – so long as that young writer hasn’t lived a life immersed in unfashionable imagery. If, however, a writer’s life experiences have been (as so many of my own have been) a swirling phantasmagoria of inconvenient truths, then problems are likely to ensue, when it comes time to seek out an audience and get published. For the time being, however, I wish only to toss this thought-bauble out there to you, Gentle Reader, as something for you to fondle or ponder in idle moments, until the time comes for us to return to it with the full force of our critical faculties – yours and mine.


77. Into Touchings We Can’t Speak

What I’d like to share with you first is the lyric to a song I composed back in the 1980’s. Like the untitled poem about “a scatter of leaves” that we looked at a minute ago, this song, entitled “Here, Now, Always” is about autumn; for, as I suggested earlier, the time has come for us to move our story forward chronologically, from out of the summer of 1970 and on into autumn. As for the melody and pace of this song of any/every fall semester (since I can’t exactly sing it to you on the printed page), just try to imagine its bouncing along with a moderato foxtrot lilt like Paul McCartney singing “When I’m Sixty-Four”:



Here, Now, Always


Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved


1.
Here, now, ends another summer, half a world from Mozambique.
Here I touch your tender cheek, you who are my love, my timer.
Here we make our carnival, spirit-filled and sexual.
Here, now, I’ll start thinking slimmer, to the warm tones of autumn’s viola,
And the leaf hues of its orange crayola. Be here now with me, calmer
Than the hands of summer’s embalmer, as autumn winds begin to hammer.

2.
Here, now, I’m the lucky winner of autumn’s merciless unloading.
And though I feel our time eroding, there’s still time for me to play the sinner
With you whenever we can sequester an hour or two, this fall semester.
Here, now, always, I taste the gin or bourbon of your flesh that’s dripping
Into touch with autumn, whipping at our backs and at our inner
Beings. I’ll be your beginner, here, now, always, until dinner.

3.
Always, you have been my honor, bubbly sweet as diet cola,
Nourishing as a bowl of granola. Now, though, I’ve become a gonner
Into this autumn wind, decoding impulses from our cells, corroding,
Humming like a piano tuner. Here, now, always, this antique
Oneness makes me play your geek, stumbling forward with your banner,
Here, now, always, in the manner of some lone long-distance runner.

4.
Be with me here, now, sooner than the sound of this unzipping,
Nearer than this autumn nipping at our heels as summer’s crooner
Fades into the mystical distance like a testicle.
Be with me here, as this nooner makes me your enraptured jester.
Autumn plays the ripe ancestor to our flesh, grown closer, vainer
Than what it was and all the saner than this wind, its entertainer.

5.
Here, now, always, we shall enter into touchings we can’t speak,
In English, Babytalk or Greek. Here, as in a Harold Pinter
Play, we move by autumn’s goading toward each other’s arms, foreboding,
Traveling toward some sucking center. Be with me as the Victrola
Of Time runs down like the Enola’s gay propeller. We’re the inventor
Of our love, the experimenter, its fuel, its victims, its tormentor.




78. A Child of my Middle Songburst

I’m not sure what I can say about this song that won’t run the risk of spoiling it for you. The guiding principle by which I wrote it was another of the more hackneyed axioms of the writer’s craft, the one which admonishes every fledgling writer to “write the sort of thing which you yourself would want to read.” That’s all well and good – so long as that young writer isn’t held in the grip of such an unconventional sense of taste that the sort of thing which he or she would want to read – or listen to, as the case may be – isn’t so off-putting to their target audience as to alienate that audience. In my own case, I resigned myself eons ago to alienating 90% of the general public, every time I open my mouth. I wish that that weren’t so, but it is. And since it is, I’ve grown to cherish and cultivate my appreciative 10% by giving them the best that I’ve got to give. Although a song like “Here, Now, Always” will never show up on Billboard Magazine’s “Top 100” chart, I’ve been gratified by the reception its been accorded by that highly select audience for whom such songs seem to prove meaningful.

As you see, “Here, Now, Always” was written in 1986 – in other words, a decade and a half after the attic year at the center of our story, and a full twenty years after my outpouring of song-lyric juvenilia composed for extra credit in Mrs. Logan’s high school English class. The vast majority of the songs I’ve composed in adult life have been the products of one of three separate periods of creative outburst (1978-80 / 1986-87 / 1989-90). “Here, Now, Always” was, therefore, a child of my middle songburst. Within the framework of my own understanding, at least, these three periods (early, middle & late) of songburst produced three distinct species of song. This is not to imply that either the form or the content within any one of these three creative periods would be easily identifiable or easily distinguishable from that of either of the other two periods. Even so, I suspect that anyone who were to listen carefully to all 28 of my songs which survive on my two poorly recorded “rehearsal” collections, Peasant Cantata (2004) & Another Think (2005), would sense, on some level, a . . . difference . . . a differentness.


79. Beth Spires, the Ohio Blizzard of ’78, etc.

When I made the decision, in the autumn of 1970, to devote myself to a life of writing, my intention was to put in a fifth year at Wichita State, in order to qualify for the double major in English & Creative Writing, to then gain entrance to a reputable writers’ workshop at one of the mere dozen or so affordable universities which even had them, back in those dark ages, and thereby to teach myself to make better & better & better poems, so that, at some point, prior to reaching the age of forty, I would win the Yale Younger Poets Award. Songwriting was nowhere on my radar. Nevertheless, by the time the Blizzard of 1978 (the second big one in two years) hit Columbus, Ohio, I found myself returning to songwriting for the first time since high school – and liking it. Over the next dozen years, I must have begun drafting no fewer than 300 song lyrics, of which approximately 100 made it to “completion” (as typed drafts), and somewhere around 50 actually got enough of a melody attached to them that I could sit down with my guitar and sing them onto cassette tape.

Quite a number of unforeseeable factors colluded, collided, conspired, converged – et cetera – to transform your humble servant from an underground avant-garde poet of the 1970’s to an underground avant-garde singer-songwriter of the 1980’s. Of that swirling phantasmagoria of unforeseeable factors, the one which packed the fiercest wallop was, of course, the abrupt end of my 5 ½-year marriage to Kate Schulte. Out of respect for Kate and her post-Galen family, however, I’m going to skip over any disclosure here of the gruesome details of that jarring little catastrophe and move on to what was arguably the single most unexpected healing factor in that transformative equation; although instead of the word “factor,” I’ll use the word “friendship.” In other words, that single most unexpected therapeutic factor turned out to be my friendship with the now rather famous American poet, Elizabeth Spires (born 1952). Here’s an abbreviated version of why I’m choosing to say this the way I am:

In the late summer of 1975, as a means of supplementing my income as part-time Creative Writing Consultant at The Columbus Torah Academy (an upscale Jewish day school) and my occasional gigs for the Ohio Arts Council’s Poets-in-the-Schools Program, I began conducting a pair of weekly poetry workshops through one of The Ohio State University’s adult education programs. These workshops were closely modeled on the format I’d learned from Bruce Cutler, Arthur Vogelsang, Robert Mezey and the like, and were remarkably popular – especially among middle-aged professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, university professors and businessmen. As the summer of 1976 approached, however, I knew that I’d be taking a rather lengthy road trip out west with Kate & Arthur, and reported this to the OSU program’s senior director, in case he wanted to be looking around for someone with qualifications similar to mine, who’d be willing to fill in for me for just the summer semester, with the understanding that they’d hand the poetry workshops back to me in the fall. That’s how Elizabeth Spires entered our lives.

Beth had just turned 24, which meant that she was only three years younger than me, which meant that we were of the same generation of writers and were familiar with many of the same writers of our generation – as well as of the 1950’s & 60’s – which meant that, from the moment we met, we always had more than enough to talk about. She’d grown up in Circleville, Ohio, not far from Columbus, had graduated from Vassar in 1974, and had spent some time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, before deciding on a course correction (no pun intended), the which would soon be taking her away from us to the Johns Hopkins Writers’ Workshop, where she would earn her masters in 1979 – and begin turning out some of the finest poetry of our generation. But for just that couple of years (1976-1978), I had the privilege of sharing a platonic friendship with her, perhaps the most significant and long-lasting benefit of which turned out to be our many long hours of shoptalk, which ended up pointing me in the direction of a completely new creative vision as a songwriter.


80. Elizabeths Bishop & Spires and my Return to Formalism

The shortest answer to how it came about that a brilliant Ivy League poetess, who had steeped herself in the poetry and totality of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and who would soon be doing the last full-length interview with Bishop (Boston, 1978; six hours of tape, later edited into an interview in The Paris Review) . . . how it was, then, that Beth Spires more or less inadvertently expedited my self-transformation from a poet of the ‘70’s to a singer-songwriter of the ‘80’s . . . the short answer to how this came about might be distilled down into two words, the names of two classical verse forms: sestina & villanelle. Having been an English major and Creative Writing student for six years, naturally I was familiar with both of these forms, but, frankly, had never given either of them a second thought. I guess that it must have been because of Beth’s contagious passion for Bishop’s poetry – which includes some of the best formalism of the 20th century – that I found myself inspired to monkey around with a number of perverse variations on both of these forms in the privacy of my personal journals.

While I might as well confess to you right up front that I was never able to bring myself to compose an anatomically correct sestina nor a salvageable villanelle, the monkeying around that I did quickly evolved into my managing to invent several lyric stanza forms which ended up serving me well, over the next dozen years of songwriting. Let me share with you now one of my favorite examples of a song lyric which began as a pathetically mutated rhyming sestina, before taking on a life of its own.


81. If We All Outlived the Sun

The World Is Ugly, and the People Are Sad


Oh, the world is ugly and the people are sad,
And you know that ain’t no fun.
But, Baby, don’t you start feelin’ bad.
Don’t you run out and buy you a gun.
Don’t you start shootin’ smack or poppin’ speed
Or smokin’ too much weed.

Refrain:
One thing you never learned from your mom and dad --
Now, don’t take it too hard or it’ll drive you mad --
But the world is ugly and the people are sad --
Yes, the world is ugly and the people are sad.

The news is spreadin’ like a weed
That the world is ugly and the people are sad.
I wonder where it all will lead,
Before our story is done.
I think of my unborn daughter and son
And all that I never had.
(...repeat refrain...)

If all the rocks began to bleed,
Would it make the people glad?
Or if we all outlived the sun,
Would we ever know what we need?
No. No. No. The world is ugly and the people are sad
And the fun has just begun.
(...repeat refrain...)

What if our lives had never begun?
Then, who would plant the seed
Of a world so ugly and a people so sad,
From the Bronx to Leningrad?
Who would there be to start to breed
These sufferers under the sun?
(...repeat refrain...)

So here we stand beneath the sun,
Trying to buy some fun --
As the dirty hooves of Life’s stampede
Pound in us to succeed.
And we each live our Odyssey and our Iliad,
In a world that’s ugly with people that are sad.
(...repeat refrain...)


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1978, All Rights Reserved


82. Like So Many Lonesome Asteroids

I suppose that it wouldn’t be terribly farfetched to say that this song, composed in a rooming house in the student ghetto immediately to the east of The Ohio State University campus (one block northeast of “Sorority Row” – as it was known back then), during the Blizzard of 1978, has ultimately come to serve (in retrospect) as a kind of foreshadowing proto-manifesto for my Mythoklastic Therapy Movement, even though it would be another 21 years (April 30, 1999) before I would get around to actually founding The Mythoklastic Therapy Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, on my 50th birthday.

As you’ll recall, the opening sentence of this story I’ve been sharing with you here today about “My Portable Bohemia” went something like this:

“And so I set out to explain how it was that I came to be the way I am.”

But I never got around to telling you the way I am. I was planning on saving that part for last. Now, though, I’m beginning to have second thoughts about that. Just a few seconds ago, it occurred to me that this guided tour of my life & times & work is apt to make more sense to you, here & now, as we joggle along together, you & I, if I at least begin dropping the bread crumbs of a few preliminary clues as to the way I am. So, where should I begin my self-revelation? Perhaps you’d be interested in hearing about my blogs. If you were to fire up the nearest personal computer, here in The Age of Obama, and make your way to any of my current thirty-nine blogs, chances are that you’d have a significant number of your questions answered (connotatively, if not quite denotatively), concerning the who, what, when, where, how & why of my Mythoklastic Therapy Institute – and, indeed, concerning all things mythoklastic. And while mythoklastic therapy does not entirely define who I am, it’s a pretty good indicator of the way that I am.

As I say, I currently maintain thirty-nine blogs (web logs), out there in cyberspace. By “maintain,” I mean that I merely use them to store data – i.e. pictures & text. (Having had the majority of my life’s work destroyed by fire & flood & human malfeasance, I’m now trying to do everything within my peasant budget to preserve as much as possible of what’s left of me.) Even though my blogs are merely out there drifting like so many lonesome asteroids through the bleak black vacuum of cyberspace, awaiting the touch of some hungry mind to come nibble at their edges and awaken them into meaning . . . even so, their very titles might point some interested party such as yourself in the direction of discovering a thing or two about the way that I am. For our present purposes, however, not all thirty-nine titles are likely to prove relevant. At least a dozen or so of them, for instance, are simply too personal or too esoteric to be of much help here. An example of this might be my blog entitled The World You Knew Is Gone Forever, which consists mainly of a hodgepodge of old family photographs, obituaries and such like private memorabilia. I’m sure you get the idea.

83. “Randomnalities” & Other Blogs

What follows, then, is a random list of those remaining twenty-seven of my current blogs which are most likely to prove helpful in illustrating for you the way that I am:

1. Symposium Mythoklasticum
2. Happy Peasant Heretic
3. The Toolmaker’s Other Son
4. Dr. Hobart Q. Zeitgeist
5. The Book of Lies
6. What Causes What?
7. Journal of Mythoklastic Research
8. Mythoklastic Therapy Institute
9. America’s Invisible Caste System
10. Adventures in Neo-Feudalism
11. Bodysurfing through History’s Riptide
12. Misophally among the Methodists
13. The Re-Endarkenment
14. Angel Negre
15. The Story of Our Story
16. Candor Vendor
17. Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)
18. Hitchhiking with Galen
19. Galen’s Postcards from Boyhood
20. My Portable Bohemia
21. Courage & Imagination
22. History Therapy
23. Lynchmob Syndrome; Scapegoat Dance
24. This Unnamable World
25. Randomnalities
26. Why I’m Here, Doing This
27. Mythdiver

One of the nicest things about blogs – the way the friendly folks at Google have engineered and formatted them – is that anyone reading My Portable Bohemia “on line” can simply go to the words View my complete profile, at the bottom of the little About me note in the narrow column to the left of the main text, and double-click on it to arrive at a menu of direct links to any & all thirty-nine of my current blogs – drifting, as they are, out there through the bleak black vacuum of cyberspace.


84. Peasant Cantata, Another Think, Tender Candor Vendor

For anyone not overly excited by the prospect of perusing what amounts to thirty-nine appendices to the piece you’re reading at the moment (or even twenty-seven such appendices), then my songs now surviving on the pair of rehearsal CD’s I mentioned earlier – Peasant Cantata (2004) & Another Think (2005) – should suffice. If, however, you should perchance desire some sort of Rosetta stone – some “key” to a clearer understanding of my system of metaphor that’s operating within these twenty-eight surviving recorded songs (which are, themselves, miniature Rosetta stones to more clearly understanding the way I am) – then I hardily recommend your giving a listen to my third recorded CD, entitled Tender Candor Vendor (also 2005). On it, you’ll hear me rehearsing fifteen songs by Bob Dylan, which I selected for the express purpose of providing (You guessed it!) a Rosetta stone to my own songs. The process of this third project – Tender Candor Vendor – was originally set in motion by the frequent comments I received concerning my own song lyrics not making adequate sense to a mainstream audience. Whether my recording and circulating the selection of Dylan songs on Tender Candor Vendor came anywhere close to achieving the desired goal, I may never know.

Even though Tender Candor Vendor contains a total of fifteen Dylan songs, ten of them in particular might legitimately be thought of as constituting that Rosetta stone to my own songs to which I keep referring:

1. It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding
2. Idiot Wind
3. Farewell Angelina
4. Subterranean Homesick Blues
5. Abandoned Love
6. Desolation Row
7. I & I
8. To Ramona
9. Up To Me
10. Mama, You’ve been on My Mind

Needless to say, however, you don’t really need to listen to Tender Candor Vendor to know which way the Rosetta stone blows; it would be just as easy to download these ten songs from the Internet. In any event, to the extent that you can understand these ten Dylan masterpieces, I’m confidant that you’ll be able to understand my own lyrics.


Chapter IX

The Arc of Human Destiny is a Tragic Arc


85. History’s Haunting Hellish Hysterics

Sex, politics & religion are the three great themes. At least it’s been that way in my own understanding of human existence, beginning in childhood, when my father, Harry the Toolmaker, first admonished me never to discuss any of these three subjects with anyone outside our immediate family. I sensed instinctually that anything that taboo had to be pretty important. I was probably seven at the time and, being precocious, was very much in need of my father’s gentle admonition. And, being ever the dutiful son, I generally managed to hold my tongue in the context of most one-on-one conversations. Inside my mind, however, was another matter entirely. Inside the gates of that Eden, the voice of Harry the Toolmaker might as well have been that of Jehovah, admonishing Adam & Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good & Evil . . . so that the voice of the serpent in this metaphor, ironically enough, turns out to be the dirt farmer, toolmaker, common sense voice instilled in me, throughout my youth, by none other than the self-same Jehovah-voiced Harry. It was almost as though I’d been set up – entrapped, if you will, into knowing what I wasn’t supposed to know – for the express purpose of my revealing that taboo truth to my future highly select audience.

Or it could simply be that sex, politics & religion are the three great themes – analogous to the three known dimensions of the physical universe . . . so that, once it came time for me to compose a song such as “I Love What We Do,” during that period in 1989 & ‘90 which I’ve already termed my Late Songburst, something inside me seems to have decided that it was OK for me to try blending the three great themes into a folksong that could be sung from beginning to end in less than five minutes (including an harmonica solo in the middle):


I LOVE WHAT WE DO


I love what we do beneath the gaze
Of heaven. I love the way we freeze
And suck these popsicle minutes, chanting
Childish dithyrambs into this hellish
World whose poisonous paints embellish
These triple-thick windows behind which, like goldfish,
We swim in this love as in a daze,
As we look out into a world that’s painting
An hysterical history, rank in its ranting.

I love what we do, here in our bardish
Sighing. I love the way these steelish
Minutes melt to form this phrase
We chant to prevent this world from enchanting
Us into some bamboozled fainting
Away from Love’s wisdom, as outside the mounting
Stormclouds darken these widows like the rubbish
Of history, reeking of Limburger cheese,
Piled higher than weather and deeper than days.

I love what we do, this petting, this panting
Together here. I love this glinting
Shaft of sunlight like a Marvin Hamlisch
Ditty that gives us the strength to blaze
Onward and inward and so to tease
From out of our flesh a love that stays
With us here now where history’s haunting
Hellish hysterics can’t force their foolishness
Through these glass walls to radish our fetish.


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved



86. “And we are here as on a darkling plain . . . . .”

When I try to recall similar songs or poems, across the spectrum of the literature with which I’m familiar, two in particular come to mind. The first is Richard Farina’s song “Children of Darkness.” You can hear it on Richard & Mimi Farina’s Reflections in a Crystal Wind album (Vanguard, 1965). I first heard it when I was still in high school and was instantly entranced by its commingling of the political dimension with the sexual dimension – and a more subtly implied religious dimension – on the order of which I’ve been speaking. Here’s just the first stanza:

Now is the time for your loving, dear,
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea
Now in this age of confusion
I have need for your company.

This theme of the light of reason failing can also be found in the one poem which springs most immediately to mind to invite “I Love What We Do” to be compared with it, and that poem is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (circa 1851), in which, once again, the political dimension blends with the sexual dimension, adding a depth which surpasses conventional connubial bliss. As if any of us needed to be reminded, here’s how Arnold famously ends “Dover Beach”:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


For those of us who grew up largely on the delusionally optimistic, ostensibly apolitical, and implicitly pampered suburbanite song lyrics of 1950’s, ‘60’s & ‘70’s rock & roll, the sorts of disquieting reminders that love takes place in a political universe – an often hostile historical context, if you will – as illustrated in a poem such as “Dover Beach” or in songs such as “I Love What We Do” or “Children of Darkness” or “Here, Now, Always” . . . such disquieting reminders can prove . . . well, mythoklastic. I can’t speak for Richard Farina or Matthew Arnold, of course, but I can assure you that, in my own case – in the case of my own songs often proving to be mythoklastic – that that result is, in fact, entirely intentional. This isn’t to say, however, that I’ve ever written any of my songs (or poems, for that matter) with a single-minded aim toward klasting whatever myths, lies or illusions may or mayn’t lurk within the minds of any or all of the members of my audience. It’s merely to acknowledge that, in songwriting – as in every other dimension of my living from day to day – a certain aurora of shimmering mythoklasm tends to somehow mysteriously tinge the fringes of nearly everything I say or do.


87. “It bends the oak of unspeakable truth . . . . .”

The arc of human destiny is a tragic arc. The transparent obviousness of this most basic of taboo truths notwithstanding, any historical anthropologist (you or I, for instance) who summons the courage and imagination to examine clearmindedly the centuries of evidence stretching so colorfully behind us, cannot but see how entire religions – entire civilizations – have been constructed to deny that tragedy is just another name for the human condition. Sophocles, Shakespeare & Arthur Miller (just to name three of many millions) were not so easily fooled. They each made a career of painting beautiful canvases of life’s tragic essence – and, in so doing, helped to make millions of people happier than they would have been otherwise.

When, in my youth, I began writing my mythoklastic songs, it was because I wanted to facilitate the happiness of my fellow human creatures by means not dissimilar from those employed by my many role models, including Arthur Miller, Shakespeare & Sophocles. Mythoklasm is just a less pretentious word for the truth. And Mythoklastic Therapy is just another way of saying education. Oedipus, Hamlet & Willy Loman all ended badly, not because their myths were klasted, but because they were klasted too late. As most of us were forced to face up to, usually during high school or college years, things are not as we’d been told they were. The first time this happens, it’s mere disillusionment. After that, it becomes education. In its most noble, useful and heretical form, it rises to the level of Mythoklastic Therapy.

We all end badly. Our only hope is to make it less bad. The world is ugly and the people are sad (a phrase I stole, as you probably already knew, from the Wallace Stevens poem, “Gubbinal.”) The sooner we come to accept this distasteful, unfashionable, inconvenient reality, the sooner the world can start becoming less ugly and the people can start becoming less sad. The happily-ever-after comedy implicit in most of the pop songs ever heard by anyone on any radio anywhere – since the invention of radio – is a lie, because comedy is a lie. This does not mean, however, that happiness is a lie. Happiness is very real. Happiness is the greatest good. Happiness is what we are striving for when we perform Mythoklastic Therapy on one another by facilitating – like Shakespeare, Sophocles or Arthur Miller – one another’s acceptance of human destiny’s tragic arc. And that’s why I wrote this song:


MONEY CONQUERS LOVE


Money conquers all.
It bends the oak of unspeakable truth.
Money is the wrench that twists the brains of lovers
Upon their pillows. There’s a thirst lurks inside
Only money can quench.
But don’t bother looking for money deep in the green wood.
Don’t waste your life digging beneath the briar.
For money flows freely, far beneath this river,
To those who inherit it, easy as fire.

Money, sex and power are the hurricanes which rip through
The temples of peace, like plagues, like poisons.
Money conquers all, and so we swallow its lies,
Which lead us into these hellish seasons.
Money buys health and youth and life and leather.
Don’t let them tell you different. Even in China,
Money remains the shield around the skull
and the main string
Between the lingam and the yoni.

Money glares down at us like a judge from its bench and
Will not weep or bend like a wind or a willow.
We glut our guts on money until we’re broke,
Then whore for more until we’re thin and hollow.
Money even supersedes the quest for bosoms.
Eyes, lips, flesh — even the airplane of love -
Even passion’s ocean’s shallow by comparison to
Money’s deep champagne.

My love, bright love, it’s to your touch I aspire.
Yet I lack the money to put you into the mood for
The respect I need to win the favor of the glutton
Within you to whom money is food.
Money, sex and power, in Carolina, and here
Are all one word, slurred together.
My love, bright love, it’s you
to whom these dull brains point,
As I watch money buy even the weather.

Money conquers love. And so I follow you, bright love,
Into the heat to soak up what wealth might
Let me be your lover, if only just long enough to
Learn to tolerate this joke.
Money conquers love. And so I follow you, bright love,
Into the heat to soak up what wealth might
Let me be your lover, if only just long enough to
Learn to tolerate this joke.


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved



88. Bill Daniels, Sigmund Freud and the Darkroom (1966)

It was Bill Daniels (q.v.) who first introduced me to Sigmund Freud. Bill & I were standing in the dim red glow of a bare 15-watt light bulb in the darkroom outside the East High cafeteria one afternoon during senior year. Bill was a staff photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook, and I was assisting him in developing and printing some recent photographs. The darkroom’s stillness and privacy invited candid conversation between two ambitious seventeen-year-old heretics who never seemed to find enough time to learn all there was to learn from one another’s minds. Bill had recently returned from a visit to Kansas City where an uncle of his had turned him on to Freud. Being an avid reader of nearly everything which held out the promise of a world of fresh possibilities, Bill had already tracked down and completely devoured that (then) widely available paperback edition of a general introduction to Freud’s works – the one with the wheat (or urine) colored cover, published (I believe) by Vintage/Anchor.

Until that fateful afternoon, my knowledge of Freud or of his work was negligible. I associated his name with his iconic cigar & beard & psychotherapy couch. Beyond those popularized images, I hadn’t a clue as to who Freud was nor as to what were even his most basic ideas. All of that was to change radically, however, in a very short amount of time. Within the forty-five minutes or so that it took for Bill & me to develop and print several dozen black & white photographs, there in the very dark, very faint glow of that darkroom’s red light, Bill’s bubbling enthusiasm for Freud and for his fundamental ideas had infected my own imagination like Promethean fire from the gods. But it wasn’t so much a “why hadn’t I thought of that?” moment for me as it was a “yes, yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking all along!” moment. Perhaps it would help the reader to understand exactly what it was that I was feeling as those forty-five minutes of bright shining revelation there in that darkroom in 1966 moved apace, if I were to compare that set of emotions to those which flooded through me one unforgettable night a year or so earlier when I brought home my newly-purchased vinyl copy of Dylan’s Another Side of Bob Dylan album and, after unwrapping it and placing it on the turntable, heard “To Ramona” for the very first time. Not so much a flood of epiphany as a flood of “often thought but ne’er so well expressed.” (I realize that those were not Alexander Pope’s exact words, but you get the idea.)

What has always thrilled me about Freud and his ideas – ever since those revelatory minutes in the darkroom in 1966 when I was seventeen – has much less (than might be guessed) to do with Freudian theories of sex & dreams & childhood & the unconscious & such . . . and more to do with Freud’s courage & imagination in attempting to describe accurately the world as he observed it. In this respect, Freud has always struck me as having more in common with Dylan, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Darwin, Newton, Galen (129-217 A.D.), Galileo, Einstein, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, Joni Mitchell, Paul Krugman and/or the fictional crime scene investigator named Gill Grissom on the original C.S.I. television series . . . than with Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karl Menninger or any of the zillions of “Freudians” I’ve ever had the pleasure to know or to read. And it is, therefore, in this same respect that Sigismund Schlomo Freud (1856-1939) might reasonably be considered one of the two grandfathers of mythoklastic therapy – the other, of course, being Charles Darwin.

For me, as the founder of the Mythoklastic Therapy Institute, the single element in Freudian theory and Freudianism that has been what I consider to be most wanting is its failure to adequately acknowledge or reasonably address Life’s political dimension. It’s been my fervent hope that, in developing my mythoklastic school of therapy, I can begin to remedy this gaping lesion in our understanding of what causes what. It has also been as a direct result of my repeated observation of Freudianism’s failure to adequately acknowledge or reasonably address the political dimension of the human condition that I’ve found myself distilling what I’ve personally found to be a rather handy little aphorism, which is that an ounce of litigation is worth a pound of psychotherapy.


89. His Dream of Waking Up

But I’m here with you today, Gentle Reader, neither to disparage the field of psychotherapy nor to promote unnecessary litigation. Rather, as I stated at the outset, I’m here to explain how it was that I came to be the way that I am. From where I stand, it feels as if one major component of whatever it is which has brought me from “there” to “here” has been a vision from deep within me of a sleeper who is trying desperately to awaken. My earliest attempt to put this guiding inner vision into worlds was in 1975 when the late Carol Berge, founder and editor of fascinating avant-garde literary journal called Center, which consisted entirely of short prose-poems, was putting together a special edition made up entirely of hundred-word contributors’ notes – i.e. short autobios written by past contributors to Center. I’m certain that I made every effort to save and archive my contributor’s copies of that historically significant issue of Center, but odds are that it ended up being destroyed or lost in one of the several above-mentioned instances of fire or flood or human malfeasance.

Even so, I can recall from memory much of what I wrote in my hundred-word self-introduction, nearly thirty-five years ago and only a couple of years out of college. I remember, for instance, naming Shakespeare, Dylan & Freud as the three most important influences on my personal aesthetic. It was a rash oversimplification, of course, but it probably did little harm. I then alluded to that guiding inner vision of a sleeper trying desperately to awaken, and concluded by saying that that sleeper trying to awaken is all of us.

I’ve chosen to harken back to that hundred-word aesthetic credo I composed in 1975 for that special “contributors’ issue” of Carol Berge’s Center, not because it’s anything like what I would write today – half a lifetime later – but because it seems to me to provide a fairly useful breadcrumb in that above-mentioned trail of breadcrumbs (and/or Rosetta stones) leading us simultaneously back down the way we came, as well as forward into where we’re becoming more and more clear & present. Even if I were capable nowadays of composing an aesthetic credo which limited itself to a hundred words, I wouldn’t know where to begin. What I do know, however, is that, here in the 21st century, the sleeper in my inner vision isn’t sleeping the same natural, healthy, bone-weary sleep that I’d mistakenly originally inferred, back in 1975. Rather, it is an induced sleep, a counter-wakefulness, brought on by and reinforced by real-world, flesh & blood human agency – “interested parties,” if you will – with a powerfully compelling vested interest in keeping our sleeper from ever rousing to full wakefulness. Here’s a song lyric I wrote, back in 1989, which states the same case without hindrance of subtlety:


THE PLUTOCRATS ARE COMING TO TOWN
(to the tune of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”)



1.
You’d better watch out — better gird up your loins,
Hide your children and bury your coins,
‘Cause the plutocrats are coming to town.

2.
They’re raping the land, raping the skies,
Raping our kids with their poisonous lies.
The plutocrats are coming to town.

FIRST REFRAIN:
They’ll bleed you when you’re sleeping. They’re always on the take.
They’ll kill you if you know too much. So PLAY DUMB, for goodness sake.

3.
They’ll make you their eunuch, make you their slave,
So you’ll shop till you drop and slave to your grave.
The plutocrats are coming to town.

SECOND REFRAIN:
The kids in Girl & Boy Land are in for some alienation.
They’re gonna build a toyland town and call it “Civilization.”

4.
But we can stop these demons. We can start a crusade.
Will you stand with me at the barricade?
‘Cause the plutocrats are coming to town.

THIRD REFRAIN:
They inherited their power, through accident of birth.
Yet they preach “The Work Ethic” in their crystal tower,
while plundering the Earth.

(repeat first stanza)



Words by Galen Green
Copyright 1989
All Rights Reserved



Chapter X

The Birth of Mythoklastic Therapy
In the Breakdown of Neo-Feudalism


90. What’s the Matter with Kansas?

In his insightful 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank does a much better job than I could ever do of getting at what I’m getting at here. Way back in 1970 & ’71, when Arthur & I were living in that funny-shaped attic, while getting ourselves as much of a college education as we could afford, and working in the circulation department at the Wichita State University’s Ablah Library in our off hours, I myself had already begun asking myself that same question which would, decades later, become the title and central focus of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book. My prime motivation for asking it way back then was, quite frankly, my love for my adoptive parents, Harry & Margaret (McCall) Green – because, as soon as I was old enough to distinguish Crap from Christmas (let’s say from the age of 17 onward, just for the sake of argument), I began fretting about the irreparable damage I could see my parents doing to themselves and the rest of us by voting for nothing but Republican candidates, while acting in another hundred related ways contrary to their own self-interest.

At the time (that is to say, throughout my late adolescence and into my early adulthood), I lacked sufficient background in the currents, patterns, and undercurrents of either macro-history or micro-history to chalk my parents’ self-defeating conservative conformity up to anything beyond what I even intuited at the time to be the unfairly harsh conclusion that Harry & Margaret must surely have been either incredibly stupid or incredibly evil. I make this shameful confession to you here today in the full knowledge that my doing so reveals an uninformed impatience on my part, of which I’m now – as I’ve just suggested – not at all proud.

Only within these past nineteen years, these years since Margaret died, thus liberating me back into the kingdom of orphanhood, these years since I’ve fled Kansas and resorted to viewing it from this more comfortable vantage point across the Missouri state line . . . only within these recent years, have I found it possible to evolve into this historical anthropologist I seem to be becoming, who believes that the incredibly complex answer to Thomas Frank’s question – “what’s the matter with Kansas” – might well have its roots buried deep within that even more incredibly complex answer to that question I began asking myself at around the age of 17, which was: “What’s the matter with Harry & Margaret?” Of course, if you or I were to ask that impertinent question of Harry’s or Margaret’s surviving relatives, most of those folks would undoubtedly respond vociferously that nothing was ever wrong with Harry & Margaret – that the problem has always lain within your humble servant. Please bear in mind, however, that these are the very same folks who’d eagerly tell Thomas Frank with equal vociferocity that nothing’s the matter with Kansas – that the problem lies within him and within the rest of us liberals.


91. A Word about Political Sing-Alongs

“The Kid That Was Me” is another of the many song lyrics I wrote during my “late songburst” of 1989-’90, and was intended to serve the same basic purpose as “The Plutocrats Are Coming to Town.” As you might guess, that purpose might best be summed up as their functioning as group sing-along anthems, suitable for both large outdoor political rallies and smaller, more intimate indoor progressive get-togethers. And I’m happy to report that both songs served both types of situations quite well. They – along with a handful of similarly constructed leftwing sing-alongs – have constituted much of my meager personal contribution to the various and sundry progressive causes I’ve championed over the past two decades:



THE KID THAT WAS ME
(to the tune of “My Bonnie”)

1.
I think that I need some advice from
the little kid I used to be,
‘Cause adulthood has scrambled my vision
and makes me deny what I see.

REFRAIN:
Bring back...oh bring back...
Oh bring back the kid that was me...was me
Bring back...oh bring back...
Oh bring back the kid that was me.

2.
I need a good heart-to-heart talk with
that smart little kid that I was --
To remind me the emperor’s naked
and to show me the evil he does.
(...repeat refrain...).
3.
I need him (her) to yank back the curtain --
that smart little kid that was me--
To show me the wizard’s a humbug,
so that I can leave Oz and be free.
(...repeat refrain...)
4.
That little kid knew crap from Christmas
and called a spade a spade.
That smart little kid that I once was
looked the world in the eyes unafraid.
(...repeat refrain...)
5.
Oh, bring back that kid for ten minutes,
and let these eyes see how it be.
Let me face this mad world through the eyes
of that uncensored kid that was me.
(...repeat refrain twice...)


Words by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved



One thing I suppose that I might do differently, if I had it all to do over again, would be to steer completely clear of copyrighted material – I mean songs which might possibly still be under some form or other of copyright protection, upon whose familiarly singable melodies I could hang my activist lyrics. “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” for example, is a traditional Scottish folksong, whereas, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was written in 1934 by identifiable individuals (J. Fred Coots & Haven Gillespie), who just may have bequeathed their copyrights to descendants who – hypothetically, at least – could prove problematic.

I wish, especially, that I’d thought twice before I wrote a sing-along entitled “Village in the Void” to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” The one time I performed it in public was on an elevated stage at a huge environmentalist rally outside the Vulcan Chemical plant outside of Wichita, in May of 1990, in front of TV news cameras and such. It was later pointed out to me by an attorney friend that I just might be playing with fire, in choosing such a recently copyrighted song to parody for political purposes. So, as you read the lyrics silently to yourself, here today, I beg you to think of it as being sung to any melody in the world other than those composed by John Lennon & Paul McCartney (even though I’m fairly confidant that Sir Paul & John’s widow Yoko would wholeheartedly sympathize with the sentiment behind my parody):


Village in the Void
(to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”)

1.
In the town where I was born lived six billion other souls;
And we made an awful noise, in our overcrowded holes.
And when there was no room to grow, the rich began to eat the poor.
So to save my sorry skin, I became a corporate whore.

Refrain:
We all live in a village in the void, village in the void, village in the void.
We all live in a village in the void, village in the void, village in the void.

2.
Twelve billion hands are all aboard,
Reaching out for more than they can afford.
And the band begins to play . . . . .
(repeat refrain)

3.
As we live a life of ease, we think that we can do just what we please.
Oceans dead, ozone destroyed – in our village in the void.
(repeat refrain)


Words by Galen Green
Copyright 1990, All Rights Reserved


92. Symposium Mythoklasticum

Speaking of having second thoughts: I’ve been having another think about the scant explanation I provided you with, concerning my blogs, a few pages back. Please know that my intention here – as in all things – is to be transparent, rather than opaque or enigmatic. But I get the feeling that, in relating those twenty-seven blogs I listed for you in Section 83 to who I am or what I’m all about, I could have put forth a bit more effort in connecting the dots. So let me take a moment to revisit those twenty-seven blog titles, if only just long enough to provide you with some better clue to what they were originally meant to mean.

Taking the twenty-seven in pretty much the order which happened to be generated internally (and probably at random) by Google’s program, the blog which Google’s program chose to place at the top of its menu is entitled Symposium Mythoklasticum. It’s probably all for the best that this is the title heading the menu, since the relationship between this particular web log and its title turns out to be self-evident. I mean that when I created Symposium Mythoklasticum, back in 2007, I wanted for it to serve as a kind of quiet grove where mythoklasts of every stripe could come and sit for spell upon a comfortable tree stump or limestone boulder, to join in a lively discussion (or symposium) on the full range of mythoklastic topics churning within the zeitgeist of our time & place in history. As it has turned out, however, as of this writing, Symposium Mythoklasticum has proven to be more of a quiet shady grove than a lively discussion.

For that matter, the same could be said for the majority of my blogs. As I stated back in Section 83, their function thus far has been primarily one of data storage. The upside of this seeming liability includes the fact that each of my lonely floating blogs might be said to function as a kind of Field of Dreams (like the famous baseball movie) – that is, as a kind of magnetic field for my thoughts, as well as for the thoughts of anyone else who cares to give them a glance (and that, of course, includes you & you & you). In this respect, I suppose that it could be said that I – like millions of other bloggers – have built my web logs like so many fields of dreams, believing all the while that “if you build it, they will come.” The fact that the “they” who end up coming to these fields of dreams we bloggers build often don’t happen to be the “they” whom we’d preconceived as coming only serves to demonstrate what most mature adults have always been able to figure out regarding the hegemonic gods of serendipity, who seem to intervene in practically every dimension of human affairs.


93. Galen Green’s Various Alter-Egos

Getting back to the blog titles themselves, however, the two of those which follow Symposium Mythoklasticum almost immediately in Google’s random menu (again, see: Section 83, above) are the names of two of my most useful alter-egos. The first of these is, as you see, Happy Peasant Heretic. This is a name I sometimes call myself; although, I suppose that I ought, instead, to refer to it as a title, analogous perhaps to Henry David Thoreau’s imaginary job title of “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms.”

The next blog title on my Google-generated menu is Dr. Hobart Q. Zeitgeist. This is an alter-ego I invented for employment upon those occasions when I wish to say something wise in print – something so wise that no one would ever believe that a schlub such as myself could have come up with something that wise.

The third of my three most useful alter-egos is Angel Negre, whom Google’s higgledy-piggledy menu has positioned further along. Angel Negre is simply an anagram for Galen Green. It translates into “Black Angel.” And yet, ironically, Angel Negre has never represented what the Jungians might call my “shadow self” nor what the Twelve-Steppers might refer to as my “dark side.” Quite the contrary; Angel Negre is precisely that happy peasant heretic referred to earlier – no more, no less. In other words, the aforementioned happy peasant heretic’s name is Angel Negre.

Back in 2005, I began composing a book-length autobiography with the working title of The Toolmaker’s Other Son. It was not until 2007, however, that I got around to creating a blog by that same name. The title comes from the plain fact that my father was a toolmaker. I mean that that was his job title at Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, during the twenty-eight years he worked there (1941-1969). As for the “other” in the title, it has its origins in the manifold “otherness” of my position within our family. But that’s a concept which would take far too long to explain here today. It would, in fact, take exactly the length of a book to explain satisfactorily. If I ever get around to completing such a book, I believe that I’ll call it The Toolmaker’s Other Son.


94. The Book of Lies

As for The Book of Lies, I first came up with that title and with a journal filled with scribbled fragments of notes toward a book by that title, way back in 1977, just a few months after Kate Schulte & I were divorced. As indicated earlier, I was living in Columbus, Ohio at that time – specifically in the same “half of a double” at 2404 Glenmawr into which Kate & I had moved, only weeks before she announced to me that we weren’t going to be married anymore. The substance of my embryonic Book of Lies, however, bore no particular causal kinship to the abrupt dissolution of Kate’s & my five-year marriage. It grew, instead, out of the randomnality of life lessons which both Kate & I had learned during our time together, during much of which time we’d each had the opportunity to observe & experience the America of the Nixon, Ford & Carter years from the highly favorable vantage point of passionate but philosophical young leftwing activists. I’ll revisit this territory, further on up ahead. For now, suffice it to say that The Book of Lies – although it was an airplane which never got beyond taxiing down an endless runway – deserves an honorable mention in our story as having served as a quasi-prototype for my current concept of mythoklasm and mythoklastic therapy.


95. “Notes Toward . . . . .”

Without exception, every one of my web logs represents a work-in-progress. And when I say that to you, I mean that each represents a set of works-in-progress; for none of my blogs is intended to voice a single, solid, unitary idea, but rather a set of ideas juxtaposed in relation to one another in such a way as to let that relationship – that dynamic – shine through in some pattern or other which I can only hope against hope will voice in chorus whatever conceptual dynamic I thought I was thinking toward meaning to mean what I meant when first I opened the mouth of my mind to make voice.

But my deeper point here is that, without exception, each and every one of these blogs of mine – these patterns of ideas, stored up within these collections of pieces of my writing (often in draft forms as rough as the one you’re reading at this very moment) – each and every one is a work-in-progress. My purpose in putting such awkward emphasis on this point is by of offering to you, Gentle Reader, a disclaimer, lest you begin surfing from blog to blog to blog and meet with nothing but disappointment. Therefore, instead of pulling this or that clump of my writings from out of cyberspace with the false expectation that you’ve got hold of a polished, finished, packaged product, please be so indulgent as to be prepared for having got hold of, instead, a handful of semi-organized “Notes Toward . . . . . ” something that’s yet to be realized.

Moreover, of those blog titles I’ve yet to explain here today, several are so closely related – thematically or otherwise – to one another that it makes most sense to me to present them to you in what I’m going to call logical clusters. For example, The Journal of Mythoklastic Research will hopefully be the official quarterly scholarly publication of The Mythoklastic Therapy Institute, starting sometime around the winter of 2012. And, while this entire set of projects of mine is – as I’ve already emphasized so very tediously – tentative, embryonic, a work-in-progress . . . I’m envisioning a recurring theme for each of our quarterly journal’s seasonal issues. Hence, according to this type annual cycle of interlocking themes, each year’s spring issue would focus on History Therapy, while the summer issue would focus on America’s Invisible Caste System. In keeping, then with this alternation between focusing on a problem and alternately focusing on a solution (albeit in reverse order, in this example), each year’s autumn issue would focus on the theme of Courage & Imagination, while the winter issue would focus on the theme of Adventures in Neo-Feudalism.


96. Jongian Insight in a Cluttered Living Room

Way back in the mid-1970’s, I caught a few minutes of an interview with novelist Erica Jong on a daytime talk show, while I was standing next to another community organizer in the cluttered living room of an indigent single mother in Columbus, Ohio, during my frustrating but mythoklastic career as a V.I.S.T.A. volunteer (1974-75). Jong had recently skyrocketed to notoriety with the 1973 publication of her sexually provocative novel, Fear of Flying, upon the success of which the talk show host was congratulating her. I can’t quote Jong’s response verbatim from memory, but the insightful gist of it has stayed with me throughout these thirty-five years since, because of how very close to my own existential home it struck. Tossing off this penetrating insight as though it were so much dust on her shirt-sleeve, novelist Jong quipped something to the effect that, “now that America has overcome its taboo toward the open discussion of sex, perhaps we can move on to overcoming our equally backward attitude toward openly discussing money.” The talk show host was left speechless, while the studio audience gave a nervous titter. But I knew exactly where Jong was coming from, because she had just said something that I’d been thinking for years.

I’m choosing to interject this Erica Jong anecdotal reminiscence at this particular juncture, of course, because it illustrates so succinctly, in miniature, a problem which many social analysts have been confronted with in the decades since the end of the Second World War – and that’s the problem of how to comment honestly and accurately about the transparent taboo realities of systemic economic injustice in post-1945 America, without caving in to the toxic mythologies which most Americans believed and lived by, right up until America’s economic collapse, which began in the months immediately preceding the general election on November 4th of 2008 which elevated Barak Obama to the American Presidency.

During the Age of Reagan & Bush (the valiant efforts of the Clinton Administration notwithstanding), it became obviouser & obviouser to me – as I’m sure that it did to you and to millions of other courageous, clear-minded liberals and progressives – that American society was being dragged deeper and deeper down into what I’ve chose to call The Re-Endarkenment. I know that you know that the horrifying realization that Reagan & the Bushes and their myth-driven followers were hell-bent on reversing the human progress brought about by the 18th century Enlightenment, as well as by both American Revolutionary Periods (1763-1789 & 1861-1865), and more recently by FDR’s New Deal legacy (1933-1953). Thanks in large part to their antidemocratic, anti-intellectual, neo-feudalist criminality, a new Dark Age – even bleaker that the one before (circa 400-1300 A.D.) – would surely have increasingly threatened the future wellbeing of the mass of humankind, had Barak Obama not won the 2008 Presidential Election.


97. Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV), etc.

None of this would have come about, of course, (none of these past three decades of re-endarkenment) had America, indeed, overcome (to paraphrase my earlier paraphrase of Erica Jong’s mythoklastic quip) its backward attitude toward – its taboo toward – openly discussing money. But America did not overcome that taboo. Instead, we continued to continue to talk about money, sex, politics, race, social class, religion, the meaning of life – and everything else that really matters to us – through our socially acceptable filters of mythology. It is, of course, what these filters filter out which we need most urgently to be discussing openly. And it is for the purpose of addressing this issue that I’ve created those of my blogs which have been variously titled Mythdiver, Candor Vendor, What Causes What?, This Unnamable World and Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV), each one with its own distinct function, and with each of those functions either named or implied right there in each blog’s title. Which was why I brought up, in the first place, Erica Jong’s quip about our taboo toward discussing money as openly as we discuss sex.


98. Bodysurfing Through History’s Riptide

As soon as I’ve had a chance to offer you at least a brief explanation of the few blog titles remaining here to be explained, I was thinking that maybe we should return for a brief while, you & I, to the attic at the center of our shared universe and to the twelvemonth in 1970 & ’71 when Arthur & I first began gestating within our separate souls that portable bohemia which each of us has carried around with us ever since – like a magical cloak woven from bright, colorful strands of counterculture, mythoklasm and pluralistic poetry – a magical cloak to be worn on the inside and on the outside simultaneously. But first, let’s briefly to our unfinished business concerning my few remaining web logs titles.

My Portable Bohemia should be obvious. It is, of course, the blog where I post my weekly installments of what you’ve been so patiently reading right here, right now.

Hitchhiking with Galen is a travelogue in which I tell about the first (1967) and the third (1969) of my three most extensive hitchhiking adventures, the earliest having taken me through the Deep South during the civil rights era and the later one having taken me through New York City and Montreal, Quebec during the two-week period surrounding Woodstock. Structuring that essay as I did, however, required my leaving out the second of my three major hitchhiking excursions – my middle odyssey, if you will – the one which actually proved in a number of ways to be the most harrowing and the most memorable – and certainly the longest and most bizarre. I’ve therefore chosen to give that dusty journey its own essay with its own title. Bodysurfing through History’s Riptide is a detailed account of my 1968 shoestring excursion from Wichita, Kansas to Acapulco, Mexico and back – including lots of stops along the way – almost miraculously accomplished, via intrepid hitchhiking and Mexican bus line (Flecha Roja), in just under two weeks time, on less than $100 (1968 U.S. dollars). When I say that this “is” a detailed account, I mean that it will eventually be a detailed account of . . . etc. For, no sooner had I undertaken the writing of it than I was sidetracked by the more urgent project of composing the various & sundry components of the web log I’ve entitled Galen’s Postcards from Boyhood for my friends at the Richmond Community Museum in Richmond, Kansas, that particular blog, by contrast, consisting primarily of random remembrances of all four of my adoptive parents’ parents (who lived between 1858 & 1981) and their prairie hamlet of Richmond, as I experienced it in the 1950’s & ‘60’s.

As for my Bodysurfing through History’s Riptide blog, its title comes from a near-drowning experience I had when I was 19, while bodysurfing alone in the Pacific Ocean, off the beach at Pie de la Cuesta, north of Acapulco. Reflecting, decades later, upon that terrifying half-minute it took for me to tear myself out of that crushing undertow and swim to the surface, I’ve come to conceive of that brief episode more and more as a viable metaphor, representing the human condition, wherein the hapless individual is inevitably dragged under and swept away (some of us more than others) in . . . well, in history’s riptide. (Hence . . . the title.) Of course, as nearly everyone who’s paying attention is now aware, in that cataclysmic year of 1968, practically every human being who walked this earth was caught in one form of struggle or another in history’s riptide. To illustrate this point, let me share with you the opening sentence of this particular memoir:


On the night that Robert Kennedy was shot, I was asleep on a sofa in the darkened, deserted waiting area of the passenger terminal at Love Field in Dallas, Texas -- the same airport where Kennedy’s older brother John had landed the morning that he was assassinated in 1963, five years earlier.


Chapter XI

Are We But Sleepwalkers, Ghosts at a Séance?


99. Czech Hannah & “The Desperate Hours”

We now have a total of five blog titles remaining for me to explain to you here today. Let’s begin with Why I’m Here, Doing This. The shortest explanation I can offer for this web log is to say simply that it’s a fairly substantial essay on the subject of why I’ve been living here in Kansas City, Missouri since 1990 and involving myself in an odd assortment of work situations, always with an eye toward making as meaningful a contribution as possible to the building of a better world for the children of the future, while affording myself optimal hands-on research opportunities. Unlike most of my other blogs, Why I’m Here, Doing This is actually a complete essay – or at least the draft of a complete essay.

The blog I’ve entitled Randomnalities, on the other hand, is the farthest thing from being an essay – and will, by its eponymous definition, never ever be complete. In this respect, at least, it may, ironically, come closer than most of my other blogs to bearing a strong verisimilitude to real life.

The Story of Our Story is a story which keeps changing. In once sense, its meaning is self-evident; whereas its meaning, in an equal but opposite sense, proves to be as fluid as that river which is never the same river twice. Here is a song lyric for you about the story of our story, Gentle Reader, one which I composed way back in 1978, on a blustery night in December, while sitting at my kitchen table in my one-bedroom bachelor’s apartment in a sprawling apartment complex across the Olentangy River from The Ohio State University. A Czech refugee lady in her late thirties named Hanna (pronounced so as to rhyme with “sauna” or “fauna”) who lived in the next building over with her young son, Rudy, a very pleasant chap who’d fled with Hannah and her ex-husband from Prague when the Soviet tanks had rolled in, in 1968 . . . sad, blond Hannah . . . had asked me to write a song for her about our lives – hers and mine – separate but similar – as a “Christmas present” for her (even though we were both wholly secularist in our beliefs). “The Desperate Hours” is the song I wrote for her that blustery December night at my kitchen table in 1978:



THE DESPERATE HOURS


Dear friend, I think we’re prisoners with invisible stripes.
That’s how I’ll begin this song you’ve asked me to write.
We’re lost in this petrified forest of invisible hypes.
We wander through this dark passage all through the night.

I’d never ask you to thank your lucky stars
For bringing us together on this isle of fury.
The desperate hours flash by like subway cars.
I wonder where they’re headed in such a hurry.

Dear friend, I think we’re lost in this lonely place.
Would it do any good to knock on any door?
Should we paddle back up the river and try to retrace
The desperate hours that left us alone on this shore?

We’re two against a world of situations.
But the king of the underworld has an appetite
For the flesh of the men and women of all nations.
So the desperate hours they drive us through the night.

Dear friend, I think we’re angels with dirty faces.
The king of the underworld has us against the wall.
He’s a devil with women but lacks in the social graces.
So the harder he drives our hearts, the harder we fall.

We’re three on a match, smoking here in the midnight.
But this fire in the left hand of God is a holy terror.
It reminds us that we’re no angels dressed in white.
So the desperate hours are going to haunt even our mirror.

Dear friend, I think we’re adrift in a China clipper.
Dear friend, I think the winds are out of control.
To sail across the Pacific, you must shed your lead slipper
And fly to your dark reckoning with both body and soul.

To have and have not a hand to put your hand in –
That’s the only question we follow into the big sleep.
Dear friend, these desperate hours are too deep to stand in.
But, dear friend, these desperate hours are all we keep.


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1978, All Rights Reserved


100. Civ. No. 00-0385-CV-W-2 (the movie version)

Misophally Among the Methodists is unique among my blogs, in that it consists almost entirely of court documents – i.e. of legal briefs, affidavits, decisions, appeals, etc – all of which center around one particular case in federal court (8th Circuit). For anyone unfamiliar with the word “misophally,” it’s easy (and logical) to remember that misophally is nothing more complicated than the masculine counterpart of misogyny. In other words, misophally is the hatred of or strong prejudice against males. It’s my earnest intention that the data stored in this web log – along with the much richer and more flavorful data stored in my head – will one day furnish forth the basis for a full-length screenplay.

Meanwhile, if anyone is interested in reading even more federal civil court documents concerning misophally, theocracy and the separate clause, let me refer you to the federal civil case number (Civ. No. 00-0385-CV-W-2). I’m adding this bit of information here primarily because, when I dialed up this particular blog earlier today, I was disappointed to discover that some sort of malevolent gremlin out there in cyberspace appears to have been causing portions of my stored information to decay and/or disintegrate.


101. Lynchmob Syndrome; Scapegoat Dance

The 27th of the twenty-seven blogs-in-progress of mine that I’ve chosen from among my total of thirty-nine web logs, drifting like so many lonely asteroids out there in cyberspace . . . the meanings of the titles of which I’ve chosen to explain briefly to you here today as a means of explaining myself to you . . . the 27th of these is entitled Lynchmob Syndrome; Scapegoat Dance. The reason I’ve saved this one for last is that I have a feeling deep down in my toes that this particular web log title is likely to require an explanation of considerably greater depth than did the other twenty-six. As an expedient for plunging us all down to that depth as quickly and safely as possible, perhaps it would make most sense for me to begin my explanation with yet another song. Not just any song, of course; but rather one whose lyrics echo this blog’s dominant theme:



OUR GRANDCHILDREN



This planet has become an emblem of our shame,
The poison upon which our grandchildren will float,
While we, whom they will call their late,
Great Gods, go bobbing down the stream
Of history. Our bodies bloat
With all these lies which were our fate
When Fate and History gave us the time
To clean it up or suck the blame.

This planet once offered us more than enough.
But we were too stupid or scared to see
That gods like us, with feet of clay,
Are sacrificing to the Golden Calf
Our grandchildren, who will become the prey
Of these toys we worship on bended knee.
Our children’s children must pay for this laugh
We’ve had with all these toys and stuff.

We said it was for them we did
These tricks and games, with brain and arm.
But we have merely introduced them to
Our god who is that worm
Who will become their fate.
And when they’ve paid for our mistakes,
A final swarm of consequences
Will sound an alarm just loud enough
For those we’ve bled, bamboozled and murdered
To know it’s only ourselves we kid.

Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved


102. As Good As It Was Ever Going To Get

We’ve all had the sort of experience I’m about to describe, whether we knew it or not. Decades ago, someone said something. But it didn’t impress us at the time as being anything worth remembering. Let’s say that it was a prediction, a friendly warning, a prophecy – perhaps one of those comments which are sometimes referred to as a “Jeremiad,” so named after Jeremiah, that so-called “prophet of doom” in the Bible. Anyway, decades pass, and, lo and behold, that seemingly worthless something which someone had said to us, all those years ago, comes drifting back to us, as might a long-forgotten melody, and gradually begins to take on cosmic significance, for the simple reason that it has, in fact, turned out to have been . . . well . . . prophetic.

Such has been the case with a comment which my friend Regina Barnett made to me one day over lunch during our freshman year at Wichita State. Actually, the comment had come from Regina’s history professor during that morning’s lecture in Wilner Auditorium and had impressed Regina sufficiently for her to find it worth recounting to me as we ate lunch in the Campus Activities Center cafeteria. As for the impression which Regina’s history professor’s grim prophecy made on me at the time, I don’t mean to say that I was entirely dismissive of its potential importance to me, but merely that it immediately got filed away in my memory under the category of: “Get back to me on that when I’m sixty.”

Before I reveal what it was that Regina related to me over lunch that day, let me briefly contextualize it. For those of you who are not me, imagine a brightly flickering moment in the spring of 1968 when the leftwing of my generation – along with liberals and progressives of my parents’ generation – dared to dream that the world was about to become better in a thousand or so wonderful ways. I’m talking about that tiny timeframe between President Lyndon Johnson’s announcing on TV that he wouldn’t run for re-election (March 31, 1968) and that horrible night, a little over two months later, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. It was surely somewhere within the context of those two giddy months of false hope that Regina’s history professor made the comment which Regina related to me over lunch that same day. As best I can recollect it, here’s a paraphrase of what she said to me:

“Dr. Douglas told our class today that this is as good as it’s going to get. He told us that he realizes that most of us think that the war will be over soon and that when there’s peace, everything is going to get better. But he said that when we’re older, we’re going to look back on the 60’s as some kind of Golden Age, when everything had gotten as good as it was going to get, and that it’s going to be downhill from here on out, for a very long time.”


103. Without Hindrance of Subtlety

Given what we know now, Gentle Reader, it would seem fair to say that Dr. Douglas’s gloomy forecast concerning the greater portion of Regina’s and my generation’s brief sojourn here on earth has turned out to be right on the money. And that’s pretty much what my 1989 song, “Our Grandchildren,” is about. Had any of us who turned nineteen in that cataclysmic year of 1968 been able to see into the future as clearly as Regina’s history professor did, I sometimes wonder what any of us would have done differently. However, just in case my reading of the history of the middle forty years of my life (1969-2009), as reflected in the lyrics of “Our Grandchildren,” didn’t prove sufficiently bleak in depicting America’s gradual devolution toward an Age of Re-endarkenment and a slimy slide toward Neo-Feudalism (sometimes referred to as “Neo-Fascism”), then please allow me to entertain you with yet another song lyric which – as I said earlier about “The Plutocrats Are Coming to Town” – states the same case without hindrance of subtlety:



AMERICAN SLAVES



Happiness hides beyond these gates --
Silver spoons and China plates.
But here we breed and slave and rot
And thank our oppressors for the little we’ve got.
Of those who dare to take a chance
By running away to wealth and romance
In far off parts of these United States,
A few of them make it; the rest do not.
The majority blind ourselves to our fates,
Play deaf, dumb and numb to what circumstance
Enslaves us to our pitiful plot.

We all are slaves to our family ties
And to whatever totems our parents baptize
Us to at birth. (This chain is mine!!!)
These are the slave shacks to which we resign
Our days with our cousins and uncles and aunts.
These are the factories that sprout up like plants,
Like tobacco, like cotton. None dares criticize
The poisons they make here and on which we shall dine.
Our sadistic oppressors we all idolize,
Because we need their bucks to finance
This earthly hell, this grim design.

These are our children and these are their fires
Which we sell for their heat to the sinister choirs
Of extinguishing gangster whose ways and means
Are more perverse than the kings and queens
Who once held their serfs in a feudal trance,
From Charlemagne onward — in England, in France,
In Russia, etc.-- while the clergy, with pliers,
Ripped out their genitals, backbones and spleens,-
Then played them like puppets from invisible wires.
These are our children. See them dance.
See them play out their pitiful scenes.

These are our hands. We sell them in pairs.
Hands that sweat while the bossperson swears
And threatens. Hands that would become wings.
Hands we fold in praise to kings
And shareholders whose childish extravagance
Feeds on our foolish intolerance
Toward new ideas which could banish our cares,
Hands we shackle with wedding rings,
Hands that get slapped if any dares
To point a finger at the arrogance
Of our proud oppressor, who mockingly sings.

We’re American slaves, ravaged and torn
From four hundred years of shucking corn
And parking cars. The needle glides
Toward the breaking point. The future rides
On our backs like Rajas on their elephants.
But this is of little relevance.
For it’s liberation and change we scorn.
Beyond these gates, happiness hides.
But don’t disturb our stupor to warn us
That we are but sleepwalkers, ghosts at a séance,
Oblivious to which way the avalanche slides.


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved



Chapter XII

Preliminary Conjectures on Recent American Politics


104. Our Long National Nightmare is (far from) Over

On November 4, 2008, America elected Barak Obama to be its 44th President. Exactly four days later, I sat down to begin writing this memoir of “My Portable Bohemia” for you, Gentle Reader. It wasn’t something I’d planned to do or that I’d been consciously thinking about doing for more than a day or two ahead of time. Not to sound melodramatic, but the circumstantial context surrounding my sitting down to write these words you’ve been reading here today bears some striking parallels to the circumstantial context surrounding my sitting down forty years earlier to begin writing “For Concha” (see: Sections 50 thru 60 above) and the rest of the poems which eventually comprised my first modest chapbook, entitled Apple Grunt (Hamburger Press, 1971). I’d gone to bed on the night of November 4, 2008, assured that – as Gerald Ford had put it in 1974, in his very first utterance as President – our long national nightmare is over. And this merciful assurance seems to have triggered, somewhere in my subconscious, an overwhelming impulse to begin writing down my own personal history of that forty-year-long national nightmare – traveling, not so much from its churning cloudy exterior inward as from that same dark cloud’s silver lining outward.

And what do I mean when I speak here of a “silver lining” within that ominous toxic thundercloud of Neo-Feudalist Re-Endarkenment which had its birth forty years earlier, on November 5, 1968, the day Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey for the Presidency? After all, not every cloud has a silver lining, while some clouds have more than one silver lining. In the case of the cloud to which I’m referring here – the cloud of our long national nightmare of Neo-Feudalist Re-Endarkenment (1969-2009) [aka The Age of Nixon, Reagan, Bush & Bush] . . . in the case of that cloud, my own sense of things is that it’s turned out to have been one those dark churning clouds that’s possessed of thousands of silver linings. But the only one of those thousands of silver linings with which I intend to concern myself here today is the silver lining The Mythoklastic Therapy Institute, which itself embodies the silvery portability of my portable bohemia.


105. His Finger in the Dyke

Of course, everything I’ve just said – i.e. the substance of these preceding 200 words or so – has, admittedly, been a bit of a false construct, a sort of comforting myth I’ve constructed inside my head, like a soothing fairytale I use to help me get to sleep at night. This is not to say that my assertions, my premises, my conclusions, etc. are not fact-based, because they are. They are quite simply verifiably true. For better or worse, however, that’s where the simplicity ends.

Perhaps the most glaringly obvious problem with my dubbing the forty-year stretch of American history from 1969 to 2009 “The Age of Nixon, Reagan, Bush & Bush” is that it overlooks Presidents Ford, Carter & Clinton. Setting Gerald Ford’s relatively benign Republican caretaker Presidency off to the side for the purpose of this discussion, I wish to say here simply that, for me, in retrospect, the Presidencies of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) would seem to resemble most closely, of all of the metaphors from out of the vastness of our shared culture, that Little Dutch Boy in the popular folktale, who bravely plugged up the hole in the Dyke with his finger, in order to hold back the sea, and thereby to save his native land. I wish that it had been otherwise, but it was what it was. Even so, now that we know what we know – those of us who where alive and wide awake and on the receiving end of that unthinkably vast sea of Neo-Feudalist Re-Endarkenment which threatened to inundate all that was best about our native land during the George W. years (2001-2009) – now that we have born horrified witness to the true nature of the menacing sea which swelled and pounded against democracy’s fragile sea wall, throughout these past forty years of our long national nightmare . . . now that we know what we know, that Little Dutch Boy named President Clinton and that even littler Dutch Boy named President Carter strike us as having been even more heroic figures than they did at the time, back then in those days when each, in turn, held back the sea.


106. A Fairly Sociopathic Electoral Majority

I’m now going to say a few words about the ugliest fly in the ointment of democracy. Walt Whitman, as we all know, is credited with the famous dictum that, to have great poets, a society must also have great audiences. This is an aesthetic equation with which I concur wholeheartedly. Moreover, Whitman’s insight about poets and audiences is possessed of a dynamic doppelganger in the political dimension of every society – certainly, of every democratic society. That is to say that, in order to have wise leaders, a democratic society must also have a wise electorate – or, at least, a wise majority.

To illustrate my point, I submit as Exhibit A the recently completed Presidency of George W. Bush, America’s 43rd Chief Executive (2001-2009). Clear-minded, responsible historical anthropologists such as myself generally agree that Bush 43 was easily one of our country’s three worst Presidents. (As for myself, I place him at #1, but only because Ronald Reagan used better grammar – and turned in a stellar performance in Bedtime for Bonzo.) For these past eight long years, I’ve had to listen to my fellow liberals complain about the Bush administration as though it were the root cause of America’s disease rather than a symptom of that disease. Listening to their naïve reasoning, one would have thought that we’d been living out those eight years in Nazi-occupied France, rather than in an updated real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). To turn Walt Whitman’s aesthetic equation inside out so that we might glimpse its dynamic doppelganger pumping away inside our 21st-century American democratic process, let’s try the taste on our tongues of the following political dictum: “In order for a modern democratic society to have such an overtly sociopathic administration as the George W. gang, that society must also have a fairly sociopathic electoral majority.”


107. Their Willingness to be Deceived

Woops! What did that man just say, Mommy? Unless I’m not hearing him right, it sounded like he just insinuated that a sizable portion the folks who contributed (either actively or passively) to Bush Junior’s stealing the Presidential elections of 2000 & 2004 were nearly as sociopathic as W. himself.

Of course: that is, indeed, what I’m suggesting.

On his 1992 album, Temporary Road, singer-songwriter John Gorka has a song about Brownshirts in the White House, which stirred considerable controversy with its subtle (and remarkably accurate) comparison of George H. W. Bush’s administration (1989-1993) to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi gangsters. And so – returning once again to Walt Whitman’s aesthetic equation’s political doppelganger: “For a modern American democratic society to have Brownshirts in the White House, it must also have quite a few Brownshirts in its voting booths.”

Here’s how Susan Jacoby touches upon this same unfashionable theme in her 2008 The Age of American Unreason:

Liberals have tended to define the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years and to see an outraged citizenry, ready to throw the bums out, as the solution. While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long-term problem in American public life. (p. 297)

“But wait!” you may be saying to yourself, “Susan Jacoby is only talking about an American public that’s angry and ignorant – not sociopathic or fascist.”

True enough. However, throughout her “American Unreason” book, as well as throughout much of her earlier writings – not to mention the published political assessments of a legion of other recent clear-minded, responsible writers on this topic (myself among them) . . . runs the bright turquoise thread of a tragic interaction between ignorance and sociopathy [pronounced with the emphasis on the ahp]. The truth is never simple; and this particular truth is particularly complicated. For that reason, I’m going to ask that we postpone any in-depth analysis of how it is that the ignorance of and sociopathy of a significant segment of the American electorate fuel one another while feeding upon one another, in a kind of demonic perpetual motion cyclotron.

In the mean time, I’d like to share with you another quote from Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, one which scrutinizes a slightly different aspect of the same human tendencies upon which I’ve been trying to focus here:

It is so much easier, so much safer politically, to simply say, “You were the victims of a lie,” than to suggest that both voters and their elected representatives, in both parties, must shoulder much of the blame for their willingness to be deceived. (p. 311)

Jacoby then goes on to invoke the spirit of the one person who, perhaps more than any other, has come to embody what might have been, had but one or two unfortunate factors in the vast equation of the 2000 presidential election process been . . . different:

It is easy to imagine the chorus of sneers from ignorant talking heads on cable news if a presidential candidate dared to use the word “ignorance” in public. Al Gore, who really did try to educate the public about global warming, was mocked unceasingly and called a bore and a pedant during his vice presidency and throughout his presidential campaign; only when he left the political stage, or was assumed to have left the political stage, did he find a voice that made Americans pay attention. (p. 311)


108. Light Rays Bend Around Our Shack

If the ugliest fly in the ointment of democracy has always been and will always be a democratic society’s reliance on the wisdom of a majority of that society’s voters, then it would seem that every democratic society’s vitality is always going to depend on its energetic nurturing of that wisdom. It’s been from out of this realization that I’ve written what I’ve written, in the years since Art Dunbar & I shared that attic apartment across the street from Wichita State University, back in 1970 & ’71.

I suggest that we now travel together in time & space back to that lopsided attic and to the fall semester of 1970. But, as we do, why don’t we share another of those mythoklastic song lyrics I’ve composed during the intervening years, those years of our long national nightmare of Neo-Feudalist Re-Endarkenment. And, for those of you whose cup of tea is neither partisan politics nor mythoklastic therapy, please accept my solemn assurance that this will be my last mention of either of those motifs for at least the next ten pages:


MODERN ROMANCE


My feeble fingers trace the crack
running through the hot green fuse
Of this flower which none can rend,
our love which fills this room whose crack
Runs deep and wide and cold and black,
All the way down to the bittersweet end
Of our melded bodies, ripe with booze.
Floating in this room, we send
Salvation forth to softly attack
any creature wearing shoes.
Light rays bend around our shack
and penetrate this love we lend.

My feeble eardrums trace the click
of your tongue as it polishes off each phrase.
Built upon a foundation of sand,
our language possesses the strength to seize
The power and glory of our hearts,
as we lie upon this auctioned land
We thought we owned and realize
that those who own each hand and gland
Of us, each ditch and prick,
have set us dancing to a sadder jazz
That’s left a crack through each lovelick
on lip and hip and mind and sand.


You listen to my engine knock
and ask me why I choose to lose.
I tune my brain to every trend
of Time and watch as each fool sues
The others to the tunes of Bach,
ill-tempered monsters, bent on fending
Off old age, and so they choose,
instead, to tread the darkness, Zenned
And drunk on bigoted blindness.
Talk about drug problems! Look who woos
Complacency! Let us unlock
another universe, Dear Friend.


My feeble fingers trace the wick
and light the flame and watch it freeze.
Beaten, robbed, raped, tortured, skinned,
I lie in sun in plastic chaise
And ponder in the sky a slick
of toxic waste. Our parents sinned
And set our teeth on edge to ease
their cowardice, and so we’re pinned
Beneath a bulldozer. And the hick
at the controls is a demon who plays
Crap with our bones and leaves a crick
from neck to toe, as we face the wind.


My feeble fingers trace the lack
of newness in what we call “the news.”
What I feel for you is blended
into my heart’s opposing views.
Floating in this room, we rack
Reality, so as to amend
10,000 years of unsung blues.
We dance a world-weary day and spend
our wad on crap to please the pack.
I lick your cut. You lick my bruise,
as hand-in-hand, we try to hack
Meaning where these light rays bend.


Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved






~ Book Three ~




Chapter XIII

An Autumn Evening in 1970


109. October 1, 1970

Now it is the autumn of 1970. Now the leaves are falling fast, here on the Wichita State University campus, where you walk along beside me, as I cut across campus in a kind of northeast to southwest diagonal path, wending my weary way back home to the attic, having worked the evening shift in the circulation department at WSU’s Ablah Library. The paved walk is well-lighted, and a few other students are strolling hither and thither, most of them headed to their cars to drive home after evening classes. The exhilarating spirit of autumn is in the air, so that, if we pause to take a deep breath, we can feel its magic fill our lungs – that incomparable sense of excitement which can come only from being on a college campus in the middle of an autumn semester.

Today has been a Thursday, the first day of October 1970. Tomorrow, everything will change, so that, by tomorrow evening – i.e. within less than twenty-four hours from now – the mood on the Wichita State campus will have gone from one of giddy optimism to one of stunned disbelief. That’s because, tomorrow afternoon, while Arthur & I and thousands of our fellow students are going about our usual Friday afternoon business of taking notes in class on this or that lecture or of breezing through this or that pop quiz over this or that chapter from the week before or of conversing amiably with one another as we hurry across campus from class to class to class . . . or of checking out library books to or checking in library books from our fellow students at the circulation desk in the formidable Ablah Library . . . tomorrow afternoon, while some of us are relaxing over a TGIF 3.2 beer together at a corner table at The Hourglass or The Y-Knot or on a barstool at Kirby’s or The Cedar or The Flicker or A Blackout or The Embers or Giovanni’s, while others of us are revving up the ’57 Ford to drive out to what was then the east edge of Wichita to that once-bountiful K-Mart which once stood across from the exit ramp off the Kansas Turnpike (where I’d so frequently ended my recent hitchhiking adventures – both the long ones and the short) . . . revving up Arthur’s ’57 Ford like Ma & Pa Kettle preparing to drive into town on their monthly foray to pick up provisions (instead of two working-class college students preparing to drive out to the edge of town on our monthly foray to pick up provisions – the most important of which, of course, will be an abundant supply of that cheap K-Mart Brand cassette tape on which we’ll eventually be recording more music & poetry from Wichita’s big new downtown library) . . . tomorrow afternoon, while Arthur & I are revving up his old gray & gray Ford to drive out to the edge of town for provisions – or perhaps to drive, instead, the five miles or so downtown to Wichita’s big new downtown library to pick up that other kind of provisions (since human’s do not live by bread and cassette tape alone) . . . then perhaps hurrying back to the attic, so as to meet my fiancée Kate Schulte, who’ll be connecting with us – you & me & Arthur – after supper, to mosey with us over to the CAC Theater to kick back at The Four-Bit Flick (formerly The Two-Bit Flick) in the enjoyment of one of the previous year’s (1969’s) major motion pictures whose distributors have milked it for all they were able, on the full-price and half-price theater circuits, and who’ve now tossed it out to America’s struggling college students (and faculty) until the actual celluloid it’s printed on has broken so many hundreds of times that it literally refuses to go through any campus theater’s projector . . . perhaps Alice’s Restaurant or Goodbye, Columbus or Easy Rider or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . . . tomorrow afternoon, while Arthur & Kate & I and thousands of our fellow students are going about our usual Friday afternoon business, on that 2nd day of October of 1970, everything will change, because, on that same afternoon, hundreds of miles away, in the mountains of Colorado, near Loveland Pass, a twin-engine Martin 404, carrying most of the Wichita State University football team (along with administrators, fans and crew) . . . is going to crash into the side of Mount Trelease, killing 31 of the 40 people on board.


110. Paris Review's Writers at Work

But that won’t happen until tomorrow. Right now, it’s Thursday night, October 1, 1970, and you, Gentle Reader, are still walking along beside me here, as I cut across the Wichita State campus, on my way home to the attic that Arthur & I share. As we amble along together, you & I, on what will turn out to be, in effect, the very last night of Wichita State’s ever having anything resembling a viable football program – ever – you begin to quiz me about “The Creative Process,” as I’ve been experiencing it personally in recent years – as well as about my observations and reflections on how it appears to operate in the lives of other writers I’ve known – or known of. I continue walking along here beside you, but take a few quiet seconds to gaze up at the nightening skyscape that’s enveloping us, as I make an effort to quickly throw together an aesthetic theory that won’t make me come across to you as the sort of neophyte I truly am, who’s never give the creative process – as it functions either in my own life or in the lives of other writers – sufficient thought to provide you with any but flimsiest of coherent answers. After all, it’s only 1970; I’ve just turned 21. At this early stage in my development as an aesthetician, having sorted through all the notions concerning the creative process to which I’ve been exposed thus far – having striven mightily to “separate the Crap from the Christmas” (as they say – the most honest answer I can give you is that the most useful insights regarding the creative process that I’ve had the good fortune to run across thus far have come from the ten or twenty Paris Review interviews with such literary giants of the 20th century as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, James Thurber, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell and Robert Frost that I’ve read and re-read since my senior year in high school.

As it will turn out (as if the concept of “turn out” were a truly viable one, in the spastic tidal wave of human events) . . . as it will turn out, twenty or thirty or forty years from this autumn night in 1970, I will still find myself recommending these wonderfully insightful Paris Review interviews to my own creative writing students, as well as to anyone at all who expresses a genuine interest in either the creative process or in some up close and personal portraits of several of the most inventive minds of the past hundred years. (As I’m sure you’re already aware, The Paris Review has anthologized these incomparably helpful interviews into a series of collections published under the title Writers at Work.)


111. Orpheus & His Muse

Here, in the autumn of 1970, the creative process, for me, consists primarily of carving for myself the right atmosphere and of budgeting the time. I do this in the faith that, if given sufficient silence and solitude, whatever it is within me that feels impelled to write will write. That’s the way it’s always worked – and the way I will try to let it work, right up until that dreadful day when it quits working.

Sixteen years from tonight – many lifetimes later, on an especially undistracted, mercifully noiseless autumn night in 1986 – I will find myself sitting down to write a song entitled “The Goddess Inside of Him.” In it, I will find myself lost in what may seem to some to be an almost cartoonishly comic book sequence of scenarios involving Orpheus & his muse, in which I play the role of Orpheus. In fact, the song’s original working title happens to have been “Orpheus & His Muse.” Over the years, I will perform this song publically, under the title “The Goddess Inside of Him,” on a number of occasions, only to learn that some folks will find its lyrics to be more than a little bit off-putting – and won’t hesitate to come right out and say so. Since the song’s two titles – both its original working title and its present title – say everything that needs to be said about what I meant for it to be about, I feel comfortable in simply not saying a whole lot more on that particular subject:


The Goddess Inside of Him

Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved


Darkness drips from the locks.
He’s a slave to her every whim.
Outside, the night drops its net
Over leaf and limb, over owl and fox,
Over mistress and pet,
Over what’s come and gone.
Inside, the lights grow dim,
As he tries to get it on
With the goddess inside of him.

Silence envelops the rocks.
He’s musical and slim.
Outside, it’s cold and wet.
Inside, the thousand shocks
That flesh is heir to skim the surface
Of each fret he fingers into the dawn.
Deeper inside, she talks
As a lioness to a fawn.
Her voice overflows his brim.

Outside, the cry of hawks
Awakens him to the grim.
Overhead, a jet reminds
His tongue of her hymn.
Inside, he hears the cocks
Of her scolding him for the debt
She says he owes for the fun
He’s had inside her gym.
Unclipping her barrette,
She jabs him deep in the brawn.

Cloudlight washes the blocks,
Both out- and in-side of them.
She grabs for all he can get.
Inside him, another sunset
Spreads the color of lox
Across his inner lawn.
Every squiggling photon
Bouncing inside of them
Moves his hand as he chalks
His name on her hem.

Inside his feet, she walks
Around the volcano’s rim.
Inside his blood, they swim
Together, in shoes and socks.
Inside his heart,
Her regret won’t let him let
His handprayers heal the pox,
Spread out like a lawn or a chessboard,
Where her pawn
Answers each time she knocks.

Darkness drips from the locks.
He’s a slave to her every whim.
Outside, the night drops its net
Over leaf and limb, over owl and fox,
Over mistress and pet,
Over what’s come and gone.
Inside, the lights grow dim,
As he tries to get it on
With the goddess inside of him.




That, then, will be a little something I’ll find myself saying about the creative process, sixteen years – and many lifetimes – from tonight. By no means, however, should this modest little song of mine ever be considered any sort of definitive statement on the subject. Indeed, I shall, in the long run – right up until my journey’s bittersweet end – be hard-pressed to find in all of literature any truly definitive statement on the subject of the creative process. And as far as attempting to make any such statement myself, this lyric is as close as I’ll ever come.


Chapter XIV

Ten Tiny Poems from Apple Grunt



112. Awash in Ravel's "Adagio Assai"

When I arrive back at the attic from our hike across campus, after working late at the library, on this invigorating Thursday evening of October 1, 1970, I climb the creaky stairs in the front entryway, past the pay phone mounted on the dingy hallway wall covered in the hundred scribbled phone numbers and phone messages of yesteryear, and on up to the second-floor landing, with its three doors to choose from: the one on the left being the padlocked door to the Wichita Free Press office, the one on the right being the half-open door to our outrageously common restroom, and the one in the middle – the one with its padlock removed and its hasp swung open – being the door to the steep, narrow enclosed staircase leading up to our attic apartment. So, here we are, glancing around this extraordinarily angular cave of making about which we’ve heard so much – the attic at the center of the universe.

Setting my book bag down on the time-worn hardwood floor next to the narrow boxsprings & mattress which serve as my bed, beneath the tent-shaped eggshell gabled interior which serves as my tiny sleep space, I take a seat at the sturdy little old white enamel-painted wooden kitchen table that’s been donated by my parents – the very same recycled table at which I sat, thousands of times throughout my childhood . . . take a seat and lean over to slip off my shoes and socks, before getting back up to pad over to the clunky old ‘fridge that belongs to the landlady, and removing a raw carrot upon which – after washing it – I commence to munch with gusto.

The door to Arthur’s sort-of room is closed. Of course, I was already aware that he was home, because the padlock securing the attic door off the landing downstairs was undone. The fact that the door to his sleep space is closed means that he’s either asleep or studying. In either event, it means that he doesn’t wish to be disturbed. But since no music is issuing from beyond Arthur’s door, I feel at liberty to play some of my own choosing, as an expedient for clearing my head of the day’s chaos. So I walk over to my inexpensive (but enviably eclectic) music center and pick out an LP, which I place on the turntable, before adjusting the volume downward to accommodate the hour of the night. Three seconds later, I’m gingerly positioning the tone arm’s fake-diamond needle over the exact groove gap which will allow me to set it down ever so gently at the beginning of the middle movement (the 2nd movement – Adagio assai) of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. In less than a heartbeat, our attic’s angular air begins to fill with what I personally consider to be the loveliest strains of nocturnal music ever composed by the human imagination.


113. Apple Grunt (1971)

One of the many perks of having a so-called “Work/Study” job in the Circulation Department of WSU’s bounteous Ablah Library is one’s having easy access to tens of thousands of books. Hearing myself say this to you, here in this context, however, brings me a twinge of embarrassment, since, in theory at least, every single one of the other 15,000 students enrolled at WSU has the same access to the library’s materials as Arthur & I do. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must confess that working in the Circulation Department has provided me with what I’ll choose to term here, for our purposes, “inside information” about where “the good stuff” is tucked away and how, most safely, to sneak it out past “security” (i.e. my colleagues and me) for a day or two. Most relevant to the poems I’m getting ready to share with you here is the fact that the library books to which my job gives me easier access than that afforded most other members of the student body tend to be those magnificent oversized (5-lb.) coffee table art books filled with sumptuously reproduced paintings, drawings, sketches, photographs, etc. from every period throughout the long history of the extant visual arts – breathtaking graphics to stir my volatile imagination into a frenzy of creative output. At least, they would if time allowed. But, alas, I’m carrying a full load of classes, and I’ve never been (nor will I ever be) either a fast reader or a fast sleeper.

Nevertheless, this magical elixir whose ingredients include the visual genius with which the pages of these art books are filled, blended together with the vinyl recordings of the musical genius borrowed from the big new downtown Wichita Public Library and brought back to this cave of making . . . blended together with this churning, swirling phantasmagoria of the everything else that adds up to college life during the Vietnam War . . . this magical elixir in which I swim . . . does manage somehow to stir my volatile imagination into a sufficient frenzy for me to steal a few precious minutes, now and then, to scribble the poems which will soon accumulate into my first modest chapbook entitled Apple Grunt, which Kate & I will publish ourselves, at the end of 1971 (Hamburger Press, 109 pages; saddle-stitched, offset, 200 copies signed & numbered; $1.00 retail).


114. Before Creeley was supplanted by Merwin

The ten short poems I’m getting ready to share with you here will all be included in Apple Grunt. Some of them I’ve already written; some of them I’ll be writing throughout the coming weeks and months. The first one of the ten, for instance, I’ll be writing later tonight, after I finish talking to you.


i.

Sitting as usual: crumpled tissue
spills from a wastebasket.

Reality dies here nightly.
Pines hum corny hymns

of death and rebirth
in a world of metabiotica.

A flow of circles smears
along the nightening skyscape.


Even though I haven’t written it yet, however, I guess I’ll go ahead and say a few words about it. As you can see, it has no title. Between 1969 and 1972, I’ll be composing a considerable number of short poems without titles. I suppose that that’s largely because I’m so very much enamored, during this period, with haiku and various other pithy poetic forms, mostly from Asian cultures. Quick brushstroke poems, if you will.

Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve been passing through my Robert Creeley phase during these undergraduate years. Many years from this night, when my beard has turned from gray to white and I sit down to write my memoirs, I’ll be remembering how it will have come about that Creeley will soon be supplanted as my favorite living poet by W.S. Merwin, as a direct result of Merwin’s publishing The Carrier of Ladders this year (1970) and of my subsequently running across a review of this marvelous collection in Time magazine. Over the coming decades, little by little by little, The Carrier of Ladders will eventually rearrange my molecules.

As of this October night in 1970, however, that transformation has only barely begun. I’m still an avid Robert Creeley fan – so much so that I wrote an essay on Creeley (1926-2005) this past summer – only a few weeks ago, in fact – as part of an independent studies project I did with Bruce Cutler. In researching my Creeley essay, I naturally read Creeley’s Paris Review interview, which includes one concept in particular which will remain vivid in my memory right up until the bittersweet end – or at least long enough for me to include an excerpt of it in the memoir I shall attempt to write sometime in the early 21st century, as I drift into my dotage. Perhaps that same excerpt might prove helpful here, where I seem to be employing my Creeley influence as a means for making clearer sense of these admittedly tiny poems I’m sharing with you here.

The interviewer’s question to which Creeley is responding is this: “What do you think was the first impulse that set you on the course to being a writer?”

Creeley: As a kid I used to be fascinated by people who, like they say, “traveled light.” My father died when I was very young, but there were things of his left in the house which my mother kept as evidences of his life: his bag, for example, his surgical instruments, even his prescription pads. These things were not only relics of his person, but what was interesting to me was that this instrumentation was peculiarly contained in this thing that he could carry in his hand . . . All of this comes back to me when I find myself talking to people about writing. The scene is always this: “What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really ‘travel light.’”

(renewed copyright 1999, Paris Review)


115. Wm. Carlos Williams, Minimalism, the Tyranny of Words, etc.

I suppose that it would be fair to say that it was as a direct result of my researching my essay of Robert Creeley for Bruce Cutler this past summer of 1970 that I first began to take seriously the poetry of one of the earlier generation of poets, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), whom Creeley often mentions as having influenced him, early on. I was fascinated to learn that many of Williams’ own diminutive poems assumed the size and shape they did because they’d been jotted down rather hurriedly on a notepad in the front seat of Williams’ car, back in the days when he’d been a country doctor making house calls in rural New Jersey, in the 1920’s . . . fascinated and encouraged I was, since my own life circumstances have so frequently proven to be of a similarly spastic flow. Here, for instance, is a little something I jotted down on the third floor of the Ablah Library just last week:


ii.

This corner of the library
is quiet this afternoon
except for some sunlight
on the northeast wall.


“Minimalist” is one of the literary terms most frequently applied to a poem like this. I’m not entirely comfortable with that label – any more than I am with any other label. Obviously, words are necessary if humans are going to live together. But I’ve recently begun to grow increasingly focused on what one of Arthur’s and my favorite professors refers to as “the tyranny of words.” That professor’s name is Dr. Geraldine Hammond. The course which I took from her last year was 20th Century Drama. I signed up for it specifically because Art had taken it from her a year or two earlier and had given it (and her) his highest recommendation. He even let me use his personal copy of the assigned hefty anthology of 20th century plays, when I followed his advice into her classroom. Gerry Hammond is one of those rare mentors of magnanimous heart and dazzling intellect who possess that unnamable gift which makes most of her students want to grow up to be just like her. Even though she’s already past her sixtieth birthday, she’ll eventually charge on into the 21st century drama and practically to the age of 100, before going to her existential reward.

While I’ve been discovering of late that Dr. Hammond’s “tyranny of words” is a concept with almost universal utility of application, I’m particularly struck with the devilish frequency with which it pops up with in the world of the arts. I’m still dwelling, of course, on “minimalism” and on how that term might prove helpful or harmful when applied to poetry such as that of Robert Creeley or William Carlos Williams – or to these ten short poems by Galen Green that I’m sharing with you at this very moment. The truth is I’m rather undecided about its usefulness. And I think that that’s all I’m going to say about that.


116. Found Poetry

One of the greatest thrills of my life, next year, will be having one of my poems accepted for publication in the prestigious New York Quarterly. This thrill will be dampened, however, by the fact that, out of all the poems I’ll be submitting to the editors of NYQ, the only one they’ll choose to publish will be what is generally known in 70’s avant-garde literary circles as a “found poem.” Here it is:



iii.

January 18, 1919

(Reidenbourg, Germany)

Dear Grandmother,
Just a card to let you
know I’m still alive. Am
guarding a big bridge at
present. 8 hrs. on and
16 off. Not bad.

Donald


In other words, this poem, which will appear in this same form in the New York Quarterly, is, verbatim, the few words handwritten on the back of a picture postcard I found. It must have been a couple of years ago that Margaret’s mother, Phoebe Evans McCall, then in her late 80’s, gave me a flimsy unlabeled brown cardboard box, approximately 24” x 24” x 18,” folded shut and packed full of old letters and postcards, mostly from and to long-dead relatives and non-relatives whose names were largely unknown to me. As I bewilderedly sifted through this dense potpourri (one of Phoebe’s favorite words – though she pronounced it “pot-poury”) of these dead folks’ life-shards, I gradually began to perceive (or imagine) a pattern emerging. Little was I to know, at the time, that this flimsy, unlabeled, brown cardboard box of life-shards from dead strangers would ultimately constitute the greater part of my material inheritance from my kindly, penurious, Victorian maternal grandmother – nor that one of the faded sepia-tone picture postcards buried at the bottom of that box would contain such a beautifully understated handwritten message on its reverse side that it would, one day, end up being reprinted in the New York Quarterly.

While I’d much prefer to be recognized by the editorial staff at the NYQ as a brilliant young minimalist poet – the next Creeley or W.C. Williams, if you will – it will seem to be my destiny, instead, to be recognized as a young archivist with a keen eye for brilliantly understated “found poetry.”


117. Whitman's Grain of Sand

Understatement does appear to be what this whole “found poetry” movement or fad or fashion – or whatever it is – here in the Vietnam War era, is largely about – understatement to the point of a subtle abstraction of life’s vast panorama down to what is commonly called “slice of life,” tiny enough so as to dazzle the reader with the sheer nano-power of its metaphysical density – like Walt Whitman’s grain of sand which could imply, if not literally contain, the entire universe . . . or like Prince Hamlet, bounded in a nutshell . . . or like that convex mirror in John Ashbery’s marvelous “Self-Portrait – “ poem, reflecting back exponentially more than the mere molecular stuff of itself. To illustrate my point, here’s another of my found poems which will appear in 1971 in Apple Grunt:


iv.

May 20, 1908

(Coffeyville, Kansas)

Mr. Smith,
If nothing hinders,
Mrs. Romig & I will take
the 9 o’clock car
Thursday morning, May 21,
and stop off at your
town & spend part of
the day with you. Yours,

O.T. Romig


I think you’ll agree that, as with the previous postcard, sent by young Donald to his grandmother from his military outpost in Reidenbourg, Germany, roughly two months after the end of the cataclysm of the First World War, this second postcard poem contains the nano-power to tell us a very extensive story – but only to whatever extent we contain the historical-cultural background to pick up on the innuendos loaded into (i.e. inherent within) the poem’s understated interlocking points of reference.


118. Still Life

Much of the experimentation I’ve been up to, here in this drafty cave of making, beginning shortly after Arthur & I moved in, at the end of the spring semester, has born a close resemblance to what, in the realm of the graphic arts, is frequently known as “still life.” Our next poem provides a passable example of this particular form:


v.

Into her full glass
he keeps pouring.

She helps him,
holding the bottle’s neck
in her twisted fingers.

Behind them
the maid holds out
a telephone receiver.

To one side
another bottle
waits to be poured.


The process of bringing forth a poem of this type is always a risky one, since ending up with a piece that’s either too static or too self-consciously mysterious can happen so very easily. In this case, I’d like to believe that I’ve struck a happy medium. However, even though this piece has been thus far reasonably well received, there’s always the chance that, with the passage of time, it could come to be seen as overly staticy – more of a frozen photograph than a living, breathing tableau. Here’s another “still life” poem, composed at around the same time as the one immediately preceding. I have a concern that it runs the same risk:


vi.

Between one round
female nude
and one finely dressed
male stands
this ambiguous child,
clothed in an old pillowcase,
flowers in its hair,
an apple twig between
its chubby fingers.

Upon the twig,
apple blossoms
compose the scene.


119. Wallace Stevens & Pablo Picasso

As for myself, I should think that it’s become glaringly obvious by now that my composing of these scenes is being performed with a considerable amount of assistance from two of the pre-eminent spirits in the arts, here in the late 20th century, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Stevens has provided my generation with a radically refreshing approach to going about the business of living, as well as the business of wordsmithing. Picasso, a name far more widely known among the general public, of course, than is that of Stevens, has likewise touched my generation with radical modes of sensing and imagining which go far beyond the visual arts – far beyond matters of the senses. Trite as these last two statements may appear, I say them this way because, within this drafty cave of making, within the creative process as I personally am experiencing it in these nights and days of 1970, the influence of Stevens & Picasso on me goes far beyond their immeasurable help in shaping these experimental poems I’m writing. I hope to find time to expand upon this theme later. For the moment, however, please allow me to share yet another of my recent untitled pieces with you:


vii.

A cosmos is dozing
behind the sunglasses
of a young naturalist
stretched in the sand
perpendicular to a lady
whose smooth belly
pillows his genius.

Nearby, an ocean crashes
unheard, as the naturalist
sails through an even
rowdier cosmos.


Again, I’ve simply tried to present the snapshot of an idea. By contrast, this next poem constitutes my attempt to compress an erotic monologue down into such a tight distillation that its conceptual cogs are apt to have become badly bent in the squeeze:


viii.

This mirror, Dear,
has got you trapped,
in a visual matrix
wrapped; and therefore
cease this futile filling
of color with shape.
Let’s tape your body
to the wall for all
to see the smooth
and soothing harmony
of light with myth.
June: moon: dear
sphere: lie down.


120. Form & Sense

I’m only 21. But I’m old enough to know that part of being a poet is to occasionally find oneself giving birth to some little monstrosity which only a mother could love. Such was evidently the case when, while seated quietly at a classroom desk, catching my breath from having just hiked across campus with a backpack full of books and papers for the Epistemology class about to commence, I opened my spiral notebook of class notes, doodles and random unrelated insights (“randomnalities”) and suddenly, spontaneously scribbled down the following ten words, exactly as they appear below, including the same line-breaks:


ix.

Form and sense
form immense
tons of sundown.

Bees buzz.


To me, these are intensely meaningful words – this is a profoundly helpful insight into the interaction between the human mind and its environment. Alas, however, I seem to be alone in this opinion. As with six others of these ten poems, this tiny sparkling gem is destined never to be accepted for publication in any periodical.


121. MoMA: “Guernica,” August 1969

Which leaves us with only the tenth of the ten. “Guernica” is one of those poems which any experienced literato in his or her right mind could have warned me, at the moment I conceived it, was bound to amount to biting off more that I could ever chew. But by the time that thought crossed my mind, it was too late; the deed was done:


x.

Guernica

Doors crash open.
Light spills into streets.
Wild shadows hasten.
And black air shatters
with the screams
of the philosophically
incorrect.


A few days before the legendary music festival and “love in,” forever to be known as “Woodstock,” began, I found myself standing 18 inches away from the 11 ½ -foot x 25 ½-foot navy blue, black and white oil on canvas original of Picasso’s “Guernica,” in an especially high-ceilinged gallery at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I can recall every minute detail of that moment vividly for a couple of noteworthy reasons. The first is that it was the first (and, I’m proud to say, the last) time in my long career as an art connoisseur that an art museum guard has had to remind me that I was standing too close to a painting and ask me to please step back another 18 inches or so. The second reason for my recalling so vividly every minute detail of that moment in August of 1969 is that I found myself thoroughly mesmerized by Picasso’s “Guernica” – or, at least, by the experience of being able to stand so inappropriately close to it and, so, to study closely the master’s brushstrokes, as well as the sketch marks of his pencil, where he’d changed his mind, here and there, during the actual application of the black and blue oil paints.

Suffice it to say, then, that that MoMA moment, there on West 53rd Street, seems to have triggered in me the desire to say a word or two about it, a year or so further down the line. If I were more skilled at talking about the arts, I could probably find some fancier rationalization for why it is that the only thing my little poem here and Picasso’s magnificent painting have in common is their title . . . than to say that they probably have about as much in common as do Picasso’s 1937 painting and the actual historically verifiable (molecular) atrocity committed by the warplanes of the German Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, against the defenseless and unsuspecting citizenry of the small Spanish Basque town of Guernica, for approximately two hours, on the afternoon of Monday, 27 April 1937 (twelve years before Galen Green’s own molecular journey had even begun). Suffice it, then, to say that Picasso’s “Guernica” is a visualization of what Picasso was inspired to “say” about that particular atrocity committed by the Nazi Luftwaffe, a mere fifteen days before he began his painting . . . and that Galen Green’s “Guernica” is a short verbalization of what I was inspired to “say” about that same 1937 atrocity – as viewed through the lens of Picasso’s visualization of it, there in that high-ceilinged gallery at MoMA, a few days before I hitchhiked on up north through New England, breezing right past Woodstock (without even slowing down to gawk) and on up the highway into Canada.


Chapter XV

Three Songs from Our Honeymoon Dungeon



122. The Right Thing versus the Fashionable Thing

Having established, therefore, that art is not journalism and that I am not Picasso, let’s time-travel together once again, Gentle Reader, back here to the present, where I can resume speaking to you in the past tense of these formative events of the Nixon years and of the attic at the center of our story.

I seem to be talking here about the creative process, don’t I, as well as about aesthetics in a broader sense. It’s within the framework of this discussion that I’d like very much to share with you the lyrics to three of the dozen or so songs I wrote between the time Kate Schulte & I were married in June of 1971 and our moving from Wichita to Boston, upon my receiving my B.A. in English & Creative Writing from Wichita State University, in June of 1972. Please bear in mind that, between my graduating from Wichita High School East in the spring of 1967 and my marriage to Kate, a full four years later, I produced no song lyrics whatsoever – nor did I attempt to produce any. As I’ve suggested here earlier, my emphasis as a fledgling writer during those four songless years (1967-1971) was, instead, on trying to teach myself to write the sort of innocuous, sexless, apolitical “free verse” so hegemonically much in vogue back then (and even more so nowadays) – poems like “Quicksilver in October” and “Killing Father.”

When I think back now on the internal process whereby I felt myself impelled, after Kate & I got married and moved into that cramped, dank and stuffy, semi-finished, cricket-infested basement, there in the 1500-block of North Belmont . . . felt myself impelled to yield, from time to time, to the guilty pleasure of songwriting . . . it feels now as though I’m recalling a sort of “cheerful rebellion” against what I’d begun to perceive then as the paradoxically fashionable pseudo-rebellion of an increasingly byzantine “free verse” orthodoxy – if that makes any sense.

Here, in the Roaring Zeros, at the opening of a new century and a new millennium, here in my dotage, I find myself weighing my moral, political, aesthetic and mundane choices more and more frequently in terms of the right thing versus the fashionable thing. (You may have noticed yourself doing something similar. If so, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) But why is this, anyway? I mean why do you suppose it is that that’s the way things work? Does it relate back to my reflections in Section 106 on the shortcomings of democracy? In other words, could it be that our aesthetic culture, just like our political culture, tends, at times, to resemble the solipsistic nightmare of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Or, in other other words: If pretty good audiences are absolutely necessary for the care and feeding of pretty good poets, then from whence cometh these pretty good audiences, if not from that same garden of courageous imagination as come the pretty good poets?


123. Someone Was Growing Old

But I digress. Forgive me. What I’d set out to do a moment ago was to contextualize the three song lyrics I’m about to share with you. The reason for wanting to include them here at this particular juncture is that the systems of imagery I’ve employed in their construction evolved organically out of the systems of imagery with which I’d been experimenting up in Arthur’s & my attic apartment throughout the preceding twelvemonth. Thus it was that the spirit of Wallace Stevens and the spirit of Pablo Picasso were every bit as surely the guiding spirits in the shaping of these three song lyrics as they’d been in the shaping of the poems (and the sketches) in Apple Grunt.

Now that I think about it, the creative spigot from whence poured forth those dozen or so song lyrics composed down in Kate’s & my honeymoon dungeon didn’t actually begin to open until after Kate & I had mutually resolved to self-publish Apple Grunt and had settled on which of my undergraduate poems (and sketches) should be included. The order and proximity of these two sets of events suggest to me now, in distant retrospect, that our tandem act of lighting the oven in preparation for baking up our apple grunt (which is, after all, a kind of deep-dish apple pie) . . . all the ingredients having been laid out before us on the floor . . . that this oven lighting moment provided me with an invitation to open the song spigot.

As nearly as I can recall, we lit that oven (so to speak) to bake our apple grunt, sometime during the late summer of 1971, so that the 200 signed and numbered, offset, saddle-stitched copies of my first chapbook went to press during our holiday break, the very last week of that year.

By that time, however, “The Beach Was Crowded With Smoldering Clarinets” had already been written (the words, not the music) and had been workshopped and otherwise passed around to a number of close friends. When I’d shown it to Sobin, Katz, Vogelsang & Mechem (see: Section 61, above) their reactions varied dramatically. Rather than alienate anybody here, these many years later, by repeating who said what, I’ll simply abstract their debate over the merits of my first song lyric in years by saying that those in the one camp found it to be too song-like, too lyrical, if you will, and therefore, to qualify as nothing more than heretical trash . . . while those in the opposing camp found it to be a charmingly surrealistic magic-lantern show – albeit probably unpublishable. Those who liked it seemed to be saying that, insofar as it was heretical, it was agreeably heretical. Which was, of course, precisely what I wanted to hear:


The Beach Was Crowded With Smoldering Clarinets

Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1971 & 1978, All Rights Reserved


The two of them threw snowballs back and forth,
Farther and farther into the morning blizzard.
For lunch, one of them ate a chicken gizzard.
The other ate the neck. They split the heart –
Everything playing its part.
Then, back out into the snow they made their trek.
All day, the wind continued from the north.

The beach was crowded with well-dressed secretaries,
Talking around and around about their work.
One of them kept looking at the clerk,
Wading in the foam with his pant legs rolled.
Each of them – growing old –
Might have helped the other feel at home,
Had they not lacked the proper vocabularies.

The two of them threw a party in the hall.
Around and around the drunken singers danced.
The crazy drummer skillfully romanced
The girl with the polka dot skirt up around her waist.
Each of them was embraced
By the music banging around from wall to wall,
Leaving only their touching eyes inert.

Someone held a smoldering cigarette,
Between their right index and middle fingers.
And, as an autumn tune which seldom linger,
The ribbon of smoke was lost among the leaves,
Among the turning leaves
Of an elm beneath which someone played their clarinet,
Around and around the late-November frost.

Someone threw a party in the wall,
Farther and farther into the morning blizzard.
For lunch, they ate part of a chicken gizzard,
Wading in the foam with their pant legs rolled.
Someone was growing old –
Though the others might have helped them feel at home,
With a music hanging around from hall to hall.


124. Parenthetical Reflections on My Songwriting

If you’re reading these words in the order in which I’m writing them, then you’ve most likely already drawn your own conclusions concerning the evolution of Galen Green’s song lyrics, over the course of the two-decade span in which they were produced (1971-1991). The author’s own opinion of that evolution would be difficult to distill into coherent sentences. As I’ve already suggested, my song lyrics from the basement year tend to rely on a system of imagery I’d begun to employ back during the attic year. In contrast to the songs I’d be writing in the 1980’s, they’re probably more heavily influenced by the visual arts. Otherwise, it seems to me that a song like “Butchers Carved In Stone” (1972) has more in common with “Modern Romance” (1986) than either has in common with any other songwriter’s work from the ‘70’s, the ‘80’s or any other period – before or since.

Incidentally, before we proceed any further, I feel as though I should take a moment to explain that the reason for all three of these lyrics composed during my second (and final) senior year at Wichita State having two copyright dates instead of one is that the first indicates the year I wrote the words and the second indicates the year I made up the melody to which those words are to be sung. I realize that this is an unusual way of going about composing a song – even for Galen Green – but the naked truth of the matter is that I simply didn’t have sufficient time at the time to devote to inventing both the words and the music. I was far too busy -- from May of 1971 to May of 1972 – sprinting for the finish line of my undergraduate career, while revving up my psychic engines by running metaphorical wind sprints, in preparation for whatever Destiny had in store for Kate & me in the months and years that lay ahead . . . too busy to noodle around enough on Steve McCaskey’s old $50 nylon-string guitar (see: Section 13) to coax anything like an original melody out of its well-worn wood. That would have to wait another six years, one divorce, ten thousand miles and a metaphorical lifetime later.


125. Meanwhile, Back at the Arthur Dunbar

Something else I should mention, while I’m in a parenthetical mode, is that Art Dunbar did not vanish from the scene, by any means, in the spring of ’71, once he’d received his bachelor’s degree in Math from WSU. Over the course of my marriage to Kate (1971-77), Arthur visited us often, and in many ways served inadvertently as one of the
more stabilizing forces in Kate’s & my life together. As a matter of fact, I’m going to guess that, over the course of those years – when Kate & I were living, first, in our honeymoon dungeon on Belmont, then (briefly) in that highbrow student commune at 8 Cogswell Road in Cambridge, then in that tiny third-floor walk-up at 53 Clarendon in midtown Boston, then in that garden-level apartment near the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City, then at 1214 East Whittier on the south side of Columbus, Ohio, then at our final shared address at 2404 Glenmawr, near the Ohio State University campus . . . I’m going to guess that Arthur’s sleeping bag was unrolled on our living room carpet during that period, at least a month or two out of any give calendar year. I may, however, be remembering this wrong; so I’ll need to check it – along with rest of my facts – the next time I talk with Art.

As another matter of another fact – and as though it had been scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter contriving an easy symmetry into the narrative arc of our story – it was only a matter of months after The Saga of Kate & Galen ended that the spectacularly more durable (and harmonious) Saga of Art & Nancy began. As of this writing, they’re about to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing them all the very best.


126. We Who Practice the Healing Art of Poetry

The main reason I can be so certain that it was the autumn of 1971 when I composed the lyrics to “The Beach Was Crowded With Smoldering Clarinets” is that I distinctly remember running off perhaps as many as thirty photocopies of it and sending it out with Kate’s & my Christmas cards to my relatives that year. And the reason I can remember that so vividly is because of one particularly generous response I received by return post from a rather unexpected source – one Helen Stone, the wife of Clarence Stone, one of my father’s nephews. (Clarence & Helen were my parents’ age and lived in Lawrence, Kansas, but wintered in Zephyr Hills, Florida.) Although this turned out to be only the first of several gestures of encouragement Helen extended to me early on, the fact that it was such a rare – though delightful – surprise for me to receive any positive feedback whatsoever from any member of either Harry’s or Margaret’s family . . . should speak volumes to you regarding that particular non-target audience.

Which kind of leads me into something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.

As I sit here rereading the lyrics to “Butchers Carved In Stone,” which I’m guessing I wrote sometime early in 1972, after Apple Grunt had hit the local bookstores (on consignment, in most cases) and after the winter semester (often referred to as the “spring semester”) had gotten under way . . . as I sit here perusing these words I composed so very many lifetimes ago, it occurs to me that it’s not really fair to either one of us – neither to you nor to me – to go on sharing these songs of mine, so interwoven as they are with their admittedly disarming strands of leftist politics, post-modernist sexuality and secularist religion, without pausing here for several paragraphs of serious backtracking. But, before I subject you to that ordeal, let’s take a moment to share this next song:


Butchers Carved In Stone

Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1972 & 1978, All Rights Reserved


What do horsemen have to offer
To times that can trample on their own?
Horsemen carved in stone
Can offer as much in human blood
As those who thundered through the mud,
Leaving us behind to survive and suffer.

What do butchers have to take
From times that can sacrifice themselves?
The butcher only delves
Deep enough to rend the heart –
While we who practice the healing art
Of poetry
Must bludgeon it awake.


127. A Flood of Unintentional Remembering

When I set out, in the same week that Barak Obama was elected President, to explain how it was that I came to be the way I am, by telling you this story of “My Portable Bohemia,” I could never have guessed that this process of intentional remembering would result in such a flood of unintentional remembering. But it has. Analogously, I could never have guessed that the process of intentional reflecting upon what writers, artists and composers most influenced my early efforts would result in such a flood of unintentional realizations that my early efforts were influenced and inspired by a vast cosmos of experiences and observations encompassing far more than all the works of all the world’s writers, artists and composers . . . encompassing, in fact, everything. But it has. They were.

In the process of sharing what I’ve shared with you so far, here, today, of these semi-representative samples of what I’ve written over the years, I’ve come to the realization that an astonishingly huge chunk of this flood of unintentional remembering has ended up leading me toward realizing that much of what I think of as my secular vision actually had its origins in a very sectarian place of mythomania. I’m referring here, of course, to my humble studio apartment within The Grand Paradox that secular humanism is frequently born in – of all places – a church.


128. It’s All Just Energy, Time, Space & Matter

That’s right. I’m going to talk about religion now. So, if you’d rather not hear what I have to say about how my early religious experiences helped to shape my present-day secularist politics & aesthetics – or if the subject simply fails to fascinate you sufficiently to justify your spending a few minutes listening to me backtrack to reflect upon some of the unintentional remembering that’s been going on inside me in these recent months when I’ve been getting ready to say this to you here today . . . then it would probably be best if you skipped over the following few pages. If, however, you, like me, have discovered yourself to be an ardent secular humanist with awkwardly dangling religious roots, then it’s my guess that you’ll be able to readily relate to what I’m about to say.

Before we begin our flashback into Galen’s Churchy Boyhood, though, let’s take a mere moment to peruse the third of these three song lyrics I’ve chosen from among those aforementioned dozen or so I set down during my final year at Wichita State to share with you here today:


IT’S ALL JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER

Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1972 & 1978, All Rights Reserved


The tender goddess of milk
Huddles among her children in the square.
The morning air is hung with a mist like silk.
(It’s all just one damned thing after another.)
The terrible goddess of thirst
Gnaws the throats of the children huddled there;
But her breast is bare; and, one by one, the children all are nursed.
(It’s all just energy, time space, and matter.)

Chorus:
Today is such a beautiful day.
I wish that I could fly.
Someday I’ll die.
Today is such a beautiful day.
I wish that I could fly.
Someday I’ll die.

The crazy goddess of words lies down upon the paper to be read,
While around her head flutters a flock of mockingbirds.
(It’s all just one damned thing after another.)
The invisible goddess of melody hovers over the printed page.
In her crystal cage she carries an entire symphony.
(It’s all just energy, time, space, and matter.)

(repeat chorus)

The playful goddess of touching
Washes her tiniest child in a tub of water.
From their teeter-totter, two of her older children sit, watching.
(It’s all just one damned thing after another.)
The goddess of together
Embraces her children huddled in the square.
Each one will share with the others according to the weather.
(It’s all just energy, time, space, and matter.)

(repeat chorus)






~ Book Four ~




Chapter XVI

Young Galen’s First Churching


129. First Methodist Church

When Galen Green was growing up in Wichita, Kansas in the 1950’s & 60’s, his family went to church nearly every Sunday. Looking back on those years of his childhood from far away at the other end of his life, Galen would recount that the only Sundays his parents did not attend both Sunday school and church were when either he or his younger brother, Kevin, or one of their parents, Harry or Margaret, was seriously ill or when the family was traveling or was entertaining visitors from out of town. And even then, if any way whatsoever could be found for at least some of the family to attend some sort of acceptable church service, his parents were certain to move heaven and earth (so to speak) to make that happen.

Suffice it say, then, that young Galen was thoroughly churched. The
setting for the bulk of all this churching was Wichita’s First Methodist
Church. It was – and still is (and most likely, ever will be) – near the
bustling heart of downtown Wichita, at 330 North Broadway. Back
then, First Methodist was the largest church in Kansas, with a
congregation exceeding 3,000 adults and children. As of this
writing, although it’s still going strong, “First Church” (as Harry &
Margaret and most of the other grownups called it) is only fair to
middling, in comparison to the mighty suburban “mega-churches”
of 21st-century America.

From the time he was potty trained and was old enough to toddle & talk, little Galen found himself in First Church’s clean, comfy Sunday school nursery, playing on the floor with a dozen or so other boys & girls or the postwar Baby Boom. Year by year, Sunday school came to resemble elementary school, more and more – except that it lasted only a couple of hours every Sunday morning, while his parents were attending adult church service and Sunday school classes. There was always a bit of Bible study and a bit of singing and a bit of artsy-craftsy playtime.

Any question of liking or disliking this or that aspect of these weekly Sunday school experiences never entered little Galen’s mind, since it was simply what one did. It was his family’s culture, and he had no choice but to join in their dance. It was, after all, the only dance in town – the only dance in the known universe. On those rare occasions when young Galen – as he and his Sunday school classmates approached puberty – might perchance ask his father (more or less out of an honestly, earnestly academic curiosity) why it was that they had to go to church every Sunday, his father’s reply would invariably focus on the notion that that was what all good Christians did.

This is not to say that Galen’s parents would not have been in full agreement with Garrison Keillor’s maxim (pronounced many years later) that sitting in church doesn’t make a person a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes them a car. It is, however, to say that Galen’s parents held rigidly to the now discredited notion that churchliness is next to Godliness. For them – just as it had been for their devout Protestant pioneer ancestors – a zealous churchliness was necessary – if by no means sufficient – for qualifying as an authentic Christian.


130. Shallowality & Babbittristic Boosterism

It must have been sometime around 1960 or 1961 that young Galen’s patience with the insipidity of Sunday school and the shallowality of most of his classmates began to wear thin. He’d have been in the 6th grade at that time – perhaps 11 or 12 years old. Paradoxically, it was at around this same time that his interest in the Methodist religion – particularly in its hymnody, its history and its social mission – began to intensify. He’d even been known to have commented offhandedly to his parents, from time to time, that he’d been giving serious consideration to a career in the Methodist ministry. (Note: The United Methodist Church, as it has been known since its merger with the Evangelical United Brethren, did not come into existence until 1968 – long after Galen had seen the light . . . and followed it out into the more breathable, bracing, truth-haunted air of Secular Humanism.)

As it happened, the massive edifice which housed Wichita’s First Methodist Church in those days contained an impressively substantial lending library, the scope of whose collection extended far beyond books about matters religious. So it came to pass that, at precisely that moment in young Galen’s development when Sunday school was beginning to lose its luster, the ideas, personalities and chronicles nestled within that cozy church library’s multifarious volumes seemed to begin calling to him to come in, sit a spell and invite them to cast their spell. And what better time to let that happen than those 45 minutes when he’d otherwise be imprisoned within that nest of ninnies which his Sunday school experience had become, of late.

I shan’t trouble you with a catalogue of all the various factors that converged during those magical years of the Kennedy Administration, which the media would later come to call “Camelot,” and which Galen would later come to call “The Nightmare of Puberty” – factors which would make our protagonist’s rendezvous with all those existential questions which first added up to his religious quest, before dividing and multiplying into his even deeper quest for that reality-based system of social science which might one day make sense out of at least a few of those converging factors in that vast catalogue of converging factors. We’ve thus far touched upon only a few of those few – such as an early overdose of Sunday school in the mid-20th-century style of urban Methodistism, as well as those parental attitudes which injected him with and immersed him in that early overdose.

But there was so much more to it than that. For instance, besides all of the commonplace ubiquities which filled the airwaves and, thus, the hearts and brains of nearly every member of the Baby Boom generation, from that moment in 1960 when JFK won the Democratic Party’s nomination to run against Vice President Nixon for the American Presidency, up to that moment in the summer of 1966 when Fate provided Galen, then 17, with the perfect escape hatch from the mind-numbing prison which church life had finally become – an escape hatch in the form of a Sunday morning work schedule at Mr. D’s IGA store . . . from that JFK moment in 1960 to that moment of escape in 1966 . . . young Galen was presented with the sort of spiritual journey which only a fortune minority of the adolescents of his – or any – generation are ever invited to experience.

Well, “invited to experience” might be candy-coating it just a bit much. Still, when he found himself reflecting on all that had happened to him during those trying years of early adolescence, Galen, in the autumn of his days, could not but forgive those distant days of zits & boogers and begin to feel something akin to lucky to have interfaced with all that craziness – that self-deluding Babbittristic Boosterism – there in that relatively cushioned environment – way back then in the springtime of his days – rather than to have stumbled blindly into adulthood totally unprepared, unsuspecting, unenlightened, undisillusioned, and, therefore, unprotected from the killer mythocracy which has undone so many less lucky “Baby Boomers.” (God, I hate that term!)


131. Wichita Christian Academy

If this process – this spiritual journey – whereof I speak must be said to have had a beginning (if only so as to commence the crude sketching of its narrative arc), then I suppose it could be said that that beginning was on the Tuesday after Labor Day in September of 1960 – that day of the years which used to mark, almost universally, across the United States, the first day of both public and parochial school classes in grades K thru 12 – when Galen and his younger brother Kevin took the very first ride of the young lives on a long yellow school bus, to begin their very first day of classes at a place called the Wichita Christian Academy. As its name implies, the WCA was a forerunner of the thousands of such church-affiliated private schools which would, later on, throughout the 1970’s and ‘80’s, be springing up all across the American landscape, in direct response to an array of racial, religious and political conflicts which were rending the fabric of any working-class solidarity that may have lingered, after the American working class had cooperated with such admirable oneness to defeat fascist aggression in the Second World War.

[This might be as good a place as any to insert the brief side-note that Kevin’s & Galen’s adoptive father, Harry Green (The Toolmaker), had evidently worked with President Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham (whom young Barak called “Toot”) at Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, to build the big bombers which played such a vital role in winning that war. “Toot,” as you’ll undoubtedly recall, came to public attention at the very end of her life in 2008, when she managed to live just long enough to cast her ballot for her grandson to be President, but not quite long enough to see him elected.]

The Wichita Christian Academy was housed in a Southern Baptist church. More specifically, its classrooms (Mon-Fri) were the Sunday school classrooms of a medium-sized 1950’s-style Southern Baptist church compound located on Pawnee, at the exact intersection of what was then a major east-west thoroughfare on the south side of town and a huge drainage ditch, commonly referred to as “the canal,” which ran diagonally the full length of the Wichita city limits from north to south. The school was surrounded by what was, in 1960, a fairly prosperous working-class (all-white) suburb, and the overall atmosphere inside the school building and on the spacious playground area surrounding it mirrored the neighborhood’s monocultural flavor. Lunch was served in three shifts (public school style) in the large social hall beneath the church sanctuary, and daily chapel was held in like manner upstairs in the sanctuary itself, which doubled as an auditorium for all-school events such as the Christmas program or the televised inauguration of President Kennedy in January of 1961 . . . or for . . . the evangelists. And, Lord, could America’s fundamentalist colleges crank out those evangelists! But we’ll come back to them in a minute.


132. Our Lad Encounters Fundamentalism

As nearly as Galen could tell, the Wichita Christian Academy existed for a wide variety of purposes, few of which had Christian indoctrination of its student body at their core. It appeared, instead, to serve primarily as a thinly veiled lunatic asylum for children whose emotional disorders prevented them from functioning, either socially or academically, in what mainstream Wichita culture would, in 1960, have regarded as acceptable modes. Besides displaying distressingly immature behavior, the majority of the student body came across as frighteningly dim bulbs. The more mentally agile among them tended toward sociopathy. It was inevitably this segment toward which young Galen’s attention gravitated, during the nine weird months he moved among them. These future burglars and evangelists were, if nothing else, less boring than their duller classmates.

Both the administration and faculty of the school seemed to consist almost entirely of graduates of Bob Jones University, which is (according to a recent Wikipedia entry) a private, non-denominational Protestant fundamentalist university in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s the largest private liberal arts university in South Carolina and has a reputation for being one of the most conservative of religious schools in the United States. The most important word in those previous sentences is, of course, “fundamentalist,” a concept which was entirely new to 11-year-old Galen. He’d heard the word before and had a vague notion of what it meant; but he’d never knowingly come in contact with one. For that matter, he’d never even met, prior to September 6, 1960, anyone who made a point of being a Southern Baptist.


133. Another Parenthetical Observation

I think that it’s time now for another parenthetical observation – if you’ll patiently indulge me for a moment. Like every city in the world, Wichita, Kansas was settled in stages, by a series of immigrant waves. Once America’s Great Plains had been subdued – fences built, buffalo and Native Americans thinned out and corralled, etc. and the first highways starting to be paved for the onslaught of our ancestors’ gas buggies –then it was time to take a close look at a map of the United States to gain the clearest grasp of which cultures and ethnicities were most likely to converge, commingle and collide on the streets of a place like Wichita – and in its busy classrooms. By the time World War II began to loom on the horizon, several dominant patterns of settlement began to texturize Wichita’s demographics.

At the risk of painting that demographic texturization with too broad a brush, let’s simply say that there was a very real sense in which those ethnic, geographic and cultural groups which had settled throughout the Wichita area, especially during and after the Second World War, remained as stubbornly heterogeneous in 1960 as the familiar red-state, blue-state delineations with which Americans have been living since the Constitutionally dubious Presidential elections of 2000 & 2004. To put it more crudely, the people with whom Galen came in contact at that fundamentalist-run day-school in south Wichita in 1960 & ’61 turned out to be very different in their values, interests, educational backgrounds, sophistication levels, and in their overall understanding of the world and of their place in the world from the people with whom he’d come in contact theretofore. In a nutshell, they generally tended to be more . . . Southern.



Chapter XVII

Saved and Re-Saved


134. Dr. Ronald Meredith

As we’ve already established, the day before Galen & Kevin first boarded that long yellow school bus at the curb, out in front of their humble home on the north side of Wichita, to begin their weird school year at that fundamentalist day-school, way off yonder on the south side of Wichita, would have been Labor Day. And, as it happened – almost as though it were meant to have happened – Senator John F. Kennedy, out on the campaign trail which would lead him in November to the White House, gave a speech in Detroit on that Labor Day of 1960 – that first Monday in September – the day before that process we’re calling “Young Galen’s Spiritual Journey” officially began . . . gave a speech in Detroit which came as close as anything else I could quote you here to embodying the other half of Galen’s journey through early adolescence – that journey which proved so essential to preparing him for the portable bohemia that was to come:


. . . I take my case to you because I am confident that the American people do not want to continue in this country poverty and discrimination and disease and slums. They want to move ahead again, and we are going to do it beginning January 1961. I take my case to the American people because I am confident that the American people will want to bring an end to racial discrimination everywhere, in the schools, in the homes, in the churches, in the lunch counters. I want every American free to stand up for his rights, even if some times he has to sit down for them. And finally I am here because we share a common, deep-seated belief in the workings of free collective bargaining and in growth of free, responsible unions, and, unlike our opponents, we don’t just believe that on Labor Day. . .


While it was certainly the case that Kevin’s & Galen’s adoptive parents, Margaret & Harry Green, had, out of desperation, made the difficult decision to send their boys to the fundamentalist Wichita Christian Academy, with its culture, doctrines and practices so different from their own, and while it was also the case that Margaret & Harry would be voting for JFK’s Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, in the fall Presidential election . . . it was equally – if paradoxically – the case that Margaret & Harry had – for the long haul and for a dozen or so pretty good reasons – chosen to bring their boys up in the relatively bourgeois bosom (and pronouncedly more abolitionistically Northern bosom) of dear old First Methodist Church. When I was making the point, just a moment ago, that that passage I shared with you from JFK’s 1960 Labor Day Address in Detroit came as close as anything else I could quote you here to “embodying the other half” of Galen’s journey through early adolescence, I was thinking specifically of a fairly forward-looking minority within “First Church’s” clergy and laity, with my sharpest focus on Dr. Ronald Meredith (1913-1987), who served as Senior Minister there from 1953 until 1966.

At the risk of drawing a false dichotomy, it’s probably safe to say that, in an important sense, Dr. Meredith’s sermons captured the spirit of the times, in the late 1950’s & early ‘60’s, providing a salubriously symmetrical counterpoise to the reactionary spirit manifested in the majority of Galen’s experiences at the Wichita Christian Academy. Invoking the name of what seemed like every significant public intellectual – from Einstein to Schweitzer, from Tillich to Gandhi, from Robert Frost to Martin Luther King – Dr. Meredith made it abundantly clear, if only through thematic suggestion, week after week, that he – and, therefore, his attentive congregation – was/were being “called” to become not only better Christians (more empathetic, humbler, more prayerful, etc.) but also wiser and more sophisticated citizens on the global stage. It must be born in mind, too, that when those members of Dr. M’s congregation who were Galen’s parents’ age or older were themselves children, America was still a primarily agrarian society and not yet a global superpower with all the responsibilities which that role entailed. They needed to be brought up to speed (and up to date), and Dr. M seemed to understand well the urgency of that need.


135. Everything Looks Like a Nail

By contrast, no such urgency appeared to be on anyone’s agenda at the Wichita Christian Academy. Instead, that old-time religion, that old rugged cross and those buckets and buckets of blood headed the metaphorical menu: there is a fountain filled with blood . . . there is wonder-working power in the blood . . . are you washed in the blood of the lamb . . . etc. Galen found it baffling – and then more baffling and then ludicrous and, finally, just plain boring – all within the timeframe of his weird year there among them, which was his sixth-grade year. Later, however, it would all prove to be wonder-working grist for the mill – background research for his extensive field notes as a Mythoklastic Therapist, if you will.

Not unrelated to this was the fact that, for the remainder of his born days, whenever some unsuspecting fundamentalist would start in to evangelize Galen with that innocent-sounding question (which was, in fact, the tip of a poisonous arrow): “Are you saved?” Galen’s face would invariably light up as he answered “Yes. I am saved.” In point of fact, Galen had been “saved” no fewer than half a dozen times, there in the sixth grade. Every couple of weeks, the student body would be treated to a performance by some itinerant evangelist – a sort of miniature revival. Often, these characters were only seminary students who needed a captive audience upon whom to rehearse their preaching skills. Every now and then, however, a seasoned Southern Baptist evangelist would be passing through town with his or her brand of revival and would turn up as the star attraction at Galen’s class’s half-hour daily chapel session to hand out free samples of their wares (so to speak). These abbreviated revivals would most often consist of that well-worn formula made famous by such movies as Elmer Gantry, opening with a rousing hymn, followed by a brief prayer and a child-sized homily, and ending with an altar call to all of the pubescent sinners in the audience who had not as yet accepted Jesus as their personal savior to come forward and be saved.

According to the sum total of Galen’s theological understanding, at ages eleven and twelve, one’s accepting of Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior (a favorite marketing phrase among fundamentalists, back in those days) – and/or one’s being born again – and/or one’s being saved (And the list of synonyms goes on and on.) . . . these were/this was a phenomenon which needed to occur in one’s life only once – indeed, which could occur only once – like the smallpox inoculation which generations of children received only once (Galen’s & Kevin’s were on their outer upper left arm.) – with the possible need of a “booster shot” on down the line. By no means, within Galen’s pubescent system of theology, was it either necessary or appropriate for a person – of any age – to be born again more than once per lifetime – twice at the most. It was, therefore, disconcerting to Galen when – even after he’d explained his understanding of the thing – the pretty little Southern Baptist girl seated next to him on the church pew at the sixth grade’s next altar call let him know with her most eloquent facial expressions that – unless he wanted to risk her eternal disapprobation – he’d best get to his feet when the time came and follow her up to the altar to be re-saved.

After that second dose of salvation, Galen began to catch on to the subtext that was operating there within that particular branch of evangelical American Protestantism, so that his third, fourth, fifth & sixth episodes of accepting Jesus as his personal savior came as easy as returning to the cafeteria line for a second (etc) helping of tuna casserole. And so it was that, even though nearly a quarter century would pass before Galen first heard that phrase which would eventually become one of his favorite maxims:

“When you’re selling hammers,
everything looks like a nail.”

. . . even as a pre-teen observer of human frailty, Galen began to figure out that the world was crawling with one-trick ponies whose one trick was to bring the same sinners to imaginary redemption, week after week, year after year, for no particular motive beyond the glaringly obvious motive of filling their collection plates with other people’s money. Was America’s job shortage so grave that these desperate folk couldn’t find an honest means of earning a living? Evidently so!


136. The Up-Side of that Weird Year

Despite Galen’s early and irrevocable disenchantment with the Southern Baptist version of Christianity, his school year at the Wichita Christian Academy did yield him three benefits worth mentioning. The first was a life-long love affair with the King James Version of the Protestant Bible, which was a byproduct of his sixth-grade teacher – that lovely, lanky turquoise-eyed, virginal brunette, Miss Donovan – regularly assigning their class Bible verses to memorize. We’ve already mentioned I Corinthians 13 – Galen’s favorite. More typical of the school’s dominant themes, however, would have been Paul’s Neo-Platonist proverbs such as the ever-popular John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (KJV)

(As is the case with nearly all “people of faith,” Christians seem to find it important to place their denial of Life’s most basic fact – i.e. Death – at the very heart of their religion.)

The second of the three benefits which his school year at the Wichita Christian Academy yielded to Galen was his acceptance of Jesus as his personal savior. To anyone who’s known Galen Green in his adult life, this proposition will sound preposterous – until they come to fully grasp its metaphorical significance. Unlike the giant invisible rabbit who was Jimmy Stewart’s middle-aged character’s imaginary friend in the movie Harvey or the imaginary human and animal friends which come as standard accessories in a normal, healthy childhood, Galen’s imaginary friend Jesus was real – because he was not. This is to say that, because Galen, who was – by even his most vicious detractors’ estimates – “far too smart for his own good,” by the age of eleven, was somehow able to both believe and not believe in the presence inside his own head of “the Living Savior” simultaneously. As any creative writing teacher can tell you, this ability is an absolute prerequisite for cultivating a sufficiently flexible artistic imagination to accomplish the manipulation of metaphor. The Jesus Metaphor – as it has been for countless other poets, philosophers, scientists, composers, etc. before him – thus became, for Galen, a kind of paradigm presence at the center of his mind, around which he could (or rather his mind could) begin to fashion an entire universe of imagination.

These first two benefits accruing to Galen as a direct result of his weird year among the Southern Baptists may or may not have eventually arrived from some other direction, even if that year’s fundamentalist weirdness had never been. The third of the three benefits most worth mentioning here, however, could, by definition, never have come his way had his youth’s journey not taken him down that particular rabbit hole and through that particular looking-glass. This third benefit of which I speak is, of course, a first-hand look at the world of American Protestant Fundamentalism.

This first-hand look, this nine-month excursion, would, in all probability, have remained outside young Galen’s experiential field, had his parents decided to have him (and Kevin) continue attending Fairmount Elementary School, 2 ½ blocks from their little gray hovel on North Lorraine, instead of having them bussed across town for that fateful 1960-61 school year. As it turned out, however, that year’s bizarre sojourn among those members of a culture so dramatically different from the culture to which he’d grown accustomed during his years at Fairmount Elementary (kindergarten thru fifth grade) provided Galen with a more richly textured background in fundamentalism than he could ever have learned from an entire library full of books, articles and documentary films on that subject. In that sense, Galen’s 1960-61 school year could be said to have provided him with his first valuable sojourn into the world of comparative anthropology. If nothing else, it lent him a well-informed basis for understanding more fully than could most of his fellow liberals the seeming mass-insanity which drove the neo-feudalist (read: crypto-fascist) attitudinal Anschluss which constituted the Age of Reagan (aka the 1980’s).


Chapter XVIII

Mixed-Message Methodistism


137. That Mile-High, Mile-Thick Wall

These three significant benefits of his sixth-grade experience among the Southern Baptists at the Wichita Christian Academy notwithstanding, it was as a Methodist that Galen was raised – albeit as a Mixed-Message Methodist. While the term “Mixed-Message Methodist” might be said to apply on many levels, the one I have in mind in bringing it up here pertains to the tension between that flavor of Methodistism to which Galen was overexposed downtown at 330 North Broadway, between 1949 & 1966, and that flavor of Methodistism to which he was overexposed in his parents’ home, during that same seventeen-year period. Let’s take a look.

Before we get started, it’s important to bear in mind the fact that Harry & Margaret first moved to Wichita in late June of 1941, on the evening of the day that they were married in her parents’ parlor in the small farming town of Richmond, Kansas, in southern Franklin County, just south of the crossroads (and I’m not making this up) of the Quantrill Trail & John Brown Road. As you might well image, the brand of Methodistism practiced among Margaret’s & Harry’s kinfolk was a far more old-time, small-town variety than that practiced at “First Church” in the (relatively) big city of Wichita. As a result, Galen’s newly-wed, newly-urbanized adoptive parents found themselves in a similar situation to that of those billions of human beings before them – and since – who’ve found themselves with one foot in one world and the other foot in another, either because of literal physical migration (as was the case with Harry & Margaret in 1941) or because of some philosophical, psychological, intellectual or intuitional flux taking place inside of them . . . whereby they must somehow reconcile their left foot with their right. In the case of Galen’s parents, who found themselves spending the war years (1941-1945) honeymooning in an apartment down the street from what just happened to be Wichita’s most urban and urbane Methodist church (but which just happened also to be the most warmly welcoming to the newly-arrived young couple from the hinterland) . . . Harry in his way and Margaret in hers, each found themselves striving for some reasonably comfortable (for them) compromise between the Methodistism of their left foot and the Methodistism of their right. By the time Galen met them, eight years later, the Methodistism within their happy home had become what it had become.

So that the reader might be given a clearer notion of what I mean by Mixed-Message Methodistism, let’s take a quick look at a few snapshots of young Galen interacting with his adoptive mother & father, and then frame each of these snapshots in its broader context. As has been established, both Sunday school and church attendance were of an obsessively regular nature for Margaret & Harry Green – and anyone who wished to live under their roof – throughout Galen’s childhood and adolescence. Harry, however, didn’t hesitate to speak critically of First Church’s aforementioned senior minister, Dr. Ronald Meredith, whenever the spirit so moved him. And he did so in front of Kevin & Galen on a number of occasions. That, then, will be our first corroborating snapshot of the sundry mixed messages which Galen felt invited to sort out with regard to his churching.

In this first snapshot, we see Harry at the wheel of the family’s old two-tone 1956 Packard in the early afternoon of a Sunday in the spring of, let’s say, 1965. Margaret is seated beside him on the front passenger’s seat, worrying silently to herself about whether they’ll get home from church before the roast in the oven burns, while Kevin (11) and Galen (15) are seated as far apart as possible in the backseat, taking in the Wichita street scenes as they glide by. It was usually at times like this that Harry would feel moved to wax critical of Dr. M. – most often finding fault with the urbanity of his brilliant sermons, which Galen, on the other hand, secretly found energizing, educational and even inspiring.

It was in listening to his father’s critiques of Dr. M’s excessive sophistication that Galen first began to construct within his imagination a sort of metaphorical Berlin Wall. On one side of this mile-high, mile-thick wall lay what Galen perceived to be the modern world – the world forged out of the flaming ruins of World War II. On the other side lay the world as it had existed before that global cataclysm, the world into which his parents had been born (Harry in 1908; Margaret in 1912) and had grown up on small Kansas dirt farms and in small farming communities like Richmond, Ottawa, Wellsville & Waverly, and had come of age during the Great Depression, helplessly watching their families of origin slide into ruinous downward economic vicissitudes, and then marrying each other and moving to their aforementioned honeymoon apartment in the big bad city of Wichita, only a few months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. With each passing year, Galen watched in ambivalent wonder as this impenetrable metaphorical wall in his imagination, between his world and his parents’ world – between his reality and his parents’ reality – grew more vivid, more palpable.


138. Harry Green’s Einstein Moment

Despite Harry’s frequently voiced negativity toward Dr. Meredith’s personality and rhetorical style, it hadn’t occurred to Galen that his adoptive father’s disdain might extend past the senior minister himself and spatter onto some of those great minds whom he mentioned and/or quoted in his sermons on Sunday mornings. In our next snapshot of Mixed Message Methodistism, then, we see Galen & Harry riding together in that same old Packard, later that same spring of 1965. It’s a Thursday evening, just a week or two after Galen’s sixteenth birthday. Harry has just picked Galen up from Youth Choir practice at First Church downtown and is now riding in the passenger’s seat next to his eldest adoptive son, letting Galen take the helm. As our young driver steers the Packard east, up Central Avenue, making the usual left turn onto Hillside to head north, past Wesley Medical Center and then on down past the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, the pre-suppertime conversation between the factory-worker father and his loving, dutiful teenaged son has thus far gone swimmingly – that is, up until a few seconds after that routine left turn toward home and supper, at the intersection Central & Hillside.

For some forgotten reason, the name of Albert Einstein comes into the conversation at that point – a name frequently invoked by the senior minister at the very church in which Margaret & Harry have chosen long ago to rear their adoptive sons. Galen’s vague recollection, a lifetime later, will be that the general topic of the conversation at that fateful moment in 1965 had something to do with genius – that is, with noteworthy examples of extraordinary human intelligence. Although in later life, Galen would become personal friends with some of the most brilliant literary figures of his time, including James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, David Ignatow, Judith Hemschemeyer, Albert Goldbarth, Elizabeth Spires & Richard Yates, the only truly dazzling adult minds with whom he’d had – at the tender age of 16 – much close personal contact were Dr. John Rydjord (a retired history professor who lived in the handsome old house across the street from Galen’s family), Dr. J. Kelley Sowards (his friend Steve’s father, also a history professor), Dr. Henry Loewen (their family physician since before Galen was born) and, of course, Dr. Ronald Meredith himself. What I’m getting at here is that, to illustrate whatever point Galen is trying to make in his conversation with his aging father, this Thursday evening in 1965, he finds it necessary to reach outside the bubble in which he and his family are living their provincial little existences, to a more cosmic realm. And what mortal realm could be more cosmic than the one inhabited by the late Albert Einstein, the best-known public symbol of mid-20th-century genius?

But no sooner is the eminent physicist’s name out of Galen’s well-meaning mouth than his father – theretofore chatting away with him so amiably from over there in the passenger’s seat – goes ballistic. Out of deference for poor old Harry Green, who doesn’t deserve to be judged on the basis of one of his less flattering moments, I’m not going to repeat for you here his exact words. Suffice it to say that they reflect a complete lack of perspective. So far as he’s concerned, the name “Albert Einstein” is synonymous with the label of “atheist,” and that’s all there is to it.

This point of view, voiced at a decibel level far beyond what would be appropriate to the occasion, betrays a shameful ignorance of three sets of fundamental facts, the knowledge of any one of which could have spared Harry the shame of that fateful moment in his relationship with his teenaged son. The first set of facts pertains to Albert Einstein’s true nature – to his humanitarianism and his paradoxically secular spirituality. The second set of facts pertains to atheists and to how it is that, contrary to Harry’s enculturated bigotry against them, their overall track record shows them to have done far more good and far less harm in the world than can be said for the comparable track record of their theist counterparts, whose very faith has compelled them to so many centuries of faith-based bigotry and butchery.

The third set of facts, Harry’s knowledge of which could have altered the course of history, pertains to the precise nature of the role which Margaret & Harry have chosen for their personal brand of Mixed Message Methodistism to play in Galen’s own enculturation. Operating, as Harry Green is, from the far side of the aforementioned metaphorical wall of the Second World War, this tension, this incongruity which exists between his own pre-war Methodistism and Dr. Ronald Meredith’s modernist post-war Methodistism is beyond his powers of understanding – or even comprehension. Like billions before him and billions after him, Harry simply doesn’t see that the world has passed him by – has moved on into a modernity which obviously frightens the hell out of him.


139. The Eichmann Trial

Before we ourselves move on, however, let’s take a quick look at one more snapshot of Harry & Galen. Unlike those first two, this one is being enacted entirely within the walls of that cramped little five-room bungalow at 1737 North Lorraine which their family called “home” between 1952 & 1965. This third snapshot is also unlike those first two in that it does not so much illustrate the lines of tension inherent within the Mixed Message Methodistism in whose bosom young Galen was raised as it provides us with a brief glimpse of a hint or clue as to the root cause of that tension. In other words, it hints at why it is that (to reshape an old cliché) “you can take Harry out of the country church, but you can’t take the country church out of Harry.”

One other difference between this third snapshot and those first two is that this one is being enacted several years earlier – not in 1965, when Galen was a teenager, but in 1961, when he’d have been a preteen and, therefore, considerably more susceptible to the words we’re going to hear Harry say to him in a moment. But first, here’s just a smidgen of background . . . . .

A few days after Galen’s eleventh birthday in the spring of 1960, as part of a covert operation, a team of Mossad and Shabak agents captured fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he’d been living and working under an assumed name (Ricardo Klement). It was not until several days later, however, that the news first came to the world’s attention on May 23rd, when Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann’s capture to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), receiving a standing ovation in return. Ben-Gurion’s announcement coincided with Galen’s final days as a fifth-grader at Fairmount Elementary, where certain of his closest school chums – Tom Glenn, Gary Short, Mike Simons, Wayne Porter, Don Jones, Ellis West, and Steve Sowards, in particular, seemed suddenly to have become minor experts on Nazi atrocities, due in large part of their fathers or their fathers’ associates having picked up bits and pieces of secondhand information on the subject in the course of their service as part of the Allied Forces during the war in Europe. (Harry, having been born almost a generation before these other fathers, had, of course, spent the war years at Boeing with Barak Obama’s aforementioned grandmother “Toot” (along with a cast of tens of thousands), helping to build the B-17’s, B-24’s, B-25’s, B-29’s, etc. (including the Enola Gay) which proved so vital in bringing an end to the war.)

When Galen would occasionally steal a moment, here and there, to take a backward glance from the vantage point of his autumn years, in an attempt to locate and identify those key historical events which most deeply influenced his attitudes as an adult, foremost among them was the trial of Adolf Eichmann before an Israeli court in Jerusalem, which began a few days before Galen’s twelfth birthday. To put it more accurately though, the trial itself was – for Galen and for most of the watching world – overshadowed by those revelations and images of the Holocaust which burst forth like the most hideous horror movie imaginable – only even more horrible, more hideous, more unthinkable – especially for the ever-questioning mind of one future poet, songwriter and mythoklast in particular, growing up in Wichita, Kansas, back then.

“The Eichmann Trial . . . . .” Whenever those of us of a certain age hear those words, our minds instantly fill with a thousand jumbled, overlapping images – some of those images being of the trial itself as we – and young Galen – saw it played out, day after day, on television; but even more – many, many more – being images of the Holocaust (the Shoah). Because it had already happened and could, therefore, in nowise be undone, then I hereby pronounce it a good and mythoklastic thing that, here in the 21st century, we cannot hear the word “Holocaust” pronounced without these same images coming to mind. It’s terribly important for us all to bear in mind, however, that it was as a direct result of the 1961 Eichmann trial that the world began to learn the full horror of the Holocaust, fifteen years after the Nazi’s surrendered to the Allies and Eichmann escaped – eventually to Argentina. And that’s why it was that, later in life, when stealing a moment’s reflection now and then, Galen would look back on the Eichmann trial and on the unprecedented media coverage of that trial and of the Holocaust as having turned out to be existentially formative in his development as a human being.


140. Some Youthful Mythoklasm

Which brings us back to the third of our snapshots of Harry & Galen – the one being enacted entirely within the walls of that cramped little five-room bungalow which their family called home, on this Friday afternoon in the autumn of 1961. Margaret has taken Kevin (7) with her, over to Don & Lois’s for an hour or so, leaving Harry & Galen alone in the house together. Harry has just arrived home from work a few minutes earlier and is in the bathroom, standing at the sink, glancing in the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet, shaving his bristly gray whiskers with his Gillette safety razor, cleaning up for the weekend. Galen is seated at the dining room table, completely engrossed by the pictures he finds filling the big slick pages of a recent issue of Look magazine (which you may or may not recall was almost identical to the better-known Life magazine – and its direct competitor).

It’s early enough in the autumn of 1961 that the dining room window directly behind Galen is open a few inches to let in a gentle breeze, which rustles the gauze window curtains ever so lightly. As Galen stares transfixedly down at the photo spread of black & white images of concentration camps, cattle cars, open trenches piled with hundreds of naked emaciated corpses and those thousand related images, jumbled and overlapping, which return to every thoughtful mind whenever the Eichmann trial or the Holocaust is mentioned, he begins asking himself (silently, inside his head) some disquieting existential questions, fraught with mythoklastic reconfigurings of his sense of reality – which we might expect him to be asking himself at such a life- altering moment. Here’s a random list of just five of these disquieting questions which young Galen finds himself asking himself on this autumn afternoon in 1961:

1) How could the rest of the world have allowed this to happen?

2) What type of people would do such a thing? (How could these unthinkable atrocities have been committed by the same country which gave the world Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Schweitzer, Albrecht Durer, Martin Luther and Albert Einstein?)

3) Did these helpless victims, piled in these trenches, gassed in these chambers, burnt to ashes in these ovens, skinned for lampshades . . . have any kind of warning that the men & women living right next to them were capable of these atrocities?

4) What kind of God would let this happen?

5) How long have my mom & dad known about this, and how could they have neglected to tell me about it?


141. Snapshot of My Father Shaving

The photo spread in this 1961 issue of Look magazine which has triggered this sudden existential crisis in young Galen’s brain represents the sort of post-Eichmann trial reflection, retrospection, and even exploitative nostalgia which is to be found nearly everywhere in the mainstream media throughout the early 1960’s. That is to say that the Eichmann trial and the subsequent revelations concerning the Holocaust which the trial has brought to the American public’s attention – often for the first time – have themselves tended to serve as a de facto introduction to a wide range of larger historical realities – for example, the rise & fall of the Third Reich, the ancient toxin of anti-Semitism (entirely new to Galen until now), and the rogues gallery of the Nazi leadership, with that charismatic fascist dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) at it’s rotten core.

The moment upon which this third snapshot of Harry & Galen pivots is the moment at which young Galen, sitting here at the dining room table studying a black & white photograph of Adolf Hitler, makes the causal connection which the editors at Look magazine and the authors of the article – and most of the rest of the powers that be – have intended that he make. And that causal connection – as mythological as it may, in fact, turn out to be – is that the Holocaust was almost entirely Hitler’s idea. In years to come, Galen will outgrow this fashionable oversimplification, but at this pivotal moment in his twelfth year on earth, with little more to go on than what he’s just now gleaned from this generally excellent magazine article spread out on the dining room table in front of him, he feels such an overwhelming sense of disillusionment, horror and outrage flare up inside of him that he gets to his feet and picks up the magazine, which he carries to the open bathroom doorway where his father is finishing up his Friday afternoon shave, swishing his Gillette safety razor in the shallow water in the bathroom sink, now afloat with shaved whiskers and dissolving white shaving foam.

For as long as Galen could remember, he’d always taken a special kind of pleasure in occasionally conversing with his father while watching him shave, directing his gaze, not at the side of Harry’s face, but at Harry’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. Once, when he was much younger, he’d asked his father why it was possible for them to look directly into the bathroom mirror’s reflection of one another’s eyes without having to make any special adjustment to the mirror. “That’s just the way a mirror works,” was Harry’s only reply.

In this autumn afternoon snapshot, Galen is holding the copy of Look magazine in both hands, as he steps into the doorway to the bathroom where his father is now rinsing any excess shaving foam from under his Clark Gable ears and patting his baby-smooth 53-year-old face dry with a terrycloth hand towel. Galen opens the magazine to the first place he’s marked with his index finger, and points to a photograph of naked emaciated corpses piled by the hundreds into an open trench at a Nazi concentration camp. He then flips to the place he’s marked with his thumb, the photograph of Adolf Hitler, and addresses his father’s face, reflected in the bathroom mirror: “Dad, did you know that this Hitler guy was responsible for exterminating six million Jews?”

Without missing a beat and in the sort of everyday fatherly tone of voice which implies that he’s anticipated this moment for a long time, Harry’s reflected face looks directly into Galen’s through those sky-blue eyes and simply, calmly replies: “Yes. And he’ll burn in hell for the rest of eternity for it.”


142. Issues of Ultimacy and Intimacy

Obviously, we could analyze this last snapshot “till the cows come home,” as Harry himself might have put it. But let’s not. My personal opinion is that it speaks for itself. I mean that it speaks as many volumes as we could possibly hope for, toward explaining the underlying nature of the Mixed Message Methodistism to which Galen was exposed, as he was growing up in working-class Wichita, back there during the Age of Elvis & JFK & the Eichmann trial . . . when most Americans were learning the details of the Holocaust for the first time.

Hell was not often mentioned among the clergy or the laity – or even among Galen’s smartass peers in Methodist Youth Fellowship or Youth Choir – downtown at First Church. By contrast, hell was, for Harry – if not so much for Margaret, not merely a very real concept, but a very real place. A while ago, I made the remark that “You can take Harry out of the country church, but you can’t take the country church out of Harry.” This literal belief in a physical place called “Hell” (Milton’s, not Dante’s) illustrates as vividly as any other example I could throw at you here just what I was driving at with that remark. But please don’t think for one minute that Harry’s belief in hell was merely a convenient parenting tool that he kept around like the razor strap – which had belonged to his own father, Ira Green (1857-1946) – which Harry himself kept hanging in plain sight on a doorknob in the family room of the cramped little bungalow on North Lorraine back then. Hell, for Harry, was as much an object of constant dread as it had been for the likes of Martin Luther or Billy Sunday.

But as much as Galen loved his father and even respected him up to a point, the goddess of modernity sang him a sweeter siren song than the one sung through Harry by the goddess of the razor strap of the old country church of his dirt farm childhood. And so it was that Galen began to individuate and, thereby, to begin thinking thoughts which were all his own – or at least which felt to him as though they were all his own. In reflecting upon this period of his life in later years, he sometimes toyed with the possibility that, if the dozen or so most preposterous implausibilities which the bullies who ruled his younger years had tried to cram down his throat had somehow been magically removed from the haphazard equation of his enculturation, then might the process of his individuation not gone much differently. For instance, had such transparent falsities as heaven, hell, the virgin birth, the rising from the dead, the biblical creation myth, etc. been magically removed from the highly eclectic, often self-contradictory hodgepodge of Judeo-Christian doctrines which constituted the Mixed Message Methodistism in which Galen Green swam through his first seventeen years, then might he not have been so eager to flee it as one might flee a burning house – or a burning lake?

Probably not. I mean that his eagerness to flee would probably have been every bit as great. I said that he toyed with the fantasy that the magical removal of the dozen or so most unswallowable Christian fantasies might have kept him from becoming the Secular Humanist he became. Toyed with. But I didn’t mean to imply that Galen, in looking back, ever actually believed for a minute that even Dr. Meredith’s impressively urbane (and urban) brand of 1960’s Methodistism could ever have become his own personal path in life. The reasons for this were manifold. Most prominent among them was the fact that, ironically, by inviting young Galen to ponder in his heart of hearts and to reason out in his heart’s head those challenging issues of ultimacy and of existential intimacy with his fellow creatures and of the perplexing entirety of Nature and of his inner self (including that part of his inner self which participated most enthusiastically with what they themselves insisted on calling the “spiritual” realm) . . . by inviting young Galen to think about these things, the grown-ups downtown at First Church ironically sowed the seeds of their own obsolescence into Galen’s little life’s drama.


Chapter XIX

“Don’t Ever Limit Yourself”


143. The View from Two Choir Lofts

To glimpse, through young Galen’s eyes, the actual church-going experience in which he would have been enveloped during the years in question (1960-1966), we should probably slip a choir robe (shimmering royal purple with iridescent gold V-shaped collar) over our Sunday best and seat ourselves in one of two choir lofts – or in both at the same time. The earlier of these two choir lofts would have been high up above and behind the pulpit, several feet above the minister’s head, and consisting of steeply graduated stair step-style rows of dark oak-stained pews (enough to seat forty to fifty choristers at once), with the choir looking out over the congregation below, and a towering bank of enormous burnished brass organ pipes rising up behind them to the ornate 18th-century Church of England –style vaulted ceiling of the old First Church sanctuary – the one which had been built in 1923 and then demolished around 1962 to allow for the completion of the new First Church. The later of the two choir lofts from whose vantage point we might wish to gaze, through Galen’s teenaged eyes, out into his actual church-going experience would have been (as I’m sure you’ve already guessed) the one in the (at the time) ultra-modern sanctuary of the new First Church, the one you’d find there today, if you were to find yourself magically transported to 330 North Broadway in Wichita, Kansas.

Architecturally, the “new” (1960’s) First Church is the antithesis of its Episcopalian-style predecessor, whose imposing limestone block walls and heavy carved oaken pews and fixtures have given way to a tasteful blend of Late 20th-century European styles, dominated by Scandinavian furnishings, carpeted floors, cushioned pews, and the light, airy, fluid circularity of a dazzling work of art hollowed out from Modernity’s womb and filled with arguably some of the finest Anglogenic sacred music that Midwestern “high church” Protestantism has to offer. This, at least, would be a fair summary of what you & I would have seen through Galen’s youthful eyes as he sat there in the considerably less lofty choir loft of First Church’s new sanctuary, in (let’s say) 1964 or ’65, with the rest of the Youth Choir in their glistening purple choir robes trimmed with shimmering gold V-shaped collars. Now, instead of gazing down on the congregation and on the back of the minister’s head, Galen and his fellow tenors, altos, sopranos, and baritones, might gaze out at the congregation from over a lovely “Danish-modern” burnished aluminum altar railing. On the opposite side of the mostly alabaster alter itself, the pulpit rises up like one magnificently solid swirl of polished walnut, reminiscent of its European ancestors of the Late Renaissance, yet entirely an avant-garde original in its execution, so that the presiding speaker might be imagined to hover angelically (and Anglogenically) above the flock below.


144. Olive Ann Beech & Other Demographics

As for the flock itself, the most succinctly revealing commentary might be for me to quote for you here the comment Galen heard most often back in those days, whenever he’d mention to any of his friends at school where it was that he and his family attended church. That comment was invariably along the lines of: “Wow! There’s a lot of money in that church!” And it’s true: there was. Undoubtedly, First Church’s most prosperous and most prominent member, back then, was Olive Ann Beech (1903-1993), the widow of aviation pioneer Walter H. Beech and, until 1968, the CEO of Beech Aircraft Company. It would not be an exaggeration for me to say here that, without Olive Ann’s generous contributions, this new First Church, opened in 1962, in which you & I now sit here quietly in this comfy choir loft, in (let’s say) 1965, across from that regal polished walnut pulpit over there where Dr. Ronald Meredith is delivering one of his more inspiring sermons (the word “homily” not having come into usage at First Church until the 1980’s) . . . that, without Olive Ann’s generous contributions, neither this dazzling edifice with its Space Age accoutrements nor these dazzling choir robes nor that regal walnut pulpit nor those rich clerical raiment – resembling black velvet trimmed in royal purple – worn by Dr. M. over there (nor even Dr. M’s expensive country house) nor that Walter H. Beech bell tower out there in front of First Church, rising authoritatively over Broadway and topped off with that embarrassingly huge, illuminated royal crown and that amusingly ambiguous Alpha & Omega bolted to the side of it near its apex like some corporate logo . . . none of this would have been possible without Olive Ann’s generous gifts.

(I suppose that it’s worth mentioning here as a parenthetical footnote of trivia that Harry Green, the toolmaker, and Olive Ann (Mellor) Beech were born in the same little east-central Kansas farming community of Waverly, albeit five years apart – Harry in 1908 and Olive Ann in 1903. Galen always found this fact poetic for any number of secretly silly reasons, not the least of which was the conspicuously stark contrast between Harry’s station in life and Olive Ann’s.)

Let me hasten to point out that, when folks around Wichita – and, indeed, around the Midwest, for that matter – back in Galen’s younger days, would blurt out that aforementioned comment: “Wow! There’s a lot of money in that church!” they were usually not thinking only of Olive Ann Beech. For example, just within the seventeen years that Galen was actively affiliated with First Church, no fewer than four members of Margaret & Harry’s adult Sunday school class – which happened, for no discernible reason, to be named “Triad Class” – were elected mayor of Wichita – some of them for multiple terms. And this pattern was the rule rather than the exception. I must admit that I’m tempted here to employ some hackneyed phrase such as: “Throughout the years since its founding in the 1870’s, First Church has provided Wichita with a disproportionate number of mayors, city council members and other civic leaders, not to mention business leaders of every stripe and in every quarter of commerce.” What prevents me from yielding to this temptation is primarily my discomfort with the “provided” part. Let’s just say, instead, that a disproportionate number of prominent Wichitans happened also – for whatever reasons or non-reasons – to have been actively affiliated with First Church . . . and leave it at that.


145. “This Latter-Day Disneyland”

In general, however, Galen’s interactions within the First Church community tended to be limited to the less moneyed elements and their offspring. As deeply as Dr. Meredith’s Sunday morning messages and the intelligent passion with which he delivered them moved Galen and lent him inspiration, the truth of the matter was that he and Dr. M never had what we could call a conversation – only the rare pleasantries exchanged in a hallway or an elevator. Instead, what little personal mentoring Galen was fortunate enough to receive tended to be from several of the adults who were directly involved with the church’s various youth programs. One example would have been Eugene Butler, who led the Youth Choir in his broader capacity as Music Director. Another would have been Rev. Bill Miller, who served as Youth Minister throughout most of the period we’re focusing on here today. Tall, gaunt, gracefully gangly, soft-spoken and seemingly selfless, “Reverend Bill” came as close as anyone Galen had the privilege of meeting up with in his younger days to embodying the conventional image of a modern-day Christ in a business suit with clerical collar.

Loren King was a sort of unconventional minor mentor from that period who deserves a modicum of mention, not so much because of his and his wife’s (whose name I forget) having been unusually active as Sunday school teachers and MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship) sponsors, nor even because they were the parents of the exceptionally bright and amiable Judith King, who was Galen’s age and, significantly, one of the very few young people he’d ever met who was an only child. What made Loren King worthy of this modicum of minor mentor mention was, rather, his (for lack of a better descriptive) human rights activism. Most notably, he was responsible for Galen’s getting to participate, with much purpose and exhilaration, in his first-ever civil rights march. This would have been sometime in 1964, if my memory serves me well, and was one of the high points of Galen’s teen years. I suppose it could be said that that ’64 march there in downtown Wichita marked the metaphorical first step in a lifetime of similar marches – for all manner of human rights causes, including women’s rights, gay rights, economic justice, environmental sanity, and, of course, in protest of the Vietnam War.

As you’d expect, Loren King’s civil rights activism, as discreet, mild-mannered and well-reasoned as it may have been, made him the target of considerable whispered and unspoken suspicion among the sleepwalkers, the Babbitts, the crypto-fascists and the ordinary philistines whom Galen gradually began to realize – sometime around the 9th or 10th grade (1964-65) – lurked within the hearts and souls of the majority of First Church’s adult congregation. So it was that, when Galen’s MYF group trouped over to the brand spanking new First Church sanctuary for a sneak peek, the week before it was set to open its doors for its very first worship service, in the spring of 1962 . . . and the young folks gathered ‘round to be among the first to sign the big guestbook out in the grandiose new sanctuary’s lavish, ultramodern foyer . . . and the first young lady in line gasped in astonishment as she pointed out to the other MYF’ers what some unknown hand had written – ever so neatly in blue ballpoint at the top of the guestbook’s very first page:

How many Africans starved while you
built this latter-day Disneyland?

. . . and the young people exchanged silent, furtive glances, as they took turns signing their own names, a few inches below the unfashionably consciousness-raising desecration . . . it seemed only natural that Loren King’s name would appear on the short list of suspects deep inside each secret mind. During his remaining years at First Church, however, not once did Galen ever hear the matter discussed out loud, as though it had vanished from public consciousness in the very same instant that it buried itself in the moist, warm soil of each individual consciousness.


146. Galen Green & Mrs. Bean

Loren King was, of course, not the culprit – not the secret sower of that particular mythoklastic seed. But the simple realization that he might have been – along with that shining mythoklastic seed itself – took root in Galen’s imagination and remained there for the rest of his born days. And isn’t that often an important part of how a truly inspiring mentorship works? Another way – and one which is far more conventional in its functioning – is, of course, the mentorship provided by a private tutor or personal trainer – a voice coach, for example. Carol Bean filled precisely that mentor (or mentess) role in Galen’s life, during the period in question here – i.e. during the three most fertile years of his adolescent churching.

Beginning at the same time that Galen was entering the 7th grade at Brooks Junior High School in 1961, and continuing on an almost weekly basis (at least 40 out of the 52 weeks each year), until he completed the 9th grade there in 1964, Mrs. Bean was Galen’s private voice coach – his “singing teacher,” if you will. For what was then the modest working-class rate of $3.00 for an intensive half-hour of afterschool vocalizing, Mrs. Bean – the pleasingly rosy-cheeked, freckled, red-haired 40-ish mother of two of Galen’s peers (Donna, who was Galen’s age and Dick, who was two years older) – would sit in her tastefully appointed living room at her polished spinet piano and focus her undivided talents and energies on the somewhat geeky, somewhat nerdy teenager standing about two feet away from her, singing his hopeful heart out.

Please note that I tried to phrase that last sentence in such a way as to suggest oedipal undertones without actually putting them into words. Mrs. Bean was a good-looking woman; but, fortunately, this potentially distracting fact was overridden by what Galen took to be the serious business at hand during those demanding half-hour sessions of vocalization exercises and the learning of literally hundreds of songs, ranging from Broadway show tunes and 19th-century parlor songs (aka “art songs”) to Anglo-American folk ballads, Negro spirituals and sentimental holiday favorites. While she may have looked like any other suburban housewife, mother and Sunday school teacher, Carol Bean possessed an achingly beautiful mezzo-soprano voice, a thorough command of the piano keyboard and a penetrating empathetic wisdom engendered by her having been partially crippled by polio in her youth. One afternoon, seemingly out of the clear blue, she removed her lovely fingers from the keyboard, laid her hands in her lap, looked Galen directly in the eyes, smiled warmly, and said to him in the voice of a perfect mentor: “Don’t ever limit yourself.”


147. Mrs. Bean & Galen Green

At the time that Mrs. Bean encouraged Galen to never limit himself, he was not yet ready to fully grasp what he later realized her meaning to be. At the time she said it, he was still only 14 years old and about to finish up, not only his three years of what was, back in those days, generally called junior high school, but also his three very empowering years of training as her voice pupil. It wasn’t until years later that he began to understand just how much she’d identified with him in several respects, the most pertinent of which, for the purpose of our discussion here today, was the extent to which several of her key life choices – particularly those touching upon her own veiled intellect and stifled creativity – had represented her own limiting of herself.

By the time she’d gotten around to uttering those few simple words of wise warning to him, that afternoon in 1964, she’d had those previous three years to observe Galen, both up close in their private time alone together and then, more recently, amongst his peers in the much different context of a Sunday morning classroom where she and her husband, Paul, served as his (& Donna’s, et al.) 8th-grade Sunday school teachers. By triangulating these two glimpses of young Galen with a third one – based upon her close acquaintanceship with his parents, through a wide range of First Church activities . . . as well as the added advantage of her having observed how he and they interacted with one another throughout his early adolescence (those years when Galen was just beginning to individuate away from becoming the excessively self-limiting clone Harry & Margaret seemed to be hell-bent on his becoming), Mrs. Bean had had ample opportunity to perceive and analyze the full three-dimensional nature of the suffocating dust-cloud of small-mindedness which young Galen would have to choose to either escape, transcend, circumvent, rise above . . . or else inhale, with all the usual deadly consequences.

But even if Mrs. Bean’s empathetic wisdom had never gotten around to compelling her to utter those few memorable words of warning, on that afternoon in the spring of 1964, Galen was not about to allow himself to be limited, held back, stifled, suffocated or hobbled by any force within himself or – to whatever extent it was within his power to prevent it – by any force outside himself, either human or otherwise. In point of fact, that was one of the dominant themes of his intermittent daydreams, as he sat there in the back row of the choir loft in the new First Church sanctuary, absorbed in Dr. Meredith’s sermon, his purple-robed form partially obscured as it was by an enormous snow-white column, so that his note-taking on Dr. Meredith’s sermon, there in the tenor section, would not distract Olive Ann Beech, sitting out there in the congregation in her usual padded pew in the front row . . . would not distract either Olive Ann or any of the several hundred other well-dressed members of the congregation, as he alternately took notes and daydreamed, while gazing up at the huge rectangular stained-glass window which constituted most of the sanctuary’s front wall, rising up behind the alabaster altar like a magnificently illuminated abstract painting in a style somewhat reminiscent of Kandinsky or Miro. Depending upon the angle at which Galen found himself contemplating the huge window’s colorful abstract patterns – and upon the ever-changing Wichita weather outside – he’d come to realize that this highly non-representational, seemingly random, arrangement of gleaming glass shards, spread out in space before him, had a way of inviting his daydreams to arrange themselves around the window’s dreamily shifting patterns of color.


Chapter XX

Random Reflections



148. God, Bob & the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

As for the choir itself, the individuals – the two dozen or so sopranos, altos, tenors and baritones seated in the four rows of cushioned pews in front and behind and on either side of him – all robed in purple and trimmed in gold – for the most part, they represented the same young people with whom he’d attended MYF and Sunday school at First Church for as long as he could remember. A few of them he counted as friends. With most of the rest (of either gender), he conversed little. Nor did they appear to ever have much to communicate amongst themselves. Part of the reason for this ostensible chilliness had to do with a shared, unspoken understanding that they were – both for Thursday afternoon choir practice and then for their Sunday morning choral performance – there together on business. For, while singing in First Church’s Youth Choir certainly had its recreational dimension, each and every one of the young men and women surrounding Galen there in the choir loft on that Sunday morning in question – that Sunday morning in 1965 upon which we’re focusing here for the moment . . . each and every one of them would have been keenly aware of the fact that their behavior – meaning their words, as much as their deeds – would reflect with disproportionate intensity upon their parents and, hence, upon their family’s image within the all-important tribe which was the First Church community. Better, then, to run the risk of being real in other venues, among less judgmental peers.

One notable exception to this rule was a slightly chunky, good-natured young fellow named Bob Comstock. Although a year younger than Galen, Bob would provide a strong supporting performance, decades later, in three of Galen’s most vivid reminiscences from his adolescent years at First Church. The first of these was a direct product of what we nowadays refer back to as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place mostly during the third week of October, 1962, when Galen would have been thirteen years old and Bob would have been twelve.

As you’ll recall, that was the week during which everyone on Planet Earth who was paying any attention at all was called upon to imagine the entire human race perishing in a nuclear holocaust. To put the background for this very warranted mass-anxiety attack into a proverbial nutshell: The U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba, and the Kennedy administration subsequently placed a naval quarantine around the island and threatened to invade if all the nukes weren’t removed promptly – to which response the Soviet Union responded by threatening nuclear war. Against this backdrop, churches all across the U.S. were keeping their doors open continuously so that a terrified public could drop by at all hours to pray for a peaceful resolution to this Cuban Missile Crisis.

So it was that, when Galen arrived at First Church for choir practice an hour or so early, that third Thursday afternoon in October of 1962 (having taken the city bus directly from school), and Bob arrived likewise, but from the opposite side of town, the two friends had an hour or so to kill before they had to be back at First Church for choir practice. In later years, Galen would reminisce to himself occasionally about how he and Bob had spent that hour, wandering the streets of downtown Wichita together, discussing that week’s disquieting events and philosophizing about the range of possible outcomes. He could remember in his mind’s eye the cars pulling up to the curbs in front of Wichita’s downtown churches and prayerful citizens filing quietly into the sanctuaries to be alone with God, in what they evidently imagined to be His consulting room.


149. Preface to a Memorable Moment

Well, the world didn’t come to an end – not in any conventional sense, anyway. Which made it possible for Bob and Galen to train as acolytes, a year or so later, even though the role of acolyte (a term used here as a synonym for altar boy) was not a standard component of the Methodist service, back then. It appears to have been added as an embellishment with the 1962 opening of the “latter-day Disneyland” of the ultramodern First Church sanctuary – along with so many other things, such as the expensive extensive set of exquisite hand bells for which a well-trained bell choir of First Church members was created to perform for special occasions.

While a dozen or so teenagers were trained to serve as acolytes (altar boys), Bob & Galen tended to be the pair most frequently assigned to the elaborate 11:00 a.m. service, probably because they looked enough alike to have been brothers (or bookends) and, thus, provided a pleasing symmetry as they processed up the sanctuary’s long carpeted center aisle together in a fashion imitative of a Roman Catholic or Episcopalian “High Mass,” leading the sacerdotal pageantry with their long butane-fueled tapers outstretched before them, stepping with robes swaying in a slow graceful rhythm to whatever lofty processional hymn the renowned organist Dorothy Addy may have been leading the well-dressed congregation in, from the massive six-tiered keyboard of what was, in 1964, arguably the most spectacular church organ in the Midwest, wailing away with angelic decibels enough to clear up even the stuffiest sinuses . . . as they processes up the sanctuary’s long carpeted center aisle together – Bob & Galen – with Dr. Meredith following close behind, accompanied by “Reverend Bill” and the energetic young junior pastor, Rev. Eugene Lowry, who were followed in turn by the so-called “Adult Choir” (to distinguish them from the 9:00 a.m. Youth Choir) led by the illustrious Eugene Butler (aforementioned), all of which company it took four or five stanzas of an average-length selection from the Methodist hymnal to get processed up the sanctuary’s long carpeted center aisle to stand in front of their various cushioned seats for the brief opening prayer and the sitting down.

In the meantime, Bob and Galen would have split apart in opposite directions as they approached the few alabaster steps leading up to the elevated main altar, so as to arrive with symmetrical simultaneity, facing the congregation with tapers raised in unison to light the pair of symmetrically positioned butane-fueled “candles” on either side of the slender space-age cross at the very center of the altar. In years to come, however, it was not the bone-rattling pomp of these weekly processionals with which Galen would most vividly associate his memory of the mischievous but likable Bob Comstock, but rather a single quiet moment which most likely lived in infamy in the minds of all who had the good fortune to be present in church on the Sunday morning it occurred.


150. And then, the Moment Itself

The scene was this:

It happened to be what the Methodists used to call “Communion Sunday,” and Bob and Galen were assisting Dr. Meredith and “Reverend Bill” with communion, up at the front of the sanctuary, on the alabaster steps leading up to the aforementioned elevated central altar. When I say “assisting,” I mean this only in the same faux-Catholic sense that the choreographers of liturgy at First Church in the mid-1960’s had Bob and Galen performing their various other imitations of actual altar boy functions. (After what occurred on the occasion I’m about the share with you here, however, it’s fairly certain that those same somber choreographers of First Church’s liturgy began to rethink a number of aspects of the acolyte thing.)

A couple of additional bits of detail which might serve to contextualize the event more flavorfully are the fact that the 11:00 a.m. service on that particular Sunday morning was being televised live on KAKE-TV, the local ABC affiliate – and the fact that a pair of highly sensitive “shotgun” (i.e. tightly directional) microphones were positioned, pointing straight down, from the sanctuary’s arched ceiling, perhaps twenty feet or so directly above the heads of whomever might be standing or kneeling at the altar. Visually, this pair of shotgun mics was intended to blend in tastefully with the sanctuary’s overall Danish-modern design motif, and was controlled from the state-of-the-art sound booth hidden way up behind the wall at the back of the expansive balcony. It was said that, when the volume on these twin shotgun mics was cranked up all the way, you could hear a pin drop on the alabaster altar below.

In general, “Communion Sunday” at First Church, back in those days, followed a liturgical script which the average cultural anthropologist might have described as an extremely loose variation on that of the Roman Catholic Mass. Beautifully polished nickel-plated circular serving racks, each laden with perhaps fifty tiny shot glasses, would be passed across each pew, from one end and collected at the opposite end by trained ushers. Each tiny glass would contain a half ounce of Welch’s grape juice, in deference to the Methodist church’s longstanding temperance philosophy – and to local ordinances prohibiting the distribution of even the mildest of alcoholic beverages to minors. Of course, as in the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, the sipping of this grape juice by the entire congregation in unison would have been preceded by the same manner of passing along each row of congregants beautifully polished nickel-plated circular serving trays, each holding hundreds of perfectly identical communion wafers which, while possessing the consistency of styrofoam, actually did taste a little like wheat. Since the Methodists were not literal transubstantiationists, no anxiety intruded with regard to the laity handling what everyone involved took to be merely the metaphorical body and blood of their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

On the Communion Sunday in question here, everything was going as smoothly as could be expected. The wafers had been lain upon the tongues of the communicants and had dissolved without anyone choking. At the front of the sanctuary, Galen stood silently between Bob and Rev. Bill, who stood next to Dr. Meredith, who stood next to Rev. Lowry – all five elegantly robed figures beneath that pair of hypersensitive shotgun mics and ceremoniously facing the beautifully polished nickel-plated space-age cross at the center of the little tableau. On cue, all five reached forward to the altar railing with its specially designed cup-holders that held the tiny shot glasses in which each one’s very own half ounce of sweet purple Welch’s grape juice waited to be consecrated and reverently consumed. The only character with a scripted speaking part was, of course, Dr. Meredith, who presided. Otherwise, the only sound filling the sacred hush was Dorothy Addy’s organ music – the same familiar ramblings of haunting pianissimo chords that she wove and unwove so delicately beneath Dr. Meredith’s eloquently rambling five-minute pastoral prayers, as a regular part of every Sunday morning worship service – Dorothy’s own special sounds of silence that somehow seemed more silent than silence.

Then, it was time for every soul in that trembling hush to lift the tiny shot glass in his or her hand, as Dr. Meredith recited those familiar words which were being picked up the microphones high above his head: “This is my blood, which is shed for you and for many. Drink this in remembrance of me.” . . . to lift the tiny shot glasses of grape juice to their lips and partake of the ritual of Holy Communion, within that stillness breathed from out of that haunting music. And so it was at that supremely sacred moment, as Galen raised the tiny shot glass to his lips, along with everyone else in that august presence, that Bob, raising the shot glass in his own hand, glanced over at Galen and whispered nonchalantly: “Here’s mud’n yer eye.”


151. Puppy Love

Whether Bob had forgotten about the hypersensitivity of the microphones aimed directly at the top of his head – from twenty feet or so up – or whether he somehow saw that moment as his golden opportunity to achieve some perverse form of local notoriety among the viewers of KAKE-TV’s live broadcast of First Church’s “Communion Sunday” service is a question to which Galen never received an answer, since he never got around to asking it. In any event, Bob and Galen remained friends for several more months, despite Bob’s totally unexpected profane toast with Christ’s metaphorical blood, on that embarrassing Sunday morning in 1964 – that toast which had caught Galen so utterly off guard that every ounce of his will power was required to stifle the explosion of laughter it had triggered at the core of his being. Nevertheless, stifle that explosion he did – albeit, with the result that, from his nostrils and from between his tightly pursed lips wheezed an uncontrollable squeak of air which – he earnestly prayed – would be misconstrued by that august presence, as well as by those few hundred members of the TV audience at home, as a stifled sneeze. What more practical prayer could the poor boy have prayed?

Not surprisingly, Bob was never thereafter scheduled to serve as an altar boy at the televised 11:00 a.m. worship service. It was also somewhere around that same period that he seemed not to be around very much at all. The reason for this turned out to be petite, comely young lass named Connie Russell, with her turned-up little freckled nose, chestnut hair, deceptively intelligent brown eyes and a flirtatiously alluring smile. To make a long story short, Connie had sung in Youth Choir with Bob and Galen ever since they’d all been in grade school, as well being active in MYF and a regular in Sunday school, on those irregular occasions when Galen chose to attend Sunday school, instead of hanging out with the friendlier spirits in the church library or assisting his parents in teaching their fourth-grade Sunday school class.

In general, the majority of the well-dressed young ladies whom a sensitive, serious, well-dressed, somewhat wimpy tenth-grade young man would have had available to daydream about (or completely overlook, as the case may have been) during, say, a particularly insipid Sunday school lesson (for instance) at First Church, back in the mid-1960’s, tended to be above average in physical appearance, but were otherwise attractive only in those ways which the young man in question had been gently enculturated into perceiving as attractive, over the many long months and years of their being young together. Out of this bevy of pleasant enough young females, however, a select handful (no pun intended) possessed an animal magnetism which made Galen’s getting out of bed on Sunday morning a more worthwhile endeavor than would have otherwise been the case. Such a one was Connie Russell.

During the months when Bob Comstock and Connie Russell were “going steady,” Galen, in spite of himself, was green with envy. He simply couldn’t help it. So, naturally, when Bob announced to Galen one day that he and Connie were no longer dating, Galen wasted not a heartbeat before asking Connie out on what turned out to be the first of a considerable number of “dates.” In the final analysis, it was just as well that his relationship with Connie remained, throughout that giddy period of “puppy love,” remarkably chaste – even by Wichita Methodist pre-Woodstock standards – since young Galen’s poor little heart was broken badly enough when Connie dumped him after only a few months. Had he had to grapple with a more pronounced sexual dimension (if you get my drift), he might have sunk into a serious depression, after being so abruptly “kicked to the curb” by such a seemingly desirable creature. As it was, however, he discovered with merciful quickness that his tiny social sphere was virtually aswarm with available young ladies whose appreciation for what he had to offer them actually exceeded that of the soon-forgotten Connie’s by a proverbial country mile.

Connie Russell, then, along with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and that memorably shocking 1964 Communion Sunday toast, “in front of God and everyone” (as they say) ended up being what Galen would remember most about his church buddy Bob, decades later. However, to reiterate my theme: Connie and Bob were notable primarily because they were, each in their own way, colorfully different from the majority of the young folks with whom Galen grew up and came of age at First Church, back there during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. There was, though, one other character on the stage, during that churchy episode of mythoklastic Galen’s early life, whom it would be remiss of me to omit here, even though he and Galen were never what you could call close friends. In fact, they were hardly more than casual acquaintances.


152. From Colby, Kansas to the Paris Opera

Sam Ramey, one of the world’s pre-eminent opera stars of the 1980’s & ‘90’s, was a young music student at what was, in the early 1960’s, still simply Wichita University, ambitiously honing his thunderous basso profundo voice with the renowned voice coach Arthur Newman. As was so frequently the case with outstanding young vocal talent at the university in those days, Sam signed on to make a bit of pocket change on the side by wowing First Church congregations with his impressive (though still developing) solo work. In addition to this, he frequently sat in with – believe it or not – the Youth Choir, as it was customary, back then, for a portion First Church’s sizable music budget to be allocated toward the hiring of a soprano, an alto, a tenor and a baritone – and, if possible, a bass – to lead each section of younger, less experienced choristers. As far as young Galen could tell, from where he sat, back in those days, a few seats away from the future superstar, Sam Ramey was just another excellent sight-reader from the university’s music department, blest with the gift of a magnificent voice, but who’d, nevertheless, most likely end up – at least, according to statistical probability – as, at best, the choir director at one of Wichita’s higher paying Protestant churches or perhaps teaching Voice at some Midwestern college. But Mr. Ramey had other plans.

According to the most reliable sources available to me at the time of this writing, Samuel Edward Ramey was born in Colby, Kansas in 1942 and graduated in 1960 from Colby High School. After spending a few years in Wichita and then at Kansas State University, he apprenticed with the Santa Fe Opera before getting his first big break at the New York City Opera in 1973, singing the role of Zuniga in Bizet’s Carmen. Throughout his long, distinguished career, he’s been greatly admired for his range and versatility, having both the bel canto technique to sing Handel, Mozart and Rossini, as well as the power to handle the dramatic roles of Verdi and Puccini. He’s performed with the world’s best symphony orchestras and in the world’s leading opera houses, including La Scala, the New York Met, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Milan, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera.

Since making his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Handel’s Rinaldo in 1984, Sam Ramey, from little ol’ Colby, Kansas, has triumphed in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, in Rossini’s Semiramide, The Barber of Seville, Il Turco in Italia and L’Italiana in Algeria, as well as in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s I Puritani. His extensive repertoire includes Mozart’s Figaro, Don Giovanni and Leporello, Verdi’s Attila and Philip of Spain, the four villains in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman and Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress.

It may well be, however, that, in the final analysis, the operatic roles for which the erstwhile university student who used to sit just a few seats away from Galen in church choir will be best remembered are his portrayals of various embodiments of the Prince of Darkness, the Enemy of Humankind. In the dramatic repertoire, Sam has been acclaimed for his “Three Devils” – in Boito’s Mefistofele, Gounod’s Faust and Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. In 1996, Sam gave a concert at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall titled “A Date with the Devil” in which he sang fourteen arias representing the core of his various operatic embodiments of Satan, and he continues to tour this program throughout the world, as of this writing (autumn 2009). In 2000, Sam presented this concert at Munich’s Gasteig Concert Hall. This performance was recorded live and was released on compact disc in 2002.





~ Book Five ~


Chapter XXI

Returning to the First-Person Past


153. Coming Back

Now, I’m going to speak in the first person again. You were supposed to have been pretending that that’s been somebody else that’s been speaking to you about me – about my early churching. But I guess it’s fair to say that you and I both knew that it was actually me, Galen, who was doing the talking all along.

Anyway, now I’m not going to do that anymore for awhile – not going to speak of myself in the third person anymore. Instead, I’m going to talk about myself in the first person – since you knew it was me all along, anyway. And here’s what I’m planning to say about myself:


154. Learning to Talk Mythoklastic

Thus far, I’ve never written a song that was specifically about my early churching. I have, however, written three songs in particular which I seriously doubt I’d have had the background to write, if I hadn’t lived through those thousands of churchy experiences, of which I’ve just now shared with you a random few, here.

The first of these three songs is entitled “Unsafe at Any Speed” and was written in 1986. Usually, when I talk about it, I begin by saying that I wish I hadn’t written it in the second person – in other words, addressed to “you.” Only friendly songs should be written in the second person, and I’m afraid that this is not an especially friendly song – although you’ll notice that it is an empathetic song. Otherwise, I suppose it’s fair to say that “Unsafe at Any Speed” carries within itself the same heavy burden as Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Positively 4th Street” – and that is the burden of being sung in the second person to an unnamed “you” with whom the singer (dramatic persona) is currently involved in some sort of antipathetic interpersonal dynamic:

You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.
When I was down, you just stood there grinning.
You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you’ve got a
helping hand to lend.
You just want to be on the side that’s winning.

While a convincing case can be made that, within Dylan’s remarkably textured canon, “Positively 4th Street” stands out as an extreme example, it is, as you know, hardly unique in its employment of the second person to dramatic effect. Such timeless classics as “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Don’t Think Twice, Its Alright” and “Like a Rolling Stone” spring to mind. It seems to me, however, that the chief difference between these three examples and such songs as “Unsafe at Any Speed” and “Positively 4th Street” is that the first three – while assuming a somewhat critical posture toward whatever imaginary “you” each is addressed to – might generally be said not to have the unsettling effect on the listener of making him or her subconsciously feel that the song’s criticism is somehow directed at them. Much of the reason for this – i.e. much of the reason for “Unsafe at Any Speed” and “Positively 4th Street” unintentionally evoking this sense of subconscious discomfort in the first-time listener – is that no implied dramatic context, such as that of a romance gone sour, is wrapped around the substance of the lyrics of either of these latter two songs to assure the listener that the singer’s (i.e. the dramatic persona’s) criticism could not logically possibly be aimed at them.......................