~ Book Six ~
Chapter XXVII
You’re the Child You Were Sent Here to Save
202. Keep Your Hand on that Plow
Anyone familiar with my own songbook knows that I, too, have experimented, perhaps more that I should have, with the time-tested form of poetic apostrophe that we see Joni Mitchell employing so skillfully in “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” I suppose that whenever the songwriter has his or her dramatic persona (i.e. singer) appear to be addressing its-self or alter-ego in the second person, the most common term of literary art that’s applied seems to be “interior monologue,” although it seems to me that a term like “meditational apostrophe” or even “apostrophic meditation” might actually come closer to the mark. In any event, that does appear to me to be what Joni is doing in “Ludwig’s Tune.” As for me, a song I wrote in 1986 comes to mind in this context, even though what I’m saying to myself (or rather having the singer say to himself) throughout that song, entitled “Think Ballet,” was never meant to stand up to critical comparison with Joni’s eloquent “Judgment – “ piece. In fact, insofar as it can be said that I cast “Think Ballet” forth into the world to perform any rhetorical function beyond that of providing what I myself consider to be above-average infotainment, I suppose that this particular song strikes me nowadays (lo, these many years after its composition) as having turned out to serve as a kind of “existential manifesto,” the core of which burns within its ending:
You’re the child you were sent here to save,
And you will always be alone,
So think ballet and be brave.
The song’s working title, as I was drafting it, was “Now,” because the concept that was originally guiding me was that of mundane immediacy, i.e. of journalistically reporting back to my audience an experiential snapshot of living through – and “working through” – an exceptionally difficult couple of hours of insomniacal angst. In hindsight, it occurs to me now, as well, that Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the final pages of Joyce’s Ulysses may also have been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind, as I was constructing this humble tableau:
Think Ballet
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved
1.
Hear that lonesome refrigerator moan.
Keep your hand on that plow.
It’s two in the morning, and you need a loan
To pay this electrical Now.
You’re only four hours away from the sea;
You’d go there, if you knew how.
It’s hard to trust yourself when she
Still doubts, so you face this unknown
Morning that teeters here on your knee
Like a child of brittle bone.
You will always be alone.
The minutes tick by before your throne,
Yet you seem to be caught in a drift
Of words and meanings, and the undertone
Of language gives you no lift.
No, language gives you no lift.
2.
Hear that lonesome traffic slave.
Keep your ear to the door.
It’s three in the morning, and you fear your grave.
Now it’s a quarter till four.
You’re only nine seconds away from her kiss;
It’s an offer that’s hard to ignore.
Beyond the door, you can hear the hiss
Of tires in the rain like a wave,
Bigger than weather and hotter than piss.
You’re the child you were sent here to save,
So you will think ballet and be brave.
Maybe you’ll get up and shower and shave
And pretend you’re a child in a haymow –
Or adrift in a weather as big as a wave
Of language, of morning, of Now.
3.
Hear that lonesome hobo groan.
Keep your ear to the night.
It’s four in the morning, and your brains are a stone,
Drifting like a kite.
You’re only alone like a bum, like a tree,
Like a wind that’s learning to shift.
It’s hard to trust ourselves when we
Have proven so accident-prone.
Hear your own whisper; it’s all that’s left.
Now is the time to hone
Your thoughts down into a moan.
You’re the child you were sent here to save,
And you will always be alone,
So, think ballet and be brave.
Yes, you will think ballet and be brave.
Yes, you will think about ballet
And you will be brave.
203. “This note upon a page too torn to ever mend . . . . .”
As I say, I wrote that in 1986. I was 37 at the time. Sharing it with you here today puts me in mind of an earlier one of my songs in which I similarly have the singer address himself in the second person, this time as “Little Brother,” which also just so happens to be the song’s title. One of the more obvious contrasts between it and the song we just shared – which I’m nevertheless going to clumsily point out here for my own larger purpose – is that, whereas with “Think Ballet” the audience is likely to readily recognize it as an interior monologue, such is not at all the case with “Little Brother.” In my own life story, I’ve had only two literal little brothers. The one is Kevin Green, the adoptive younger brother (born 1953) with whom I grew up in Wichita and shared quarters for approximately fifteen years. The other is Willie Anderson, an underprivileged little fatherless fellow who was only six years old when the Columbus, Ohio chapter of Big Brothers of America assigned him to be my “Little Brother” in 1978. Neither in the case of Kevin nor of Willie would it have made sense for me to have spoken to them – either in real life or in song – in the words or sentiments out of which my 1980 song “Little Brother” is built. For one thing, Kevin, being in his late 20’s by the time I composed “Little Brother,” had long since learned on his own any useful lessons the song presumes to impart. For another, Willie, who was only eight in 1980, would have been far too young to have provided an appropriate fictive audience for this particular song:
Little Brother
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1980, All Rights Reserved
Little Brother, life is like a boat.
And rowing it all day, your arms get tired.
Your little soul will fly up to its rafter
And look down to where you hang your little coat.
Little Brother, life is poorly wired.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after.
You toss and ride upon life’s purple sea
And dream of a land you once desired.
Little Brother, life will have its laughter,
But please don’t take this as a guarantee
That you’ll have laughed your fill before you end
Or gaze at life forever from your rafter.
Little Brother, you may not agree
That life is both your lover and your friend.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after,
But life has loved and walked away from me.
Little Brother, life is what you float upon
And what will break you till you bend.
Little Brother, yesterday I wrote
This note upon a page too torn to ever mend.
204. Charles Wesley, Eugene Butler, Songwriting & Me
Before we come to the end of my telling you about some of these more significant musical influences on my own songwriting, I feel as though I should mention a couple which preceded my exposure to Dylan, Baez, Buffy, Judy, Joni, or even the Beatles. Although I’ve never fully thought through on a conscious level any of the mysterious dynamics of causality whereby my creativity was impacted by either Charles Wesley (1707-1789) or Peter, Paul & Mary (that most quintessential of 60’s folk trios), I have no doubt whatsoever that their impact was both audible and palpable. Beginning in just a few more pages, I intend to leave off with all these writers of songs – for a while at least – in order to carry you with me back to those days and nights of yesteryear when Art Dunbar and I were sharing that rickety drafty attic in Wichita, and when all that I thought that I wanted in life was to marry Kate Schulte and somehow earn my bread as a poet. But first, let’s chat a bit about Peter & Paul & Mary & Charles.
If you were to indulge me by flipping back for a moment to Sections 143 thru 147, you’ll recollect that it was during the years 1961 thru 1964 that I studied voice with Mrs. Carol Bean (remember: “Don’t ever limit yourself.”). Those happened also to be the years that I attended Brooks Junior High School with Mrs. Bean’s daughter, Donna (7th, 8th & 9th grades) and that I was forced to wear braces on my teeth (the old-fashioned clunky, junky-type of braces). More pertinent to our present discussion, however, is the fact that those were also the years when I was becoming increasingly active in Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) and in First Church’s youth choir (see Section 148), as well as in what some folks might call “the life of the mind of the church itself.” Nowadays, a half century after the fact, however, I suppose that it would be more to the point to say that what I was actually becoming increasingly active in (along with choir and MYF) should, instead, be called something like metaphysics or spirituality or existentialism. I say this because, in, say, 1962, Galen Green (founder of the Mythoklastic Therapy Institute) was still several decades away from figuring out that the church is all about cash-flow, just like any other business. (Not just that specific church in the life of the mind of which I felt myself becoming rather passionately involved, throughout those years of the Kennedy administration, but rather any church of any faith.) Indeed, for young Galen in, say, 1962, cash-flow – like plumbing or parking space – appeared to be as far from what he misperceived to constitute the life of the mind of every church as true love is from the paying of doctor bills.
And that’s as good a way as any of beginning to explain how Charles Wesley entered into my embryonic half-understanding of things. Part of Eugene Butler’s job as director of our youth choir at First Church was to teach us a bit about the music he had us singing. So it was that, probably sometime in 1962, when I’d have been a curious thirteen-year-old 7th or 8th grader, the subject of Charles Wesley’s illustrious career as the lyricist of over 6,000 Methodist-Episcopal hymns came up. (I suppose that it’s also worth mentioning here briefly that Eugene Butler himself – now retired and in his late 70’s, living, coincidentally, only a few minutes’ drive from me here in the Greater Kansas City Area – has, as of this writing, published over 750 musical compositions through no fewer than 47 publishing houses, making him – in my own mind, at least – a kind of modern-day Charles Wesley.)
The original Charles Wesley – the one in question – was, as you’ll recall, the younger brother of Anglican clergyman John Wesley (1703-1791) and has sometimes been called the co-founder (along with John) of what eventually became the Methodist church. If my memory serves me well, I myself just so happened to have been the young chorister who brought up Wesley’s name at youth choir practice one afternoon in 1962, when I raised my hand (just like in school) to ask Mr. Butler (later Dr. Butler) why it was that Wesley’s name kept showing up as the lyricist on such a disproportionate number of the hymns in our Methodist Hymnal. Excellent teacher and mentor that he was, the thirty-something Mr. Butler immediately seized upon this “teachable moment” (as it would be called later on, in the 21st century). For my part, I immediately seized (I guess for the first fully conscious time ever) upon the very idea of “the lyricist.” Even though I’d been studying voice with Mrs. Bean at that point for well over a year, her methodology for introducing my voice and ear and brain to what is frequently nicknamed simply “The American Songbook” paid little attention to the people whose genius had composed either the music or the lyrics to those many songs. There was just not sufficient time for that kind of color commentary within the half-hour or so that I’d stand beside her piano every week back then.
And so it came to pass that, while Mr. Butler stood patiently in front of our youth choir, with us seated in our neat rows of SATB, with sopranos up front and basses at the rear . . . stood patiently explaining, in a highly abbreviated lesson, Charles Wesley’s role in the evolution of the mid-18th-century Methodist Movement in England . . . there in Wichita in 1962, it came to pass that my youthful imagination began to formulate its own little idiosyncratic big idea of “the lyricist” – the individual who thinks up and writes down the words to all the songs that have ended up getting sung by anybody, ever – “the lyricist” as something I might one day enjoy being. And since Charles Wesley was the only lyricist I could name, off the top of my head, in that moment of minor epiphany in 1962, my fascination began to fasten upon him. Within the week, therefore, I had paid a visit to First Church’s fairly impressive lending library (which I probably would have done anyway, back during that stage of my self-invention) to check out the most basic illustrated little biography of Charles Wesley that I could find. Significantly, however, my interest in him was not at all analogous to my later adolescent admiration for Bob Dylan or for any of those other songwriters whom I’ve already mentioned to you here. Instead, what drew my attention to Wesley was nothing more sophisticated than the plain fact of his having composed in his lifetime (some 200 years earlier) the words to more than 6,000 hymns, many of which we stood up in our pews and sang from our hymnals, week after week, in exuberant unison, there in that thundering big downtown church of my childhood. In other words, Charles Wesley symbolized for me, very early on, what a songwriter did and was.
205. The Fact-Based Radiance of Mythoklastic Therapy
Anyone familiar with the history and hymnody of the mainstream Anglo-American Protestantism of the late 20th century is likely to be at least remotely familiar with dozens of Wesley’s hymns. Some of those likely to be most familiar to you might include: “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “And Can It Be That I Should Gain,” “O for a Trumpet Voice,” “Come, thou Long-Expected Jesus,” “Spirit of Faith, Come Down,” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” As with most of the other successful Anglo-American Protestant hymnists of the 18th & 19th centuries, Wesley possessed a highly literate versatility which enabled him to paint with a very broad palette, ranging from the meditative to the militaristic. Here, for instance, is the third stanza from his “Soldiers of Christ, Arise” (circa 1741). I chose it to share with you here because of its especially vivid imagery:
Stand then against your foes, in close and firm array;
Legions of wily fiends oppose throughout the evil day.
But meet the sons of night, and mock their vain design,
Armed in the arms of heavenly light, of righteousness divine.
With very little tinkering, this particular Wesleyan hymn could be converted (so to speak) to a 21st-century rallying cry against the pseudo-Christian Right Wing at the heart of what is currently being called America’s “Teaparty Movement.”
At the opposite end of the thematic spectrum, we find “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” which opens thus:
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven, to earth come down;
Fix in us thy humble dwelling;
All thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation;
Enter every trembling heart.
An anthropologist from Neptune, doing a bit of field research here on Earth, might conceivably glance at these eight short lines of English verse (assuming that he, she or it could somehow read English) and conclude that the human species must have a darned good thing going here on our planet. That interplanetary visitor would, of course, be concluding wrongly, since these lines – as is the case with practically all passages of religious text – are hopelessly myth-based. Nonetheless, growing up, as I did, as a semi-adopted orphan boy, stranded among the members of a highly superstitious (mythbound) tribe of aliens, these lines, these hymns, these prayers, these myths did manage to provide me with something like cultural stability throughout my younger days, until such time as the simple complex act of living could lead the way for me onto a brighter, surer path, lighted by the fact-based radiance of mythoklastic therapy. Even here in my extremely late “middle years,” however, I myself can glance at a lyrical line such as “Enter every trembling heart” and shamelessly admit that these mythologies upon which I was suckled have managed also to construct within me a conceptual framework around which I’ve been able to cultivate this imagination that’s gotten me through my adult life.
Being a stranger here myself then, albeit not quite from Neptune, it turned out ironically to be certain of the ideas embedded in the myth-based hymns of that mythbound tribe of earthly aliens among whom I found myself stranded which eventually morphed into the basis for my grown-up fact-based view of the world. Key among these embedded ideas, I made friends early-on with the idea of alienation itself, as we find Charles Wesley implying it here (though perhaps not intentionally) in the second stanza of his 1740 “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”:
Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on Thee is stayed,
All my help from Thee I bring;
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.
206. “God and the imagination are one . . . . .”
And so it was (turn, turn, turn) that, by the time Art Dunbar & I came to be sharing that rickety drafty attic on Fairmount Street, across 17th Street from Wichita State University, through that twelvemonth immediately following the 1970 Kent State Massacre, and I heard for the first time the voice of the great American poet Wallace Stevens reading from out of my mediocre phonograph speakers, from off that turning and turning black vinyl phonograph record that I’d checked out from the downtown branch of the Wichita Public Library . . . reading aloud his “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” . . . by that time, I’d already been able to cultivate – as I was saying a moment ago – this imagination that’s gotten me through my adult life . . . been able to cultivate this imagination around the conceptual framework which had been constructed within me, in large part (ironically), by certain of the mythologies upon which I’d been suckled as a pup. I say “ironically” because of the degree to which Wallace Stevens is anything but myth-based or mythbound. Here’s how he concludes his interior paramour poem:
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Is it any wonder that the poet James Merrill declared this poem to be akin to the 23rd Psalm? I can certainly relate to that comparison – as, I’m sure, many other secular humanist poets can. I guess that the point of the point that I seem to be trying to make here is that, in my own case at least (and, I suspect, in the case of a great many other freethinkers over the past few centuries) my adult understanding of and relationship with my own imagination seems to me to have developed, almost organically (in large part) from out of my earlier adolescent (Dare I say Charles Wesleyan?) conceptualization of and imaginings of God – including, of course, my imagined inner relationship with the so-called indwelling Holy Spirit.
207. The Name of What Was Brought
Fortunately for me, my adolescent mind was soon rescued from domination by such mythbound God-thoughts, thanks to the tidal wave of a zeitgeist whose roar happened to sound a little bit like Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I mean that fortunately for me, it was only a matter of months after my initial exposure to the story of Charles Wesley as lyricist that my fascination with him was overshadowed by the sunlight of an even more meaningful fascination (oxymoron intended). And so as not to mix things up too much for you here, I should make it clear that PP&M were not so much the object of my new fascination as they were the medium through which that object, that substance, that something was delivered into my thirsty veins and my hungry brains. What, then, shall we name that something my fascination with which could begin – let’s say, in the early months of 1963 – to draw my attention and then my affection inexorably away from the church of my childhood and toward the church of a truer truth? What, O what, name shall we give to that something?
For my part, looking back today from this vantage point where I can reflect only dimly a half century later, I feel as though I’m able only to name that “something” with an embarrassingly tautological circularity and so to say awkwardly that that unnamable “something” whose sunlight overshadowed earlier fascinations back then appears to have been made out of whatever the medium of PP&M singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963) and later his “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964) ended up delivering into the thirsty veins and the hungry brains of my adolescent self. In other words: Whatever it was that their singing was bringing me, that’s the name of what was brought.
And as tempting as it may be to conclude simplistically here that what was brought by their singing’s bringings were merely the songs of that “enfant-terrible” Bob Dylan, this past half century of reflecting upon the dynamics of what caused what within me back then (and why) have led me to hypothesize, instead, that those two early Dylan anthems of sociopolitical change (as prime examples, but by no means singular examples) were themselves merely the vehicles, the vessels, the media of that unnamable something. Should we call it an attitude, a philosophy, or a refreshing mist of sea-spray from off the leading edge (the avant-garde?) of that tidal wave of the zeitgeist that I mentioned only a moment ago? For my part, any of these names might do, were each of them not so limiting, so narrow. That sticking point notwithstanding, let’s go with the name of “attitude” for the time being, if only for the sake of furthering our forward momentum.
Why was it, though, that the attitude contained within (indeed, arguably constituting) Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (for example) had such a profound effect on me, at that time in my young life, just when I’d probably have seemed, to most clear-minded secular humanist readers of our present account, to be desperately in need of rescuing from the Babbitristically predatory clutches of what Donald Barthelme once called “the priest hustle” -- ? Why? Because I already knew all that stuff! That's why! I mean that by the time my 14th birthday rolled around, in April of 1963, the fertile ground of my heart and mind had been sown with the seeds of the attitude contained in Dylan’s protest songs so many years prior to my first hearing PP&M singing them to me through the speaker of my AM radio that little more was needed, by that point in time, than the gentle rain (or the hard rain) of those highly unconventional songs to begin the process – under-ground, so to speak – of bringing forth the fruits and vegetables of what I was to become.
208. What the Broken Glass Reflects
Now, we heard the Sermon on the Mount,
And I knew it was too complex.
It didn’t amount to anything more
Than what the broken glass reflects.
~ Bob Dylan, “Up to Me” (1974)
I’m thinking now that it must have been sometime in 1968 (that fateful year), when I’d have still been a freshman at Wichita State, and my father was living secretly in constant dread that he’d be laid off from his job as toolmaker at Boeing Aircraft. It was the year that he turned sixty. He’d worked at Boeing since before Pearl Harbor. It was the only decent job he’d ever had – or that he would ever have. To say that Harry Green was “on edge” most of the time in those days would have been putting it mildly. Even in better times, he’d been famous for his high anxiety level (And who could blame him, given his grim lot in life!), but by the time that evening in our kitchen in early 1968 (that I’m remembering now) rolled around, my poor father’s level of tolerance for any hint that his eldest adopted robot was turning out to possess a mind of his own was at an all-time low.
Let the record show that I was a good son – loving and loyal. And it certainly was not the case that I ever once went out of my way to share my opinions – heretical, liberal, mythoklastic or otherwise – with either of my bigoted, reactionary, pathologically uptight adoptive parents (the only parents I’ve ever known in this life). Still and all, through their network of spies and their surprise dinner table interrogations, it became glaringly obvious to them, by the time of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, in the same month that I would turn nineteen, for instance, that I’d been a fervent admirer of Dr. King’s throughout the 1960’s. By contrast, my father voted for Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential election. The other key bones of contention between my parents and me, back then, were (as I’m sure you’ve already guessed) America’s role in the lives of the people of Indochina and, thirdly, the then-emerging feminist revolution, for which I’d already shown far more active enthusiasm than my jailers deemed appropriate.
Foremost among my joyless parents’ excuses for hating me (definitely not too strong a word) in those days was the perfectly natural, normal and healthy process occurring in our lives which the psychological community often refers to as “individuation.” Had I been raised by Joan Baez’s parents or Pete Seeger’s parents, then this component of the maturity process would have been recognized for the beautiful thing it was, and our lives would have flowed along smoothly without rancor. Harry & Margaret, however, chose, instead, to take their eldest adoptive robot’s individuation personally. Although I believed for several years afterwards that my parents choosing to assume this pose simply manifested their forgivable lack of social skills, a considerable body of new evidence that’s come to light only in recent years reveals a far less forgivable – indeed, a far more sinister – motive on their part. And that motive was, of course, to provide themselves with a rationalized (self-deluding) pretext for lying about me, so as to solicit tons of ill-gotten sympathy from their equally narrow-minded, prejudging relatives and friends – while cravenly distancing themselves from any taint of my liberalism.
Naturally, once this poison had been disseminated throughout their social network (a family and community within which, by rights, I’d have otherwise inherited a well-deserved position of respect) . . . by the time my unforgivably disloyal adoptive parents had spread their toxic disinformation about me, causing the jury of public opinion to hideously morph into a lynch mob, any hope I may have ever thought I had of establishing credibility (much less affection) among the members of that lynch mob was but vanity and wind.
Returning now to that evening in the kitchen in the spring of 1968 – now that it’s been briefly contextualized for you here – my father, who was, indeed, on the brink of being robbed of the only decent job he would ever have (see: “Mr. Dracula” in Section 160, above) . . . my father has been recorded here in my memory-movie, taking grave and loud exception to those aforementioned bones of contention sticking out of the skin of my individuation. I’m not going to waste your time or mine by laying out what I may or mayn’t recall, at this moment, of all the gory details, since such father-son duet scenes have been sufficiently colorfully re-enacted on stage and screen thousands of times, over the past half century. What I’m about, in having taken this bit of your time and mine to contextualize this kitchen moment from 1968 for you here, is an explanation of why it was that I felt my adolescent self being blown away the first time I heard PP&M singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” on some Wichita rock & roll AM radio station or other in 1963. The first time and the tenth time and the twenty-fifth time, etc. I was blown away because it was like coming home – as though some circle was being completed. Similarly, another, somewhat different circle was being completed as a result of that brief but heated conversation between my father and me in my parents’ kitchen in the spring of 1968. To save us both time, Gentle Reader, I’ll cut directly to the punch line:
“Where did you ever come up with these crazy notions of yours, Son?” my father finally demanded. “Who in the world put all these ideas in your head?”
And I, being a good, loving and loyal son, responded to my father without really processing my response, answering him in well-intentioned honesty with this short answer: “Jesus Christ.”
209. Homebrewed Wichita Liberation Theology (1968)
At the time, I suppose that I’d fooled myself into believing that my father actually possessed the mental and emotional equipment to grasp the well-intentioned nature of this answer to his question, and perhaps even to glimpse the logic in it. In distant retrospect, however, I now realize that I surely must have secretly realized then that my father would, instead, explode in a childish rage. He had a bad habit of doing that. Be that as it may, I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination to visualize what then ensued, since my bothering you with it here would blur my point. The point I do not wish to blur is that, up until the moment when I unguardedly provided my worn-out father with the real true answer to his rather malicious grilling, I wasn’t entirely clear about it myself. Nowadays, however, I further realize that the reason that “Jesus” (the semi-historical philosopher, not the mythic demigod) was the correct answer to my father’s mean-spirited question is the same reason that my first hearings of PP&M singing the attitudes, perspectives, opinions, etc. of the young Bob Dylan on the radio in 1963 & ’64 resonated so deeply within my heart and mind with a sympathetic vibration like that of . . . well . . . why not go ahead and say it . . . like the “Chimes of Freedom.”
Let me take a moment to pause here to issue a warning to any parents of small children who may be listening. Moms & Dads, if you don’t want your children to grow up to be Crypto-Nazis (like the German-American mother of some kids with whom I attended elementary school in the 1950’s, she having been in the Hitler Youth as a girl in the 1940’s), then don’t expose your little ones to an excess of anti-democratic, hyper-militarist or fascist ideas and images. (My school-chums’ mom, of course, was the chair of our local John Birch Society chapter.) Now, that’s one side of my warning to you parents out there. The other side of my warning is this – that, by the same token, if you don’t want your children to grow up to be liberal democrats, then don’t expose your little ones to an excess of liberal democratic ideas and images. These might include (but by no means be limited to) letting them go trick-or-treating for UNICEF (as our MYF group did, several years in a row), letting them attend racially integrated schools where they’ll make friends with the very people they’re supposed to hate, and (worst of all) letting them study the careers of such subversive personages as Dr. Martin Luther King, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Paine, Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein, and (in many ways , the most subversive of all) that semi-historical Jewish philosopher most widely known today by the name of “Jesus.”
In the spring of 1968, at the time of that memorable kitchen conversation with my father, I had never heard of “Liberation Theology.” That’s because the term wouldn’t even be coined for another three years by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who wrote one of that movement’s most famous books, A Theology of Liberation (1971). Nevertheless, I suppose that it would be fair to say that it was my own personal homebrewed Wichita Methodist Socialist version of Liberation Theology that I so lovingly flung in my father’s face on that fateful evening. By the time of my nineteenth birthday, it had already been roughly two years since I’d entered a church, except to attend weddings and funerals. That didn’t mean, however, that I’d come away from those first seventeen years of my churching empty-handed or empty-headed. It’s just that what I’d come away with my hands and my head full of wasn’t what Harry & Margaret wanted for them to be full of. Nor did my individuating myself from either my parents or their church (i.e. my becoming a mature adult with a mind of my own) mean that I’d lost interest in studying them as fertile subject matter.
When I hear myself telling you about these things, “Kum Bah Yah” comes to mind. I’m going to infer that you’re familiar with it. “Kum Bah Yah” (sometimes written as “Kumbayah”) is, of course, an African-American spiritual from the 1930’s, which enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960’s and which became a standard campfire song in Scouting and other nature-oriented organizations. We used to sing it at MYF gatherings when I was in junior high. According to the Wikipedia entry I have here in front of me: “The song was originally associated with human and spiritual unity, closeness and compassion, and it still is in many places around the world.” It’s been recorded by hundreds of artists, including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul & Mary. Is it any wonder, then, that “Kum Bah Yah” has, in recent years, become a fashionable code word among neo-feudalist (pro-slavery), pseudo-Christian, Right-Wing extremists such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh with which to ridicule the rest of us? Evidently, these frauds have a following out there that takes twisted glee in associating those of us who like to hold hands and sing “Kum Bah Yah” with what they sometimes call “Surrender-Monkeys.” Whenever I hear the Fox News Channel phonies playing this “Kum Bah Yah” card, I’m reminded that all bullies are basically cowards. Certainly, if I ever have the privilege of meeting you in person, Gentle Reader, I suggest that we hold hands and sing “Kum Bah Yah” – if only in our minds.
As for my father, I seriously doubt that the part of him which voted enthusiastically for the notoriously pro-slavery George Wallace in the 1968 Presidential election would ever, in a thousand eternities, have arrived at feeling comfortable about holding hands and singing “Kum Bah Yah,” anymore than he’d ever, in a thousand eternities, have arrived at seeing within the Rorschach blot of the career and character of Jesus anything remotely similar to what I see. Speaking strictly for myself alone, if I were to try to distill for you here today what I find to be Jesus’ most enduring lessons, this is what that distillate might look like:
Jesus’ Most Enduring Lessons
1. Empathy
2. Irony
3. Poetry
So, you see that everyone seems to want to see Jesus in his or her own image. So, why should I be any exception? (Actually, I honestly believe that my position on the subject is as verifiably valid as that of anyone who’s ever written.)
Chapter XXVIII
“What Do You People Want, Anyway?”
210. “Before they’re allowed to be free . . . . .”
The first time ever I heard Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” was not, strictly speaking, the very first time I’d ever heard them singing a song on the radio, there in Wichita. As nearly as I can recall, that would have been sometime in 1962, when their first hit single, “Lemon Tree,” was released. While “Lemon Tree” was an entirely different sort of song – more traditionally “folky,” if you will – from the two political Dylan anthems which PP&M would be releasing in 1963 & 1964, the tragic theme of its lyrics – the way they portrayed our human pursuit of romantic attachment as being doomed to futility and heartbreak – provided us with a refreshing change of pace from the standard AM rock & roll radio fare of bebop, bubblegum and materialistic insipidity which held virtual hegemony over the Wichita airwaves in those days. I guess what grabbed me about “Blowin in the Wind” was the fact of its being a blend of that empathy, irony and poetry that I just mentioned. And as much as I’d enjoyed several of other early PP&M hit singles, it was that Dylan song that – as I said before – blew me away – and got my full attention.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see now that it was -- unbeknownst to me at the time -- with the genius of the young Bob Dylan that I’d become so enthralled back then. As beautifully and powerfully as PP&M delivered the goods, it was Dylan who was starting to teach me, way back in my early teens, what it was that I longed to understand about how one writes songs about what I’d already begun to understand to be the fundamental realities of human existence, the realities which somehow never seemed to make it onto the airwaves in Wichita, Kansas. Paradoxically, however, they did manage to permeate the walls of First Church. So it struck me as nothing other than purely natural and spontaneous – perhaps even a bit predictable – when an entire stanza from “Blowin’ in the Wind” made its way, one Sunday morning in 1963 (or perhaps ’64), into Dr. Meredith’s characteristically meandering free-association prose-poem of a pastoral prayer, as we in the congregation (my parents and Olive Ann Beech included) sat quietly in our pews with our heads bowed:
How many years can a mountain exist,
Before it is washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist,
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes. and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind;
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Whether or not Dr. Meredith, a crafty and seasoned politician of the pulpit, had chosen to blend this quote from a hit single composed by a relatively unknown young Jewish folksinger from Hibbing, Minnesota (by way of Greenwich Village) into his pastoral prayer that morning as a nod to us few liberals in the congregation or as a nod to us teenagers, who’d have been the ones most likely to appreciate the topically of the reference, I, Galen, was certainly impressed. For one thing, it served to reinforce in me the ultimately misguided belief that the church I attended was on the right side in the struggle for African-American civil rights which I’d seen going on all around me from earliest childhood. After all, it had been only a couple of years before I entered kindergarten at Fairmount Elementary School that the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down its landmark decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education (of Topeka, KS, no less), setting the wheels in motion for the mandatory racial desegregation of America’s public schools.
For reasons never entirely clear to me, Wichita’s public schools (referred to most often nowadays as USD#259) had already been ostensibly desegregated racially for a very long time. As a matter of fact, after my parents moved to Wichita (on the very same day as their wedding in my mother’s parents’ front parlor in Franklin County, Kansas in June of 1941), my mother got a job teaching elementary school. Throughout the late 1930’s, she’d taught in a number of one-room schoolhouses around Franklin County, but it wasn’t until after her marriage to my father and their momentous 1941 move to Wichita that she got her first taste of a modern urban school system. More to the point, the Wichita grade schools where she taught throughout World War II and pretty much up until a year or so before Harry & Margaret adopted me in the spring of 1949 were among the few Wichita schools with any significant population of African-American students. Those schools were Ingalls, Isley and Dunbar. Besides those three where Margaret taught for several years before I came along, the only other elementary schools in Wichita with any recorded African-American enrollment at that time were L’Ouverture, Little and Fairmount, where Kevin & I ended up going during our first few years of public school.
If you’ll forgive me, Gentle Reader, for putting this footnote right here, smack-dab in the middle of our narrative text, I’d like to take a short detour here to acknowledge one recent publication in particular which has proven to be an invaluable resource to me in researching this Portable Bohemia memoir I’ve been sharing with you today. Dissent in Wichita: the Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-1972 by Gretchen Cassel Eick (an associate professor of history at Friends University in Wichita) was published in 2001 by the University of Illinois Press (312 pages; illustrated). It would be impossible for me to overstate the degree to which Eick’s painstaking research and flawless journalism have aided me in my ongoing struggle to make better sense out of that broad range of personal experiences and observations which were, for me at the time, either too close up or too far away or simply too distorted by any number of cultural filters for “The Kid That Was Me” back then to have unscrambled to my own satisfaction. Here, for instance, is a passage from page 62 of her book, from a section entitled “Black and White Collaboration in the Fairmount School Project,” in which she clarifies for me several key elements of my experience of attending a racially integrated elementary school back during that pivotal time in our nation’s history:
Fairmount already had a long-standing reputation for academic excellence as well as a popular principal, Gerald Cron, who was enthusiastic about the opportunity to make Fairmount a model integrated school. The parents designed an elaborate program to integrate the staff and curriculum and offer exceptional education. Enrichment programs, accelerated classes for the brightest students, remedial classes for those who needed them, recreational programs, the latest audiovisual technology, workshops for the community at large, curriculum materials that were racially inclusive, and the use of the latest research in education through the involvement of Wichita University – all of these were part of their program. The Fairmount Elementary School Project brought together an impressive biracial coalition: Wichita University, the NAACP, the Urban League, churches, city government agencies that had an interest in stabilizing the residential area around the university, and dedicated parents whose own educations ranged from dropping out of elementary school to acquiring doctoral degrees. The mayor, a city commissioner, the former chair of the Kansas Anti-Discrimination Commission, and Chester Lewis supported them, and together they persuaded the board of education to add its support.
211. September 24, 1957: Little Rock, Arkansas
I hope that my sharing this pertinent paragraph from Eick’s Dissent in Wichita will serve to further illuminate the reason for my light bulb reaction to the arrival in our lives in 1963 of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as rendered on the radio by PP&M. I realize that, read here in its decontextualized form, the passage I’ve just quoted might tend to give the reader the false impression that Kevin & I were schooled throughout the late 1950’s in some sort of socially-engineered utopia. Nothing could be further from the truth of the matter. Well, almost nothing; of course Little Rock, Arkansas could be – and would be. But I guess that the point I want to make here is that, the Fairmount Elementary School Project notwithstanding, the cost-benefit ratio produced by the racially charged milieu within which Kevin & I spent our early school days could fairly be said to have been a ratio of tremendous lifelong benefit purchased at a much higher short-term cost than the previous paragraph suggests. Perhaps a less abstract, less euphemistic way of saying this might be to say that my own personal experience with America’s and Wichita’s complicated journey from Jim Crow to Barack Obama had many sides to it – not merely two sides like a coin or a sword, but at least as many sides (as many facets) as a well-sewn soccer ball – or as the little diamond in my adoptive mother’s wedding ring.
That fact of multifacetedness notwithstanding, however, I, for one, was deeply grateful on a pretty much daily basis not to be growing up in the so-called Deep South. On my father’s meager salary from his job as a toolmaker at Boeing (about $6,000 per year back then), we couldn’t afford a very nice TV – just an old used Munz, the approximate dimensions of whose fake walnut cabinet must have been something like 40” high x 30” wide x 30” deep, for which Harry had paid “an ol’ boy out at the plant” (i.e. the aircraft plant or factory) $50 in 1956. Its 21” picture was, of course, black & white (but mostly gray) and made of horizontal lines which frequently jerked and rolled. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but it was our window on the world, so that when, on the evening news, as Harry & Margaret & Lois & Kevin & I sat together around that little white enamel-painted wooden dinner table that would later end up in the attic at the center of the universe with Arthur & me in 1970 . . . sat eating our supper, on that paradigm-shifting evening of September 24, 1957, while gazing transfixedly into that TV’s flickering screen at those nine brave African-American youngsters (who’d later go down in history as “The Little Rock Nine”), marching past crowds of angry, screaming white people (mostly women) . . . marching through that ugly racist gauntlet, under the (temporary) protection of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army sent by President Eisenhower . . . gazing transfixedly at that scene played out at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas earlier that same September day in 1957, I, Galen, knew for the first time in my eight short years what it felt like to actually be ashamed of being white.
A half century later, I still have indelibly burned into my memory the weird words shouted by one of the white women in that mob at those brave black kids who just kept looking straight ahead as they marched into the school building. You know the white woman I mean – the one with the dyed blonde hair permed and teased up big, who managed to step up inappropriately close to the nine youngsters (even with all those federal troops standing around with their fixed bayonets) . . . that same white woman who also managed to step up inappropriately close to the news camera and mics and to shriek (like I suppose her great-grandmother probably shrieked at her slaves a hundred years earlier) these bizarre words:
“What do you people want, anyway?”
212. What Their Singing Was Bringing: PP&M
Being only eight years old at the time, and white bigotry being a relatively new phenomenon to me in 1957, my inclination was to take that rageful white woman’s question at face value. I mean that I took it literally. I mean that when I heard her weird words coming out of the speaker on our family’s old used Munz TV that evening, I naïvely misinterpreted her question as having been posed – albeit very rudely – out of some sort of perverse curiosity – as though she actually expected The Little Rock Nine to stop in their tracks and begin enumerating for her (and for the audience at home) a list of their “wants.” In the six or seven years that passed before I first heard PP&M interpreting Dylan’s first couple of big civil rights hits on the radio, however, television (and it really was mostly television, more than any other medium) turned out to have much more to teach me about the goings-on in America’s Deep South. I suppose that the main reason for those sounds and images produced by the 1957 drama of racial integration at Little Rock’s Central High School leaving such an indelible impression on my memory is the fact that they were the very first impressions of their kind to enter my little corner of the world. As anyone who lived through The Civil Rights Era or paid any attention at all to its turbulent sequence of events can attest, that televised turmoil of September 1957 constituted but one of a thousand historic steps in America’s endless journey to where we need to be – to what we the people “want”:
Come senators, congressmen -- please heed the call.
Don't stand in the doorway. Don't block off the hall.
For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled.
There's a battle outside and it’s ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls,
For the times they are a-changin'.
To repeat once again what I still feel to be PP&M’s most lasting legacy to me: “What their singing was bringing was what was brought.” I guess that the only thing new for me to add here to what I’ve already said about their impact on my hungry young heart and mind back then would be that I’ve been doing some rethinking, in the past few minutes, about what I said to you earlier (back in Section 207) regarding the “what” that they brought on the wings of their singing’s bringings. After further reflection on the matter, I’ve now pretty well tumbled to the conclusion that “worldview” is not too lofty a name, after all, to give to the “what” that was brought – not only in the case of PP&M, but probably in the case of the majority of “anthology” performers and sundry musical interpreters of other people’s compositions (although I realize that either Peter or Paul or Mary did, in fact, put their hand to the actual composition of some of the songs they performed).
Of course, it’s one thing to acknowledge that PP&M brought us a worldview and quite another thing to stick one’s neck out by trying to name that worldview. And since I haven’t bothered to try to name Dylan’s or Joni’s or Buffy’s or Judy’s or Joan’s (etc.) worldview, I see no reason to start now. Besides, any name that anyone gives to anyone’s worldview is bound to trivialize, diminish and obscure that worldview. (Isn’t one of the inherent curses of human language that once we’ve named something, we’ve unavoidably bent it and shrunk it?) In the case of my own songs, I’ve often applied the concept of “mythoklasm” or “Mythoklastic Therapy” to the unifying theme I have in mind as their creator. But my saying this is probably not all that helpful to most folks, since those concepts probably say more about my personal, internal agenda as their creator than they do about any worldview constituting a decipherable pattern of decoded meaning which this or that faithfully attentive audience member is likely to be able to find within them, when taking them as a wholeness.
213. In the Back Room of that House on Jarboe Avenue
As you know, Mary Travers passed away recently. And for that matter, my own adoring opinion is that PP&M didn’t produce any fresh material worthy of my music dollar after the 1967 release of Album 1700. So now that they belong to the ages, I guess that I’ll just mention a couple more of my favorite songs of theirs here and then move on.
Prior to the early 1980’s, when a charismatic former movie star named Ronald Reagan began casting his mythocratic spell over the American people, so that, ever since that period of Re-Endarkenment (i.e. Counter-Enlightenment), America’s de facto national motto has been “Blame the Victim” . . . prior to that unfortunate paradigm shift, those of us who are old enough to remember such things will sometimes recall that the fact-based, clear-minded, egalitarian aroma of FDR’s New Deal was still very much in the air we breathed, largely in the form of the policies bodied forth by the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter administrations. Aesthetically, artistically, musically (etc.), this lingering, inspiring aroma occasionally manifested itself in the form of some profoundly penetrating song lyric or other which would manage to voice – at least as effectively as the blues of Bessie Smith, Etta James or Leadbelly – the inherently tragic nature of the human condition, particularly within the lives of the disenfranchised. Just such a song is “Old Coat,” which appears as the second cut on side two of PP&M’s 1962 album entitled Moving (released by Warner Brothers in January of 1963). In my own estimation, few images in the history of lyric literature pack the metaphoric wallop of this one in the song’s final stanza:
Like some ragged owlet with its wings expanded,
Nailed to some garden gate or boardin’,
Thus will I by some men all my life be branded,
Never hurted none this side of Jordan.
“Old Coat” (1962)
by Stookey, Travers & Mezzetti
I can even tell you the very first time I heard them sing that song. It was in the summer of my fifteenth year, when I was still too young to get hired for a real job, so that my Aunt Elsie (Margaret’s older brother, Cecil’s, wife) took pity on me and invited me up to stay for a few days in my cousin Bill’s room at their house on Jarboe Avenue, just south of Westport Road and west of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. It was one of those summers when Bill was dividing his time between the Boy Scout camp down in Osceola, Missouri and a family friend’s farm down in Franklin County, Kansas. He was exactly a year older than me, was Cecil & Elsie’s youngest child and their only son, was a good-natured fellow, handsomer and more athletic than me – and absolutely crazy about horses. It was there in Bill McCall’s room at the back of that house on Jarboe, with its windows looking out onto the tree-shaded backyard and its every available horizontal surface crowded with Bill’s Little League trophies and his statues of mustangs, palominos, cowponies, etc., in the Kansas City summer of 1964, that I first heard PP&M’s earliest three vinyl albums.
Come to think of it: I’m not even sure that those particular albums belonged to Bill. I think that they actually may have belonged to Elsie. Certainly, those of us left alive who knew her back then can recall that she was, in fact, “a pretty sharp cookie” (as we used to say), for a Midwestern working-class housewife and grandmother in her late forties. I specifically recall that her taste in music was vastly more eclectic, enlightened and “with it” than that of either of my own parents, whom I never caught intentionally listening to anything more progressive than a Marian Anderson 12” 78-rpm recording they’d purchased before I came along. (I believe that it was the one on which she sings “Ave Maria,” but I could be wrong.) Elsie McCall would have been market-segmented in the 1960’s (if anyone at Billboard Magazine was even doing such a thing back then) as a woman who enjoyed the relatively benign folk sounds of the likes of the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limelighters, The Kingston Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, and her all-time favorites, the Smothers Brothers – but who drew the line at welcoming into her tidy Methodist world the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie or Joni Mitchell. And again, those of us left alive who knew her back then can easily compute how that line she drew came about.
214. The Tsunami of Human History
The other song from PP&M that I thought I might take just a moment to mention here as one whose positive impact on my psyche has been particularly long-lasting is “The Great Mandella (The Wheel Of Life)” by Peter Yarrow. Although it appears as the sixth cut on the first side of the group’s 1967 Album 1700 (so named because its original LP issue was Warner Bros. Records’ catalogue #WB-1700), I seem to have some vague recollection of having heard that song played as a single on the radio in Wichita (I mean commercial AM rock & roll radio – probably “Yours truly KLEO” [“colorful Kleo”]), on several occasions in late 1966. But again, I could be wrong. I’m getting old. Even the most significant experiences of my youth are starting to smoosh together like bright pictures in colorful wet paint.
As I imagine you’re already aware, “The Great Mandella” tells the story of a conscientious objector from the point of view of his disapproving father. It hit the airwaves throughout America at the height of the Vietnam War, and is arguably one of the very most effective anti-war songs from that period. For my peer group and me, it could not but hold an extra special significance, as we were all approaching the end of our high school careers and our eighteenth birthdays, which meant – for the males among us – that time in our young lives when we were legally obligated to register for the draft or face a mandatory prison sentence. Rather than try to paraphrase the tragic events poetically recounted in “The Great Mandella,” I’d prefer simply to share the ending of the song, its final refrain:
Take your place on The Great Mandella,
As it moves through your brief moment of time.
Win or lose now, you must choose now;
And if you lose, you’ve only wasted your life.
“The Great Mandella (The Wheel of Life)”
by Peter Yarrow, 1966; from Album 1700 (1967)
I think that the reason this particular song, which appears on PP&M’s last truly great album, can still send a chill through me and cause my eyes to fill with tears, nearly a half century after I first heard it on the radio, there in my senior year at East High, has to do with how perfectly it resonates with my own sense of who I am and what I believe my task in this life to be. Nor do I believe myself to be at all unique in my response to the song. It is, after all, about all of us and our especial places on The Great Mandala (the more standard spelling), The Wheel of Life – the tsunami of human history. Deep down, beneath the surface of one draft resistor’s hunger strike and beneath the song’s implicit messages about the Vietnam War and/or about war in general – and beneath all else that we might perceive to be timely and topical about “The Great Mandella” (the song), what moves us most is its way of reminding us all that we are each important as participants in history’s vast epic.
215. Upon this Planet of Liars
Of course, not everyone sees it that way. I realize that there are many here among us who prefer either to blend into the scenery or to assume such utterly somnambulistic roles in the world as to pretend not to have a place on The Great Mandala – the tsunami of human history – in anything even remotely resembling the profound existential sense in which Peter Yarrow’s Vietnam-Era song lyric paints it. Then again, there are more of us here than seems to be generally recognized, either in the popular media or in the popular imagination, who prefer, instead, to embrace our very puniness, frailty and ultimate mutability in the world as we might embrace a badge or a trophy. Such a one is the dramatic voice – the “bum” – I set out to create when I sat down in 1986 to compose a song which I eventually titled “A Bum in the Rain.”
When I was a lad growing up in Wichita, sitting with Kevin and our adoptive parents at their breakfast table or supper table, during those years in the mid-1960’s immediately prior to Margaret & Harry’s aforementioned heavy-handedness in reacting against my individuation away from their personal bigotries, we used to have civilized conversations, some of which revolved around news items which happened to appear in that morning’s Wichita Eagle & Beacon (as it was then called – but which my friends and I had nicknamed The Beagle). One such item, which stuck in my mind for many years afterward because of the conversation which ensued between Harry and me as a result of the item’s appearance that morning, involved a series of recent overnight arsons in a local salvage yard (aka “junk yard”) where piles of discarded rubber tires appeared to have been the sole target. I asked my dad what he made of it and was both surprised and educated by his answer.
Harry, whose life story throughout much of the Great Depression of the 1930’s could reasonably be called “a Woody Guthrie song,” explained that he’d known hobos (aka “bums”) who’d pour kerosene on piles of junk tires and set them on fire to keep warm on cold winter nights. Twenty years later, the bleak imagery of hopeless resignation which Harry’s rather extensive lesson concerning the downside of a bum’s existence evoked in me came howling back at me one wintry night in the middle of the Reagan years (those years which the historian Haynes Johnson has so aptly referred to as Sleepwalking Through History). So I sat down and wrote this little song:
A Bum in the Rain
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved
1.
Soon the fire will die, and in the darkness I'll sit down
Among the piles of smoldering tires
And search within my center
For the seed of an original idea
To dodge that shark that picked up my scent,
Even before I started to bleed.
Tomorrow may bring new rains and perhaps new fires,
And, again, I'll be the one the darkness hires
To think about its dominion
And the spark at its center
Toward which all my questions lead.
2.
Soon the power company will cut the juice,
And February will swoop in
From beyond these vapor lamps
And have me declared insane for ever expecting
This dead land to produce any more than
This daily harvest of pain.
Tomorrow may bring new terrors, tall and blonde,
And, again it will be my job to break the bond
Which pulls me away from my center with the excuse
That the powers of darkness think they know
What is best for my brain.
3.
Soon I'll have nothing left but my desires
To come between me and this brittle rain,
Needles and pins from a sky I never agreed
To walk beneath, upon this planet of liars,
These driven dead, stoned on lies and greed.
Tomorrow may find me frozen in Lovers' Lane or
Entwined in golden arms in Southern Spain, but
Sitting alone in this cold tonight requires
More resignation than I'd ever expected to need.
Chapter XXIX
If You Want Peace, Work For Mythoklasm
~
To base a belief or worldview on science or what passes for science is to reach out to the nonbelievers and the uninitiated, to say that they too can come to the same conclusions if they make the same systematic observations and inferences. The alternative is to base one’s worldview on revelation or mystical insight, and these are things that cannot be reliably shared with others. In other words, there’s something deeply sociable about science; it rests entirely on observations that can be shared with and repeated by others. But in a world where ‘everything you decide is true, is true,’ what kind of connection between people can there be? Science, as well as most ordinary human interaction, depends on the assumption that there are conscious beings other than ourselves and that we share the same physical world, with all its surprises, sharp edges, and dangers.
~ from: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books/ Henry
Holt & Company; 2009) pp. 71-72
~
216. An Almost Newtonianly Fundamental Quasi-Law
Over the course of the past four decades, Art Dunbar has recommended to me what have often turned out to be some of the most important books, films, articles, etc. to impact my life. A few weeks ago, for example, he suggested that I might enjoy Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, which I just quoted, since she seems to be writing about some of the same themes upon which I’ve been touching here. And, as usual, Art’s hunch as to what was likely to grab me turned out to be right on target.
At this particular moment, I’m only about halfway through Bright-Sided, but I’ve already come across a number of ideas and phrases that I’ll undoubtedly be stealing in my future writing. (Thanks, Art! Thanks, Barbara!) As you can see, I was especially smitten with the above passage from Chapter Two, entitled “The Years of Magical Thinking.” When I first encountered it, my heart and mind and gut reacted with that same “oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” reflex that I’ve already mentioned (to wretched excess) in these pages. (Cf. Alexander Pope’s 1701 “Essay on Criticism.”)
What I hear Ehrenreich articulating in the above quote, better than I feel that I ever have (though not for lack of trying) in my own writing, is an almost Newtonianly fundamental quasi-law which states that: fact-based living is an absolutely necessary ingredient for human happiness – and that its absence and/or opposite will inevitably result in human suffering in the form of alienation, confusion, anxiety, stress, and – I would venture to extrapolate – in a whole host of under-examined human misfortunes, ranging from ethnocentric xenophobia to violent psychopathologies.
I just now used the phrase “human misfortunes,” because it conjures the desired imagery. Nevertheless, some preferable diction likely lurks in the wings. That’s because “misfortune” hints at an absence of human agency in the calamity in question, and the calamity which most interests your humble servant is that type of calamity in which we may find winners & losers, victims & abusers, Iagos & Desdemonas, Nazis & Jews, lynch mobs & scapegoats, etc. And the reason that the alleviation of that brand of human suffering which involves human agency interests me far more than does its opposite is that that’s the brand of human suffering which we as a people have been most generously endowed (with tools such as science, writing, speech, reason, empathy, irony, poetry, etc.) to attempt to alleviate – if we but have the will.
You’ll recall that Shakespeare, in Act iv, scene 4, has Hamlet say:
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
As one who grew up thoroughly churched and believing, well into my teens, in the Maker of whom Shakespeare has Hamlet speak here, I find it extremely easy to let my secular humanist imagination go for an afternoon’s meander along the myriad sun-drenched footpaths of logic and illogic into which Hamlet’s assertion here invites us. Paradoxically, it was as much in my churching as in any other realm that I first stumbled blindly into these myriad sun-drenched footpaths. Bathed in the warmth of the music from that giant organ at First Church, when I was in my early teens, with that Abstract Expressionist stained-glass window filtering the Sunday morning rays into postmodernist thought-patterns, and the minister’s soothingly pseudo-paternal babble adding to that warm, enveloping atmosphere of imposed tranquility (such a refreshing “sanctuary” – or so I once believed – from the angst of early adolescence) – bathed, soothed, enveloped, there then – that was where I first began to doubt. But when has it ever been otherwise? Wasn’t Mother Church the womb in which was conceived and nurtured the liberating doubts of every important Western Post-Christian Enlightenment leader we can possibly name from the 16th, 17th or 18th century?
217. Out of the Myth-Based Quagmire
I think that it must have been sometime in the early 1990’s, perhaps around the time when Bill Clinton was elected to his first term as President, that I first caught sight of that bumpersticker (which I’m quite sure that you’ve seen) with that now-famous quote from Pope Paul VI: “If You Want Peace, Work For Justice.” That was a memorable moment – mainly because I’d been saying similar things myself in the years leading up to that moment. Of course, when it was only Galen Green saying it, that pithy little conceptual nugget received less attention than when His Holiness in the Vatican said it. But that was alright; I wasn’t bitter. The important thing was that it made its way onto a million or so car bumpers where it could furnish food for thought to a people whose minds hungered for just such thoughts (whether they knew it or not).
There was, however, one crucial difference between Paul the Sixth’s way of expressing it and my own. If my memory serves me well, what I’d scribbled in the pages of one of my journals (now lost to history) back then went something like this:
If you want peace, then work for justice.
If you want justice, then work for truth.
If you want truth, then work for mythoklasm.
And therefore:
If you want peace, then work for mythoklasm.
This would have been during that period when I was right on the verge of adopting the concept and process of mythoklasm and Mythoklastic Therapy as the centerpiece of nearly all of the political writing I’ve done since.
In retrospect, what I suppose I was doing when I laid out my thoughts in that way was challenging certain of my allies on the ideological Left to accept that same unfashionable configuration of realities which I myself had already had to accept in order to arrive at what I considered to be a workable model for educating the American electorate out of the myth-based quagmire into which twelve years (1981-1993) of Reagan-Bush mythocracy had sleepwalked them. What I mean by this is that, while unanimity generally prevailed on the American Left as to our shared thirst for peace and justice, such had never been the case when it came to choosing our priorities, methodologies, coalition partners, preferred idioms of rhetoric, etc. Within this fractious disconnect, I began to see more and more clearly a debilitating reluctance on the part of many to challenge (i.e. to critique, to “klast,” to debunk) those toxic myths which undergirded Republican policies of governance. Upon closer inspection, the most unfashionable reality of all came into terrifying focus – the fact that the reason for these killer myths being sacred, taboo, off-limits, is that their habitat turns out to be the collective psyche of the American electorate – the very beast to whom both major political parties must needs pander and whom not even we ourselves can afford to alienate. Our task, then, should we choose to accept it, would seem to be that of performing a kind of Mythoklastic Therapy upon that collective psyche – but doing it in such a way as not to wake the patient until the exorcism is complete.
218. Back to those First Few Fragrant Days of that Summer
That brings us to Dr. Gerald Paske. Travel with me now, if you will, back to the summer of 1970, to that angular cave of an attic there on the edge of the Wichita State University campus, and to young Arthur Dunbar, who is about to begin his second year as a senior at WSU, majoring in Math, with a minor in Philosophy. As nearly as I can recall, Art has (in our flashback) completed all his requirements for his bachelor’s degree, but has decided to stick around for the ’70-’71 school year to indulge himself in a flavorful assortment of elective courses which will enable him to graduate in the spring of ’71 with a double major. Even though I’m quite sure that he explained all this to me at the time in precise detail, I’ve nonetheless managed to delude myself for the past four decades into tacitly assuming that the main reason for Art’s remaining in Wichita for that second senior year was for the incomparable pleasure of my company. In any event, I was lucky that he did – for about a thousand reasons which I’m not going to stop to innumerate for you right at the moment.
Travel with me then, if you will, back to those first few fragrant days of that summer of 1970. Arthur & I have just moved into the attic at the center of the universe, he from the dorm, I from the home of Susan & Dr. F.W. Nelson at 155 N. Roosevelt – that spacious white stucco Mediterranean-style house with its terra cotta roof which will later play such a fascinating role in American letters as the setting for a good deal of Antonya Nelson’s (eleven years old in our flashback) excellent semi-autobiographical fiction.
If you look closely, through the foggy ruins of time, you’ll be able to zoom in on Arthur & me as we’re walking together across campus from our old new digs in the “attic house” at 1725 N. Fairmount to Dr. Paske’s Philosophy of Religion summer school class in Corbin Hall, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and named after Jeff Corbin’s father, Harry, the former president of the university (see: Sections 24 thru 28, above), whose library I visited that day in 1960 when Jeff invited me to lunch, when I was in the fifth grade at Fairmount Elementary. (You’ll recall that it was from the west window of President Corbin’s enchanted library, in that noontime when I was ten years old, that I caught that epiphanal x-ray glimpse of what we might call "Harry Green's Planet" from the vantage point of "Harry Corbin's Planet," little more than a football field away -- so near and yet so far.)
And as you zoom in on Arthur & me walking together across campus to Dr. Paske's class in Corbin Hall, you've already undoubtedly noticed that Arthur is carrying a big fat textbook, along with a spiral notebook for taking notes, while I, on the other hand, am carrying only a spiral notebook -- no textbook. This is because Arthur is actually enrolled in the course and I'm not. And that's because I've gone to Dr. Paske ahead of time to ask his permission to sit in on his class (though not formally to "Audit" it, as they used to call it), for the pure pleasure of listening to Wichita State's most notorious avowed atheist teach his abbreviated summer school course on religion.
Jerry Paske was a tall slender young professor with Leon Trotsky glasses, a fiery mane of wavy red hair and a high-pitched forceful voice like the demythologized Lincoln’s, as described in primary historical documents. The summer before, Kate & I would occasionally have the opportunity of watching him swim what seemed to us like interminable laps in the bustling sun-drenched faculty club
pool where James Nelson and his girlfriend would often invite us to join them on hot afternoons. It reminded me of some enviably sleek aquatic creature out of Northern European mythology. As a classroom instructor, Paske surpassed most of the competition. Like Bill Nelson and Geraldine Hammond, he possessed both an effervescent passion for his subject and a rare talent for delivering that passion packaged in the form of the most infotainingly dispassionate insights one could hope for.
As nearly as I can recall, the very first time I laid eyes on Dr. Paske would probably have been when he spoke at one of the WSU student movement’s many antiwar rallies. The next time would most likely have been at one of Susan & Bill Nelson's cocktail parties or front-parlor get-togethers or whatever various people called them back then. Between 1969, when I first found myself invited into that fluid social circle, until 1977, when the dissolution of my marriage to Kate Schulte, along with my inevitable signing on with new, out-of-town collaborators, made my presence awkward, I was lucky enough to rub shoulders (sometimes literally) with some of the university's liberal arts college's most colorfully controversial, forward-thinking and sometimes radically outspoken faculty members -- as well as with their equally flamboyant spouses or partners. Jerry Paske was one of these.
Admittedly, it was to Dr. Paske's considerable charisma that I was initially drawn. After all, we were -- whether we fully realized it at the time or not -- living The Counterculture, when such neo-enlightenment campus figures as Dr. Nelson, Dr. Hammond, Dr. Sowards and Dr. Paske earned and received a very special brand of admiration from serious-minded undergraduates such as Art Dunbar and Galen Green. Thus it was that when Arthur happened to mention to me, one day near the end of the spring semester, that he’d signed up for Paske’s Philosophy of Religion summer course, I instantly turned green with envy – and immediately set about making arrangements to sit in on at least a few of the class sessions. (The reason I didn’t simply enroll in the course had to do with my needing to take an English course – Victorian Essayists – that summer, which, along with my work schedule at the library, provided more than sufficient counterbalance of gravitas to my blossoming full-time romance with Kate Schulte.)
219. My Admittedly Embryonic Thoughts
It was a full year later, however, before I finally got around to taking Philosophy of Education from Gerald Paske – the course whose curriculum sowed within me the seeds of that hope which still plays a major role in getting me out of bed in the morning – i.e. the hope that the American people are teachable. Even though Philosophy of Education was only a 9-week summer school course (analogous to the one that Arthur had taken a year earlier), I seem to recall that Paske had us buy at least three paperbacks to use as textbooks, only one of whose title I can recall at the moment. And that was Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, which, quite frankly, didn’t live up to the promise implied by its sexy title. Nevertheless, Paske, like any adroit infotainer of the classroom, managed almost magically to stretch the germ of the theme contained within the book’s title into an overarching theme for the course of that 9-week course, there in the early summer of 1971.
As you’ve heard me say repeatedly here in these pages, with reference to the full range of early influences on the process of my eventual becoming: the provocative notion of teaching as a subversive activity, along with Gerald Paske’s insight-filled and – dare I say – subversive mode of delivering that provocative notion to my brain, were just what I was ready, willing and able to absorb, there in the early summer of 1971, in those dizzying days immediately following my marriage to Kate Schulte. Fortunately for me – and for the millions of beneficiaries of Mythoklastic Therapy – those were not all that I was thirstily absorbing back then. Paske’s Philosophy of Education course was, as you would naturally infer, designed to target undergraduate students (mostly seniors) who were intending to be certified as either high school or elementary school teachers and subsequently to spend a goodly portion of their productive years toiling in those worthy vineyards. Fortunately for me – and for the millions of beneficiaries of Mythoklastic Therapy – I was not among their number.
As nearly as I can recall, I bolted from what was called “The Teaching Track,” sometime during my sophomore year. It seems to have been right around that same period that I stumbled upon an unassuming paperback in the CAC (student union) bookstore entitled Myth and Mythmaking (1960), an anthology of essays edited by Henry A. Murray. In retrospect, I believe that much of what attracted me to it was the fact of my recognizing simultaneously my interest in myth and my impatience with what appeared to me at the time to be an almost total lack of available material on the workings of myth within the lives of we post-Renaissance characters upon history’s burning stage.
Myth and Mythmaking provided me with my earliest exposure to several of the 20th century’s most insightful and influential thinkers in the field, including Thomas Mann, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye and Harry Levin. Here are the titles of but three of the anthologized essays, just to give you some idea of the book’s emphasis: “The Historical Development of Mythology” by Campbell, “Myth and Mass Media” by McLuhan and “Freud and the Future” by Mann. While my favorite mentor Bill Nelson had often mentioned Joseph Campbell’s works in the two literature courses I’d taken from him, and while his eldest son James, my good friend since the 7th grade, had been toting around and touting the ideas in Marshall McLuhan’s wildly popular book-length patchwork illustrated quasi-essay entitled The Medium is the Massage (co-created with graphic designer Quentin Fiore) during this same period, and while my lifelong bosom buddy Art Dunbar was then in the process of reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and educating me about Mann’s ideas, it was, for me, the juxtaposition of these particular thinkers’ thoughts in Myth and Mythmaking which seems to have served as the catalyst which invited the electrochemical spark within my psyche eventuating in my own first attempts at writing down my admittedly embryonic thoughts as to the nature and function of myth within the very culture in which I myself had swum throughout my entire life.
220. Myths as Prelogical Presuppositions
It may also have been the fact (which I now find supremely ironic) of my never having taken a single course in anthropology which allowed my reading of Myth and Mythmaking to prove so galvanizing. As Fate would have it, Dr. James Nickel’s Epistemology course turned out to be the unlikely portal through which I was to find myself entering this vast open field which I choose to call – for lack of a more telling term – “Historical Anthropology,” and through which field you’ve come upon me happily wandering here today. According to Dr. Nickel’s on-line CV, he was born in 1943, which would put him at right around 28 years of age when he and I spent an entire 18-week semester together (i.e. perhaps 30 or 40 classroom sessions) in one or another of the stuffy basement classrooms in historic old Fiske Hall, the oldest surviving building on the Wichita State campus in 1971 and one of my personal favorites for any number of reasons, not the least of which was its attractive faux Ivy League architecture which invited me to pretend that I was attending what I considered to be a real university.
Despite the stuffiness of that particular classroom, and despite young Dr. Nickel’s somewhat nervous style of delivery (which I’m sure that he overcame with age), I quickly acquired a taste for epistemology. This process of discovering within myself what struck me at first as being a wholly unaccountable enthusiasm for investigating how we know what we know provides me today with one of the happier memories from those undergraduate years. At the risk of sounding like a broken record: I’m sure that much of the reason for my rapid conversion to the Gospel of Epistemology (or so it seemed at the time) must surely have been the fact of my having already been an epistemologist for many years prior to my signing up for Dr. Nickel’s (1971) Epistemology course. I just didn’t know it yet. (I suppose that that’s the way it is with a great many of our pathways, portals and vocations in this semi-knowable life here on Earth.)
The title of my Epistemology term paper was “Myth & Nakedness.” It referred to my chosen interpretation of the ending lines of one of my favorite William Butler Yeats poems:
A Coat
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Admittedly, a well-informed or highly opinionated Yeats scholar might well choose to interpret “A Coat” (1916) in some way radically different from my own view. The burden of my Epistemology term paper, however, wasn’t so much to seek or to claim an interpretation or exegesis of Yeats’ delightful little poem as it was to employ the poem’s rather ambiguous system of metaphor to illuminate my own as-yet undeveloped thoughts about the nature and function of myth in our daily lives.
I’m pretty sure that at least one copy of “Myth and Nakedness” still survives somewhere in the world – most likely in the deepest, darkest recesses of Art & Nancy Dunbar’s attic in Des Moines. Not having a copy of it here in front of me, I am nevertheless able to vaguely recall a few of its highlights for the purpose of today’s telling. Perhaps the most significant of these was my settling on the phrase “prelogical presuppositions” as being what I myself preferred as a functional definition of “myths,” as I was discussing them throughout my essay. My choice of this definition was greatly reinforced when the poet Bruce Cutler congratulated me on its accuracy, after he’d been kind enough to peruse “Myth and Nakedness.” Naturally, I was flattered by Cutler’s affirmation of my critical judgment, and have consequently gone on to test the efficacy of his assessment of my definition at every opportunity since.
221. The Deep Sociability of Mythoklastic Therapy
The central problem with which I found myself confronted from the very outset of my attempt, as an ambitious undergraduate philosopher in 1971, to explore the mysteries of “myth” in our daily lives was this: like so many other words, “myth” has been used, over a very long period of time, to mean two different things. On the one hand, myth means legend or story. On the other hand, myth means fashionable falsehood or mass delusion or any cluster of widely believed misinformation. In a very real sense (or so it seems to me), the word “myth” can actually mean two diametrical opposites. Therefore, my choosing “prelogical presupposition” as my preferred definition – at least for the purpose of that essay – represents an attempt to acknowledge, if not solve, this problem. My 1971 essay was, after all, an Epistemology term paper, not an examination of either ancient legends involving the supernatural or of modern mass delusion.
The only reason I’m telling you all this, of course, is to provide you with a glimpse of some of the larger roots of this Mythoklastic Therapy which seems to have evolved into my life’s work. Another branch (or tributary) of those roots – and one of equal importance – found its embodiment in a simple quotation from the American humorist Josh Billings (actually Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-1885), which I first ran across (as Destiny would have it) during this same period that I’ve been reconstructing for you here today – i.e. the period surrounding the attic year. Because I’ve seen this deceptively simple Josh Billings quotation stated in print in so many various forms over the years, I’m not going to presume to “quote” it for you here so much as to merely paraphrase it. According to Josh Billings: It’s better to know nothing than to know what isn’t so. The concept behind these words quickly became axiomatic to me. And, once again, that was, in large part, because the seeds of that concept had already been sown, years earlier, into my epistemological heart, by the experience of having grown up in a household and a town and a world where most of the human damage I’d witnessed being done seemed to me to be caused by folks “knowing” what wasn’t so. And another word for what those damageful folks “knew” – a word which I found myself adopting, there in that attic year – was “myth.”
I began this chapter with that wonderful little passage from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided because of its everyday common-sensical way of saying something which I personally believe to be of the utmost importance. For me, Ehrenreich’s deceptively simple phrase, that “there’s something deeply sociable about science” reaches out sociably to connect that deep sociability of science to what I know to be the deep sociability of mythoklasm and of Mythoklastic Therapy. In this world we share, in which anti-science and counter-enlightenment and all manner of toxic myth lurk and loom as persistent threats to peace, justice and human happiness, it is of the utmost importance that more and more of us come to embrace the deep sociability of science – a feat which can be accomplished only when we’ve come to clast (or klast) the lies that blind us and bind us to the mythocrats who persist – as of this writing – in enslaving us to their neo-feudalistic predations.
222. A Mythoklastic Love Song
I want to return to this theme in future chapters. Before moving on, however, let’s take a look at yet another of my song lyrics from the 1980’s. “There’s a Worm in My Future” might reasonably be called a mythoklastic love song. By the time I got through high school, I was feeling more than a little bit put off by the fact that the vast majority of the thousands of love songs I’d ever heard insisted on implicitly promoting what I considered to be a dangerous and debilitating mythology involving erotic love’s undying, eternal nature. You may well have experienced a similar discomfort, from time to time. I’m not talking here about lifelong monogamy, which can be quite beautiful. I’m talking, instead, about all those songs which – if taken at face value – can come across as insulting any listener’s intelligence regarding the place of even the most steadfast lovers in Nature’s grand scheme.
When I take a minute to read through this little mythoklastic love song’s lyrics today – more than two decades after I composed them – I’m suddenly reminded of the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which was not even on my radar screen at the time I was composing “There’s a Worm in My Future” in 1989. I’m sure you know the line I mean:
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
When you read my song’s lyrics, you’ll understand instantly why I make this mental connection. Even more illuminating perhaps is another 17th century poem which popped into my mind just now – and which likewise was not even on my radar screen in ’89. That’s Andrew Marvell’s masterful gem of a carpe diem entitled “To His Coy Mistress.” Certain of its lines and images seem to me to be getting at what my song is getting at. For example:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
and
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
As for my calling mine a mythoklastic love song, I suppose I’d have to say that that’s because of its attempt to transcend those conventional mythologies prelogically presupposed by most other love songs. Does it work? Is it transcendent? Does the singer’s unblinkered acceptance of the lovers’ mortality make their love even sweeter? You tell me:
There’s a Worm in My Future
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved
There’s a worm in my future, you sexy creature.
And that’s why tonight I’ll worship the moist
Folds of your presence before it goes
The way of all flesh, the way which Great Nature
Has programmed us all to go.
Who knows with what foul virus these hours be laced?
There’s a worm in my future, so tonight I’ll hoist
What’s left of me to drink in each feature
Of you, my goddess, my purple rose.
There’s a worm in my future. And when I’m deceased,
It’s not going to matter which position we chose,
Tonight, as we feel the wings of that vulture
Who’ll pick clean our beautiful folds which have voiced
Love’s lame complaints. Let’s forget that stretcher
Which will tote us away to where we can’t expose
Nature for the monster She is who’d bulldoze
A love like this one we share in the creased
Darkness that swallows us up like our culture.
There’s a worm in my future. And that’s why I pose
Here with you, so the children of the future
Can see what we were – me with my greased-back
Smile and you with that cute little nose.
There’s a worm in my future. And that’s why Love’s boist’rous
Tunes flow out of my fingers to torture
Nature’s foul program, that this darkness might suture
Our souls, that here where brief love glows,
Your flesh might prove my flesh’s Christ.
~
Chapter XXX
Joining in the Conversation
223. The Poet Bruce Cutler
It was Bruce Cutler who first encouraged me to join in the conversation. As nearly as I can recall, the scene was played out in a booth in what they used to call the Alibi. That was the name of the cafeteria-style burger & fries & cherry coke student eatery at the south end of the 2nd floor of what they used to call the CAC (Campus Activities Center) or Student Union back then, but which probably has another name nowadays. There was a well-stocked juke box; I remember it fondly. Had it been the lunch rush, you’d be able to hear above the din Paul McCartney singing “Let It Be” with the Beatles or “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” with his wife, Linda. (“Hands across the water/ Heads across the sky.”) But it’s now the middle of the afternoon. Bruce and I are sitting across the anchored table from each other, drinking coffee – mine with cream, his black. The Alibi’s thirty or forty booths are mostly empty now, leaving the dining area so quiet that we actually have to lower the decibel level of our voices from where they’d have been if we’d been meeting in his office at the north end of the 3rd floor of Jardine Hall, instead of in this less formal setting.
I’d be kidding both of us – both you and myself, Gentle Reader – were I to presume to remember the exact date of this pivotal meeting with Bruce Cutler, there in that quiet booth on the Wichita State campus, but I suppose that it must have been shortly after the beginning of the fall semester in September of 1971. As I stated earlier (Section 219), I’d spent that summer getting married to Kate Schulte and getting settled into that cramped, dank, semi-finished ($100 per month) basement apartment in the 1600 block of Belmont, near the Ken-Mar shopping strip – that “Honeymoon Dungeon” referred to earlier in the title of Chapter XV – as well as taking the aforementioned Philosophy of Education class from Gerald Paske and working part-time as an assistant circulation librarian in the Work-Study Program, checking tens of thousands of books in & out & out & in, or reshelving and re-re-reshelving periodicals or sitting at either the east exit or the west exit of the Ablah Library to peek inside the bags, briefcases and purses of my fellow students (on the theory of keeping honest folk honest, while acknowledging that nothing was going to stop a determined thief). So far as I know, Bruce had spent the summer traveling a bit, writing, reading and persevering in his longtime project of building WSU’s creative writing program into an increasingly vital and viable entity.
It wasn’t until Bruce Cutler died of kidney cancer on March 24, 2001 in Santa Cruz, California that I finally learned some of the basic facts behind the local legend. (And that was only because Art Dunbar happened somehow to run across Bruce’s obituary in the on-line L.A. Times and pass it along to me.) Bruce had been born October 8, 1930 in Evanston, Illinois and had attended Northwestern University, the University of Iowa and (what later became) Kansas State University where he received his M.S. in 1957. He did further graduate study at the Universita degli Studi in 1957-58. Of special interest to me was Bruce’s having been a conscientious objector in the early 1950’s. That’s the short version of his background. He ended up teaching at Wichita State from 1960 until 1978, eventually serving as Adele M. Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities and, of course, coordinator of the creative writing program (a chair that’s been filled now for many, many years by another old friend of mine, the superhuman poet Albert Goldbarth.)
If my memory serves me well, I first met Bruce a few months before I’d have earned enough undergraduate credit hours to be permitted to enroll in my first poetry workshop with him. That would have been during the relatively brief period in 1968 when I had a part-time Work-Study job as a kind of junior assistant custodian on the 3rd floor of Jardine Hall, for a couple of hours every weekday afternoon from like 3 to 5 p.m. – sweeping the floors and emptying the wastebaskets in all the English professors’ and Sociology professors’ offices, as well as in the hallways and classrooms and restrooms. That grimy gig turned out to be loaded with serendipity, since it afforded me the unusual opportunity, not only to meet Bruce whilst tidying up his enchantingly literary office, but to make my first personal contact with numerous other English professors, several of whom would eventually loom large in my legend as either friends or mentors or both. These included Geraldine Hammond, James Merriman, Helen Throckmorton and Jerry Hoag.
224. The False Dichotomy of Cooked & Raw
What I am about to tell you about is a conversation. But it’s not the conversation to which the title of this chapter, “Joining in the Conversation,” refers. Instead, the conversation I’m about to tell you about is a conversation I had with Bruce Cutler about the conversation referred to in this chapter’s title. The conversation that my September 1971 conversation with Bruce was about is what has sometimes been referred to as “The Great Conversation,” meaning the sum total of all the chatter and all the dialogues and all the private correspondence, etc. among all the literati – both great and small – alive at any given moment, since human language began, up until and passing through the present moment and on into whatever future our species may inherit. In other words, what Bruce began encouraging me to think about doing, there in the quiet of the Alibi, on that September afternoon, at the outset of my senior year at Wichita State, was choosing a handful of my favorite contemporary poets with whom to initiate a correspondence.
To put Bruce’s flattering invitation to me to join in this “Great Conversation” into its proper historical perspective, let us recall that, back then, there were no personal computers (they hadn’t been invented), there was no Internet (it hadn’t been invented), there were no cell phones (much less “intelligent” phones) nor even fax. Back then, any budding young writer living in the Midwest who wished to join in the great conversation or symposium or colloquium or graduate seminar or whatever you wish to call it, had but one viable option, and that was the United States Postal Service (aka “snail mail”). The “up side” of this seemingly primitive situation was that any Galen Green from Wichita, Kansas who could scrape together the price of a first-class postage stamp (which I believe was 8 cents back in those days) and an envelope, along with photocopies of two or three or four of his (or her) best poems, could, with a half-page cover-letter, take a stab at joining in the conversation.
As nearly as I can recall, the original purpose of my meeting with Bruce over coffee in the Alibi that afternoon in September of 1971 was to discuss, in relatively general terms, my academic and literary future, Bruce having recently been officially assigned as my “academic adviser,” even though I’d been relying on his advice, encouragement and criticism for well over a year at that point. The time had come, of course, for me to begin sending away for graduate school catalogues. (That was actually the way it was done “back in the day,” as the kids today say.) Happily, the time had come as well when I’d composed, workshopped and polished a sufficient gathering of poems that Bruce and I agreed that his advice regarding the process of submitting them for magazine publication was called for. It was, therefore, only after these first two items on our agenda had been covered – of graduate school and magazine publication – that the talk came around to the prospect of my “joining in the conversation.”
The picture that I have here in my memory is of Bruce pausing pregnantly while enjoying a sip of Alibi coffee, then beginning again to speak as he set his heavy ceramic cafeteria mug back down on the table between us. The first thing he asked me was whether or not I’d had the opportunity to dip deeply enough into either or both of the pair of paperback anthologies of modern poetry he’d had us buy – the handful of undergraduates in his Poetry Workshop – to have developed a particular liking for any of the poets I’d read. The pair of anthologies to which he was referring were Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America (1957, Meridian Books; introduction by Robert Frost) – which Bruce labeled, in his mock-Chicago accent, “duh cooked” – and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (from Grove Press, 1960) – which Bruce labeled appositionally “duh raw.”
I was surprised by Bruce’s absence of surprise with my answer. After all, my own poetry had been of an ilk which I myself would – wrongly – have lumped in with “duh raw.” Therefore, when I confessed to Bruce (as it felt like to me at the time) that, despite my heartfelt leftist political bent and inborn passion for stylistic experimentation, I found myself powerfully drawn to the works of several of the (ostensibly) “cooked” poets, such as James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwin and Anthony Hecht, he seemed not at all astonished. I realize now that the reason for this was simply that Bruce had never bought into the false dichotomy of cooked & raw into which so many of the rest of us had bought. As for any particular favorites from among the raw, I told Bruce that the ones whose work interested me most were Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch and Gary Snyder.
225. Stafford, Wilbur, Ignatow & Merrill
Anyway, that’s basically how the whole thing started, although I held off on undertaking the project until Kate Schulte Green and I had assembled and published my first chapbook of poetry entitled Apple Grunt at the very end of 1971. With Apple Grunt in hand (roughly two dozen copies of which were allocated for the purpose of attempting to open up dialogue with the established generation of poets), I set about, in the early frosty weeks of 1972, inviting myself into the conversation. At first, the only established poets who showed any interest in corresponding with me were Richard Wilbur (born 1921) and William Stafford (1914-1993), whom Bruce had specifically encouraged me to connect with, probably already aware of Stafford’s extraordinary generosity toward fledgling poets like myself. I ended up exchanging letters, postcards and books with both Wilbur and Stafford well into the late 1980’s, when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune simply became too overwhelming to allow me to continue. By the time Kate & I founded our little poetry magazine Fireweed in Columbus, Ohio in 1975, however, I had managed to initiate a number of brisk correspondences with a broad range of poets, both established and obscure, but most them somewhere in between. When I say “a broad range,” I mean stylistically broad. Of those, the two most worth mentioning here would have to be James Merrill (1926-1995) and David Ignatow (1914-1997).
JM or “Jimmy” – as Merrill most often signed the dozens of letters and postcards he ended up sending me, between 1974 and 1989, turned out to prove every bit as generous a mentor to me as Bill Stafford and Dick Wilbur combined. In fact, one of the high points of 1987 for me was his mentioning to me in passing, in the context of a much longer letter, the fact that “Dick Wilbur and I were talking about you just the other day.” I couldn’t have felt more elated if Woody Allen had written to tell me that “Ingmar Bergman and I were talking about you just the other day.” If my memory serves me well (since so much of my personal archive has, as I’ve mentioned, been destroyed by fire, flood and foul play), the burden of that particular 1987 letter concerned JM’s feedback on a collection of song lyrics entitled Sad Rodeo, which I’d compiled some months earlier and copies of which I’d sent off to both Merrill and Wilbur for their thoughts. It meant a lot to me at the time – and still does, in retrospect – that JM found these lyrics of mine reminiscent of those of Cole Porter (1891-1964) in their lust for paradox, urbane diction and (although these were not Merrill’s exact words), their whimsical cynicism toward social propriety. That comparison never occurred to me until he brought it to my attention. (Thanks, Jimmy!)
As Dumb Luck would have it, JM and I began our lengthy correspondence right at that period in his career (1974) when he was turning away from the polished and formalist lyric poetry which had been the trademark of his earlier writing, and toward an epic narrative involving occult communication with spirits and angels, collectively titled The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) which dominated his later career. JM, being sensitive to my harassed penury, had his publisher ship to my ever-changing mailing addresses in Columbus, Ohio and suburban Philadelphia, autographed copies of two of the poetry collections which eventually accumulated into that epic: Divine Comedies (which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for poetry) and Mirabell: Books of Number (which won the 1979 National Book Award for poetry), as well as the epic itself, when it was released in 1982 (going on to win the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award).
226. An Ever-Widening Conversation & The Changing Light
When I sat down to write my first “fan letter” to James Merrill in 1974, I knew next to nothing about his personal life or about him as anyone other than the author of what I considered to be some of the most dazzling poetry by a writer of my parents’ generation. I did not, for instance, know that his father had co-founded the brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch or that he (JM) was gay or that he (JM) was rapidly acquiring a reputation as a patron of the arts and of young people toiling in the arts. With regard to that second point of my not-knowing, therefore, I was still unsophisticated enough to be a little confused when, in 1975, I received the first of what surely must have turned out to be dozens of notes in the mail from David Jackson (“DJ”) who explained simply that he was “JM’s friend” and that he’d be writing in his stead from time to time. It really wasn’t until I began reading what would eventually evolve into the opening sections of The Changing Light at Sandover that it started becoming clear to me that this same DJ who’d occasionally write to me in the voice of JM’s gracious male secretary was, in fact, Merrill’s life partner – and had been since 1954.
Since I never had the good fortune to actually visit James Merrill and David Jackson (1922-2001) at the house where they lived together at 107 Water Street in Stonington, Connecticut (the only address I ever needed to memorize, because they always had their mail forwarded to wherever they were actually staying throughout any given year – their postcards and letters often arriving with return addresses in Key West or Montreal or, with pretty Greek stamps, from Athens) . . . I mean that, since my only basis for understanding them as a couple was through what I read, I found it mythically meaningful when JM ended one of his letters written to me from Stonington in January of 1982 by saying something like: “I’d better close for now; DJ and I are getting ready to watch Brideshead Revisited, which starts in just a few minutes.” Never having had the opportunity to visit them in their home, therefore, I’ve been left with, as I say, that mythically meaningful tableau, here in my imagination, of that elegant old married couple, JM & DJ, snuggling up on the couch with a glass of wine and a bowl of popcorn to watch Jeremy Irons, Claire Bloom & Company on PBS in the British miniseries based on the Evelyn Waugh novel by the same name. Far better known to the reading public is an equally mythically meaningful tableau of JM & DJ seated at a Ouija board performing 20 years worth of séances with the otherworldly spirits of deceased friends such as Maya Deren and W.H. Auden, as well with a first-century Jew calling himself Ephraim.
And as Dumb Luck would further have it (though it was the furthest thing from my conscious mind when I sat down to write my first fan letter to JM in 1974 – only weeks after Kate & I had moved from Salt Lake City to Columbus, Ohio for me to begin serving as a V.I.S.T.A. volunteer), the vicissitudes of fortune being what they are, my lengthy friendship with JM ended up growing an unexpected dimension. The shortest version of that story is simply that, in 1982 (a year which began with PBS first airing Brideshead Revisited and ended with my hegira from Croydon, Pennsylvania – north of Philadelphia – back to Wichita, Kansas, a few months after my father’s untimely death), James Merrill came to my rescue in what was, up to that time, my darkest hour. That is to say that he helped me out financially, when no other hope for help was available – first, by making it possible for me to fly back to Wichita in April for Harry’s funeral and then literally saving my life by making my aforementioned hegira back to Wichita possible in October. Keeping the promise I made to JM at the time of that autumn rescue, I wrote nothing about this episode publicly until after his own untimely death in 1995.
227. To Transport Some Fresh Insight into another Mind
Anyone familiar with The Changing Light at Sandover will quickly recognize the strong similarities it bears to Dante’s Divine Comedy. In thinking back now from the vantage point of this present moment, here in the 21st century, in the third millennium, in these months following Barack Obama’s election to the American Presidency, I am struck, not only by Dante’s and Merrill’s similar narrative devices for letting their interactions with the dead provide a means for animating their own particular kinds of “great conversations,” but by how both of those fictive cosmologies of conversation provide an almost perfect metaphor for what my own experience of “joining in the conversation” has, at this point in my life’s journey, become.
Do you happen to recall what I said to you at the very outset of this “Portable Bohemia” story we’re sharing here today – what I said to you about the cast of characters moving about inside whatever dramas took place there in that attic at the center of? I said that the characters in that cast were as follows: Arthur Dunbar, Galen Green, Kate Schulte and Everybody Else. Thus it has turned out to be for me, here in the creaky drafty attic of my life’s journey. Having joined in one conversation and then another and another, as these past forty-some years have swept me along and brought me here, I’ve come to discover that “the great conversation” into which my poetry professor Bruce Cutler first invited me to join, that afternoon in 1971 over coffee in the Alibi, would turn out to be but a small (though integral) part of an even greater conversation – one which we might as well classify as cosmic, since it does, indeed, appear to incorporate all the important elements necessary to any of the cosmologies my mind seems capable of grasping.
Perhaps it’s the so-called “Internet” that’s delivered me to this way of thinking. After all, the mixed blessing that has been the advent of the Internet seems to have delivered all seven billion of us (as of this writing) to a global gossip session wherein anybody can converse with anybody else. And yet, it’s not the Internet, not the faddishly fluid phenomenon of “social networking” that ultimately interests me. Rather, it’s the ancient paradigm of human intercourse over which the circus tent of the Internet has been so garishly draped. That ancient paradigm of which I speak is the oldest form of speech. It’s the kind that happens when one mind is able to transport some fresh insight into another mind. Distinct from the limited degree to which this mental transportation – this crystalline communication . . . . .
228. Tinged with Hues of Mauve and Salmon
I’ve lost my thought. The phone rang, and now I’ve lost my train of thought. Let’s see now: where was I? Actually, I was about to segway toward another of my song lyrics, this one from 1989. It’s entitled “Portable Paradise,” which I’m hoping is pretty much self-explanatory. If it’s not quite yet, then I’m confident that it will be, once you’ve read into it up to its second or third line. My reason for bringing it into my ramble at this point is mostly as an example of what I thought I was starting to say in that previous paragraph when the phone rang. And what might that have been? Well, I’m pretty sure that it had to do with how an understanding appears to have evolved within me in recent years with regard to an ever-expanding definition of “the conversation” and, therefore, of the act of joining in the conversation.
As I was saying, my reason for bringing my 1989 song lyric “Portable Paradise” into my ramble at this point is to offer it as an illustration of that ancient human intercourse – that crystalline communication – which takes place so far beneath the surface of what we think of as “the world” that anything approaching an accurate representation of it is nowadays to be found only as a rarity, such as in some of the more forbidden passages of D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Admittedly, my song fails to achieve that degree of intensity, settling instead for mere description:
Portable Paradise
She’s my portable paradise who has stirred
Within my blood a stew which this famine,
The world, had withheld from this hunger I dance.
She’s my portable paradise, uncommonly heavenly,
Tinged with hues of mauve and salmon.
She my portable paradise who makes me wince
With ecstasy. It is without effort
That I’m swallowed into this lilac romance.
She’s my portable paradise who melts this absurd
World’s hellish famine each time I summon
Her into my blood to coincidence there
With my hunger and so illumine
The heaven she brings with its tang of persimmon.
She’s my portable paradise who stirs my wants
Into that stew to which I referred earlier,
In this lilac romance.
She’s my portable paradise who melts the hard
Hell of my hunger as she lets me examine
Her heavenly menu to deliciously rinse
Away this world’s famine amidst the lemon-
Sweet scent of her flesh, lilac and almond.
She’s my portable paradise who stirs each ounce
Of what rescues my flesh from the hooves of the herd,
As I’m swallowed into this lilac romance.
Words and Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved
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Chapter XXXI
Three Books that have Brought Me Here
229. W.S. Merwin's Carrier of Ladders (1970)
As I’ve said, Arthur Dunbar and I both worked part time in Wichita State University’s Ablah Library throughout that attic year of 1970 & ’71, as did Kate Schulte and several other friends of ours, including Larry (Stephen) Perry, Pam Eldridge, Forrest Nagley, Don Smith and Joel Meyer. From time to time, Arthur or I would take our turn for intervals of an hour or so – as did each of the student assistants assigned to the circulation department – seated on an elevated swivel chair behind a big desk at the west exit, peeking into the handbags, purses, briefcases, backpacks, etc. of anyone leaving the library through that set of double glass doors. Except for especially high-traffic times of the day or evening, this relatively cushy gig afforded the doorkeeper the opportunity to work on a homework assignment or simply to lollygag one’s way through the pages of one of the many magazines from the nearby current periodicals racks. It was in the process of just such low-traffic lollygaggings at the library’s west exit one afternoon that I stumbled upon Time magazine’s review of poet W. S. Merwin’s recently published volume, The Carrier of Ladders.
That stumble changed my life. Merwin’s work was, at that time, by no means unfamiliar to me. Besides having read and enjoyed his anthologized poems such as “The Drunk in the Furnace” and “The Last One,” I’d also rubbed up against the contagious enthusiasm that several of my college friends had expressed for his more recent work, most notably Louie (Lois) Novinski of the Daniels Gang and Phil Corp, whom I’d known since junior high school and who’d married another friend, Pam Eldridge, right out of high school. Phil and Louie and a handful of others actually formed a kind of local W.S. Merwin quasi-fan club, though only in my imaginings. As for me, it was not until I stumbled upon that Time review of The Carrier of Ladders while perched at the library’s west exit that my heart and mind began their gradual, inexorable conversion to the gospel of Merwin. What won me over, that fateful afternoon, was the reviewer’s having chosen to quote a few of the more dazzling passages from what has since become one of my very favorite poems of W.S. Merwin’s entitled “Words from a Totem Animal.” The first passage quoted in the review was from the poem’s opening:
Distance
is where we were
but empty of us and ahead of
me lying out in the rushes thinking
even the nights cannot come back to their hills
any time
Please remember that, at the moment I found myself reading these words for the first time, I was treading my own murky marshland with one foot enamored of the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Bob Dylan and the other foot enamored of the likes of Robert Creeley, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. That’s a lame oversimplification, but sufficiently accurate to illustrate my rather commonplace psychodynamic of feeling myself pulled oppositionally, both in the direction of a relatively history-based existential poetic and (on the other foot, as ‘twere) a relatively post-logical and less occidental poetic. The adrenalin rush mounting in my hungry young blood, as I continued on to the next quote from that same Merwin poem and then to the next, was triggered in large part (I now theorize in hindsight) by some nebulous impulse I believe myself to have been experiencing preconsciously at that moment, toward a singularity of synthesis between whatever bipolarity my right foot and my left foot had come to represent within my embryonic aesthetic, way back there in that attic year. In other words, I was lusting after new and better poetry to learn from and to steal from and to fall in love with. And suddenly, here it was:
When I stop I am alone
at night sometimes it is almost good
as though I were almost there
sometimes then I see there is
in a bush beside me the same question
why are you
on this way
I said I will ask the stars
why are you falling and they answered
which of us
Here was a mind speaking to my inmost mind, a self speaking to my inmost self, in a language resembling (or so it felt) that inmost language with which the mind and the self conduct their inmost complaints and confessions, as in this secularist prayer with which the poem concludes:
Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way
230. “. . . saddest of instruments . . .”
The fact of "Words from a Totem Animal" being an amazing poem is obvious, and is, therefore, not at all the point I'm trying to make for you here today. Instead, it's the fact of the poem's being an unexpected breath of mountain air which makes it relevant to my theme of significant influences. But as with so many of the influences I've already enumerated for you here today, the impact of Merwin's 1970 Carrier of Ladders poems has not turned out to be so much one of shaping my own writing style as it has been one of validating my inmost worldview, my inmost sense of life (of things) and, hence, one of validating my senses of taste, both aesthetic and political. Exactly how this came about I cannot rightly explain. I can only attest to the fact that it did, indeed, come about, since it was inside of me that this process occurred.
Destined as I seem to be to live out my life at the lower altitudes of this world’s flat dusty prairies, these unexpected inhalations of mountain air, deliciously bracing, such as came at me from out of the best of Merwin’s poems in The Carrier of Ladders, soon grew from cause for an adrenalin rush into a naked craving in my later life just short of outright chemical addiction. That’s how I’d have to describe Merwin’s amazing 1970 collection’s bringing me from there to here. For better or worse, from that time forward, this part of me which craves the type of poetry-driven rush to which I’ve just alluded will no longer settle for a diet of poems which fail to (at the very least) approach the standard of excellence set by Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders, as illustrated here the opening lines of “Second Psalm: The Signals”:
When the ox-horn sounds in the buried hills
of Iceland
I am alone
my shadow runs back into me to hide
and there is not room for both of us
and the dread
Frankly, I’ve never been especially comfortable talking about why a great poem is great. I tend to yield to the scoffers who dismiss any attempt at evaluating literature as being but a rationalization of subjective judgment. So, shoot me. But before you do, please let’s savor together what I subjectively rationalize to be the astonishingly beautiful closing lines of this same poem:
when the ox-horn is raised in silence
someone’s breath is moving over my face
like the flight of a fly
but I am in this world
without you
I am alone as the sadness surrounding
what has long ministered to our convenience
alone as the note of the horn
as the human voice
saddest of instruments
as a white grain of sand falling in a still sea
alone as the figure she unwove each night alone
alone
as I will be
If you were born before, say, 1954, you’ll most likely have the year of Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders’ publication etched in memory as having been one of the bloodiest and bleakest of the Vietnam War. For me (and for thousands of other readers, including, evidently, the members of the committee which awarded it the 1971 Pulitzer Prize), these poems carry within them a dark undercurrent which cannot but reawaken within those of us who lived through that tragic era some of the darkness of that world, as well as of this one.
All that I’ve just now said here notwithstanding, however, when I pick up my copy of The Carrier of Ladders nowadays and take a moment to ask myself, as I’m thumbing through it, why it’s been so easy for me to choose it as the first of these three books that have brought me here from that attic year, the reason that comes back to me is its wisdom – over and over, the soft voice of its wisdom. While the book is permeated with examples I could cite for you here, the easiest course for me is to simply point you in the direction of “Teachers,” which appears at the outset and is, rightly, often anthologized. To my mind, it’s one of those poetic gems most worth taking the time to memorize. Here’s a brief passage from out of the center of it:
what I live for I can seldom believe in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided
I think you’ll agree that poetic wisdom seldom arrives in a form more honest than that.
By contrast, “Banishment in Winter” delivers a wisdom considerably more “political,” in the sense of that term that’s most applicable to our attic year and to that year’s zeitgeist. The pastoral imagery with which it opens evokes in me a wistful longing for its landscape which is seductively sustained right up to the poem’s closing lines where it delivers its thematic antistrophe without giving up the seductiveness of its imagery:
the dark migrants
the souls
move outward into the cold
but will it ever be
dark again in my country
where hanging from lamp posts
the good
fill the streets with their steady light
231. The Drunk on the Highwire
More than forty years after I first stumbled upon Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders, I have yet to compose any poetry of my own that even comes close to equaling it in quality – because that’s simply not the way the creative process works, is it. Of course not. In a nutshell, how it works is that, first, Merwin is inspired to compose these magnificent poems. Then, young Galen reads the poems, synthesizing their beauty, wisdom and gut thrill into wherever it is inside himself that his own creative process takes place, usually over an infuriatingly long period of time. After that, what we commonly call “the creative process” becomes a mystery to me.
Back in 1973, when I was working on my master’s at The University of Utah, nestled on that picturesque mountainside in Salt Lake City, the poet Richard Schramm arranged, at my request, an audience for me with the then U.U. Professor Emeritus Brewster Ghiselin (1903-2001), author of The Creative Process, which I’d read as an undergraduate at Wichita State. (If you ever decide to track it down, Ghiselin’s little anthology is subtitled Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences and amounts to a symposium of the writings of some thirty-eight men and women, including Katherine Ann Porter, Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh and D.H. Lawrence. I recommend it.) Dr. Schramm had gone out of his way to tell me that Dr. Ghiselin (70 years old at that time) was retired and seldom even set foot on campus, but would be stopping by one afternoon to go through some papers and – based on a fan letter I’d sent him from Boston that spring – would be pleased to meet with me for an hour or so in an office the U.U. Writers’ Workshop kept available to him.
My only point in mentioning this here is to proffer yet more evidence that I’ve been using whatever digging tools have been within my reach throughout my life to learn everything I possibly can about the creative process – and am still in the dark. Perhaps I’ve been digging in all the wrong places, barking up all the wrong trees. In any event, I’m no closer now than I was when I sat down to chat with Brewster Ghiselin in 1973 to being able to explain how the machine we call a “cow” turns a bail of hay into a pail of milk – which is to say, how the machine we call the human imagination turns a poem by W.S. Merwin into a song by Galen Green. Or is it perhaps more likely that a song such as “The Drunk on the Highwire,” which I composed in 1986, comes about as a result of experiences only minimally literary? After all, the aesthetic derives as often from the political as the religious derives from the sexual. Why not hypothesize, then, that the metaphorical conceptualization at the core of one of my songs isn’t born from out of epiphanies, lies and memories which are wholly preverbal, and perhaps even prelogical – perhaps even preconscious?
The Drunk on the Highwire
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1986, All Rights Reserved
My parents sold me to pay their taxes.
Now I teeter a hundred feet from my death,
On this narrow strand I call my home.
Yet it’s only my lack of nerve which waxes
This wire upon which I balance each breath.
Someday I’ll fall like Saigon, like Rome –
Which is why my spinal cord never relaxes.
I’m the drunk you see on the highwire
With this balance beam which I use to fix
The planet beneath me. Full of rum
and steady as a hieroglyph,
I walk this length, as a shrill wind picks
My flesh to shreds and leaves me numb.
(Won’t you toss me up another fifth?)
Above the crowd, I slide like a fox
Through a henhouse,
like a breeze through a tomb.
This highwire is the only home
I’ve known since before I left the womb.
Deprived of safety net and bath,
As blind and confused as Oedipus Rex,
I inch my way from magic to math,
Trying not to look down at my doom –
As at my feet a downdraft sucks.
Sometimes I wonder how I’ve come
Into this hazard – by what hoax
Was I led into peril of life and tooth.
Below me I study your streets I’d roam,
If I could escape this distance
which strokes me,
Numbs me like a fine vermouth.
Below, I can hear my destiny hum.
%%%%%
232. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Picture, if you will, the lower level of the CAC bookstore – not as it is today or in recent years, but as it was on that afternoon in 1970 – the one I’m thinking of, the one I see as vividly here in my mind’s eye as if it were only yesterday. Walk with me now down the bookstore’s broad staircase from the main floor with its conventional, predictable accoutrements aimed at the hearts of alums and frosh, Greeks and freaks alike – “Woo-Shock” sweatshirts, pennants, pins and postcards, as well as all the latest bestsellers in both paperback and hardcover, etc., et alia. Descending with me, you take note of and even comment on how this broad staircase, up and down the interior of this amiably modern student union bookstore, seems to be the one and only infrastructural feature which hasn’t changed in the span of these forty years between today’s Obama administration and the Nixon administration, back, back, back into which we’re now traveling together once again, you and I.
If the clothing and hairstyles on the Wichita State students milling around among the hedge rows of fiction and non-fiction, arranged so very tastefully here on the lower level weren’t enough to alert us to the fact of our having descended into the year 1970 of the Common Era, then certainly the titles on the covers of the paperback novels should give it away. Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut. Couples by Updike. The Confessions of Nat Turner by Styron. Myra Breckinridge by Vidal. Portnoy’s Complaint by Roth. The Godfather by Puzo. And such like.
But wait! Go back one! Just before The Godfather. Because – wait a minute – Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth won’t be available in paperback for several more months. In fact, it just so happens to be the reason we’ve come here today. Look over there, straight ahead. See there, over this thicket of new-smelling books, there in that sort of clearing where a dozen or so students have clustered themselves into a sort-of circle of sofas and easy chairs with Jim Erickson and Gary Greenberg at one end of their little gathering. This is why we’ve come here today, because photocopied fliers tacked up around campus have announced that Dr. Erickson of the English Dept. and Dr. Greenberg of the Psychology Dept. have generously volunteered an hour of their time this afternoon to lead an informal discussion of Philip Roth’s latest novel, entitled Portnoy’s Complaint. And now, here we are, you and I, Gentle Reader, a part of this little sort-of circle in this clearing in the thicket on the CAC bookstore’s lower level.
Ensconced as I’ve been in my own wild little world of classes, homework, socializing, struggle, etc, I’d failed to even notice, up until a few weeks ago, the title of Roth’s highly controversial new novel printed out on a page, but had only heard it spoken aloud by a few of my hipper fellow English majors. Consequently, I’d mistakenly assumed that what I was hearing them saying was “Port Noise Complaint” – a title which failed entirely in attracting my interest since it sounded to me like just another adventure story set during the Second World War – presumably in some remote locale of which I’d never even heard. After all, where the hell was this place called “Port Noise?” It must surely have been purely fictional.
In contrast to the sudden flash of infatuation for the poetry of W.S. Merwin which I’ve just finished attempting to describe and which rocked my world at almost the exact same moment on the 1970 calendar as this little discussion group that’s meeting here in my memory on the lower level of the student union bookstore at Wichita State University, my infatuation with Portnoy’s Complaint – and, far more importantly, with quite a number of the later books of Philip Roth – manifested itself as less of a sudden flash than an organic transformation. In retrospect, it was as though that hour or so of our little group bandying about a few of the key motifs, as well as pieces of the overall method of narrative execution which make Roth’s Portnoy novel the ingenious, enjoyable breakthrough work of art that it obviously is turned out to be the Promethean lightning bolt which brought to life within me a new creature fired by a galaxy of twinkling inchoate possibilities for liberation, both artistic and personal. Or to put it another way, the novel which Jim Erickson and Gary Greenberg introduced us to in that little sort-of circle turned out to be the very novel for which I’d been waiting.
233. Jon & Mark & Barney
Ironically, both Kate Schulte and Art Dunbar (along with almost everybody else on the planet) got around to reading Portnoy’s Complaint before I did. As nearly as I can recall, Kate bought a paperback copy of it somewhere around the time that I graduated from Wichita State and we made our big move to Boston. One reason for my being fairly certain about the timeframe here is that I seem to recall that my own initial exposure to its actual text (rather than to what Roth fans had been saying about it) was when Kate would read her favorite passages aloud to me in our dinky third-floor apartment at 53 Clarendon Street, a couple of blocks south of where the new John Hancock Bldg. was under construction back in those days. I hope that you won’t take it the wrong way, Gentle Reader, if I confess to you here that both Kate and I found Roth’s novel to be remarkably helpful in getting a handle on the various forms of American Jewish Culture with which we were so fortunate as to find ourselves coming into ever-increasing contact, from the moment we left Kansas and headed east; for, while Roth’s Portnoy does, indeed, speak much mythoklasm to his fictional audience, his psychotherapist, Dr. Spielvogel, I personally find the novel to contain a warm undercurrent of heartfelt compassion for its characters – and most certainly for the Jews as a people.
Within the timeframe of which I speak (1972-73), Kate and I were very very lucky in the quality and variety of the new friends we made, an inordinate number of whom were, in fact, Jewish. Of these, the three most memorable remain, for me, Jonathan Katz, Mark Rattner and Barney Frank. (Yes, that Barney Frank.) Jon I mentioned earlier. Along with Arthur Vogelsang and Tony Sobin, he’d founded
Ark River Review, back when the three of them had been teaching in the English Dept. at WSU. Kate & I first became friends with him when she sometimes accompanied me to the Wednesday night ARR poetry workshops which the six or eight couples involved took turns hosting. When the subject came up of Kate’s and my intention to get ourselves to Boston by any means necessary, Jon quickly responded that he just happened to be planning an automobile trip at the end of the school term in early June (’72) back to his hometown of Brooklyn (Flatbush, to be specific) to spend the summer at his parents’ house, finishing his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold.
A poem which Arthur Vogelsang composed back in Wichita and mailed to Jon’s parents’ address within the space of the week or so that it took for Kate & Jon & I to take turns at the wheel of Jon’s 1967 Dodge sedan as we ourselves made our way there, by way of Des Moines, Iowa City, Kent State and Youngstown, displayed the poet’s penetrating insight into the individual personalities of we three travelers, as well as into the shape of our interpersonal dynamic. I’m sorry to say, however, that I no longer have my copy of Vogelsang’s Frank O’Hara-style poem about that trip, so let me just say for now that a good time was had by all and that Kate & I received many valuable bits of instruction from Jon regarding American Jewish life. At Mr. & Mrs. Katz’s modest home in Flatbush, for instance, where we were first introduced to a real-life Kosher kitchen, Jon had thoughtfully saved us from needless embarrassment by having oriented us ahead of time – while crossing Pennsylvania – as to why it was imperative that we not offer, after supper, to help with the dishes.
Mark Rattner and I worked together in the same division (ICSC) of Keystone Mutual Funds at 99 High Street in Boston’s financial district, right on the waterfront, with a spectacular 25th-floor view of the shining blue harbor to the south and of the planes taking off and landing at Logan International to the north. Although Mark was a year younger than me, my double major and subsequent second senior year at Wichita State resulted in his and my both graduating in the spring of ’72 (he from Northeastern University), and thus in our coming through the front door of the Keystone Bldg. almost simultaneously that summer. Mark was urbane, good-hearted, extremely witty, politically liberal, and an eager teacher of the Wichita W.A.S.P. he perceived me to be. He was also a huge fan of the anti-mythological mythopoesis which constitutes the fabric and fiber of Portnoy’s Complaint.
Being one another’s only real kindred spirits there at 99 High Street (which, incidentally, appears repeatedly in the waterfront shots throughout Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Oscar-winning film, The Departed), Mark & I took our lunch hour together nearly every day, scarfing our cheap eats in a matter of minutes, then spending the rest of our time prowling Boston’s downtown bookstores and – best of all – Filene’s world-famous bargain basement, where I did most of my holiday shopping for 1972, snagging, for instance, an armload of “hurt” copies of Wallace Stevens’ The Palm at the End of the Mind in hardcover for 50 cents a piece. It was primarily on these delightful lunch hour outings that Mark (who was originally from Paramus, New Jersey) prepared me as much anyone could have for my life as an increasingly passionate Yiddophile.
I first met Barney Frank outside the entrance to the Kroger’s supermarket, just down the street from the little brownstone apartment building where Kate & I had finally settled in the summer of ’72, following our hectic hegira from the land of our parents. Barney would have been thirty-two at the time, standing there with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, sporting a thick mane of handsome dark hair and a campaign button pinned to the front of his shirt. He was making his first run for public office – to the Massachusetts House of Representatives – a race which he won, as all the world now knows. That first conversation was brief. I shook his hand and thanked him for the campaign flier he handed me. Since Kate & I were new to the neighborhood, I asked him a couple of questions about its demographics, which he answered. And that was it. We voted for him. He won. McGovern lost. Winter arrived.
The next time I ran into Barney was a few weeks after he’d been elected state rep. Our conversation that evening was considerably cozier and more substantive. It took place in the 1st-floor apartment of a young woman named Elsa Gallstone, who managed our little brownstone for the owner and just so happened to be a personal friend of Barney’s. Elsa had taken a liking to Kate & me and so had invited us downstairs to her place for an evening of drinks and noshes and political conversation with our new state rep. Back then, it seemed like everybody smoked. Kate & I both smoked cigarettes, while Barney contented himself with a big cigar, which he used as a prop to punctuate his remarks – and which gave one the impression (in spite of oneself) that this elegantly tailored gent sitting there puffing away on it might conceivably be a big-city “machine” politician out of a much earlier era. Nothing could have been further from the truth of the matter, of course. It’s merely a whimsical image that comes to mind occasionally when I’m watching a much older, more wizened Congressman Barney Frank on television nowadays, still sticking up for the rights of little guys like me – and for our unfashionably rational (i.e. mythoklastic) modes of socioeconomic problem-solving.
234. Roth’s Paris Review Interview
Please bear in mind that my only reason for dragging Jon & Mark & Barney into this reminiscence of how it has been that Portnoy’s Complaint has turned out to be one of the three more noteworthy books first published during that era of the attic to have brought me here from there . . . is that Jon, Mark & Barney just happen to stand out most prominently in my memory as embodying the authentic actualities of progressive American male Jewishness from that era as I was so fortunate as to come to embrace it as my friend in a sense strikingly parallel to the sense in which Art Dunbar and I came to embrace each other’s friendship over these past forty-odd years. To say the very least on this particular score, Philip Roth’s more masterful works of art and my many friendships with folks who happened to be Jewish have operated in my life rather as engines of reciprocating nurturance.
But it’s been far more than an amusing quasi-orientation to American Jewish Culture of the mid-20th-century for which I owe Philip Roth a heart full of thanks. For me, a wannabe mythoklastic therapist, all the way back there in that first discussion group on the lower level of WSU’s campus bookstore, and then in the years following, during which time I became more familiar with the importance of Portnoy’s Complaint in the context of late-20th-century American letters, what it was about that book which grabbed me the deepest was its honesty. When I said earlier that Roth’s Portnoy novel turned out to be the very novel for which I’d been waiting, I should think that it was glaringly obvious that neither Jewishness nor masturbation nor going hog-wild in the 1960’s was what I was referring to – though I did, admittedly, get a kick out of Roth’s portrayal of those elements, as well. No, it was his honesty that grabbed me the deepest, the fact – despite all of its distracting Dadaistic humor, ethnic, sexual and otherwise – that Roth uses his Portnoy story as a deceptively intelligent microscope under which he invites us to examine, as he himself examines, those “obvious facts of the human condition” (see: “Unsafe at Any Speed” – second stanza, above), those tragic facts which were buried beneath a ton of taboo throughout my own boyhood.
Not long ago, I finally got around to reading Hermione Lee’s Paris Review interview with Roth from the mid-1980’s, from which a couple of his comments felt to me as though they might illuminate my own feeling of kinship toward him – or rather, toward the voice in his writing, that dimension of himself he shares with us, with you and me. The first is in response to her asking him if he felt that he was “part of what was going on in the sixties”:
I felt the power of the life around me. I believed myself to be feeling the full consciousness of a place – this time New York – for the first time really since childhood. I was also, like others, receiving a stunning education in moral, political, and cultural possibilities from the country’s eventful public life and from what was happening in Vietnam.
A few sentences later, he gets specific when sharing a rueful insight, variations on which I myself have attempted to articulate many times in the past few years – though never nearly as grimly to the point. What prompts it is the interviewer’s asking him about a famous essay of his that had been published in Commentary in 1960 about the way thinking people in America felt that they were living in a foreign country, a country in whose communal life they were not involved. It’s this second part (quoted here) of Roth’s response with which I feel such a profound affinity:
Little did we know that some twenty years later the philistine ignorance on which we would have liked to turn our backs would infect the country like Camus’s plague. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as a prophetic sentry, just where Orwell failed; he would have seen that the grotesquerie to be visited upon the English-speaking world would not be an extension of the repressive Eastern totalitarian nightmare but a proliferation of the Western farce of media stupidity and cynical commercialism – American-style philistinism run amok. It wasn’t Big Brother who’d be watching us from the screen, but we who’d be watching a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable soap opera grandmother, the values of a civic-minded Beverly Hills Cadillac dealer, and the historical background and intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical.
235. My Heart’s Little Handle
As nearly as I can calculate, I’ve read (to date) twenty-four books by Philip Roth, which is probably only about half as many as he’s actually written. Predictably, I’ve got my favorites among them. The only reason I think that this might be of any interest to you, Gentle Reader, is that my sharing this short list of those of his books I’ve enjoyed most might shed some few helpful rays of sunlight upon what it is about Portnoy’s Complaint that’s brought me all the way here from that little discussion group back there in 1970, with its Promethean bolt of lightning:
My Favorite Philip Roth Books
(In Order of Favoriteness)
1. I Married a Communist (1998)
2. The Counterlife (1986)
3. The Plot Against America (2004)
4. The Human Stain (2000)
5. Indignation (2008)
6. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
7. Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
8. The Ghost Writer (1979)
9. Nemesis (2010)
The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
11. Patrimony: A True Story (1991)
If Roth’s writings have functioned as Promethean lightning, fire and healing balm for me, over the years, then I suppose we could extend that metaphor a bit further and say that it’s been one of my ambitions here in later life to functions as a kind of junior Prometheus for the generations which are to follow. Roth is sixteen years older than me. He was born in 1933, I came along in ’49 – so that, through the voice in his writings, he’s mentored me along about as well as anyone could have, now that my parents have gone into the dark and left me here to think for myself.
Finally, before we move on to a quick look at B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (the third of the three books that brought me here from that attic era), I’d like to share with you another of my songs. This one’s from 1989. It’s entitled “If I’m to be Led,” and it came to mind the other day as I was trying to gather my thoughts concerning Portnoy’s Complaint and , more generally, concerning Roth’s sense of things as he transmits it through the voice in his writings. I guess that the connection my mind was making had mainly to do with human sexuality and with how it is that Roth and I each regard human sexuality as a thoroughly appropriate subject for examination within our chosen genres. Nevertheless, the nature of songwriting, with its inherent issues of an aural audience, versus the nature of writing the published printed word, with its advantage of interpersonal intimacy with each individual reader, is a contrast that’s bound to bring forth starkly contrasting offspring, no matter how kindred their authors’ motives might seem:
If I’m to be Led
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved
If I’m to be led by my heart’s little handle,
If I’m to be enslaved to Love’s fondle,
Then let it be you who leads my soul rushing
Headlong, heartlong into Love’s hair.
Let it be you who seduces my fear
With those lips of which I shall never tire
And those arms which enfold me like a bundle
Of boyish desire and neurotic gnashing.
Let it be you who caresses my wishing.
If I’m to be led by my heart’s primal wire
Into Love’s circus like some dancing bear,
Then let it be you who gives me the needle
That stupors my soul and leads it dashing,
Breathless and brainless as a river rushing.
If I’m to be bewitched by blushing nuzzles
To drown in Ecstasy’s tear,
Let it by you whose wise fingers fiddle me
Forward to open and drown in Love’s middle.
If I’m to be led by my heart through this slashing
Night by a pinhole of light that’s flashing
At the end of Love’s vision, then let me dare
To let it be you whose movements addle
My breathless brains or teach me to straddle
Love’s galloping mare or at least to peddle
This tandem tantrum in all its fishing forward.
Let it be you who draws near
From out of this darkness to fondle my fire.
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236. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner (1971)
The sense in which Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders and Roth’s Portnoy novel have brought me here from way back then (1968-’72) might legitimately be said to have as little in common with the sense in which Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner’s 1971 book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity brought me here from there as an elegant horse-drawn carriage has in common with a donkey cart. All three of these groundbreaking books have carried me along for the past four decades, but not exactly in the same style as one the other. In the case of the Merwin poems, it started out with my being ambushed by joy and then sustained by an overwhelming admiration and envy toward Merwin’s intellect. In the case of Roth’s Portnoy novel, it started out with my excitation over having had delivered to my doorstep the very novel for which I’d been waiting since kindergarten and then sustained by the hard knocks and heartaches of my adult life being soothed by Roth’s subsequent books’ continuing to deliver to me a sense of things to which I could comfortably relate. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, on the other hand, arrived in my life under far more prosaic circumstances and has remained as a factor in my adulthood’s daily equation for far more mundane reasons.
It was most likely while seated on the aforementioned elevated swivel chair behind the aforementioned elevated desk arrangement at Wichita State’s main library exit and lollygagging through the pages of Time magazine, during those periods when the foot traffic of students, faculty and visitors with backpacks, briefcases and purses to be peeked into had slackened for a while, that I first learned of the publication of the most recent book by the author of Walden Two (1948), The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (1938), and Verbal Behavior (1957). As I’m sure you’re already aware, Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) is best remembered today as the father of a philosophy of science known as “radical behaviorism” and as founder of his own school of experimental research psychology known as “the experimental analysis of behavior.” In a June, 2002 survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.
On the campus of Wichita State University, throughout Arthur’s and my undergraduate careers (cumulatively spanning the years 1965 thru 1972), Skinner and the behaviorists were wildly popular in the Psychology Dept. Throughout other humanities depts. within WSU’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, however, one could sense an undercurrent of negativity toward Skinnerian behaviorism – a mostly unspoken attitude which seemed to range from sneering contempt to blanket dismissal. Within the English Dept., where I plied my trade as a wannabe writer and literary critic, it felt to me as though practically the entire philosophical agenda of experimental psychology (along with the rest of the social sciences) was simply not talked about because it wasn’t relevant to the business at hand. That was but one of the dozen or so reasons I myself never quite fit in there, even though the vast majority of my close personal relationships during my college career did tend to be through the English Dept., and I remain convinced to this day that English was the right course of study for me to have pursued. Even so, my journey as an English major was dogged constantly by the unfashionable conviction that the acuteness of one’s understanding of the social sciences (even the sometimes deadly dull Skinner) could not but enhance and sharpen one’s acuity as an analyst of the arts – and most especially of the literary arts.
It was, then, within the cage of this context that I found myself seated there “guarding” that same library exit where, only months before, I’d first caught wind of Merwin’s truest genius – seated there lollygagging through the pages of yet another issue of Time magazine – when suddenly I was visited by an inner angel of what I myself believed at the time to be a fresh new approach to writing (and thinking) about the subject of tragedy.
What ensued might reasonably be tarred with that brush labeled “opportunism” (on my part). That’s because the sudden availability of Skinner’s new book in hardcover on the non-fiction rack of Wichita State’s aforementioned campus bookstore happily coincided with Dr. James Merriman’s assigning the term paper for his Literary Criticism class in which I happened to have been enrolled that semester. Although I’d been looking forward with considerable excitation to having the opportunity to show off my penetrating sagacity through the composition of whatever Lit Crit term paper I ended up writing for the elegant, white-bearded, chain-smoking Jim Merriman, I was self-knowledgeable enough to recognize certain limitations within myself which threatened to dull my sparkle. Foremost among them was my lifelong dyslexia (or “lysdexia,” as one clever friend called it.) I am – and always have been – a painfully slow reader. (Actually, in recent years, as my symptoms have worsened as my close-up vision has dimmed, I’ve begun to reassess my reading problem as having been, all along, the product of poor eyesight rather than of any brain dysfunction.)
Because of this, and other, personal handicaps, it had been obvious to me from the outset that whatever source materials I ended up choosing to write about in my big wonderful Lit Crit term paper, they’d better be works of literature with which I was already familiar and/or which were available on phonograph recording or cassette tape. Thus had I all but settled on Shakespeare’s tragedies – including those minor ones, such as Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus which very few people bother to read or perform. Furthermore, I’d pretty well made up my mind that the theme I would choose to target would have something to do with the issue of free will versus determinism, because the consensus among nearly all philosophers of literature since Aristotle had been that, if the tragic hero/heroine or protagonist didn’t have free will, then the story didn’t qualify as a tragedy – a notion which I found to be ridiculously classist and utterly childish. Moreover, my mythoklastic, post-Darwinian, post-Freudian, hyperdemocratic perspective on what constitutes tragedy was, in the early 1970’s, but a subset of the perfectly verifiable perspective which 22 years of life on earth had given me on the broader topic of free will vs. determinism. Hence, my gravitation toward B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity as a legitimizing lens through which to re-examine the leading characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Brutus, Romeo, Antony, etc.).
Unfortunately for me, Dr. Merriman turned out to be a staunch traditionalist when it came to such time-honored dogmas as what constitutes tragedy. The fact that I’d gone to the pains of purchasing Skinner’s book (only the third hardcover book for which I’d ever in my life paid full price – the second having been Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems in October of 1969 and the first having been Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems during my freshman year at Wichita State) and of quickly digesting its highly agreeable deterministic thesis and jargon for the sole purpose of composing my stupendously innovative term paper for his Lit Crit class evidentially impressed Dr. Merriman not in the least. In retrospect, I’m now able to better understand – if not sympathize with – his position. After all, if Skinner (& Freud & Darwin) and I were right, then the way in which tragedy – Greek, Shakespearean and Modern – is taught would have to be radically altered and the entirety of university textbooks and classroom curriculum updated.
(And this is, of course, not even to mention the much more wide-ranging threat which public acceptance of modern science’s secular determinist conclusions about the individual’s place in society would be sure to pose to the existing mythocratic social order which just so happened to pay Jim Merriman’s salary, as well as determine [no pun intended] his future on the tenure track at what was then and still is today one of the Midwest’s more conservative state universities.)
237. Of Crazy Love, Gone Glad and Sure
On top of all this, I rather doubt that Dr. Merriman cared much for the title I gave to my mythoklastic treatise on Shakespearean tragedy. I called it:
I Said I Will Ask the Stars Why Are You Falling,
And they Answered Which of Us
It comes from W.S. Merwin’s aforementioned poem “Words from a Totem Animal.” To me, it seemed to tie a neat ribbon and bow around what I’d tried to say in the text. To Dr. Merriman, not so much. To give you a faint glimmer of what it was I was trying to get at in my Skinnerian Shakespeare paper, back there in my second senior year at Wichita State (but without “re-litigating the case,” as they say), I’ve picked out a pair of my songs which I have not as yet shared with you. The first is entitled “You Make Me Crazy’ and was written in Wichita in 1989, the year before I moved to Kansas City. I present it here as a lighthearted look at the passions – or, more to the point, a lighthearted look at one male’s sexual passion toward the female object of his desire:
You Make Me Crazy
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1989, All Rights Reserved
You’ve made me crazy ever since
I woke up this morning. Your beauty seems
To beckon to some beast or car
Inside of me to rev and pounce
Upon your shape, which makes its mimes
In this morning air in which we share
This crazy love which circumstance
Has made in us beyond our shames –
Sweet surgery that leaves no scar.
You make me crazy with each ounce
Of love that burns within your beams.
You make me crazy when you puff my cigar
And blow smoke rings, then get up and prance
Around the room in a ring which tames
The crazy car in me to care
Too much for you whose blazing blintz
Has made me crazy these morning times
That surgically remove life’s nightmare.
You make me crazy with each glance
And with your inner beauty which gleams
Deep in your eyes, as, hour by hour,
You surgically remove my wants,
Putting in their place these rhymes
Of crazy love, gone glad and sure.
Ah, you make crazy with this lying-down dance
We do, that leaves my blood in flames,
Leaping like songs from this guitar.
When re-reading Shakespeare’s tragedies in preparation for constructing a well-documented, heavily-footnoted 20-page critical analysis of my chosen subject matter, in strict fulfillment of Dr. Merriman’s guidelines, I found myself sniffing out patterns and themes in a way I’d had no strong incentive to do before. As I sniffed, what emerged might be summed up in a phrase which Bill Nelson, my favorite mentor, frequently employed when I was taking his Shakespeare course a couple of years earlier. To put Bill’s oft repeated phrase into context for you here, simply imagine him asking our class something like this: “To what extent might we legitimately assert that Romeo (or Hamlet or Othello or Lear) is Passion’s slave and Fortune’s fool?” Bill seemed to love that phrase, and I soon grew to love it, too, so that, by the time I was in the homestretch of my undergraduate career, married to Kate, headed for Boston, a published author and renowned hitchhiker, and now cobbling together what I considered to be my Lit Crit masterpiece for Dr. Merriman’s class, I’d already observed and experienced enough of life among the humans to have developed some pretty firm hypotheses concerning the answer to Bill’s question. By that time, the very process of being alive and paying attention had taught me that every human creature ever born turns out to be both Passion’s slave and Fortune’s fool.
238. It’s All Beyond My Control
The “Fortune’s fool” half of this tragic equation is, of course, every bit as scientifically verifiable as the “Passion’s fool” half. Anatomy is destiny, and environment is destiny, as well; though neither of these laws of nature has ever been considered very American. Rather, they have, in all times and places, been considered as treasonous by all governments and heresy by all religions. This must be, else how can the abusers go on blaming their victims and getting away with it?
“The Church Bells” is a song I wrote in Columbus, Ohio in 1980, the year which marked the final ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and the year in which I compose the bulk of my abortive novel, Garuda in Toyland, which prophesied with chilling accuracy all the ways in which the church bells do, indeed, remind those of us with ears to hear just how far “beyond my control” the laws of nature invite this world to unravel. As we can easily read from my song’s text, the sound of the church bells invites the singer to extrapolate a tameless cosmology, the tragic nature of the human condition, and a perfectly ordinary sense of personal hopelessness:
The Church Bells
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1980, All Rights Reserved
1.
You’ve got me on the run,
Since you let me know I’m not the one.
You promised to be true,
But you’ve traded me in on someone new.
Refrain:
O, you promised me your love,
But all you gave me was pain.
I think I’ve got a right to complain.
O, I listen to the church bells toll.
They tell me it’s all beyond my control.
O, I listen to the church bells toll.
They tell me it’s all beyond my control.
2.
I stare into my glass,
Hoping this heartache will someday pass.
I bury my thoughts in a book.
I wish that that was all it took.
(Repeat refrain)
3.
I walk out into the rain
To try and wash away this pain.
You’ve got me down in a hole.
It all seems to be beyond my control.
(Repeat refrain)
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239. God's Little Dummy
As the third of these three books that have brought me here, B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity probably strikes the reader as being somewhat out of place. Yes, it was first published at roughly the same moment in America’s cultural history as Portnoy’s Complaint and The Carrier of Ladders. Yes, it represents, in its own way, the zeitgeist’s turning away from some particular set of established, myth-bound forms and norms. But clearly it lacks the magic of the Merwin and the Roth. It is, after all, merely a popularization of a laboratory-based set of theories concerning the nature of human psychology. In what sense, then, does it feel to me as though it's brought me here?
I suppose the answer to that would have to be that it represents to me my first feeble attempt to bring together in my writing, there at the age of 22, my interior world of verifiable facts and my interior world personal speculation as to the nature of our shared human condition. And I wish to stress the word "feeble" here. Even so, the time I spent alone together with Skinner's ideas in that book (as un-cuddly as they often are) did, in its own way, propel me toward what I hope have been more lucid subsequent juxtapositions of my various interior worlds.
Insofar as these three books -- along with the three hundred others which neither you nor I has the time nor the patience to have me mull over here today -- represent contributing influences on whatever it is I've become so far, we might toss them into Life's big mixing bowl with a thousand or so songs and television shows and stir vigorously for a full minute, and . . . still not have replicated the recipe we sought. How about a screenplay, then? What if, instead of continuing to presume wrongly that writers are made out of words and that songwriters are made out of words and melodies, we were to attempt a screenplay -- or at least a few notes for a screenplay -- in which we simply allow a seemingly random series of images lifted from out of someone's life -- mine, for instance -- to flicker across the screen, accompanied by a voice-over spoken off-camera in the voice of the person whose little slideshow we are watching? And what if the screenplay for which we're compiling these notes were to focus on a series of life-altering events which occurred at a Methodist seminary during Ronald Reagan's first term as President of the United States? Might not such an approach offer us all some welcome relief from this relatively straightforward journalistic narrative we've been sharing here today thus far?
But soft you: this one further song before we go there. I wrote "Chubby Loveless" back in 1978 in Columbus, Ohio, during a period when I was still actively involved at the grassroots of several progressive movements, including what was then called "the Feminist Movement." It was written with the utmost compassion, as an exercise in empathy. And over the years, women especially have received it as such. I've been very pleased with its reception among my Feminist cohorts. Today, I play it for you here as a bit of foreshadowing of one of the major themes I would end up grappling with at the seminary, five years after I wrote it.
Chubby Loveless
Words & Music by Galen Green
Copyright 1978, All Rights Reserved
Chubby Loveless, with legs so stubby,
Dreams of becoming an airline stewardess.
But her mirror tells her she’s too damned tubby,
And the airline doesn’t even have her address.
Nobody likes to look at Chubby.
She gets the feeling her life is useless.
And the men she knows are too damned grubby
To suit the taste of Chubby Loveless.
Chubby Loveless is frequently snubbed.
She’d like to send out an S.O.S.
For the ladies to invite her to join their club,
Before she drowns in her loneliness.
Chubby munches an Italian sub,
Then tries to swallow her distress.
She waits for the bus and stoops to rub
The ankles that hold up Chubby Loveless.
Chubby Loveless prays for a lover,
A gentle man with a soft caress,
A sensitive man who might uncover
Inside of Chubby the little princess –
Her daddy’s girl who longs to discover
The magic that happens when people undress,
A loving man who would never shove her
Around or make her feel loveless.
Chubby Loveless is a lady in trouble.
Her mirror tells her that her hair is a mess.
The alarm clock rings and pops her bubble.
She scrawls on her mirror that more is less.
She stares into the eyes of her double
Then walks to the closet to pick out a dress
For another day of wading through the rubble
Of the burned-out life of Chubby Loveless.
Chubby Loveless looks at her tummy
And her waist that will be forever hug-less.
She sits with her mother, playing rummy,
In her life that will be forever love-less.
She’s her daddy’s girl and God’s little dummy,
Though her red lips ache to say ‘yes’
To another world, no matter how crumby,
That would love little Chubby Loveless.
~ Book Seven ~
Chapter XXXII
The Seminary: Notes for a Screenplay
Silver spoons for some mouths.
Golden spoons for others.
Dare a man to change the given order.
Though they smile and tell us all of us are brothers,
Never was it true, this side of Jordan.
“Old Coat,” PP&M
~
240. Preface
Now, I’m going to tell you about the seminary. It’s not only about what happened to me there in 1983 and 1984, but also about the before and after.
All these authors and all these poets and songwriters that I’ve been talking to you about here today served mostly to validate me in my life’s momentum and direction – as well as to comfort me. And so it was with the seminary and with all those people there and in the before and after. As with the books and their authors and the songs and their writers, it wasn’t so much how they changed me as it was how they helped me to feel better about what I was already doing and thinking and being.
~
241. Opening Voice-Over [Actor Playing Galen]:
Whenever people find out that I once attended a Methodist seminary, they always seem to end up asking me the same set of questions:
Why did I want to go there in the first place?
What was it like?
Why didn’t I sue them for a million dollars in damages?
The answers I give to these questions tend to vary, depending on who it is I’m talking to and how I’m feeling at the time. Generally, however, I might say something like this:
I went to seminary to find out whether or not modern American Protestantism could possibly undergo a kind of Second Reformation.
What it was like was an overpriced Church Camp run by unqualified sociopaths.
The only reason I didn’t sue them for a million dollars in damages was that I couldn’t afford an attorney.
~
242. Opening Scene [During Opening Voice-Over]
FADE IN – dolly shot through summer treetops and across seminary grounds, taken with zoom lens from helicopter hovering 200 feet above Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Elmwood Cemetery, cattycorner (northwest to southeast) across the intersection of Van Brunt Blvd & Truman Rd.
We zoom from panorama of entire campus of Saint Paul School of Theology, with its charming New England village chapel spire, surrounded by a smattering of old and new buildings alike, tucked among towering shade trees and ample parking . . . to CLOSE-UP of the actor playing Galen Green at the age of 34, removing suitcases and boxes from his faded, battered and rusty, formerly-navy-blue 1970 Chevy Handi-Van that he’d bought, ten months earlier, from Ernie Perez, his construction worker neighbor in the Neshaminy Woods Apartments in Corydon, Pennsylvania, with several hundred of the $3,500 that the poet James Merrill had given him to escape from his “darkest hour yet” and make his hegira back to Wichita in the fall of 1982.
This tin-can of a van is parked in the front circle driveway of Schoelkopf Hall, a handsome three-story antebellum-style relic, constructed of native stone and red brick and resembling – with its broad front porch and neo-classical columns – the sort of student housing one might have expected to find on any of a hundred Ivy League campuses in America in 1983 . . . or a century earlier, for that matter.
CUT TO: Galen’s west-facing dorm room window on the second floor of Schoelkopf Hall. It’s the night of that same day in late August, and we can see out into the darkness filling the western sky, as the tall window is curtainless, and Galen has raised the spring-loaded window blind almost all the way to the top. As camera dollies back slowly, we see that the room’s ceiling is unusually high for the late-20th century – perhaps ten feet. Galen is seated in a plain straight-backed chair at the spartan writing desk built into the wall that’s opposite his single bed. He has turned toward the window, gazing out into the gathering night. As the camera dollies back in on the back of his head and over his left shoulder, we ourselves can see out into the darkness enough to catch a glimpse of the tiny red light that’s flashing on and off, five miles in the distance – nearly to the horizon – from atop the barely-visible thousand-foot broadcasting tower which stands near 31st & Grand in Midtown K.C. – one block south of where Galen was born. FADE SLOWLY TO BLACK. [Cue musical soundtrack.]
~
243. Flashback to Before the Beginning: Summer 1948
MUSIC (those same dreamy strains of that middle movement, “Adagio Assai,” from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major) BEGINS TO PLAY AS WE SLOWLY FADE BACK IN FROM BLACK TO: A tastefully modest middle-class bedroom, lit only by a single reading lamp on a bed stand in the foreground. At the bottom of the screen, we read these words:
Kokomo, Indiana
August 1948
(Unless, of course, we decide to make it one of the other “middle-sized towns in North-Central Indiana” she later told the social worker she was from – perhaps Wabash or Monticello…..)
A young couple in their mid-20’s is rustling about in the dimly-lit room on a double bed whose covers have all been pushed to the floor. In silhouette, we can make out that both are completely naked and sweating profusely from the summer heat and from the exertion of having been making love with considerable enthusiasm. Under the music, the only sound is their heavy breathing, the rustling of the bed-sheet beneath them, and the soft whir of one of those old-style oscillating electric floor fans – the kind that could never get past the Product Safety Commission nowadays.
Just at the moment of climax, the young man suddenly stops his thrusting and freezes in terror.
HE
Damn! I think it broke!
SHE
What do you mean, “it broke?”
HE
I mean I think it split open somehow.
SHE
How could that happen?
HE
I don’t know!
SHE
I mean, didn’t you get ‘em from the same place you
got the others?
HE
Yea, but…..
SHE
I mean, Wayne, Honey, we can’t afford to have a baby
right now!
HE
I know, Verna! I know!
SHE
I mean, I just got my own beauty shop and I’ve got to
start makin’ some money so’s I can start payin’ off that
loan!
HE
I know that, Baby!
SHE
Don’t say that word right now!
HE
I’m sorry, Verna, but…..
SHE
Do you think any of it leaked out?
HE
Well, maybe…..but just a little bit.
SHE
What do you mean “just a little bit?” How the heck
much do you think it takes, anyway?
HE
OK. Yea. I see what you mean.
SHE
I mean, Wayne, I absolutely cannot afford to get
pregnant at this time in my life!
HE
I agree, Sweetheart. I agree.
SHE
[Bursting into tears]
Oh, Wayne, Wayne. Don’t you see! This could ruin
everything! Absolutely everything!
FADE TO: 1940’s-model steam locomotive pulling into K.C.’s Union Station. Caption at bottom of screen reads:
Kansas City, Missouri
October 1948
CUT TO: Actress playing Verna Slater, 26 years of age, wearing a prim 1940’s dress, is stepping down onto the station platform with her suitcase in hand. An actor playing one of the male administrators of The Willows (a “hospital for unwed mothers”) steps toward her from out of the crowd. He’s dressed in a stodgy three-piece suit and is wearing a fedora and spectacles. As she acknowledges him with her eyes, he doffs his hat and extends his arm. They walk away together and into Union Station.
CUT TO: He is now helping her out of his 1947 Chrysler sedan, then lifting her suitcase from the car’s trunk.
CUT TO: Now he’s escorting her up the steps of whatever early 20th-century red brick and native limestone building we can find to stand in for The Willows, which was demolished in the early 1960’s. (Both the historic Swope Park and Valentine neighbors of modern-day K.C. are likely to furnish plausible candidates.)
~
244. Voice-Over to the Above [Actor Playing Galen]:
SYNC WITH SCENE OF TRAIN PULLING INTO UNION STATION: I must have been eight or nine years old before I ever heard the word “bastard.” And even then, I never heard it applied to me – at least not until after I was married, if you know what I mean.
My biological mother’s name was Verna Slater and she was a successful beautician from a town of between five and ten thousand souls in North-Central Indiana. At least, that’s what she told the social worker who interviewed her at the time of her arrival at The Willows, which was a hospital for unwed mothers – as they used to call them. The old folks say that, back then, The Willows was where the respectable middle-class young ladies went when they got “into trouble,” as they used to say. I have, in fact, read that same thing in reliable publications, so I guess that the old folks weren’t just trying to make me feel better. All I can say is that, if it’s true, then the day I was born was the day I got kicked out of the middle-class.
MUSIC RISES. [Ravel Piano Concerto has been playing all along, under the above voice-over.]
FADE TO MONTAGE: 20-second montage to include the following silent visual sequence to run as piano concerto simply plays on top of it, exactly according to Ravel’s score:
FADE TO: Actor & actress playing Galen’s adoptive parents, Harry & Margaret Green, are driving through Midtown K.C. in a black 1939 Ford sedan in the spring of 1949. They are both dressed in their Sunday best. Harry is at the wheel. They glance lovingly into one another’s eyes and hold hands tenderly. Caption at bottom of screen reads:
Kansas City, Missouri
April 30, 1949
FADE TO: They are seated next to one another in one of the administrators’ offices at The Willows, signing yet more in seemingly endless series of legal adoption papers. Over the administrator’s head, on the wall behind him, hangs a large, handsomely framed and matted photograph of The Willows, which is labeled “The Willows” at the bottom. To one side, hangs a standard black & white photographic bust-shot of the President of the United States of America, Harry S. Truman, who had been inaugurated to his first full term only a few weeks earlier. (Harry & Margaret both having voted for his Republican opponent, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.)
FADE TO: Verna Slater giving birth to her illegitimate son, Wayne Slater, soon to be renamed “Galen Green.” [It is recommended that a tasteful bit of Computer Generated (CG) birthing imagery be inserted here, depending on our production budget.] Significantly, once the newborn has been held up by his heels and spanked and has begun his first healthy cry, he is removed from the birthing room. (He & Verna will never see each other again.)
FADE TO: Birthing nurse, now in an adjoining room, wrapping the newborn in a fuzzy little pale blue blanket and carrying him through a different doorway to where Harry & Margaret are waiting. Margaret steps forward somewhat hesitatingly, with Harry two steps behind. The nurse, ever so gently, hands Margaret her newborn son. [The entire cast ad-libs the predictable cliché body language, especially the baby, who is, of course, CG, for insurance purposes.]
FADE TO: Aerial panoramic shot of Franklin County, Kansas, checkerboard of tilled farmland in May. The sun is shining brightly through fluffy, friendly white clouds, which part so that our camera may zoom in and down to Harry & Margaret’s 1939 Ford sedan, tooling along merrily on U.S. Highway 59 (two lanes in those days), which runs between Ottawa and Richmond (pop. 400).
FADE TO: Margaret, in the back seat of the Ford, tending to her newborn son. Harry, of course, is in the front seat, guiding them past fields, fence posts, Burma Shave signs and hedgerows. We see from over his right shoulder, every few seconds, through the windshield, a truck or car flash by, headed in the opposite direction – that is, north, back into Ottawa.
FADE TO: Will & Phoebe’s little white wood-frame house on the corner of Ruth & Rigdon (both gravel) Streets in Richmond, Kansas. Harry guides the Ford up the “street” and parks next to the drainage ditch that runs along the soft shoulder. At that very moment, relatives and well-wishers come pouring out of the little white house and rush to surround the Ford, peering through its windows to get a glimpse of the freshly minted adoptee, their newly arrived would-be family member.
VOICE-OVER: [Just as the Ford is pulling up in front of the little house, the piano concerto softens in volume and the following voice-over begins. NOTE: Unless otherwise indicated in the final shooting script, all voice-over narration will be spoken in the voice of the actor playing Galen Green in late middle-age.]:
Some people believe that there are just so many human souls in the universe and that they keep getting recycled, over and over and over again – kind of like there are just so many water molecules – like the way this glass of water I just finished drinking might have contained some of the same water molecules urinated by a dinosaur, millions of years ago. They believe that – just like water can’t be created or destroyed – neither can human souls.
CUT TO: Camera, meanwhile, pans slowly upward from the Ford and its occupants and all the relatives and well-wishers peering in . . . to treetops and housetops of Richmond, KS . . . and continues on up…..
FADE TO: Aerial view of the entire hamlet of Richmond and the surrounding countryside . . . until we are gazing down at earth from the moon – that iconic “blue bowling ball in the darkness of space” vantage point.
VOICE-OVER: (As we’ve slowly zoomed out to this shot from space, the MUSIC has risen in volume for approximately 10 seconds and then fallen back under this resumed voice-over):
At the moment I was conceived – at the very split-second when my father’s solitary squiggly sperm fertilized my mother’s waiting egg . . . simultaneously, far away in New York City, the soul of baseball legend Babe Ruth departed his body. I mean that Galen Green was conceived in the very same instant that Babe Ruth ceased to be. In other words, there’s a good chance that I ended up with Babe Ruth’s soul – that is, if you believe that kind of stuff. Personally, I don’t. I find it to be rank superstition.
CUT TO: Newsreel footage of Babe Ruth hitting a homerun – that clip where he smacks it and then looks up to watch it disappear, as if this were a feat which even he finds somewhat beyond belief.
~
245. Wichita
VOICE-OVER: My biological mother, Verna Slater, named me “Wayne,” after my biological father; though I never have understood why. It must have had something to do with some sort of legal technicality – so that if the adoption didn’t work out and Harry & Margaret decided to return me to the orphanage, the people at The Willows would at least have something to call me. Anyway, that’s one theory.
CUT TO MONTAGE: [Running time of approximately 20 seconds] FADE TO: Beneath large shade tree in backyard of that two-story house on North Estelle in Wichita. It’s a summer afternoon in 1949. A visiting relative is holding a Kodak box camera, preparing to snap a photograph of Margaret holding infant Galen in her arms, but leaning down so that the family’s red cocker spaniel bitch, Linda, can sniff the baby, who, in turn, is grabbing at Linda’s wet, black nose with his tiny fingers, while Harry looks on.
FADE TO MONTAGE WITHIN THIS MONTAGE: Of still shots of headlines from various major newspapers across the country in June of 1949, all making reference to the Red Scare and to the fact that celebrities including Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson have been named in an FBI report as Communist Party members.
MUSIC continues to rise & fall, to allow for VOICE-OVERS to play and then, alternately, to leave spaces for MUSIC to come forward.
VOICE-OVER: I’ve always found it fascinating how lots of seemingly unrelated things happen at the same time – like Babe Ruth’s life ending at exactly the same moment when my life was beginning. By the same token, lots of babies were being born into this world at almost the same instant that I was. For example, Jessica Lange & Billy Joel & Christopher Hitchens & Meryl Streep; they were all born within just a few days of me.
Also, that was the point in time when Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical, South Pacific, starring Mary Martin & Ezio Pinza, opened on Broadway. Maybe you remember some of the songs from South Pacific, like “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” It’s about bigotry. You’ve got to understand bigotry, if you’re going to fully understand my story about the seminary. Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
[MONTAGE continues] FADE TO: Interior of that house on North Estelle. Harry & Margaret are seated across from one another in the living room. All the same furniture appears in this scene that will later appear in the living room of the little house on North Lorraine – all very working-class, World War II era, and beginning to look a bit worn. Galen, now a year old, toddles back and forth between them, smiling inanely, still drooling a bit, and flapping his arms up and down as though he thought he could fly.
~
246. Margaret, Part Onc
VOICE-OVER: My adoptive mother’s name was Margaret. She was born in the winter of 1912 in a little farm town in East-Central Kansas called Wellsville. Margaret had three brothers, although the youngest one, Willie, died of scarlet fever when he was only a little fellow. Cecil was two years older than Margaret and Myron was four years younger. My mother’s parents were Phoebe Evans McCall (whose friends called her “Fee”), who was born in 1880 and William Keeling McCall (known as W.K.), who was born way back in 1868. My grandmother always addressed my grandfather as “Will,” so that they were “Will & Fee.”
MONTAGE: During that voice-over, we see a sepia slideshow of still photographs from the period in question – the rural Midwest from the 1870’s through the 1930’s. Special emphasis should be placed on a breadth in the variety of these thirty or forty photos, but without letting audience focus drift far from the working-class W.A.S.P. culture being sketched. Along with horses, buggies, church picnics and small-town backdrops, shots should include a healthy smattering of extant portrait and informal family photos of Will & Fee’s kinship groups and neighbors.
VOICE-OVER: Based on the scraps of evidence available to me, I get the impression that Margaret, my adoptive mother (and, of course, the only mother I was ever to know), had a pretty typical childhood for rural Eastern Kansas in the years between Woodrow Wilson’s first term in the White House and the stock market Crash of 1929.
Then, in an instant, everything changed irrevocably for the worse. When the farmers and small-town merchants to whom Margaret’s father’s little bank had lent money were suddenly unable to repay their loans, my grandfather Will – instead of foreclosing on their homes and farms and businesses – committed the fatal (and unforgivable) error of showing them mercy. It wasn’t long before his bank was shut down and my mother’s family was financially ruined forever.
~
247. Flash-forward to Here & Now
CUT TO: Galen Green (or the actor playing him, as he appeared in his early 60’s) seated at a modest writing table, ostensibly composing these very words. As the camera pans out from a fairly close-in profile half-shot, we see that the scene is taking place beneath the overhang on the broad front porch of a cabin on a hilltop at the edge of dense autumnal woods overlooking a valley through which a little creek is happily burbling.
While the camera continues to zoom outward to an ever-broadening view of the valley below, we’re able to observe in the extreme foreground the journal into which Galen is scribbling with his ordinary ink-pen, as well the predictable bohemian clutter scattered over his writing table.
VOICE-OVER: Of the hundreds of toxic myths which pollute my beloved country’s questionable psyche, one of the most deadly is the false notion that most families like my mother’s, which were ruined by the Great Depression of the 1930’s, eventually “got back on their feet.” This is factually inaccurate. A few of them did. Most did not. Margaret’s did not.
~
248. Return to Scenes of Social Contextualization
FADE: From shot of Galen composing this screenplay in his journal on hilltop front porch in time-present . . . to MONTAGE of black & white photographs from Margaret’s childhood (of middle-class comfort) to her early womanhood (of toil).
VOICE-OVER: Margaret grew up thinking that her life was going to be one way, but it turned out to be another. It has always seemed to me that this crushing disappointment was something she simply never got over.
CUT TO: Little Galen, now age four, snuggled on Margaret’s lap, her arms around him, as she reads aloud to him from a book of nursery rhymes. They are situated on the couch in the cramped little living room of the house to which the three of them have moved, on North Lorraine, near what was then Wichita University. Margaret is wearing a very plain short-sleeve flowered summer dress, and Galen is wearing shorts with suspenders and a little T-shirt with broad horizontal stripes. It’s the summer of 1953. Harry is at work at the Boeing Aircraft plant.
VOICE-OVER: Throughout the Great Depression of the 1930’s, my mother was a schoolmarm. She taught school in a series of one-room schoolhouses in some of the tiny farming communities near Ottawa, Kansas, which is the county seat of Franklin County, and she used to tell me stories about what it was like. It was a hard life, she said. But it was just about the only honest way for a young woman without a husband to get by in those days. Besides, her parents, Phoebe & Will, had both taught school in some of those same one-room schoolhouses there in Franklin County, Kansas – way back before they even knew each other – way back in the days before there were cars and paved roads and electricity and the like.
So, I guess Margaret was sort of born with teaching in her blood. One thing I’m quite sure of is that, when I was growing up as her adopted little boy, I was constantly aware that I was being raised by an intensely dedicated schoolmarm.
CUT TO: Montage of brief scenes from Galen’s early childhood in which he is constantly being made aware that he is being raised by an intensely dedicated schoolmarm.
~
249. Harry, Part One
FADE TO: Montage of black & white photographs from Harry’s childhood – farm life, church life, family, schoolhouse, playmates, and all kinds of agricultural machinery from that era immediately surrounding the 1914-1918 World War. Much emphasis on little Harry’s being isolated on a bleak farm with unusually old parents – like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
VOICE-OVER: My adoptive father’s name was Harry. He was born in the summer of 1908, outside of Waverly in East-Central Kansas. Harry had a six or eight brothers and one sister, all but one of whom were old enough to be his parents, and some of whom had, in fact, offspring of their own who were older than baby Harry.
MONTAGE [in sync with the above narration]: Very early version of a biplane drifts lazily over fields, woods, creeks and farmsteads, allowing us to take in, from perhaps 200 feet up, both the topographical and anthropological milieu into which Harry P. Green is being born. As the plane passes over that farmhouse where the Green Family is gathered, we zoom in through the roof to witness the blessed event.
VOICE-OVER: My father’s mother, whose name was Etta, was born in January of 1861, a few weeks after Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, but a few weeks before The South succeeded from the Union, sparking the American Civil War. Etta would have been close to fifty years of age when she gave birth to my dad. Informed observers speculate that this fact alone accounted for much of Harry’s mental and emotional peculiarity.
MONTAGE [in sync with the immediately above]: Sepia photographs of Etta Green (1861-1958), fading from one to the next chronologically, spaced perhaps ten years apart, reflecting various passages from infancy to death, with cinematic representations of historical events superimposed over them, also chronologically, beginning with iconic scenes and images from the Civil War.
VOICE-OVER: Harry’s father, Ira Green, was even older. He was born in 1858, right in the middle of President James Buchanan’s administration, when John Brown was still alive and breathing Abolitionist fire. I regret that I don’t know much about Etta & Ira Green, but the strange truth of the matter is that my dad didn’t seem to know all that much about them either, even though they were his own parents. (Either that or he was hiding something from me; but I doubt it.) A few years ago, I did a little genealogical research which landed my best friend Art Dunbar and me in the oldest section of a rural cemetery in Jefferson County, Iowa, where quite a few of my dad’s ancestors appear to be buried. But that was where the backward-leading trail “went cold,” as they say.
MONTAGE [in sync with the immediately above]: Sepia photographs of Ira Green (1858-1946), fading from one to the next chronologically, spaced perhaps ten years apart, reflecting various passages from infancy to death, with cinematic representations of agricultural advancement superimposed over them, also chronologically, beginning with relatively primitive agrarian techniques in the Antebellum North – plowing with mules and oxen, the McCormick reaper, manual mowing, etc. – then the world of threshing machines, steam tractors, threshing crews, barn-raisings, well-sinkings, etc. – right on up through the advent of tractors with internal combustion engines, pulling manure spreaders, disc harrows, plows, rakes, hay wagons, etc. – and finishing up with a few grim images of farm failures, foreclosures and the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
VOICE-OVER: Anyway, all these dead pioneers were only my ancestors by adoption. And I’ve never had enough money to buy the time to worry about them and their origins, except in my imagination.
CUT TO [in sync with the immediately above]: The present-day Galen again, seated as before, writing these words, then looking up from the page to gaze out over the valley stretching below.
VOICE-OVER: My father’s father, Ira, passed away before I was born, so I never knew him, except through my dad’s brief anecdotes. Harry’s mother, Etta, however, stuck around until I was in the fifth grade – though her final years were spent in an impenetrable fog of dementia as the result of what may or may not have been an accidental mishap with an old gas stove.
One of my earliest memories is of Etta mistaking me for a boy she’d known when she herself was a little girl in Iowa – a boy who’d evidently been a drummer in the Union Army. I remember Etta speaking to me as though she believed I’d just returned home from the Civil War. (Pretty cool, huh?)
MONTAGE [in sync with the immediately above]: Overlay of Etta going about her daily routine during her last years of semi-lucidity, there in that tiny shotgun shack in Richmond, Kansas where her final accident with that old gas stove occurred. Perhaps a dozen or so slices of her life in her eighth decade, fading in a steady journalistic sequence from each shot to the next, as she might have moved about through a typical quiet summer’s day.
~
Chapter XXXIII
The Interview Begins
~
250. Venturing Out From His Front Porch
VOICE-OVER: Unlike my mother, my father had no childhood comforts from which to fall. Informed sources all agree that every single one of the little dirt farms that Ira & Etta worked was a bust. Back before Harry was born, even way back before the Spanish-American War and the Massacre of Sitting Bull and his people at Wounded Knee – and all the way up until the middle of the Great Depression (which finished them off) – my dad’s parents rented one little dirt farm after another, mostly in and around Waverly or Melvern or Richmond, Kansas. Not once were they ever able to afford to actually purchase the land they worked. And not once were they able to “make a go of it” for more than a few years at a stretch – despite the backbreaking labor with which they strove mightily to do so.
CUT TO [in sync with the immediately above]: Galen, on the present-day cabin porch, still gazing out over the valley below, gets up from his writing table and begins walking slowly toward the steps leading down into the garden, which has heretofore been hidden from our view, lying, as it does, in the lower foreground of our landscape. As the camera follows him along the paved garden path, out toward the traditional rural mailbox, Galen turns to whistle over his shoulder, as though he were calling up a favorite dog, a golden retriever, for instance; but what comes trotting toward him from off camera (to his left), instead, is a full-grown chestnut & cream colored nanny goat, her ample udders jostling along beneath her well-fed belly, her little tail wagging, as though she were his favorite hunting dog, happy to be summoned for a jaunt.
Continuing his amble out to the mailbox, which stands on its decorative post by the side of the road, at the end of the garden walk, perhaps twenty yards from the cabin’s front porch, Galen turns his head briefly to see the goat come trotting up to him, bleating enthusiastically, until she can fall in behind him, like a good dog. As she nuzzles up against the leg of his jeans (this being autumn), he reaches down affectionately to scratch under her chin.
GALEN [looking down at the goat, who’s looking back up at him]: That’s a good girl, now, Esmeralda. Shall we see what’s in the mail today?
In another half-dozen steps, they arrive at the white metal mailbox, with its curved top and its little bright red metal flag which the “postman” has tucked back down into its “down” position, indicating that the outgoing mail has been picked up.
GALEN: OK, let’s take a gander at what Old Jeremiah brought us this time.
CUT TO: Close-up of Galen reaching for the latch of the mailbox.
CUT TO: Profile shot of same.
CUT TO: Over his shoulder, watching his hand pull the mailbox door open.
ZOOM IN: We can now gaze directly into the inside of the mailbox, all the way to the back. There, we begin to make out the blurry opening of the scene at the seminary into which we are about to fade, in the late summer of 1983.
CUT TO: Close-up of Galen’s eye, in which we can discern the bright reflection of the outline of the mailbox framing the approaching scene, somewhat analogous to the cathode ray tube-lit screen on an old color television set from the 1980’s.
CUT TO: The outline of the mailbox framing the scene into which we are now gradually fading, until it fills the entire movie screen. We open with a series of quick “wide shots” of everyday life among students, faculty and staff on the campus of Kansas City, Missouri’s Saint Paul Seminary in early September of 1983.
MUSIC: Simultaneous to our fading into this cliché series of seminary campus shots, Ravel’s adagio assai movement from his G-major Piano Concerto can be heard drawing to its serene conclusion, so that the ambient sounds woven through the campus scenes (birdsong, engines rising & falling, footfall on pavement, unintelligible human chatter, etc.) can be brought forward without grating against the Ravel. As in a Robert Altman transitional scene, however, the sounds and the visuals tend to get all mixed up and blended together, just the way they do in any peopled environ.
VOICE-OVER: Seminary was not at all what I had expected. But then again, very little in our lives is what we expect. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that I was a darned good sport about it.
CUT TO: Large classroom where forty or so graduate students in Theology are seated around seminar tables in groupings of five or six at each. The room is arranged in a loose semicircle with students facing a wall of dry-erase whiteboards serving as backdrop to whatever professors happened to be team-teaching on any given morning, lecturing from a pair of long “church-basement” tables set in front of the semicircle of paying customers.
CUT TO: Contrasting cross-shots of the principal characters in our little drama filtering across campus and into the classroom.
VOICE-OVER: Anyone interested in seeing the seminary through my eyes will want to bear several things in mind. First of all, even though I had grown up in the bosom of the Methodist church, I had made my escape from that bosom at the age of seventeen and had not returned until the age of thirty-three – when I could do so on my own terms. During my sixteen years away from the church, it had changed almost as radically as I had, albeit in quite the opposite direction.
CUT TO: Series of lingering close-ups of each of the dozen or so characters, there in the classroom, who will develop into the principals. Interspersed with these, the camera catches several different glimpses of our protagonist, Galen, as he visits affably with his new academic peers. We see clearly that, as has always been the case, he is a seasoned politician, a happy warrior, who never fails to get along well with everyone he meets, no matter what their superficial differences.
VOICE-OVER: Secondly, I was among the oldest entering students, one of a handful (out of forty or so) with a Master’s Degree, and one of the most widely published poets and authors – not only among my peers, but also when measured against the seminary faculty.
CUT TO: The front of the classroom, where two elderly biblical scholars are team-teaching their introductory remarks, employing the white dry-erase board mounted on the broad wall behind them to emphasize the same sophomoric points they’ve been emphasizing throughout their lengthy careers.
VOICE-OVER: Finally, anyone interested in seeing the seminary through my eyes will want to bear in mind that I had devoted a generous portion of those sixteen years away from the church to active involvement in several of the fashionable causes and less fashionable grassroots political movements to which the church itself and those within it had paid generous lip-service, but little else in the way of personal risk or inconvenience.
To put it more plainly: I had mostly been walking the walk, while they had mostly been talking the talk. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back, but simply to properly frame the events I’m about to recount for you here.
CUT TO [simultaneous with the immediately preceding verbiage]: Galen at age fifteen linked arm-in-arm with a Black woman on his right and a Black man on his left, marching in his first Civil Rights march (circa 1964) through the streets of downtown Wichita. Everyone, of course, is singing “We Shall Overcome.” As the camera pans back to take in the total scenario, we see that all participants of both races are dressed in their Sunday best. The crowd numbers approximately one hundred, mostly adults, about a fourth of whom are Caucasian and the rest African-American.
CUT TO: Wichita Police Department motorcycle escort (perhaps a dozen or so uniformed armed officers), gliding slowly alongside the demonstrators, in accordance with the terms of their parade permit.
CUT TO: Galen at age twenty, marching in one of several Vietnam-Era Anti-War Demonstrations in a crowd of perhaps a hundred mostly-white, mostly-young protesters, along Hillside Avenue near Wichita State University. As the camera pans back to take in the total scenario, we note eight or ten FBI informants dressed as WSU business majors (Mormon Missionary attire, narrow black 1960’s ties, Woody Allen glasses, close-cropped crew-cuts, etc.), snapping photos of Galen and his highly informally dressed (olive drab or faded blue denim, shaggy-haired) fellow Anti-Vietnam War Activists with [and I’m not making this up] those old “110” Model Kodak Instamatic box cameras.
VOICE-OVER: If I fantasized that I was following in anybody’s footsteps by embarking on my uncharacteristic excursion into the deepest, darkest bowels of organized religion in those months following my father’s death, then I suppose they’d have been the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, The Reverend William Sloane Coffin and Sigmund Freud.
CUT TO [montage of documentary footage to run simultaneous with the above narrative]: Dr. King preaching from a variety of pulpits and sundry public places and marching in a variety of demonstrations, from the earliest to the final footage available from his public career. Rev. Coffin shown in a variety of public demonstrations throughout the course of his career. Sigmund Freud shown primarily in still photographs taken throughout the course of his career, blended in with quick-cuts of whatever documentary film footage might be available for our use here. [Running time of this entire montage should be not more than 30 seconds.]
~
251. St. Galen & the Dragon
VOICE-OVER: Even as a little boy, I never believed in dragons. I did, however, believe in metaphors. And, for me, all those dragons that all those bold knights and all those gallant heroes and all those other good guys were forever managing to slay in all those neat stories they were always telling us all came to life inside my imagination, as metaphors – as perfect metaphors for the dragons I would be needing to slay – or at least to try to slay – when I grew up.
MONTAGE: Quick-cut sequence of both still and video imagery of some of the most famous dragon-slayers of legend, including St. George, Beowulf, Indra, Krakus, Apollo, Archangel Michael and Marduk. These are mere suggestions, since availability of any given visual is always iffy. Try to squeeze in at least 30 or 40 overlapping scenes within the time it takes for the above voice-over narration to be read.
VOICE-OVER: But by the time I was a grown man, the experience of living in the world had taught me that, for me, there was one dragon in particular which towered above all the other dragons inside my imagination, taunting me like the worst kind of bully, daring me, taunting me, begging me to step forward in my shining armor of naked mythoklasm to devote my life to slaying him.
And what (you might ask) was the name of that dragon which kept rearing his ugly head? That dragon’s name was Bigotry. Every good guy needs a dragon to slay, and the name of my dragon was Bigotry.
MONTAGE: Overlapping scenes of racial hatred, anti-Semitism, witchcraft trials, torments and executions, gay-bashing, etc, spanning the past 500 years. These should include – but not be limited to – scenes of lynchings, documentary quick-cuts from the Holocaust and, of course, representative news footage of Southern school desegregations (contextualized by snarling mobs of Southern Whites in tease-ups and crew cuts) and KKK rallies, marches and cross-burnings. [Running time: approximately 15 seconds.]
VOICE-OVER: Had I not entered kindergarten in 1954, the very same year that the United States Supreme Court handed down its Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka decision calling for the immediate racial desegregation of public schools all across the country . . . and had I not had the good fortune, throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, to attend some of the most racially integrated schools in America, there in Wichita, Kansas – where I was lucky enough to have many Black friends, several of whom invited me to their homes to meet their families and who, in turn, came to our house to meet my family . . . and had I not witnessed firsthand, “up close and personal,” the ugliness of racial bigotry throughout my youth, as well as on the TV news night after night . . . and had I not been driven by these and a thousand other experiences and observations to the horrifying (yet liberating) realization that I was surrounded on all sides by superstitious bigots . . . had all of this been otherwise . . . then . . . the name of the dragon I believed myself to have been called upon to slay might have been something other than Bigotry.
MONTAGE: Throughout the 60-90 seconds it will take for the above lengthy passage of narration to be read as voice-over, a sequence of montages will be required to illustrate the narrator’s theme of growing up and coming of age in what is frequently referred to as “the Civil Rights Era.” As much as is possible, the personal should be juxtaposed with the public, cinematically, since the challenge is to show how progress in public policy facilitates progress in the personal lives of individuals – such as our protagonist, Galen Green.
VOICE-OVER: But Bigotry it was. And so it was with this metaphor planted firmly inside my imagination that I arrived at seminary in the late summer of 1983, prepared to do battle with the dragon I called Bigotry.
MONTAGE [simultaneous with the above short passage of narration]: Fade to sequence of 3 or 4 seemingly inconsequential scenes on seminary campus, each involving Galen and a different one of 3 or 4 of his academic peers – from among those who will eventually be developed in our story’s principal characters.
~
252. Q & A in the Autumn Woods
[At this juncture, the relatively even flow of our film’s voice-over narration, spoken by the actor portraying Galen Green at age 64, with all these montages fading from one to the next in the sequence prescribed above, is abruptly broken.]
CUT TO: Galen, hiking through the dense autumn woods near the roomy cabin (or, more accurately, the cabin-style chalet) he shares with his partner, Marie. He is not so much striding along as he is poking along like a distracted schoolboy, pausing frequently to examine the down on a dried thistle or to observe a rabbit or bird or squirrel rustling about in the near distance, to one side or the other of the broad hiking path that’s been cleared. This entire sequence will be shot with a Steadicam, the 28mm lens (wide-angle) of which is carried at a distance of ten feet ahead of him, providing a lushly framed full-length portrait of the man in his element.
At first, Galen’s attention is completely absorbed by his immediate surroundings, until the instant at which the otherworldly voice of the first audience member to get to her feet and begin speaking jerks us all into the metafictional reality of our film’s possessing a dimension of which we’d been heretofore unaware.]
YOUNG WOMAN [an African-American college student]: ‘Scuse me. Professor. Down here. ‘Scuse me, sir.
[Jump-shot backwards to reveal the metafictional fact that we have actually been watching a movie screen on which Galen has been walking through the autumn woods. Just as we hear the Young Woman’s voice from the audience in the imaginary darkened theater, we see her silhouette rise from her theater seat and begin to move about with little gestures of her arms and head.
Her silhouette, of course, appears to be only a few inches high, there at the bottom our actual movie screen, while the movie screen within the movie screen continues to portray the arboreal scene containing Galen as being (as one would expect) larger than life.]
YOUNG WOMAN [raising the pitch and volume of her voice this time]: Yoo-hoo. Professor. Down here, in the third row. ‘Scuse me, sir. I have a question.
[Up on the movie screen, the actor playing Galen stops in his tracks and directs his attention downward to the Young Woman’s animated silhouette. We see that he is now giving her his full attention.]
GALEN: Yes. The young lady in the third row. You had a question?
YOUNG WOMAN: Yes, sir. I was just wondering . . . . .
GALEN: Yes?
YOUNG WOMAN: I was wondering . . . You just now said that you arrived at that seminary, there in Kansas City in the summer of 1983 . . . [We see that she is reading from class notes she has jotted down on the steno pad she holds in her hand.] . . . in the late summer of 1983, “prepared to do battle with the dragon I called Bigotry.”
GALEN: That’s correct. Was there a question?
YOUNG WOMAN: Well, yes, sir. I get the impression that you acquired your powerful animosity toward bigotry from your having grown up in a time and place where you witnessed quite a lot of it.
GALEN: Yes, that’s right. I did; although I should add that the bulk of the bigotry I witnessed was on my television screen. But I suppose that could be said about anybody, including all those high-ranking government officials whose job it was to put an end to it.
YOUNG WOMAN: But you did experience it firsthand?
GALEN: Oh, absolutely. The fact that Wichita’s public schools had never been racially segregated in the same way Topeka’s public schools had been – because of the way Kansas’ lawmakers had laid things out, many years earlier – didn’t mean that Wichita wasn’t the scene of its share of racial tension. By the same token, the fact that Fairmount Elementary School and East High School were probably about as comfortably integrated as any public schools in the entire United States – both then and now – didn’t mean that racial tension wasn’t in the air most of the time, especially throughout the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Believe me: it was.
YOUNG WOMAN: OK, then: what I’m wondering, sir, is what other types of bigotry did you encounter along the way, after you finished high school but before you arrived at the seminary?
GALEN: Ah! Good question! Excellent question! I’m glad you brought that up.
While it is certainly true that my initial exposure to bigotry – as a child and an adolescent, growing up in Wichita – appeared to me at the time to be limited to racial bigotry, the fact of the matter is that the racial bigotry I experienced and observed early on provided me with a kind of mental prototype or template or model or paradigm with which I was later able to recognize, identify and analyze a variety of other manifestations of bigotry, as my life progressed on into adulthood and middle-age.
YOUNG WOMAN: Yes! That’s exactly what I’m getting at. Could you tell us a little about that?
GALEN: Sure. I’d be glad to.
[He takes a few more steps forward to where a good-sized stump sticks out of the ground, surrounded at its base by fallen maple leaves. Looking down at it as he walks around it, he takes a seat, then directs his attention back to the Young Woman’s silhouette and continues with his answer to her question.]
~
253. Broken Legs & Picked Pockets
GALEN: In the America where my generation grew up – that so-called “Baby-Boom Generation,” born in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War – the word “bigotry” came to serve as a handy catch-all term for racial prejudice, animosity and intolerance. It was often narrowly applied as a synonym for White racism toward Blacks.
Nowadays, of course, its predominant usage refers to persons who are hostile to those of differing sex, race, ethnicity, religious belief or spirituality, nationality, language, sexual orientation and/or age – as well as to those from a different region, those with non-normative gender identity, those who are homeless, and those with various medical disorders, particularly behavioral and addictive disorders.
Now, that’s a paraphrase of something I recently read on Wikipedia. My own view of the matter is that that’s both too general and too specific.
To my way of thinking, bigotry is more of an epistemological phenomenon than an emotional phenomenon. In other words, it’s not so much about, for instance, “hatred” (which I find to be an intellectually lazy label that gets plastered in lots of places where more intellectually rigorous labels would better serve).
Bigotry strikes me as being about information – about how we know what we think we know.
YOUNG WOMAN: That sounds like some of the things you’ve written about myth.
GALEN: That’s a very astute observation. And we’ll get to the subject of myth and myth-bound living and mythoklasm and mythoklastic therapy and so forth, a little bit later. Since you brought it up, though, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to mention here in passing that the seminary – as much as any place we might be able to locate on a map – turns out to have served as the laboratory in which the Mythoklastic Therapy Institute was conceived.
[He shifts his position on the tree stump where he is still seated.]
Getting back to the subject of bigotry: whenever I’ve tried to talk about it in recent years, I’m always reminded of something Garrison Keillor, the public radio personality and (in my opinion) one of our most enjoyable fiction writers, had to say about one particular type of character inhabiting his fictional little town of Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. I’m paraphrasing once again, because I have no idea where to track down the exact quote. Keillor’s description of them went something like this: they’ve made up their minds about you before they’ve even met you, and nothing you can do or say is going to change their opinion. And that’s that.
To me, that’s bigotry in a nutshell. And, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, folks like that are entitled to their bigoted little opinions, so long as their wrong-headedness “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The problem is, of course, that, because of the way the world is constructed, folks’ bigotries unavoidably pick some-body’s pocket or break some-body’s leg.
Am I right?
YOUNG WOMAN: Well . . . when you put it that way . . . . .
GALEN: When I was very young, all that the word “bigotry” meant to me was a bad attitude inside the hearts and minds of certain White people, some of whom I’d seen on the TV news shouting at Black folks who wanted only the same opportunities in life that they themselves had. More importantly, however, my earliest meager grasp of the concept of bigotry encompassed members of my own family – both immediate and extended; and it was this fact which tormented me the most.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess, in retrospect now, that a goodly measure of the shame, back then, derived from my associating bigotry with America’s unforgivable sin of poverty. And it was for good reason, of course, that I made this connection. After all, was it not the very same demographic whom I grew up looking down on as “White Trash” who were now (i.e. in the Kennedy/Johnson years) expressing attitudes and opinions discomfortingly similar to those I was hearing around my own tribal circle?
YOUNG WOMAN: What did that feel like? I mean, what was it about that discomforting similarity which tormented you so?
GALEN: Why, it was nothing short of the fear of being “White Trash” myself. I mean, I’m well aware that “White Trash” is a bigoted term in itself, but is was, nonetheless, a deeply meaningful term for those of us in the White lower-middle class (or “Working Class,” if you will) whose economic circumstances had already automatically condemned us to that stereotype, in spite of the reality of our modes of relating to the rest of humankind.
YOUNG WOMAN: But, if you knew that you weren’t like that, why should it bother you if other people mistakenly believed that you were?
GALEN: It bothered me because not being a bigot was as much at the core of my identity, once I’d reached my teen years, as was being polite to women or being kind to children or not wrecking the family car or not lying or cheating or stealing.
~
254. Only a Pawn in their Game
YOUNG WOMAN: But, of course, bigotry is not – as we all now know – simply a matter of individual identities and personal choices. It’s also a matter of group identity and of overwhelming cultural forces.
GALEN: Exactly! And, by the time I was in college, I was beginning to figure that out for myself – or perhaps I should say, with a little encouragement from various currents of liberal thought flowing all around me in those days.
Bob Dylan probably deserves a lot of credit. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that song of his entitled “Only a Pawn in their Game.” It’s one of his most brilliant early “folksongs,” although he manages to make it come off sounding artlessly homespun.
YOUNG WOMAN: No. I’m sorry to say that I’m not familiar with it. So – you’re saying that this Dylan song helped you to better understand the nature of bigotry? How so?
GALEN: Well, that particular song was written in response to the June 12, 1963 assassination of the Mississippi Civil Rights leader, Medgar Evers. Dylan recorded it a mere two months after the fact and performed it on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial on the same afternoon when Dr. King delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech there.
YOUNG WOMAN: Wow! That must have been some song!
GALEN: Indeed. I myself consider it to be one of the most insightful songs ever written.
YOUNG WOMAN: What’s so special about it?
GALEN: For me, what’s special about it is its bold assertion that the person who killed Medgar Evers was only a pawn, a tool, a stooge, a puppet to lots of other people far more powerful than himself.
[He turns slightly to his left, lifting his open left hand and bringing it down gently, just as a magician might. As he does, a window opens in the upper right-hand corner of the movie screen, temporarily blocking out that quarter portion of the autumn woods where Galen remains seated on the tree stump. Within this window, the black & white image appears of the very young Bob Dylan, recorded on a YouTube posting, performing “Only a Pawn in their Game” in concert (perhaps at Newport?). At first, the audio portion of Dylan’s early performance is muted.]
GALEN: Dylan’s song opens simply enough with the line:
“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood.”
He offers a quick sketch of the killer’s actions on that shameful night in 1963 and ends the stanza the same way he’s going to end every stanza:
“But he can’t be blamed –
He’s only a pawn in their game.”
[In the corner window, the young Dylan continues his performance without sound.]
YOUNG WOMAN: If I understand you correctly, then, you seem to be saying that this song is about how what appears at first to be a personal evil turns out to be the product of a systemic evil. Do I have that right?
GALEN: “Systemic Evil.” Sure. That’s certainly a legitimate way of looking at it. [He turns his head to look at Dylan’s performance, up in the superimposed window over his left shoulder.]
Let’s listen to the third stanza. Please bear in mind that this comes only after Dylan has laid down two stanzas of narrative groundwork.
BOB DYLAN [singing in the window]:
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers,
the governors get paid.
And the marshals and cops get the same.
But the poor white man’s used
in the hands of them all like a tool.
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin,
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in.
But it ain’t him to blame:
He’s only a pawn in their game.
[At the end of this stanza, the audio portion of Dylan’s performance from YouTube fades back to mute.]
GALEN: It was over thirty years later that a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. That was in 1994. Two years later, a movie version of the whole mess was released entitled Ghosts of Mississippi, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg and James Woods. What I recall most vividly about it is my frustration at the filmmakers’ omission of Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in their Game” thesis, thus leaving the average viewer with the dummied-down conclusion that De La Beckwith was just another evil man who nearly got away with murder, had it not been for the dauntlessness of Alec Baldwin’s character.
YOUNG WOMAN: That must have been disappointing.
GALEN: To say the least.
YOUNG WOMAN: But at least the general public was reminded of how things used to be.
GALEN: Well, yes. That’s always important.
YOUNG WOMAN: OK. So – let me ask you this: Did growing up in the so-called “Civil Rights Era” with all this racial turmoil in the air and then attending racially integrated schools and getting to know some of the Black kids and so forth . . . did that experience make you in any way curious about what life was really like down in the Deep South?
GALEN: Of course it did. That’s why I hitchhiked down there to take a look around, first chance I got.
YOUNG WOMAN: You did? That sounds fascinating – not to mention dangerous!
[As the two are exchanging this last bit of dialogue, the young Dylan’s black & white image begins to fade, as he silently finishes his 3:33’ YouTube performance from the mid-1960’s, in the window that remains open in the upper right-hand quadrant of our movie screen, superimposed over the real-time image of the autumn woods in which Galen remains seated on his tree stump as he chats with the young woman and – thus – with the metafictional theater audience seated all around her.]
~
255. Hitchhiking into the Deep South, 1967
GALEN: It was in August of 1967 – the summer after I graduated from high school, the summer after that race riot in the burger joint parking lot across the street from my high school – four years after Medgar Evers had been gunned down in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi and three years after those three civil rights workers (Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney) were brutally murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
[As he is delivering these lines, a new set of images begins to emerge in the window from which Dylan’s has now completely faded. The first is a full-color panoramic shot of a rural Arkansas landscape where an 18-year-old Galen Green is walking backwards along the shoulder of some two-lane federal highway, his old Boy Scout knapsack on his back, facing the oncoming traffic, trying to thumb a ride.]
GALEN: I had just turned eighteen and was getting psyched up to enter Wichita State University as a freshman in the fall. I had fifty dollars in my pocket and a case of wanderlust that kept me awake at night.
[In the time that it’s taken him to say this much, the camera of our complete visual attention has panned away from Old Galen on the stump in the woods and been wholly drawn into the scene taking place up in the superimposed window. Finally, what we’d been viewing in that window becomes all that there is.]
GALEN [in voice-over]: I talked it over with my parents. I assured them that I knew what I was doing and that I was aware that there was a certain amount of risk involved but that I just had to get away for a while and see as much of the world as my $50 could purchase.
[Our narrative format has now completely returned to that of VOICE-OVER with GALEN and the YOUNG WOMAN dialoguing over our visuals.]
YOUNG WOMAN: So you hitchhiked into the heart of Ku Klux Klan country?
GALEN: You make it sound worse than it was. My plan was to hitchhike from Wichita to New Orleans, then over to Nashville, then back home. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I’d be trespassing on the Klan’s turf or that they might take exception to a scrawny little 118-lb. Yankee from Kansas dropping in for a visit – even if I did happen to look as though I were only twelve years old at the time.
YOUNG WOMAN: Well, so, did you cross paths with any members of the KKK?
GALEN: As it turns out, I think I did – although one can never be 100% certain and still live to tell the tale – if you know what I mean.
YOUNG WOMAN: How’s that?
GALEN: Here, let me show you.
[A nondescript red pickup slows down and pulls over onto the shoulder, a few yards ahead of where Galen is walking backwards. He runs over to the passenger’s side and asks the driver, “How far you going?” which he has quickly learned is the accepted universal code of the road for the all-important but silly seeming question, “Did you pull over in order to offer me a ride?” It would, after all, be less than prudential to simply make that assumption and then to hop into the passenger’s seat of an unwilling stranger who had pulled over to let his engine cool down or to urinate.]
GALEN [still in VOICE-OVER]: This is part of a conversation I had with a stranger who pulled over to give me a ride, somewhere around the Arkansas-Louisiana state line. This would have been the same day I reached Vicksburg, Mississippi, where I spent the night.
YOUNG GALEN [on the screen]: How far you going?
STRANGER: Oh, just down the road a piece – ‘bout thirty miles or so. Hop in.
CUT TO: [Several minutes later] Mid-conversation between the two, as the northern Louisiana countryside flashes by, outside the open windows.
STRANGER: Mind if I ask you somethin’? I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.
YOUNG GALEN: No. It’s OK.
STRANGER: I was just won’drin’ – you ain’t one of them civil rights creeps, are yuh – come down here t’ agitate?
YOUNG GALEN [laughing amiably]: No, sir, I’m not. I’m just trying to get down to New Orleans to see what it looks like. In a couple of weeks or so, I’ve got to be back in Wichita to start school.
STRANGER [nodding politely]: That’s good. I was just curious.
[The two exchange more hospitable nods, then return their attention to the road up ahead, as they sit silently for a minute, trying to think of some further benign small talk with which to pass the miles.]
~
256. Just another Civic Organization
CUT TO: Old Galen, still seated on the stump, still being interviewed by the Young Woman, whose silhouette remains standing and gesturing, out in the third row of our metafictional theater. The screen over Old Galen’s left shoulder again is occupying the upper-right quadrant of our metafictional movie screen. On it, Young Galen and the Stranger at the wheel continue their conversation, there in the turbulent Deep South of the mid-1960’s.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, what was it about him specifically that led you to conclude that he was likely a member of the KKK?
OLD GALEN: It was something he said later on in our conversation. I don’t recall the exact details of how the subject of the Klan came up, but it did. (Remember that this was more than forty years ago.) Anyway, it had to with the way he chose to characterize them. It just struck me as being unnecessarily overly defensive.
CUT TO: Interior of the pickup truck. Half-shot of the Stranger, still driving, turning toward Young Galen, employs the chatty tone of your favorite corner grocer.
STRANGER: Folks down here know that they’re not gonna have any trouble with the Klan. They’re not at all like you probably think they are. I mean, I’ve seen how they’ve been made out to be these murdering rednecks, riding around the night, lynching Colored folks and all. But that’s because that’s what them TV camera people from up North want you to believe – because that’s what suits their purpose.
Down here, folks know that that may have been the way the Klan was, fifty or sixty years ago; but they’re not like that nowadays. Nowadays, the Klan is just another civic organization – like the Elks or Kiwanis. You’re apt to see them being interviewed on some local TV station. No hoods. No robes. Just regular folks – like me or you.
[Young Galen answers him with appeasing body language, but the remainder of their conversation is what used to be called a “dumb show,” a pantomime, played out in the front seat of this pickup truck, as summertime flashes by. Meanwhile, Old Galen and the Young Woman continue to dialogue in the voice-over.]
YOUNG WOMAN [obviously taken aback]: “Just another civic organization like the Elks or Kiwanis!” And this was how many years after the Klan had murdered those three young civil rights workers down in Mississippi?
OLD GALEN: Three years. It was just three years later that I hitchhiked down there to check out the situation for myself.
YOUNG WOMAN [mostly to herself]: Oh, Lord Jesus!
OLD GALEN: Have you ever seen a 1988 film called Mississippi Burning, starring Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand and Gene Hackman?
YOUNG WOMAN: As a matter of fact, I have. It was on TV a few nights ago – on some old movie channel.
OLD GALEN: Were you aware that it was based on those same murders to which you were just referring?
YOUNG WOMAN: What? You mean Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney?
OLD GALEN: That’s right.
YOUNG WOMAN: Wow! No, I didn’t make the connection.
OLD GALEN: That might be because the filmmakers focused the center of the story elsewhere. And that’s OK. At least a lot of people all around the world have seen it and been given some vague inkling of that unfortunate era in American history.
CUT BACK TO: Our metafictional theater where the Young Woman continues to dialogue with Old Galen, who’s still up on the movie screen, in the woods on his tree stump.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, was that your only brush with the Ku Klux Klan on your 1967 fact-finding tour of the Deep South?
OLD GALEN: I doubt it. But, as I said earlier, there’s really no way of knowing. Most of the people who picked me up were men, and most of them were White. Lots of truck drivers, salesmen and farmers.
I was doing some research on the subject recently and was shocked to learn about the number of homicides involving hitchhikers back in those days in that part of the country.
I suppose that if I’d known then what I know now, I never would have done it. I mean, statistically, it’s a miracle that I survived all those thousands of miles I ended up hitchhiking around these United States during my college years.
~
257. 2334 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive (39213)
YOUNG WOMAN: Did any Black folks give you a ride?
OLD GALEN: There’s only one that I can recall. But that ride yielded an abundance of serendipity.
YOUNG WOMAN: How do you mean?
OLD GALEN: Well, because I ended up with something far more valuable than just a lift down the road.
This very professional looking Black man picked me up on the outskirts of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the morning after I’d had that provocative conversation with our friend in the red pickup truck. As luck would have it, he was driving back to his home in Jackson, which isn’t all that far from Vicksburg.
When he told me that he lived in Jackson, Mississippi, I couldn’t help but ask him about Medgar Evers’ assassination in the driveway of his home there, four years earlier.
FADE TO: Two-shot of Young Galen and the well-spoken, professional looking middle-aged Black gentleman in question, seated in the front seat of a 1965 Chevy Nova, the Mississippi summerscape flashing by outside. Although we can readily discern from their facial expressions and hand gestures that they are in the middle of a lively dialogue, we never get to hear their voices. All that we’re able to hear is the ongoing interview between Old Galen in the woods and the Young Woman in the metafictional theater.
OLD GALEN: Now, as it turned out, this remarkably well-spoken middle-aged African-American gentleman from Jackson, Mississippi shared my interest in matters political, historical and racial, so that he and I were able to have a wonderfully stimulating conversation along that stretch of highway taking us into Jackson.
YOUNG WOMAN: Can you give me an example of what the two of you talked about?
OLD GALEN: Well, let me see. I know that we talked about local Black leaders in Wichita as they compared to local Black leaders in Jackson, Mississippi. The reason I remember that is because my interlocutor himself happened to be what he himself modestly described as “a relatively minor player” in his city’s civil rights drama.
YOUNG WOMAN: Do you think he was genuinely interested in what you had to say about the civil rights movement in Wichita, Kansas – or was he just being polite?
OLD GALEN [chuckling]: For all I know, he may have just been being polite. He was certainly the polite type. But if he was, I tend to suspect that it would have been because he recognized the hour or so that he and I would be spending together as what has come to be called, in recent years, “a teachable moment.”
YOUNG WOMAN: Don’t you just hate some of the insipid terms that some people come up with?
OLD GALEN: I know what you mean.
YOUNG WOMAN: I mean, really! “A teachable moment!” That doesn’t even make logical sense!
OLD GALEN: I agree. But, anyway, you know what I’m getting at.
YOUNG WOMAN: Yes. Of course. Please, continue.
OLD GALEN: My guess is that this nice guy figured out, within the first five minutes of our conversation, that he had stumbled across something which I myself have found to be a rarity in recent years, and that’s a bright young person with a genuine curiosity about what’s going on in the world.
YOUNG WOMAN: Like me!
OLD GALEN [grinning with his voice]: Yes. Like you.
YOUNG WOMAN: Please, go on.
OLD GALEN: Anyway, I imagine that he realized that the more he got me to talk about the civil rights movement in Wichita, the more receptive I was likely to be to whatever he felt I should know about the movement nationally – and about which I still seemed to be in the dark.
YOUNG WOMAN: Can you give me a for instance?
OLD GALEN: Well, I remember telling him about Chester Lewis, who was, at that time, head of our local NAACP. Chet Lewis was a civil rights attorney who happened to be remarkably charismatic, on top of being remarkably articulate and politically savvy. His prominence in the local media spotlight had coincided with my coming of age amidst the tension of Wichita’s relatively tame civil rights maturation.
Basically, what I related to my host, as he drove us along that highway between Vicksburg and Jackson, was my personal disenchantment with Chet Lewis’s approach to leading Wichita’s civil rights movement. I confessed that it seemed to me that Lewis’s agenda had shifted from one of pursuing racial equality to one of promoting himself as a local media icon – ‘though I’m sure that those would not have been my exact words.
YOUNG WOMAN: I think I get the idea.
OLD GALEN: In hindsight, what I was complaining about was not at all unusual in 1967 – any more than it is here in the 21st century.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, what was his response? What did your driver have to say about your disenchantment?
OLD GALEN: He was very understanding. Again in hindsight, I’m quite sure that he’d been through his own version of the same movie – probably more than once.
He explained that what was probably happening with Chet Lewis was the not at all uncommon phenomenon of getting swept up and swallowed by historical forces that were too big for him to even perceive.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, what did you think of that explanation?
OLD GALEN: Well, given the fact that my driver was undoubtedly hypersensitive to the fact that he was conversing with a stranger whom he’d picked up off the highway only minutes earlier – there in arguably the most violently racist state in the Union – I took his answer with a grain of salt. Had the setting for our conversation been other than a closed car going 60 MPH through Mississippi in August of 1967, I might have felt more invited to debate. But, then again, so might he.
YOUNG WOMAN: Anyway, you’d started to tell me about how your ride with this Black man had yielded an abundance of serendipity.
OLD GALEN: Yes. That’s right. So, as I was saying, when he told me that he lived in Jackson, Mississippi, I couldn’t help but ask him about Medgar Evers’ assassination in the driveway of his home there, four years earlier.
So . . . after we’d chatted for 10 or 15 minutes about matters political, historical and racial, during which time I suppose he was sizing me up – screening me for the next level of enlightenment – he asked me if I’d be interested in seeing the house where Medgar had been murdered.
YOUNG WOMAN: Wow! What did you say?
OLD GALEN: I said “sure!” You can imagine what was going through my mind. I couldn’t believe my luck.
YOUNG WOMAN: I’ll bet.
OLD GALEN: Right! He said he’d be happy to drive past and show it to me.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, how did that go?
OLD GALEN: About the way you’d expect. What struck me most was just how ordinary the house was and how closely it resembled some of the houses of the factory workers, college professors and small business owners whose kids I’d gone to school with in Wichita.
YOUNG WOMAN: What were you expecting?
OLD GALEN: I can’t say for sure.
YOUNG WOMAN: I mean, were you disappointed?
OLD GALEN: No, not disappointed. More like demythologized.
YOUNG WOMAN: Mythoklasted?
OLD GALEN: Yes. More like that.
YOUNG WOMAN: But it was a positive experience for you?
OLD GALEN: Yes, it was. I mean, all we did was drive by and slow down a little, but not so much as to upset the neighbors.
YOUNG WOMAN: So, that must have felt like some kind of pilgrimage for you, there at the age of 18 and all.
OLD GALEN: That’s a good way of putting it. It’s amazing – isn’t it – how many lessons one can learn in the few seconds it takes to slow down when driving past something one needs to see.
YOUNG WOMAN: That’s a good way of putting it.
OLD GALEN: When I recollect those few seconds now, I’m reminded of that phrase that came up during the Eichmann trial – “The Banality of Evil.”
[Throughout the entirely of the above off-screen exchange of dialogue between the Young Woman and Old Galen, what we’ve been watching on-screen has been a continuation of the conversation – in dumb show – between Young Galen and the Black man at the wheel, as they’ve been approaching Jackson, Mississippi, then entering the urban outskirts, making their way toward the house in question at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive (39213) where Medgar Evers was gunned down in June of 1963.]
SOUNDTRACK: Just as we see the road sign announcing the Jackson, Mississippi city limits, cue soundtrack of Bob Dylan singing and playing the opening stanza of “Only a Pawn in their Game.” The music should be perfectly synchronized with their drive to, by, and from the Evers house, where the car slows from 35 MPH to 10 MPH for no more than perhaps five seconds. As the opening stanza ends, Young Galen is getting out of the Chevy Nova on the shoulder of a southbound highway and shaking hands with his host. Smiles and nods express mutual amity.
BOB DYLAN: [pre-recorded]
A bullet from the back of a bush
took Medgar Evers’ blood.
A finger fired the trigger to his name.
A handle hid out in the dark.
A hand set the spark.
Two eyes took the aim,
Behind a man’s brain,
But he can’t be blamed –
He’s only a pawn in their game.
[Just as Dylan is singing this last line of this opening stanza, we see Young Galen up on the screen in half-shot, walking backwards again, facing the on-coming traffic, trying to thumb a ride on down through Mississippi to New Orleans.]
~
Chapter XXXIV
The Interview Continues
~
258. Rocking Chair Duet
FADE TO: The Young Woman, walking along next to Old Galen on the same leaf-strewn path that he had taken from the house to get to the tree stump where he’d been perched the last time we saw him. From the expansive sequence of shots of the two of them walking, it’s clear to the audience that they’re headed back up to the house. The Young Woman, a light-skinned African-American graduate student in her late twenties, is dressed in the customary university campus jeans and flannel shirt of the Obama era.
OLD GALEN: I thought we both might be more comfortable continuing our conversation on the front porch.
YOUNG WOMAN: I appreciate that. I was beginning to think that you were going to let me stand there in that dark theater through this whole movie. (They both laugh.)
FADE TO: Panoramic helicopter shot from 200 feet up, sweeping across the colorful treetops of the autumn woods and the valley below, then slowly zooming in on Old Galen seated in a rocking chair on the front porch of the hillside chalet he shares with his partner, Marie, along a paved two-lane rural road somewhere in the Midwest.
The Young Woman is seated in an identical rocking chair, positioned at the usual angle and proximity from his. Between them stands a squat patio table, just big enough to hold the Young Woman’s notepad, along with the two fat ceramic coffee mugs from which each of them pauses to sip as the interview continues.
YOUNG WOMAN: Well – so – I’m dying to know – did you ever make it to New Orleans?
OLD GALEN: Of course I did. That same day, in fact. A trucker dropped me off on the outskirts of town where I caught a city bus which took me downtown, near the French Quarter, right at the door of one of those big city missions for homeless men.
It was a different world, back then. Social services for the homeless were a whole different ballgame than they are today. Back then, every American city had at least two or three of these men’s missions. That’s what they called themselves. Like so many of them, the one where I ended up that evening was heavy on the Southern Baptist brand of evangelizing. Fortunately, I’d spent the sixth grade at the Wichita Christian Academy, so I knew all the right answers to the pushy preacher’s queries as to whether or not I’d been “saved” and whatnot.
YOUNG WOMAN: I guess I kinda got you off the subject of bigotry, didn’t I. Sorry about that.
OLD GALEN: That’s OK. Don’t worry about it. In a way, it was my fault. All you did was to ask me if growing up in Wichita amidst the turmoil of the so-called “Civil Rights Era” had made me at all curious about what life was really like down in the Deep South.
YOUNG WOMAN: Well, I’m happy that you took the time to give me the answer you did. It was very helpful. Maybe sometime you could fill us in with a few of the more colorful details from the rest of that Deep South adventure.
OLD GALEN: I’ll try to do that sometime before I depart this vale of tears.
YOUNG WOMAN: Anyway, you seemed to be taking us in some clearly definable direction when I sidetracked you a while ago.
OLD GALEN: It felt that way.
YOUNG WOMAN: So . . . ?
OLD GALEN: Let me see . . . I’ll have to think about it for a minute. [Pausing to ponder] I remember that I had a pair of straight lines in my mind and that the first represented everything that I’d learned about bigotry between, let’s say, the age of eight and the age of thirty-four when I arrived at seminary – and that the second represented everything that I’d learned about bigotry between the moment of my arrival at seminary and the present moment where I’m speaking these words to you here.
[As he’s explaining this, he attempts to illustrate his thought by holding his two index fingers straight up at about chest level, first bringing the right one in from his far right to meet the other directly in front of him and then sliding his left one nearly all the way out to his far left.]
YOUNG WOMAN: OK – so, it sounds like you’re talking about two halves of one very long, continuous timeline.
OLD GALEN: I suppose that’s a fair statement. So, the first half would be twenty six years in length, and the second half would be closer to a full thirty years in length.
YOUNG WOMAN: I take it that you mean to imply that your understanding of bigotry has changed pretty often and pretty radically over the years.
OLD GALEN: Precisely – and that that elongated sequence of melodramas I’m lumping together under the title of this movie we’re in right now [using his mock announcer voice] “The Seminary” – played a pivotal role in expediting the evolution of my understanding of bigotry and of everything related to it.
YOUNG WOMAN: And all this began with your boyhood exposure to racial prejudice?
OLD GALEN: More or less – if it can be said to have had a starting point in time.
YOUNG WOMAN: Somehow I get the sense that, long ago, you moved on from your youthful mission of slaying that metaphorical dragon called Bigotry.
OLD GALEN: That would be correct. By the time I joined V.I.S.T.A. in 1974, that metaphorical dragon had morphed in my imagination into a giant question mark. It was no longer an evil to be slain, but rather an evil to be anatomized, dissected, deconstructed.
YOUNG WOMAN: Why not slain?
OLD GALEN: Only an egomaniacal fool would think he could eradicate an evil of that magnitude. But by the time I finished graduate school in August of 1974 – the same month in which Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency in disgrace – I myself had resigned myself to the grown-up reality that my mission was not eradicate a disease so pervasive as Bigotry, but rather to diminish its harmful impact on human happiness by learning more about it and then sharing what I learned by way of my writing.
YOUNG WOMAN: Tell me again what VISTA stands for.
OLD GALEN: Volunteers in Service to America.
YOUNG WOMAN: I’ve heard it referred to as “the domestic Peace Corps.”
OLD GALEN: That’s as good a thumbnail definition as any.
YOUNG WOMAN: You just now mentioned something called “human happiness.” Would you care to elaborate on what you mean by that phrase?
OLD GALEN: You’re kidding – right?
YOUNG WOMAN: Maybe a little bit, but not entirely.
[Old Galen buys himself some time to assess her question, as well as her probable motive in asking it the way she did. Reaching for the coffee mug closest to him, he inhales the autumn air and blows gently across the top of the warm black liquid.]
CUT TO: Close-up of Old Galen cooling his coffee by blowing gently across its surface.
CUT TO: Panoramic view of the entire landscape that’s visible from the chalet’s broad front porch. This shot is framed so as to catch a portion of the back of the Young Woman’s head along with Old Galen’s seated upper half, as he sips his coffee – so that, in essence, we are seeing our version of what they are seeing.
CUT BACK TO: “Rocking Chair Duet” – of Old Galen and Young Woman seated as before on the broad front porch in rocking chairs angled in the customary conversational arrangement of rural America, circa 2012 C.E. As he returns his mug to its place on the patio table between them, she reaches for the mug nearest her and begins to perform the same gentle cooling ritual.
OLD GALEN [with bemused expression]: I learned long ago – as a Philosophy Minor at Wichita State – never to attempt to explain the obvious.
YOUNG WOMAN: Well, to me, what’s most obvious about human happiness is that it’s logically impossible to make everyone happy.
OLD GALEN: That’s right. And that’s why folks like me & Bill Clinton & Al Gore & Barack Obama & Sam Harris & Steven Pinker keep coming back to the 18th century Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s phrase, “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
YOUNG WOMAN: I guess that makes sense. It’s certainly good enough for me.
OLD GALEN: And that’s why I went to seminary.
YOUNG WOMAN: What is?
OLD GALEN: To look under the hood and see what it is that organized religion is doing wrong.
YOUNG WOMAN: It looks to me as though they’re doing everything wrong.
OLD GALEN: Sure. But then, how do we account for the majority of human beings on this earth believing that religion makes people happy?
YOUNG WOMAN: Maybe they’re deluded. Maybe they’re consciously lying because it serves their interests – or, at least, they think it does.
OLD GALEN: What does? Religion or lying?
YOUNG WOMAN: Both……………….
(.....to be continued.....gg.....March 14, 2012.....)
~
Table of Sections
~ Book One ~
Chapter I: The Attic at the Center of . . . . .
1. Our Cave of Making
2. Our Dramatis Personae
3. Our Historical Backdrop
4. Our Soundtrack
5. How Galen Met Arthur
6. Just a Little Background
7. James Henry Nelson
8. Dr. F.W. (Bill) Nelson & Co.
9. Stopping by Antonya Nelson's Girlhood Home
10. My Escape from the "House of Not-OK"
11. Destiny's Needle Pulling the Threads
12. J.L. McClure
13. Steve McCaskey
Chapter II: The Pied Piper of Perspective
14. Jack Whitesell, Bookseller
15. Our Wintry Afternoon Visit to Jack's Curiosity Shop
16. A Flashback Within a Flashback
17. Awash in a Wistful Trance
18. Like Some Tragic Human Fish Drowning in the Air
19. The Hazards of Time-Travel
20. Coda: The Recycled Pied Piper
21. The Forgotten Headshop
22. The Hourglass
23. A Saturday Morning in the Spring of 1960
24. Jeff Corbin
25. A Rearranging of My Molecules
26. Tracings
27. From Harry Corbin's Library Window
28. Our Texaco Station's Exotic New Proprietor
29. Anatomy of the Machine Itself
30. From Point A to Point B
31. Pinball Wizard
32. Where Questions Come From
33. All That We Have
34. This Summer I Hear the Drumming
35. And Spread All of Our Itchy Questions Out
Chapter III: Gunfire Inside the Hourglass
36. Gaps
37. Preliminary Thoughts Concerning Not Knowing
38. Editorial Note
39. Susan Nelson
Chapter IV: Attic Snapshots
40. History and National Stupidity
41. From out of Grooved Vinyl
42. Our Other Attic Soundtrack
43. Grooving on Dead White European Males
44. Listening in the Attic
45. Very Much Reality
46. Donald Barthelme Re-re-reconsidered
47. Surrealism as a Subversive Activity
48. From the Small World Department
Chapter V: Rhyming My Way Out of Hillside High
49. You Play the Hand You're Dealt
50. Creative Awakening -- Or Whatever
51. Gazing Off Through the Alpine Haze
52. To Begin at the Ending
53. Visiting Rick Craycraft in Denver
54. My Near-Fatal Miscalculation
55. How I Kept from Freezing to Death
56. Rescued & Fed
57. The Big Rig from out of the Blizzard
58. Arthur’s Recent Poem about my Deliverance
59. The Key to Concha
60. The Key to Phoebe
Chapter VI: Wichita’s New York School of Poetry
61. Mechem, Vogelsang, Katz, Sobin & Co.
62. What I Learned from Reading “Two Hunters” on KMUW
63. Nothing to Be Done
64. By the Crooked, Crippled Light
65. Juvenilia: Writing Songs for Extra Credit at Old East High
66. Formalism’s Warm, Fragrant Arms
67. Limericks & Double Dactyls
68. A Brief Note on Free Verse
Chapter VII: Adventures in Not-Knowing
69. When, What to Arthur’s Wondering Eyes . . . . .
70. The Kappa Sig House across the Street
71. In the Street Theater of Self-Defeat
72. To Construct a Philosophy of Not-Knowing
73. I Corinthians 13:12 vs. Faulkner’s Joe Christmas
74. Barthelme & Literature’s Ethical Dimension
~ Book Two ~
Chapter VIII: Song Was Ever My Weather
75. A Scatter of Leaves
76. Another Part of Art’s Project
77. Into Touchings We Can’t Speak
78. A Child of my Middle Songburst
79. Beth Spires, the Ohio Blizzard of ’78, etc.
80. Elizabeths Bishop & Spires and my Return to Formalism
81. If We All Outlived the Sun
82. Like So Many Lonesome Asteroids
83. “Randomnalities” & Other Blogs
84. Peasant Cantata, Another Think, Tender Candor Vendor
Chapter IX: The Arc of Human Destiny is a Tragic Arc
85. History’s Haunting Hellish Hysterics
86. “And we are here as on a darkling plain . . . . .”
87. “It bends the oak of unspeakable truth . . . .”
88. Bill Daniels, Sigmund Freud and the Darkroom
88. His Dream of Waking Up
Chapter X: The Birth of Mythoklastic Therapy in the
Breakdown of Neo-Feudalism
90. What’s the Matter with Kansas?
91. A Word about Political Sing-Alongs
92. Symposium Mythoklasticum
93. Galen Green’s Various Alter-Egos
94. The Book of Lies
95. “Notes Toward . . . . .”
96. Jongian Insight in a Cluttered Living Room
97. Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV), etc.
98. Bodysurfing through History’s Riptide
Chapter XI: Are We But Sleepwalkers, Ghosts at a Séance?
99. Czech Hannah & “The Desperate Hours”
100. Civ. No. 00-0385-CV-W-2 (the movie version)
101. Lynchmob Syndrome; Scapegoat Dance
102. As Good As It Was Ever Going To Get
103. Without Hindrance of Subtlety
Chapter XII: Preliminary Conjecture
on Recent American Politics
104. Our Long National Nightmare is (far from) Over
105. His Finger in the Dyke
106. A Fairly Sociopathic Electoral Majority
107. Their Willingness to be Deceived
108. Light Rays Bend around Our Shack
~ Book Three ~
Chapter XIII: An Autumn Evening in 1970
109. October 1, 1970
110. Paris Review's Writers at Work
111. Orpheus & His Muse
Chapter XIV: Ten Tiny Poems from Apple Grunt
112. Awash in Ravel's "Adagio Assai"
113. Apple Grunt (1971)
114. Before Creeley was supplanted by Merwin
115. Wm. Carlos Williams, Minimalism, the Tyranny of Words, etc.
116. Found Poetry
117. Whitman's Grain of Sand
118. Still Life
119. Wallace Stevens & Pablo Picasso
120. Form & Sense
121. MoMA: “Guernica,” August 1969
Chapter XV: Three Songs from Our Honeymoon Dungeon
122. The Right Thing versus the Fashionable Thing
123. Someone Was Growing Old
124. Parenthetical Reflections on My Songwriting
125. Meanwhile, Back at the Arthur Dunbar
126. We Who Practice the Healing Art of Poetry
127. A Flood of Unintentional Remembering
128. It’s All Just Energy, Time, Space & Matter
~ Book Four ~
XVI: Young Galen’s First Churching
129. First Methodist Church
130. Shallowality & Babbitristic Boosterism
131. Wichita Christian Academy
132. Our Lad Encounters Fundamentalism
133. Another Parenthetic Observation
Chapter XVII: Saved and Re-Saved
134. Dr. Ronald Meredith
135. Everything Looks Like a Nail
136. The Up-Side of that Weird Year
Chapter XVIII: Mixed-Message Methodistism
137. That Mile-High, Mile-Thick Wall
138. Harry Green’s Einstein Moment
139. The Eichmann Trial
140. Some Youthful Mythoklasm
141. Snapshot of My Father Shaving
142. Issues of Ultimacy and Intimacy
Chapter XIX: “Don’t Ever Limit Yourself”
143. The View from Two Choir Lofts
144. Olive Ann Beech & Other Demographics
145. “This Latter-Day Disneyland”
146. Galen Green & Mrs. Bean
147. Mrs. Bean & Galen Green
148. God, Bob & the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
149. Preface to a Memorable Moment
150. And then, the Moment Itself
151. Puppy Love
152. From Colby, Kansas to the Paris Opera
~ Book Five ~
Chapter XXI: Returning to the First-Person Past
153. Coming Back
154. Learning to Talk Mythoklastic
155. One of the Hundred Best Songs Ever Written
156. Wherever the Bad Shepherds Lead
157. An Existential Meditation on Inculturated Toxins
158. Abducted at Birth by Space Aliens
159. Oblivious to Which Way the Avalanche Slides
160. Everything is About Everything Else
161. ‘Cause We’re Born on a Battlefield, at War
Chapter XXII: Angels of Sweet Validation
162. Barry Goldwater’s Dog-Whistle
163. Worse than Church
164. Stumbling Along in a Random Herd of Strangers
165. Sporadic Doses of Affirmation
166. College Hill
167. The Daniels Gang
168. We Jog on into the Darkness, Unaware
169. As We Draw Our Courage from the Air
Chapter XXIII: Walking the Streets of Youth
170. The Original Core of the Daniels Gang
171. Epistolary Prototype for this Book (2008)
172. Here among the Damned
173. Rick Craycraft & the Music
174. Wichita Made Me Do It (Another Prequel)
175. Watch Out So You Don’t Step On Me
176. Brother Al & Sergeant Preston
177. We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told
Chapter XXIV: In the Syllogism of My Becoming
178. Lying Sunward One Summer’s Time
179. On the Evening of My 17th Birthday Omelet
180. The Tangy Stew of Being Young in That Swirling World
181. Embedded in those Shiny Black Vinyl Microgrooves
182. Wafting like an Ocean Breeze
183. Judy Collins’ Fifth Album
184. Pete Isaacson
185. Sharing my Songs with a Few Friends
Chapter XXV: Semiconsciously Gestating
Within the Womb of the World
186. Within the Laboratory of My Own Aesthetic
187. What is a Folksong?
188. Why is Every Truth Inconvenient?
189. An Even Better Rosetta Stone
190. Hope is where you Find It
191. Our Canadian Railroad Trilogy
192. Rick Wade
193. The Beck Factor
194. A Pleasing Contrapuntal Sound
Chapter XXVI: Emboldened to Know the Real to be Real
195. “Freely I slaved away for something better . . . . .”
196. Homage to Ingmar Bergman
197. Great-Grandchildren of the 18th-Century Enlightenment
198. A Cliché is a Kind of Lie
199. “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling . . . . .”
200. “Like me, she had a dream to fly . . . . .”
201. “They’re going to aim the hoses on you . . . . .”
~ Book Six ~
Chapter XXVII: You’re the Child You Were Sent
Here to Save
202. Keep Your Hand on That Plow
203. “This note upon a page too torn to ever mend . . . . .”
204. Charles Wesley, Eugene Butler, Songwriting & Me
205. The Fact-Based Radiance of Mythoklastic Therapy
206. “God and the imagination are one . . . . .”
207. The Name of What Was Brought
208. What the Broken Glass Reflects
209. Homebrewed Wichita Liberation Theology (c. 1968)
Chapter XXVIII: “What Do You People Want, Anyway?”
210. “Before they’re allowed to be free . . . . .”
211. September 24, 1957: Little Rock, Arkansas
212. What Their Singing Was Bringing: PP&M
213. In the Back Room of that House on Jarboe Avenue
214. The Tsunami of Human History
215. Upon this Planet of Liars
Chapter XXIX: If You Want Peace, Work For Mythoklasm
216. An Almost Newtonianly Fundamental Quasi-Law
217. Out of the Myth-Based Quagmire
218. Back to the First Few Fragrant Days of that Summer
219. My Admittedly Embryonic Thoughts
220. Myths as Prelogical Presuppositions
221. The Deep Sociability of Mythoklastic Therapy
222. A Mythoklastic Love Song
Chapter XXX: Joining in the Conversation
223. The Poet Bruce Cutler
224. The False Dichotomy of Cooked & Raw
225. Stafford, Wilbur, Ignatow & Merrill
226. An Ever-Widening Conversation & the Changing Light
227. To Transport Some Fresh Insight into another Mind
228. Tinged with Hues of Mauve and Salmon
Chapter XXXI: Three Books that have Brought Me Here
229. W.S. Merwin’s Carrier of Ladders (1970)
230. “. . . saddest of instruments . . .”
231. The Drunk on the Highwire
232. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
233. Jon & Mark & Barney
234. Roth’s Paris Review Interview
235. My Heart’s Little Handle
236. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner (1971)
237. Of Crazy Love, Gone Glad and Sure
238. It’s All Beyond My Control
239. God’s Little Dummy
~ Book Seven ~
Chapter XXXII: The Seminary: Notes for a Screenplay
240. Preface
241. Opening Voice-Over [Actor Playing Galen]
242. Opening Scene [During Opening Voice-Over]
243. Flashback to Before the Beginning (Summer 1948)
244. Voice-Over to the Above Scenes [Actor Playing Galen]
245. Wichita
246. Margaret, Part One
247. Flash-forward to Here & Now
248. Return to Scenes of Social Contextualization
249. Harry, Part One
Chapter XXXIII: The Interview Begins
250. Venturing Out From His Front Porch
251. St. Galen & the Dragon
252. Q. & A. in the Autumn Woods
253. Broken Legs & Picked Pockets
254. Only a Pawn in their Game
255. Hitchhiking into the Deep South
256. Just another Civic Organization
257. 2334 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive
Chapter XXXIV: The Interview Continues
258. Rocking Chair Duet
259.
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Table of Song Lyrics (by Section)
1. Here, Now, Always …77…
2. The World Is Ugly and the People Are Sad …81…
3. I Love What We Do …85…
4. Money Conquers Love …87…
5. The Plutocrats Are Coming to Town …89…
6. The Kid That Was Me …91…
7. Village in the Void …91…
8. The Desperate Hours …99…
9. Our Grandchildren …101…
10. American Slaves …103…
11. Modern Romance …108…
12. The Goddess Inside of Him …111…
13. The Beach Was Crowded With Smoldering Clarinets …123…
14. Butchers Carved in Stone …126…
15. Energy, Time, Space & Matter …128…
16. Unsafe At Any Speed …156…
17. Mr. Dracula …160…
18. I Can’t Afford to Play the Redneck Anymore
…161…
19. Driven by Fear …168…
20. In the Cemetery Above the Interstate …172…
21. Chain & Die …174…
22. Eyes on the Prize …177…
23. Tomorrow & Tomorrow & …186…
24. Scenes from a Marriage …196…
25. Think Ballet …202…
26. Little Brother …203…
27. A Bum in the Rain …215…
28. There’s a Worm in My Future …222…
29. Portable Paradise …228…
30. The Drunk on the High Wire …231…
31. If I’m to be Led …235…
32. You Make Me Crazy …237…
33. The Church Bells …238…
34. Chubby Loveless …239…
35. All We Gotta Change is Everything ...???...
(……to be continued…..gg…..March 14, 2012….)
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