David’s Story

I met David in 2003 when I was on a ten-day retreat at the Green Gulch Farm, a Zen Center in rural Northern California. He was a skinny guy in his fifties, and he wore the same parka and ball cap each day. He smoked a lot, and he drank coffee while most of the other participants sipped green tea. He had been there a while before I arrived and he stayed a while after I left. He was trying to become a member, which would entail a place to live, because, as I learned over time, Dave was, off and on, homeless. 

In 2004 I helped him move from a farm he was staying at in Fremont, California to a San Francisco youth hostel where he subsequently lived and worked for three and a half years. This was in the neighborhood called, South of Market (SOMA). It has always been a seedy part of San Francisco and with the closing of mental institutions in the late nineteen seventies, or so the legend goes, homelessness up-ticked as did drug use. 

The place was filled with “lots of locals" Dave told me when I asked him about that experience. "That was always a problem. How to keep the locals out. They were all druggies. I would say half and half. Half local druggies and half European kids backpacking. Cute girls. I didn’t have a problem if the druggies only sold the kids weed.” 

When he speaks, David uses a slow clear and at times clipped enunciation and talks and talks and talks. 

And he is a loner, he is a total loner. 

Once, recently, he told me, “I never gravitated towards the popular kids in high school. Why would I need to? I was always the outsider, I stayed away from people intentionally. I didn’t need that kind of approval. ‘Hi, I’m a fucking cool guy, look at me!’ I never wanted any of that.” The word cool comes out of his mouth extra slow and he extends the -ew sound like only a guy from Brooklyn can do.

He remains proud of his father, “a genius. He was a real artist. One year he made over one hundred thousand dollars, the next nothing.” His father was a businessman, a hustler. His grandfather, he told me, was a Ukrainian Jew: “a big, strong man," Dave balls  up his fists, straightens his arms at his sides and puffs up, "a carpenter. He could do anything.” Dave himself is rather slight. Maybe 5'7", he told me once he had held over sixty jobs over the course of his life. "I always quit when they tell me to do something I don't want to do."

Dave's sister died at age 57, “of a coma.” 

“A coma?” I ask. 

“Well, I didn’t want to be rude. I didn’t think it would be polite to ask the doctors to give me a diagnosis. She died of a coma. She was in a coma for thirty days before she died.” 

“She was on all kinds of drugs. Xanax and Prozac; and she once told me she took eight codeine 3’s a day. I told her, stop doing that. You can’t do that!” (Again, the -ew sound. That phoneme). His Brooklyn accent filled with pathos and despair. 

I keep the conversation going because my sister died only a few years-ago, and he knows this. “That is a lot of codeine. But I wonder what killed her, the codeine or the Tylenol, or something else? Maybe just long-term pharmaceutical drug use?” 

“Good question. She went to (such and such a) hospital in Manhattan and went through a rehab to get off the pills. It worked for a while.”

“I don’t know very much about it, but I think all drugs are either uppers or downers," he adds, "like, I don’t know the difference between a sedative and a tranquilizer but I know they are both downers.”

He left the youth hostel when a new company bought it. That was maybe in 2007, and I was long gone from the East Bay. I lived in Bonny Doon, rural Santa Cruz County, where I worked in Special Education and rented a room in a cabin out in the woods. 

When I touched base with David again, in 2012 or so, he was living in a room the size of a large closet in housing for the homeless in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. I had moved back to Berkeley, and he would come over on BART and we would sit in my back yard and smoke. Often I would buy him bulk coffee and bulk creamer at the Safeway before I put him back on BART to the City. This was the same David from the Zen Center, although moodier, and minus many pounds and several teeth. He was on Disability and receiving $900 a month. He lived in one of the most expensive cities in the world. 

Each time I visited I saw some horror or other on my way to his building. One night I noticed an entire family on the sidewalk having a barbecue. It was shocking to see children one, two, three years old, children in strollers, eating dinner on the same sidewalk as junkies passed out blocking traffic. Who would raise kids in such an environment? What kind of society would turn a blind eye to this neglect? How have we come this far?

Dave told me that on either side of his room lived schizophrenics, so hour-long screaming rants echoed through his walls as an almost an all-night occurrence. This was when he stopped sleeping nights and began sleeping most of the day instead. The building’s lobby was filled with homelessness—the long term homeless—watching TV, smoking, lounging about in a wheelchair, on the couch doing the crossword, leaning on a cane, drinking malt liquor from a clear forty ounce bottle. 

About me, he said, “it’s sad to see a young person embracing a dystopian vision of the world,” his voice rising to a whining high pitch on the word ‘world.’ “But I understand your point of view. I see things almost exactly the same way. What you have to understand is that life is suffering!” 

“I know,” I say, “I gotta get away from this shit. California is going down the drain, even if it sounds like I agree with Trump.”

He comes off as a bit arrogant and misanthropic. While shopping at Whole Foods where we are out buying a dozen eggs: “I am not coming back to this place. It’s got a snooty vibe.” 

When I complain to him about the predilection people have to compile all their problems and dislikes and place them on the head of Donald Trump, he spouts, “he’s mentally ill. What do you expect? He is a terrible human being. He only cares about himself.”

“Look, I hate everyone but me, but I don’t go around telling people. I try to have compassion, I try to care. I see so much suffering! I have seen so much suffering since I became homeless and became aware of other people’s lives.”

He places emphasis on certain words. Seen, and suffering. His voice rises at these important points. He scrambles me eggs with cheese on his stovetop and bakes us potatoes in his microwave. He eats slowly and still the food winds up on his beard. He cannot help it, he has six teeth in his head.

In 2019 he moved into Section 8 housing and a larger studio apartment, back in the area South of Market. Here, things are better. It reminds him of Manhattan, life on the sixth floor with a view of the building across from him and the goings on down below; but he goes days without talking to anybody. He has people he calls on the phone and people he emails. He has an invitation to visit someone he knows from one of the shelters in the City—“the best desk person at any of the shelters I stayed at. Such a good person. He really understood suffering”—this would be somewhere in Sonora, which he asks me about because he knows I have been to Mexico so many times.

Dave's new, larger apartment in SOMA

When I finally catch up with him, he reminds me that in 2014 and my last visit, he told me he wanted to meet Robin Williams because he thought of him as the comic genius if his generation. “He died just a week after I told you that,” he says. 

“Wow, that is true” is all I can think of to respond.

He pays $275 for what amounts to a couple hundred square feet. He has a bathroom with toilet and bathtub and shower; he has closet space. His apartment would be worth over $2500 a month in a free market. Since he qualifies for a Section 8 Housing stipend, he pays only 30% of his income.

This is a Federal Program and landing a spot is not easy. I mention that I know someone who was living in Section 8 Housing and found it much easier to get free of the bureaucratic hurdles and requirements. The mandated income, the limits on the amount of money in the bank.

“I’m trapped, and that’s the one thing I don’t like,” Dave tells me. “I am forever grateful for my apartment, but I can’t earn more money; I can’t work; I can’t have more than $2000 in my Savings Account!” 

“I want to hear about Sonora,” he says with a soft chortle.

“You’d like it there,” I tell him, “People actually live life. They have time for one another. There aren’t all these wealthy morons who don’t know how to walk down the street.” 

I am making this up. Sonora must be hot during the summertime. I know this but do not tell Dave. If he has so many adventurous traveling experiences what could go wrong? By his account he once did five days of driving through Iran sleeping in the car each night; he caught pneumonia sleeping on an Israeli beach for two weeks without a blanket; he spent two months going to the Universalist International School in Norwich in the UK, whatever that is; Finally, Dave has fallen in love with multiple women in numerous settings: on communes, in a London squat, during a train ride through Turkey. What could a little Sonora hurt?

Once Dave realized that I am pessimistic by nature, he had to read and reread me Yeats’ famous poem, "The Second Coming":

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

He wanted to talk about it with me. “The center cannot hold!” he proclaims, “everything is awash in chaos and misery, the falcon cannot hear the falconer!” And, "he’s talking about a world without rules, without law! I love it!” 

“But Dave, no rules means I can screw one of my high school students. You know, one of the hot chicks wearing yoga pants.”

“Go for it, do it!”

“But, Dave, I could get in serious trouble if I were to sleep with someone under the age of eighteen.” 

“What do I care? Screw whoever you want. Aleister Crowley once said, 'do what thy will. The only law is love.'”

“Dave, you’re a Jew, you don’t believe that love shit! You believe in the ten commandments and six hundred thirteen or whatever sub commandments!”

“How do you know about those?”

“I had a Jewish girlfriend. She told me all about it. All the restrictions and stuff. Dating back like thousands and thousands of years. The more I think about it the more ridiculous I think it is.”

“It is ridiculous, but the world needs order. That was what the commandments were for. That is what they are for. Every government in the world has the same basic rules: don’t cheat or steal. Don’t sleep with your neighbors wife. All that sort of thing. How else can a government stay in control of things?”

“Are you saying that Jews control the government!?”

“No! That’s the myth you read in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The myth that Jews control world finance, that there is a secret group of Jews controlling everything. That’s what Hitler believed!”

“But, Dave, maybe it’s sort of true. I mean, look around. Look at who controls Hollywood. Who runs the banks? What about that Jeffrey Epstein guy?”

“Epstein? He was just a pervert. You were talking about bankers.”

“Dave, Epstein was a banker. Or, a hedge fund manager or something. He made a ton of money and nobody really knows how. Right at the time of the financial collapse of ’08.”

“Oh? Well there you go. I believe that.”

The spot where Dave collapsed when he had a stroke

By 2020 Dave had a problem aside from the fact of his long-term homelessness. He had been diagnosed with cancer. Around this time we began to talk quite a bit on the phone. I learned the news of his cancer that summer. I was away from the Bay Area at the time. We discussed a visit upon my return. His insistence that I bring and wear a mask, though, bugged me. I was adamant from the outset of the Covid-catastrophe that I thought the mask mandate was one biggest overreactions enacted. I could not find a scientific paper—no serious scientist—showing masks do anything to protect from airborne pathogens.

I was surprised by people like David, who I considered intelligent, seasoned, wise. I was surprised by the acquiescence to what amounted to totalitarianism. Where had the Spirit of 1968 gone? Dave, you should know, was at Woodstock. And Woodstock took place during a Pandemic which was about as bad as the Pandemic of 2020.

Our relationship was strained by Covid and Covid policies. He mocked me when I told him I thought the vaccine mandate seemed like an act of powerful polities dead set on killing people. I felt (and still feel) the same way about lockdown policies. I am certain more death will come—a lot more death—from the response to Covid than from the disease. 

I have seen experts claim that in the U.S. alone, overall deaths are set to increase by half a million people each year going forward. These experts also assert that treating people with vaccines during a pandemic creates variants the vaccines do not protect against. These strains keep coming back, seasonally, and those vaccinated are susceptible to them because the vaccines alert the immune system to a specific pathogen but leave the immune system susceptible to those variants.

Further still, there is plenty of evidence pointing to the fact that the vaccines themselves are dangerous. VAERS, the vaccine warning system, has recorded more deaths and adverse reactions from the Covid vaccines than every vaccine ever manufactured going back thirty years. These jabs may cause long-term health problems. I asked a medic who worked forty or fifty years ago about the long-term effects of the drugs he worked with back then. He told me that those treatments used to 'raise the dead' eventually caused long-term heart issues and many of them have been discontinued.

Dave did see the light about the medical industry. He had been diagnosed with cancer but he did not want to believe the diagnosis in part because the diagnosis was based solely on blood tests and statistics. He was scared to get a biopsy, he was a frail guy, and so all he could do was call me on the phone and kvetch and cry about his diagnosis, the medical industry, and his insurance, which all amounted to dread. Whether he acknowledged it or not, he was staring death in the eye. 

He wanted my help to return a guitar, he wanted me to take precautions about Covid when I visited, but that he did not want to deal with in any way his possible demise disturbed me. He refused to take responsibility for his health. He took the Covid vaccine, for God’s sake, and he smoked unfiltered cigarettes. He rarely left his apartment for exercise. He grew irritated by my actions. He demanded to know why I did not answer the phone when he called, he wanted to know the best times to call and talk and grew angry if those times did not align with his right times.

We stopped talking after I cancelled the trip to the guitar store. I was borrowing my father's car, which I did not want to take into the city for fear it might be broken in to. San Francisco is like that. 

This turn of events upset me. I felt I had betrayed David. (This is where he would call me generous and I would say, au contraire mon frere! I am selfish like everyone else: I only do these things so that I don't feel like such a schmuck all the time.) 

Then one evening he called and told me he had had a stroke. 

David recovering from the walk to Whole Foods

I visited him the next day and walked with him to Whole Foods so he could buy eggs, salmon, milk, bread. The basics. He walked with a cane and we stopped at a delicatessen where he bought a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. He looked skinnier and his beard was disheveled. He had collapsed on this very walk a week earlier. 

He had collapsed across the street from the Whole Foods, about where he normally stopped on his way back to his apartment for a smoke. "A black guy driving with his family helped me up and into his car and drove me to my building," he told me. "At the front desk I got an ambulance. I was in the hospital for three days," he intoned. "One night I shit myself and it took two days before any of the nurses came to clean my backside."

"They said I had had a stroke. The meds they have me on are terrible. My blood pressure is through the roof." He was visibly stressed out about the medication he was on. "Yeah, I'm  worried." I wondered to myself how that medication mixed with whatever was in the Covid vaccine. 

He thought, when I asked why the stroke, that it was caused by the amount of weed he smoked. He had stopped smoking weed. I told him I wanted to be sure to inherit his vaccination card, for its inherent privileges. He chuckled almost knowingly. 

The last time I saw him was, incidentally, his birthday. One of the many ideas I brought up in one of our several talks over the previous two or three years was that I would come out to the City and drive him to Rainbow Grocery, a popular cooperative with the New Age and hipster crowds and an establishment that has for years been selling organic bulk foods and organic veggies, the kind of food one would find in a 'commune.' It would remind us of the Zen monastery where we met.

The day I drove out to SOMA to take Dave to Rainbow Grocery was typically grey. It was mid-December and the Forty-Niners were on the radio. Masks were the rule at the grocery store and I saw one clerk, who happened to be wearing a black anarchist outfit advertising his allegiance to Antifa, walk up to an unsuspecting costumer to remind her to cover her face correctly.

David began in the coffee section where I tried to warn him away from the medium and light roasts, "Are you moving in and splitting rent?" He asked, voice rising in annoyance. He then moved on to the bulk honey, which he mixed with his coffee as a substitute for sugar because at some time in his distant past, "a backpacker chick turned me on to putting honey in coffee. I love it." He had told me this half a dozen times over the years.

He bought his usual fare: eggs, milk, bread, jam and yogurt, but he could not buy fish because Rainbow is completely vegetarian, a fact I had not realized until after we finished shopping and I asked if he remembered his salmon. A hip and sprightly Asian girl checked us out and after I made a small purchase, Dave, who was behind me in line, went back into the store because he had forgotten freeze dried hummus. I told the girl I was assisting an old friend, a man who had cancer and had recently had a stroke, and that he wouldn't be long. 

At Whole Foods, where I normally took him, I had noticed that Dave frequently broke his compassion for suffering rule with the clerks. It was a bit like shopping with a parent as a teenager. Embarrassing. If his salmon was a fraction overweight he would ask for the correct amount. If he was asked if he brought his own bag he would respond incredulously. More than once I had to interject to settle frayed nerves or explain what it was he was confused about.

Once, when we were walking out the front of the store, music from a handheld radio could be heard from out on the sidewalk. "Negroid vibes! I sense negroid!" Dave chortled just as a black guy stormed past carrying a mini boom box playing loud R&B, agitated and in a rush.

At Rainbow, Dave seemed to enjoy shopping that day. He bought bulk items aside from the honey, coffee and humus that he would not have found anywhere else. We stopped to get tacos at a taco truck on our way back. He stunk up my car with a cigarette. Listening to the Niners game he said, "you listen to the sports? I like the sports." 

David grew up in South Brooklyn in the 1950’s and 60’s. A young man in the 1970’s he once travelled the world as a backpacker, picking up rides, smoking hashish—his favorite drug alongside cigarettes and coffee—and he traveled to India overland. All the while he worked sporadically and contracted a pneumonia several times. He spent two months at Brooklyn College where he took a class in French and another in Sociology. 

When I met him he said he'd come to the Bay Area chasing a girl he knew from high school. She was married, or recently divorced but he moved in with her anyhow. When it did not work out, she gave him $10,000 and showed him the door. For a year and then some he rented a small apartment near Lake Merritt in East Oakland. When the money ran out he went to the lake and found a bench to sleep on. He noticed one or two other guys doing the same thing.

 

Eventually he made his way to Berkeley and the homeless shelter there ("it was like a prison: same petty vibe. Arguments; guys who watched TV all night with the volume turned loud. Racial animosity.") He discovered the Berkeley Zen Center and befriended the head monk. Our paths crossed not much later, out at Green Gulch, near where Dave's hero Alan Watts once lived. 

When I met David, there was nothing to size up. He was clear, open, a man who seemed devoted to humility. What I thought of as surrender might have been resignation. It seems, in the end, he might have needed from me more than I did from him. I couldn't give him what I did not have. Something like that...

If you are out there and you have read this far, light a candle for David Schur. May your travels be safe, Dave. A kind but saddened Soul who rejected so much of the vanity, the frivolity and arrogance, the sanctimony and (to quote him) the snootiness of what passes as Society these days. He used to say, "thinking about it makes me want to cry," when I brought up his sister. I wish—I really wish—I could have held him a little closer to my heart...to let him know it was going to be okay. He was scared when his time had finally come.

It is long past time, in retrospect, I finally grew up. 

Young Goodman Brown

It takes time to understand that each human experience reflects in some way the human experience, that our humanity connects us to others across time and space through language. But what does it mean to be human, and what is this thing called life? What do teachers mean when they state that great literature must reflect something universal about being human, and what do they mean when they say: you cannot be neutral, you must choose a generic, ideological perspective from which to see the world? There are thoughts that are all too often sidetracked by philistine urges, by the desire to see what is considered art as a tool by which to hammer others on the head with a political or sociological perspective. (If I say Jack London is a master storyteller, someone inevitably will say he believed in eugenics and therefore his writing is suspect.)

The reward for writing is the writing itself: writers write because we have to write; there is no choice in the matter. Which gets me to the task at hand: I want to explore briefly the various themes outlined just now—universalism, humanity, and ideology—in a wonderful short story by the famous, widely-known American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The story is “Young Goodman Brown,” and though I am not versed in the necessary jargon to explicate for academic ears all that the allusions and references meant to the contemporary writers Hawthorne wrote alongside, I have been taught, on a cursory level, a conventional understanding of the story. 

The bulk of “Goodman Brown” takes place over the  course of one eventful night that we experience through the eyes, feelings and thoughts of the story’s protagonist, a character symbolically named for his innocence (Young), his righteousness (Goodman), and the fact of his heritage, which is Anglo or English origin (Brown). Here we have an ‘everyman’ who stands in for what we are to understand as a prototypical Puritan villager newly married and living in Salem Village, in Colonial New England. 

Here is Spark Notes' version of the story’s summary:

Newly married, Goodman Brown leaves his house for a mysterious purpose. As he  leaves, his wife, Faith, wearing a pink ribbon in her cap, pleads with him to stay. She says she becomes scared when she spends the night alone. Brown assures her that if she says her prayers and gets  to bed early no harm will come to her. As he departs he looks back, feels a twinge of guilt, but is also worried Faith might have had a premonition or dream about the task at hand.

Brown sets off on a road through the gloomy forest. “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.” He soon comes upon a man in the road who greets Goodman Brown as though he had been expecting him. The man looks normal except he carries a walking stick featuring a carved serpent, which is so lifelike it seems to move. 

The man offers Goodman the staff, but Goodman refuses. He says he showed up for the meeting because he promised to but now wants to return to the village. Goodman tells the man his family members have been good Christians and that he feels ashamed to associate with him. The man tells Goodman that he knew Goodman’s father and grandfather, as well as other members of the church of New England, and even the governor of the state. 

Goodman Brown says that even if this is so he wants to return to the village for Faith’s sake (a pun). Next, the two come upon an old woman hobbling through the woods, and Goodman Brown recognizes Goody Cloyse, who he knows to be a respected woman from the village. He hides, embarrassed to be seen with the man, and the man taps Goody Cloyse on the shoulder. She identifies him as the devil and reveals herself to be a witch, on her way to the devil’s forest ceremony.

Soon he hears the voices of the minister of the church and Deacon Gookin, who are apparently on their way to the ceremony. Shocked, Goodman Brown swears that even though everyone else in the world has gone to the devil, for Faith’s sake he will stay true to God. However, he soon hears voices coming from the ceremony and thinks he recognizes Faith’s voice. He screams her name, and a pink ribbon from her cap flutters down from the sky.

Certain that there is no good in the world because Faith has turned to evil, Goodman Brown grabs the staff, which pulls him quickly through the forest toward the ceremony. When he reaches the clearing where the ceremony is taking place, the trees around it are on fire, and he can see in the firelight the faces of various respected members of the community, along with more disreputable men and women and Indian priests. But he doesn’t see Faith, and he starts to hope once again that she might not be there

A figure appears on a rock and tells the congregation to present the converts. Goodman Brown thinks he sees his father beckoning him forward and his mother trying to hold him back. Before he can rethink his decision, the minister and Deacon Gookin drag him forward. Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier bring forth another person, robed and covered so that her identity is unknown. After telling the two that they have made a decision that will reveal all the wickedness of the world to them, the figure tells them to show themselves to each other. Goodman Brown sees that the other convert is Faith. Goodman Brown tells Faith to look up to heaven and resist the devil, then suddenly finds himself alone in the forest.

The next morning Goodman Brown returns to Salem Village, “and every person he passes seems evil.” He sees the minister, who blesses him, and hears Deacon Gookin praying, but he refuses to accept the blessing and calls Deacon Gookin a wizard. He sees Goody Cloyse quizzing a young girl on Bible verses and snatches the girl away. Finally, he sees Faith at his own house and refuses to greet her. It’s unclear whether the encounter in the forest was a dream, but for the rest of his life, Goodman Brown is changed. 

My teacher—the man who taught me the story in the course on teaching pedagogy—argued that Brown’s initiation—his dream, or vision, or bad trip—culminates in the revelation that everything Brown previously held to be true about his life has been false, and he lives the rest of his life resigned and cynical, but victorious in this understanding. He returns to the village and views the others as they really are. Here is that moment in the text:

“…young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him, that she skipt along the street, and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

(italics mine)

Goodman Brown must accept things in his life the way they are, and he responds accordingly. His quest culminates—it is completed—with the newly gained knowledge about the world he inhabits. He must resist the urge to knowledge gained in the service of Evil (their participation in the ceremony will reveal to them all the wickedness in the world). This is Joseph Campbell's “Hero’s Journey” applied to "Young Goodman Brown," but also to the Biblical story in Genesis of Adam and Eve. My professor taught this ideology to my pedagogy class

The Spark Notes interpretation of the story, in the section of their textual interpretation labeled “Summary,” equates Goodman Brown to Adam (from Genesis) and  Faith to Eve, who succumbs to temptation. In the Spark Notes analysis, Hawthorne wrote the story as an attack on American religion.

More than an attack on American religion I see Hawthorne's story as an attack on the hypocrisy of respectable society. Brown resists temptation and passes out. Like the later protagonist in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, we see the  prototypical everyman as somewhat sheepish but intelligent enough to avoid the pitfalls of life; in this case Brown is tempted by power. 

When he awakens, the next morning, Goodman Brown's brow is softened "by the coldest dew." He is Baptized. From here forth he sees the people around him for their vanity and hypocrisy. He has experienced, either in real waking life or in a dream, that good and evil intertwine. There aren't 'good' and 'bad' people, there are only people and they should be based on their individual choices. He cannot understand Faith's choice and he can no longer take the village hierarchy seriously. 

If Hawthorne attacks religion (Puritanism) in "Young Goodman Brown," he takes aim at its aversion to Nature. Young Goodman is blessed by the morning dew: the thing that wakes him, the one truth in his life, is Nature; Nature was the very thing the suspicious Puritan mind feared most: the wilderness and the natural world, to the Puritans, was anathema to progress.

There is great irony at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” On the one hand, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world turn out to consist of evil themselves, and Goodman Brown begins to experience, at the culmination of his trip, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world as multifaceted. The story does touch on something profoundly human in that it relates to loss. 

The Crossing 

Cormac McCarthy

When I have written about literature on this blog I have, up until what I wrote about Gatsby, given a clear outline of plot and wrapped my blog post up with a comment or opinion about the book I reviewed. I have done this in order to keep it simple: tell what happens--i.e. the plot--and then describe the plot's implementation. I try to explain, in other words, the aesthetic choices the writer employs in telling his story.

With the novel Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, the stories encapsulated between the pages of the book are multiple and far reaching and because the foregrounded plot relates to the narrator, I derive meaning from the way the story is told. The telling relates to how stories are told and to the inner workings of human consciousness as much as it is about childhood abandonment, the system of education in England, London  as it existed at the time of World War II, etc. 

It is true, too, to an extent, with The Great Gatsby, that consciousness belies reality. Here the plot line seeps out over the course of the novel and includes a backstory imbued by the narrator's subjective feelings for his subject as well as his commentary on class and ethics. 

Unfortunately, at times I feel we live in a world of philistines, people who delight in placing political and or sociological concerns before aesthetics when analyzing text. People who read for utility rather than pleasure. So it is with some trepidation that I announce to no one in particular (I figure that anyone who reads my blog will find something in it they need) that I plan to write a bit about Cormac McCarthy, a White man with many ex-wives. 

One basic goal of literature is to do with language that which has not been done before. McCarthy's style markings litter his oeuvre: he uses no quotation marks to delineate character speech; his texts are filled with characters who speak Spanish; and his prose, generally, mimics the language of the Old Testament, or, at the very least, William Faulkner or Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  

This last is important because McCarthy writes books of young men on quests. His Border Trilogy, of which The Crossing is book two, relates two coming-of-age stories set just before and right after the Second World War on the borderland between Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. In All the Pretty Horses, a sixteen year old sets off on horseback with his best buddy to explore Northern Mexico and to try to work there as a ranch hand after his mother, who has long separated from his War traumatized father, sells the family ranch.

In The Crossing a teenage boy in New Mexico living near the Arizona and Mexico border is tasked with capturing a wolf that has been killing his family's cattle. Instead of euthanizing the pregnant she wolf, after catching her, he puts her on a leash and decides to ride his horse into the mountains of Mexico where he will set her free, returning her to her rightful place in the world.

Things don't go as planned because there is no plan. The adventure with the wolf is followed by a return home, where the boy, Billy, discovers all of his family save his younger brother have been killed, a return to Mexico with his brother, Boyd, in search of the family's horses, a separation there from his brother, another return to New Mexico, and then a final journey to Mexico and back, this time to find and return with his brother.

Billy Parham's quest is divided into three. In the first part he aims to put the world back as it ought to be, or as it was once: before the Spanish and Anglo ranchers fenced off land and began raising domesticated stock. Of course he soon discovers the futility in this venture, but as life so often does, his first decision leads him to his second quest and the attempted recovery of his patrimony, in the form of his father's two stolen horses.

Finally, he returns to Mexico, one last time, to retrieve his brother, who he has been separated from and who, it turns out, has become a legend of the Revolution, a person songs are written about for bravery in battle. His brother has been made a relic, romanticized as a symbol of a mythic time and place where good defeats evil and so by the end of the book we realize that on Billy's quest, unique and complete, he discovers that all that he thought true about the world, all that he held sacred and all he believed, has both led him to this point, his fate, and left him to deal with it alone. 

He wanders the desert of New Mexico, homeless, adrift, without family, looking for work, and in the last pages of the book witnesses, first hand, the detonation of the first test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo. It is an apocalyptic ending to a unique novel oozing at the edges with dark matter. 

The genius of Cormac McCarthy relates to the fact that he imbues his fiction, from top to bottom, with historic fact and he employs this fact to undermine ideology from left to right. In The Crossing, when Billy and his brother Boyd go looking for their stolen horses, they discover them on a massive ranch owned by an American media magnet. McCarthy models this ranch on Babicora Ranch, owned by William Randolph Hearst, scion of the Hearst family, which existed in the north of the state of Chihuahua until 1953. It was 117 miles long and consisted of more than one million acres. In '53 the Mexican Government seized the land, subdivided it into thousands of parcels, and redistributed it to peasantry. (Phoebe Hearst, wife to George and mother of William Randolph Hearst, purchased the land that became the ranch in 1900 for $100,000).

In 1934, the Mexican government, under Lazaro Cardenas, should have given the Hearst land to the feudal classes. Cardenas did indeed redistribute 45 million acres. He dismantled the hacienda system. (10 percent of the lands were American owned.) However, realistically, the Revolution did not meet its aims and the fighting went on. This is where the Parham brothers arrive in the history. Security officers--private militia--on the Barbicora Ranch have the boys’ horses, and they eventually shoot Boyd in a chase after the boys reclaim the horses; these men are part of Hearst’s personal security apparatus, called the guardia blanca, or white guard. Even after the Revolution, this was contested land. (Earl Shorris, historian of Mexico, claims the Revolution never ended.) Cardenas' social reforms were corrupt. 

There is a lot going on here. On one level McCarthy gives his english reading audience a snapshot of an historical moment most don't know anything about. On another he makes comment on social reform, raw power, and idealism. As I mention, the overarching structure of plot exists in three parts; it is a triptych. There is something deeply religious about Billy's journey. We must imagine that Billy grows, that he matures, as the novel progresses. What becomes clear by the end of the text is that he has lost completely the innocence that allowed him to believe he might capture, tame, save and find a place in the world for a wild animal, because that world does not exist. 

There are powerfully dark forces at work in the universe of Cormac McCarthy, the Hearst family a prime example. In The Crossing he writes about the tension inherent between what amounts to culture, society and governance, and the interior world of the initiate's mind. That consciousness, in the shape of Billy Parham, is left battered and bruised, awake and perhaps aware that the story he has lived, in some way, represents our story and our story can only have meaning in the reality of its destination, the path on which we arrive, again and again, at fate. 

I began this blog, partly, in order to write periodically about literature, mainly because I have two degrees in literature, a B.A. from UCLA and an M.A. from San Jose State. In graduate school I took ten classes in total, almost half of them in Creative Writing (I took four creative writing courses, three in poetry, one nonfiction, and I took two courses from the director of the Creative Writing program which were hybrid: with both analytical assignments and creative). 

This comes from someone who has taught english in the Cal State system, at the community college level, in high school, and most recently at UC Berkeley Extension. I am deeply ambivalent about higher education on the whole and think that it took a turn for the worse somewhere between my B.A., which I completed in 1997, and my M.A. which I finished in 2012. I was one of the fortunate few who can say I studied in a world class english department before that turn, so I have an inkling about what a solid liberal education could look like (one of the reasons I went back to school was to try to fill in the gaps my twenty year old self ignored, shied away from or was just too overwhelmed to cope with at the time). 

As an undergrad I wrote my capstone thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the idea of Carnival (i.e. the festive season, in Christian liturgy, that leads up to Lent) in conflict with Lent (the period of asceticism observed by Christians leading up to Easter and the Resurrection) in the novel Tender is the Night. Not realizing it at the time, my professor's career had, in part, been built upon this very idea. My work was sloppy and haphazard. I have no idea how I came up with the idea, but I noticed the Carnival motif in Fitzgerald's oeuvre. He was a Catholic, and he was concerned with the cycles of not only the natural world but with Time (capital 't') in general. He was concerned, I believe, with Christian Ritual and tradition. 

If I had delved a bit more deeply, I would have discovered that other modern writers had the same concerns (these concerns were trending at the time, and in many ways they still are). I knew that in 1918 Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, which argues that civilizations are structured in cycles and that the West was in the stage of protracted decline. T.S. Eliot published "The Waste Land" in 1922, and that poem, both pessimistic and Conservative, exudes a longing for a lost world. Then came Gatsby, in 1925, which draws on Eliot's poem and ends with a beautiful and elegiac evocation of not only Jay Gatsby, the man, but of the conundrum of time:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I got a B minus in that capstone seminar. 

Looking back, the things that interested me most about literature had to do with what critics wrote about that literature. In other words, I was not being trained to appreciate art or literature in and of itself but rather to place something like a grid over what I read, which really could have been anything, and to chop what I read up into pieces through analysis. This, I believe, is a lot less about making the world a better place (one thing I think studying literature with a mentor or a group of friends has the potential to do) and much more to do with teaching people privileged with the opportunity to make themselves look good, generally. I was partly being trained, or I was training myself, in the art of shaping an image of 'me,' whatever that was, which I would then, potentially, parlay into something greater than 'me'. I was being asked to grow, but was I being asked to grow in the right direction?

Which gets me back the novel The Great Gatsby and the character of Jay Gatsby because, as I mention in my previous blog post about the figure, Gatsby is a self-made man, a figure constructed over time to be perceived as glamorous, wealthy, intelligent, smart and while he is all of these things, he can only be seen as such because of something not these things. All that he has gained has been on the back of illicit financial dealings: bootlegging and gambling to be specific. 

So the book is one of paradox and parallels. On the one hand we have the corruption of blue-blood American wealth, depicted in Tom Buchanan, a wealthy yet dangerously violent man who has no regard for other people, while on the other hand we have the possibility for renewal and growth, seen in Gatsby, who has positioned himself thusly based on other peoples attraction to vice. On one hand we have the green light of an "orgastic future" balanced, on the other hand (and on the other shore of a bay), by an obsessed man with a murky past. This is the brilliance of the book. 

I want to go a bit further and harken to what I mention in the previous post on the novel about the idea of image and economy. Jay Gatsby, self made, deceitful, beautiful, mysterious and all the rest, is, really, a man selling an image to the world: he exists as a card trick, a sleight of hand. It seems worthwhile to think about the many ways images work to structure and manage the economy we inhabit. It is common for academics to talk about 'spectacle' and the kind of economy and or politics 'spectacle' can undergird. 

And this last point gets me to the difference, I think, between higher education today and the higher education of the past, which was still based in the concept of character development (which exists at its foundation and the the inception of American higher public education) but also, eventually, on developing personalities (like Nick Caraway) and has become all about the shaping of self- image, which is exactly what dictates and holds sway in postsecondary education today. 

Campus life today revolves around empty terms like 'equity' and 'safe spaces.' Empty of critical thought and open discourse, or, in other words, the very foundations of democracy free thought seems anathema in today's academy. Sure, hewing to convention and orthodoxy have always been a fact: one thing a degree from a school like Princeton entails is the right job at a legacy firm on Wall Street (this is Nick Caraway's story). That that degree conferred might not be base on the qualifications inherent to the necessities or rigor the fields of study offered require underscores the overwhelming propensity of people to be swayed and lulled by image. We feel secure in the understanding, false as it is, that institutions function as they should. Nick Caraway, after all, is the honorable friend and temperate narrator of a key story about the turn in American history away from truth and discretion and towards something more like what we experience now. 

At the risk of being labeled reactionary (I might be) or Conservative (I value tradition but not the brutality of either the Neoconservatives or Neoliberalism), let me explain where I am going with my understanding of the phenomenon that is Gatsby. The book has been analyzed in a variety of ways that I find somewhat disingenuous. Theory has screwed the novel up. One theory, in particular, I think emblematizes the current state of affairs in higher education, and that theory holds that the novel and the novelist are eugenicist, akin to Hitler. 

This is Critical Race Theory as applied to the novel. Because we see Tom at the apex of society, surrounded by various, less powerful people descending in a hierarchy from Gatsby and Nick to the Greek machine shop owner with whose wife Tom is sleeping and next the Shylock-like Meyer Wolfsheim, who finances Gatsby in his illicit activities, and finally all the rest of the ethnic and racially lower castes in society, Fitzgerald himself is, it is argued, pointing out that the lower  on the hierarchy, the less worthy one becomes. If Tom represents White Supremacy, Gatsby can never best him, convince Daisy to leave him, or live in East Egg, because of Gatsby's proximity to an ethnic Jew. In other words, Buchanan represents the apex of a society governed for good reason by Anglo tradition.  

This interpretation of American culture as viewed through the lens of Race is premised on the notion that were things shaken up, if the old caste system were replaced by one based on 'equity,' where minority groups felt 'safe,' why then everything would be equal. I think it is a strange reading because Fitzgerald paints Tom Buchanan as a conspiring brute. The tragedy of the book is that Gatsby dies, that Gatsby never attains his desired goal. 

The Gatsby as eugenicist interpretation was replacing older more staid interpretations when I was in college (like reading the text in the way I attempted to in my seminar paper). That Critical Race Theory is mainstream in today's political and Corporate environment shows (me at least) that it really does not relate to 'equity' so much as it does to a replacement ideology, or what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology, which creates a new kind of hierarchy, much more bureaucratic than what came before, as the number of institutional seats at the table continues to dwindle. Ideology basically serves as a tool of selection for who gets to sit at the table, as it did, for instance, under the Soviet hierarchy. Political correctness meant, in Soviet times, that one was versed in expressing the correct political views.

The second interpretation that serves to explain, in part, where academia has lost the plot, states that the text's meaning revolves around a homoerotic attraction between Nick Caraway and Jay Gatsby. This particular reading only serves to distract me when I think about what I like about The Great Gatsby. "Oh no," I think, "these characters are gay!" as if that has any real impact on the novel's outcome. In reality, Jay cannot have Daisy because he gets sent to the War, then he gets mixed up with shady businesspeople, and finally Tom Buchanan and his type simply are too Machiavellian to allow Jay and Daisy to be together. That they are not together has nothing to do with Jay Gatsby's sexual orientation. As with Critical Racy Theory, this type of Identity Politics based reading was coming in to vogue in the mid 90's in english departments.

Here I am trying to explain my interpretation of what Wesley Yang calls the successor ideology and which causes critics like Yang and James Lindsay to raise so much alarm. I want to be clear. Between teaching western civilization using the tools of western civilization based on a theory of aesthetics that is western (i.e. teaching books like Gatsby by acknowledging its obvious lineage, which relates to Greek and Christian myth) and teaching books like Gatsby as problematic because of its tradition, lineage and, by default, its aesthetic, I am  left with a great feelings of ambivalence.  

Critical Race Theory was pounded into my head beginning in fourth grade. Then I got to UCLA and realized that there was great power in seeing western art as normal and meaningful. I only want to acknowledge what I see as a rupture in history that occurred somewhere in the 20th Century. That I see that rupture as permanent and ongoing might make me a reactionary. My ambivalence towards tradition is complete. The first philosophy that took hold in me was existentialism: whatever you do, try to be the very best at whatever that thing is to you.

Finally, my favorite theoretical reading of The Great Gatsby, defines Jay Gatsby as a vampire. First seen at night, when the story opens, trembling as he looks across the bay towards East Egg and the famous green light, he thereafter appears and disappears almost mysteriously. Of course his marks are both Nick and Daisy. In this reading the book is satire. Nick celebrates the vampire who would sap the blood of America. 

 

 

"'Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her/ If you can bounce high, bounce for her too/ Till she cry, “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover / I must have you!'--Thomas Parke D’Invilliers" -- epigraph to The Great Gatsby, attributed to fictional poet.

Scott Fitzgerald, the story goes, wrote his classic novel The Great Gatsby in response to being jilted at Princeton by a young lady well above his caste. Ostensibly created to exorcise that green worm of envy, Gatsby, simply put, describes a lovelorn soldier, Jay Gatsby, home from war who moves into a house across a bay--and an economic divide--from that of a now married former girlfriend. He obsesses over this ex-girlfriend and attempts to woo her by throwing extravagant parties, inviting wealthy, stylish people in the hopes that she will show up and be duly impressed. 

On its face, the premise of Gatsby appears 'cringe.' A man too shy to approach his -ex, Daisy Buchanan, instead 'stalks' her. Daisy's cousin, Nick Caraway, narrates. He sits somewhere in the midwest, one year after events, and he extols the man who spent the summer previous using him to get to Daisy. In the telling, that man associates himself with known underworld crime bosses and has created an entire identity based on a series of lies and nefarious financial dealings. Self-made, wealthy beyond his dreams, Gatsby has created an image--a persona--in order to one day attain the object of his desire. 

Gatsby's real name, it turns out, is Jay Gatz, and he is a farm kid from North Dakota who migrated slowly east and learned to grift along the way. In Louisville where he met Daisy, a debutante, and consummated their affair, he trained in the Army. After serving in the Great War in Europe and returning circuitously by way of Oxford University, Gatsby has arrived  on a Long Island bay in a location called West Egg, which sits across from East Egg and  Daisy, who has married, unhappily, an American aristocrat, Tom Buchanan. 

This timeline--the timeline of Gatby's life and interaction with the other characters in the book--trickles out through Nick's narrative. Through it we come to regard in Gatsby a Dionysian energy that relates, in the simplest sense, to Great Myth. The book is perhaps as much an ode to Romanticism, or:

"These beauteous forms, 

Through a long absence, have not been to me 

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: 

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din 

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,  

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet."

This is from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," a canonized poem, in which the poet describes remembering a walking trip, five years past, to the ruins of Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley.  Much has been made of the ways the English Romantics wrote about grief, loss and death. 

For those unfamiliar with the terms Romanticism and Modernism, the former describes the period of time between the the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, while the latter describes the era beginning with the turn of the century and ending at about the Second World War. Arbitrary markers, yes, but useful in that they are defined by the distinct series of attributes related to art, architecture and literature of those specific time periods. Trends, if you will. 

Academics hold that the modern sense of the sublime relates directly to the earlier Romantic appreciation of Nature and represents a break, in the Arts, from that which came before. In other words, whereas before the Revolutionary fervor of the late 18th Century the sublime in Art was expected and appreciated, it was not foregrounded. By the early 20th Century, artists like Gertrude Stein began making an Art that made everything about the sublime. Their theory of Aesthetics was meant to be persuasive and it ignored certain aspects of life: the banality of politics and of the direct experience of things like war. 

In American letters, one notion of the sublime, when we talk about Art and artistes (and their coordinated efforts), relates to "the myth of (the) un-transacted destiny propose(d) as the spirit of the true America: the long suppressed...'deific' sensibility that is common to all." (Jeffrey Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem). Jay Gatsby does not suppress this deific sensibility and it attracts Nick to Jay. 

Of course, Gatsby exists first and foremost as image. Sure, he is fond of addressing people as, "old sport," and he pleads with Daisy to leave her marriage. But we get absolutely no sense of an inner life and the people who revel in their interactions with him reveal a variety of narratives that attribute to his murky past. 

He first appears in the book in the last two paragraphs of the first chapter on a warm summer night, standing at end of his lawn, on bay's edge looking across at the green light on the end of the dock that juts out in front of Daisy and Tom's mansion. Nick watches unobserved as Gatsby stretches his arms out towards the green light. 

"Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full  of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call  to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." (18-19)

Fitzgerald returns to the green light--and the color green generally--as symbol. The light at the end of the dock anchors the book and forms the basis for teaching Gatsby to high school english students. What does the green light represent? Power? Wealth? Greed? Renewal? Spring? Rebirth?

Whatever it is, Fitzgerald points to the subconscious urges that undergird desire and he seems to argue that the energy that runs through Gatsby--the energy that makes it appear as if he is trembling when Nick watches him stretch his arms  towards the green light--is the same as the energy that drives, for instance, a daisy, forcing it from the earth and into bloom. In the western world, we call this energy, when seen in human form, Dionysian. It was the god Dionysus who was celebrated during Spring festivals in the ancient world. Fitzgerald's interpretation of this concept relates, consciously or not, from Ezra Pound, the fascist poet tried after World War II for treason.

In the aughts of the 20th Century, Pound put forth a theory of Aesthetics called imagism based on artistic expression shaped in its precision and sparseness from natural forms. A simple summation of Pound's Theory of Aesthetics goes like this: “Beauty is sexuality, and sexuality/Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility/Of the earth is economics,” which makes sense from an agrarian standpoint. 

One significant context of The Great Gatsby, though, is the world of high finance. Nick makes a living as a stock broker and Tom Buchanan and even Jay Gatsby, it could be argued, are part of the investment class. Buchanan comes from 'old money' while Gatsby possesses what is called 'new money.' He has hustled his way to wealth. 

The novel only became fashionable at the end of the Second World War when it was distributed to soldiers coming home from Europe. One suspicion I have is that this was done in order to dissuade those soldiers from attempting to take up with ex-girlfriends who had moved on during the war. After all, that is exactly Gatsby's story and the warning in his story is that, of course, he fails to attain Daisy, in the end, and is instead murdered in a case of mistaken identity abetted by Tom Buchanan.

What about finance makes the world Fitzgerald describes differ from that of Pound's world of fertility as economics? Here we arrive at the fulcrum of the text. 

 

"All of a novelist’s characters are himself." - someone

"Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. He spoils us with descriptive flights." - Jonathan Lethem

An anarcho-collectivist cadre makes documentary films about protests during the sixties. The group embeds at a university where a group of students have banned administrators and police from campus, creating a siege. One of the film-collective members is sleeping with both the leader of the radical group holed up on the college campus and with the federal prosecutor in charge of infiltrating and destroying the group. She is coerced by the prosecutor and helps set the student group leader up and participates in his assassination. 

A year later, protected by the government but on the run from her past, she meets a guitar player who is performing in a rock band. The two marry and have a child. Shortly thereafter the federal prosecutor discovers his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts and sets her husband up on drug charges. As a deal cut with the prosecutor, the husband vows never to see the mother of his child again and takes the baby with him to Northern California and a town named Vineland, a place recommended to him by a DEA agent. His ex-wife goes into a witness protection program, remarries and has another kid. 

Flash forward to 1984 (note the year is also the title of a famous dystopian novel) and the War on Drugs. In Northern California, DEA agents threaten to show up at the home of the before mentioned father, Zoyd Wheeler, and his daughter, Prairie, who have been given foreknowledge and go into hiding. The federal prosecutor, Brock Vond, wants to get at the daughter (Prairie), who is now 14, of his ex-lover (Frenesi).  This is where Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, begins. 

To escape the escalating danger, Prairie goes to San Francisco where her boyfriend’s band, the Vomitones, will be playing at a mafia wedding. Through a string of coincidences, she meets a woman called DL at the wedding, her mother’s former partner from the days of the film collective, and the two head out to a female commune in the mountains above Monterey. There, Prairie is given access to the collective’s film archive, which includes footage her mother filmed. The women at the commune are ex-collective members, and they share anecdotes with Prairie about her mom.  The book ends with a large family reunion in Vinland where Brock Vond attempts to kidnap Prairie. 

The book is inhabited with what Pynchon calls Thanatoids, a seemingly zombie-like segment of the population that work menial jobs, watch a lot of TV and are not totally “alive," in fact some characters in the book die and reappear as Thanatoids. I’ve passed on a lot of detail, in part because the book mostly consists of dense flashbacks that strangely seem to go nowhere. Pynchon demands we remain awake while reading. Confused? There are no conventional plot twists in this life or any other. 

What is Pynchon doing with this book? Well, he’s explicitly looking at the upheaval on college campuses in the sixties. He is also writing about groups like the SLA and people like Patty Hearst, who famously developed Stockholm Syndrome and sided with her kidnappers. Other members of the SLA became fugitives who hid from the law under aliases and started families, had kids and careers. Most hippies, following the trend, at some point became yuppies. Vineland paints a picture of California in the sixties, seventies, and eighties in all its absurdity and un-reality. Mainly, though, I think Pynchon is commenting on the ways reality becomes dangerously warped by mediating forces, specifically television. It should be reiterated that the 'present moment' the book describes is 1984. 

Pynchon’s fame revolves around his anonymity. He has never given an interview or been photographed in public. He writes alternate histories (Vineland was published in the mid-1990's). When researchers dug into Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel about wartime England and Germany, they discovered that much of what seemed implausible in the book was fact. American and British War profiteers colluded with German arms manufacturers; the theater of war was just that: theater created to divide and destroy. It has been said recently that Gravity's Rainbow would never be published in today's political media climate. The book would be deemed Q-Anon, Alt-Right, conspiracy theorist stuff. 

Jonathan Lethem does an excellent job of describing the oddball ex-hippy, and master, Thomas Pynchon. Here is Lethem writing for the New York Times about Pynchon’s 2013 book Bleeding Edge:

"Figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it. He’ll employ a string of citations to real and imaginary Bette Davis movies, say, or riffs on basketball, much as Pollock uses a color on a panoramic canvas or Coltrane a note in a solo: incessantly, arrestingly, yet seemingly without cumulative purpose. Instead, they’re threads for teasing at, or being teased by." 

Now zoom in a bit and look at Pynchon's style, which is absurd but comprehensive in its categorization, and dreamlike in its movement. At the book’s outset, Zoyd, our locally liked ex-hippy loser living in (the imaginary) Vineland, California, prepares to perform a televised stunt which will allow him to continue to receive his disability check from the State. Zoyd first buys an oversized dress at a thrift store and then a 'woman’s size' chainsaw (the size that fits into a purse). Next, going to the bar at which he assumes TV crews will be prepared to film him, we see him surrounded by gay yuppies at a bar off Highway 101 in Del Norte, California. He has ignored his answering machine's earlier warning telling him that the location the event would be filmed at this year is elsewhere.

He performs his jump annually. This year's jump takes place at the Cucumber Lounge. News trucks film him as he jumps through a plate glass window he discovers is also made of sugar; the film crews have staged this event and get images not just of the leap but then of a man wearing a dress holding a mini sized chainsaw munching on broken glass. 

The fact he initially goes to the wrong bar provides us with a few bits of information: Zoyd is a bit of a space cadet: even though he has been told this year his filmed act of 'mental illness' will take place at a new venue, he shows up at the one he worked previous; and, Zoyd is stuck in the past: he does not recognize that the lumberman’s bar has become a gay bar filled with yuppies, men dressed in boots that cost three figures and designer jeans. Finally, Zoyd seems to either lack self-awareness (he is not ashamed at all about the stunt he performs) or the fact of his lack of self-awareness about his stunt signals something important. Is Zoyd an idiot savant? Autistic? What does his inner life consist of? We do not know.

What is more pertinent than actual lived experience is the way it is experienced through the eyes of others; Pynchon gives us a man who lives up to those expectations by acting in an absurd manner and without dignity. This "otherness" points to the ways second order observation works. In this model, the individual does not matter,  because behavior is based on mimesis: we imitate based on some desire not our own. We look at something how it is observed by someone else, which is exactly the way TV and film, in general, operates. 

On one level, as I have stated, the novel's theme relates to what media, most specifically television, does to perception. On another, the characters and plot are a thinly veiled nod to the Weather Underground, the Manson family, and contemporary Humboldt and Mendocino Counties. Brock Vond represents not only C.A.M.P., the federal program to eradicate marijuana, but the fascism of Reagan America. The book is about the existent tensions between the ethos of the sixties and that of the eighties. Moreover the book details human biological impulses that go unchecked, unfettered and become warped and manipulated into authoritarianism.

What Pynchon does with the narrative relates to what John Gardner describes thusly:

"The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths."

We taste the sugar-glass Zoyd chews on when he does his stunt, and we experience the paranoia Frenesi and her group experience in their takeover of the college campus. Look at  this description of Thanatoids in Humboldt County waking up to a summer day on which a family reunion will occur, the conclusion to the book's action:

"Some had chosen to sleep inside their recreational vehicles, others lay out on mattresses in the beds of pickup trucks, a few had packed on further into the woods, and many had pitched tents in the meadows. Presently, as the light came up and birds started in, clock-radio alarms began to kick on in a thickening radio fugue of rock and roll till dawn, Bible interpretation, telephone voices still complaining about yesterday's news. Behind the mountains that climbed from here inland, morning-glory-blue light grew in the sky. Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves, gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links, eggs, flapjacks, waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puppies, were sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just-made coffee. People who'd slept overnight in the woods began to wander in. Blue jays appeared on foraging patrols, shrieking, bullying, scavenging, seagulls of the redwoods. Radio weather reports called for a real scorcher, even down in Vineland after the fog burned off. Younger cousins looked at the sky and into one another's backpacks. Fishermen set off along the creek bed to see what might be up and feeding, and golfers tried to scheme ways to slip off for a quick eighteen holes down at Las Sombras, a genuine links beside the fog-hung coast of Vineland. The marathon crazy eights game in a battered but shined-up Becker Airstream proceeded ageless as generation begetting generation, like a pot-au-feu of nickels, dimes, chips, greenbacks, and nuggets that might have been simmering continuously here since the times of the Little Gold Rush. Elsewhere in camp there were other games, poker, pinochle, dominoes, dice — but it was the Octomaniacs, as they thought of themselves, who as a crowd carried a more coherent look, as if they ought to be wearing matching T-shirts, while among the assortment of semi-strangers in and out of the other games, talent and judgment might vary by orders of magnitude, causing delays, astonishment, and episodes of consanguineous discombobulation."

This might describe an annual Rainbow Gathering, or Reggae on the River. It captures a time and place and that time and place is Humboldt County during the second half of the 20th century. Loggers have been replaced by hippies who are disappearing and being replaced by yuppies. The metamorphosis into a new and different type of 'space' is what Pynchon concerns himself with in Vineland. 

I read the book for about the third time and this time only began to recognize a plot. That might not be a resounding vote of confidence as a book review, but I like Pynchon's writing and I think he makes interesting points about the counterculture. Take, for example, this description of Brock Vond, the federal prosecutor infatuated with obtaining and controlling Frenesi:

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop."

Or this tidbit, spoken by a member of the former film collective:

"Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — 'I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?"

The question to ask is, has the counterculture--the hippies, the communes, the intentional communities--merely replaced Nixon's moral majority? Sadly, I think in the age of Covid, Trump, the internet and smart phones, the answer is a resounding YES! Reagan has been replaced by Biden; and the Australian police sergeant in charge of maintaining a strict health quarantine, the high school principal in San Francisco watching students for masks slipping beneath their noses, the woman demanding that the unvaccinated stay away from her...these real life 'characters' display to one degree or another the inchoate characterizations that, if allowed to go unchecked, result in the kind of character that is Brock Vond: controlling, desperate and absolutely psychopathic.