Thoreau – Under The Table

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2012)

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” Henry David Thoreau

I am writing the first draft of this essay with pen on paper and using a big hardback copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Tetrascroll as my portable desk. I am sitting on a rug a few feet from our woodstove, the fire therein making our living room the most appealing room in our otherwise chilly house. Should I create an essay I want to keep, I will venture into my chilly office, ignite the electric space heater adjacent to my desk, and type these words into my computer to ready them for sending to Bruce and Mark at the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Marcia is in her office, a world apart just fifteen feet away, and I am thinking about several events and ideas and technological changes that have commandeered my consciousness and are asking me to write about them.

Yes, I believe that ideas and stories from sources outside our individual consciousnesses, perhaps propelled by unseen spirits or equally fantastic invisible forces of Universe, are constantly seeking willing portals (creative beings) for expression in our dimension. I know that sounds like hackneyed spiritual crap to some of you, but it rings true to me.

For the past week, Europe has been gripped by enormous simultaneous protests involving millions and millions of people in several countries, though the American media has barely covered these historic events, and we know why. Our overlords don’t want us getting any ideas about imitating our European brethren who are rising up against their governments to say: We will not allow you to keep punishing us in order to benefit the bankers and swindlers who created this economic mess.

Of course the economic mess is Europe is intrinsically connected to the economic mess in America, and messes made by the bankers and swindlers and governments here and abroad are now so huge that nothing short of near total (or total) collapse and reconstruction using new operating paradigms will improve the situation. And new operating paradigms will not be allowed to take hold until the crooks and swindlers are replaced by highly intelligent people working for the greater good.

Meanwhile, as a kind of case in point, the company that has for too long made Hostess Twinkies is going out of business, which means 20,000 American will lose their meaningless jobs along with their deeply meaningful salaries and retirement benefits, and some other company, very possibly a Chinese company, will become the new manufacturer of those nutritionally worthless and physically harmful gobs of refined white flour and refined sugar and refined chemicals. Hostess went bankrupt shortly after being bought by a group of hedge fund swindlers who ran the company into the ground in no time, crooks who will no doubt profit from their crimes and use a portion of those profits to enter politics or elect other crooks and swindlers. Is this a great economic system, or what?

Meanwhile, through a series of what I consider miracles and what those who don’t believe in miracles might call a series of astonishing coincidences, all of my long out-of-print novels are now available as e-books—kindles, nooks, apples, googles, etc.—and I may be on the verge of benefiting (we hope) from a technology I don’t use and am not attracted to but that will nevertheless bring my stories back to public life after decades of unavailability following their very brief lives in-print.

And at the very moment of the birth of the kindle nook apple versions of Forgotten Impulses, Louie & Women, Night Train, and Ruby & Spear (joining Buddha In A Teacup and Under the Table Books as e-books) not one but three well-meaning people sent me articles detailing the evils of e-books and how these downloadable digital editions not only deprive readers of the sensual delight and healing power of reading and fondling real live books, but e-books (these articles contend) are doing terrible damage to the market for real live books. To which I say: given a choice between people reading my books as e-books or not at all, I’ll go with the e-books and trust that the sensual healing power of my stories will get through to readers regardless of delivery mode.

Meanwhile yet again, there come more dire reports of the ongoing environmental holocaust underway on planet earth that will soon dwarf and exacerbate the current global economic turmoil and make the demise of Twinkies and the coming of e-books seem like nothing of much consequence, though all these things are related and intertwined. How so? Well, I would say that the gestalt of the events and ideas and technological changes engulfing us today suggests we are in the midst of several major turning points adding up to a global turning point that rivals the Industrial Revolution in scope and impact.

As I sit on this rug (made in India) writing longhand on 100% recycled paper (made in Canada) with a pen (made in China) by the light of a lamp (made in Indonesia) and lit by energy made from oil (pumped out of Alaska or Texas or Saudi Arabia) while keeping warm by a woodstove (made in Norway) burning wood (trucked from Boonville to Mendocino), I am keenly aware that the earth cannot sustain for much longer my level of material ease and affluence for billions of people unless everything manufactured henceforth on earth is entirely and efficiently recyclable and produces zero pollution before, during and after manufacture while employing 100% renewable energy sources in the manufacturing and shipping processes. Now there’s a paradigm shift that only a few nations have embraced and are beginning to implement, while the rest of us earthlings continue our suicidal coal burning gas burning nuclear power burning ways.

Add to this mix of ideas and events the amazing (to me) news that Nigeria is one of the largest markets in the world for mobile phones, especially the Blackberry mobile phone. Selling for two hundred dollars in Nigeria, a country where sixty per cent of the population lives in dire poverty, the demand for Blackberry phones even among Nigeria’s poor far outstrips supply and…

I suddenly had a vision of a future world wherein Americans and Europeans and people all over the world have voluntarily given up many of the creature comforts that are, through their manufacture and deployment, the causes of global warming and global pollution, in exchange for being able to have cell phones and computers and a fast and exciting global internet system. In this future world, most people walk and bicycle and take electric shuttle buses and drive groovy ultra-light electric vehicles for local travel rather than driving cars running on gasoline, and capitalism as we know it today is a thing of the past replaced by millions of worker-owned cooperatives and organic farms and splendiferous public transportation systems; and we have this vivacious absolutely free computer interweb global infrastructure. Most people live materially minimalist yet comfortable lives, jet travel is an extreme rarity, international trade happens on slow boats and solar electric gravity powered trains, superb healthcare is absolutely free, and we have a super cool internet and world wide web providing everyone with marvelous cross-cultural connectivity, information, and culture.

At present I don’t own a cell phone or any sort of portable computer pad thingy and I don’t plan to own them, but could it be possible (imaginable?) that billions of people would be willing to dramatically reduce their energy consumption and assume the carbon footprints of the average Nigerian of 2012 in exchange for an ever improving lightning fast, mind-expanding, earth-saving interweb accessible through phones and pads and computers? Might we not harness this powerful desire for wide-reaching interconnectivity as a bridge to the wholly regenerative and undeniably socialist (in the best sense of the word) future?

So there I’ll be sitting on my rug (woven by weavers of the village weaving cooperative) writing longhand by the light of a solar-powered lamp I brought back on my bicycle from the village solar power collective store. The solar electric heater and the fire in the woodstove keep me warm while the six trees I planted for every cord of wood we burn are growing fast in the nearby recovering woods. When I get a draft I like, I will type the words into my computer and send the essay forth to Bruce and Mark at the Anderson Valley Advertiser and to those dozens of folks who enjoy me on the worldwide interweb.

(This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser March 2011)

“As the heavens are high and the earth is deep, so the hearts of kings are unsearchable.” Book of Proverbs 25:3

“Have you seen The King’s Speech?” asked a friend.

“Marcia has and loved it,” I replied. “I’m waiting for it to come out on Netflix.”

My wife Marcia and I are on the two-movies-a-month plan, and we often don’t find the time to watch even that many.

“Of course,” continued my friend, “they’ve taken great liberties with the historical facts. I read one article that said the movie isn’t even close to the truth and another that said it has some truth in it, but not much.”

“The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.” Henry David Thoreau

Historical facts. Hmm. When I was attending UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s (and I really did do that) Norman O. Brown came to teach at our newborn college. His course Myth & History was open to undergrads, so I signed up to hear what the famous man had to say. Who was Norman O. Brown? Having taken his Myth & History class, and having spent a few hours blabbing with Norman about this and that, I think he would have been amused by the question. Why amused? Because the central theme of his course was that myth and history are inextricably entwined; history being mythologized the moment that highly subjective reporter known as a human being attempts to put into words what he or she thinks may have happened.

Before I tell you a little more about Norman O. Brown, I would like to recount a scene from Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the novel, not the movie. The Norman I remember (which is probably a very different Norman than the Norman other people remember) would have appreciated this digression because his lectures were composed entirely of digressions that would then double back on themselves and culminate in conclusions that, depending on each listener’s perspective, made some sort of larger sense. Or not.

“Great things happen when God mixes with man.” Nikos Kazantzakis

So…in The Last Temptation of Christ there is a memorable scene in which Jesus and his disciples are sitting around a campfire after a long day of spreading their gospel, when Matthew, a recent addition to the crew, is suddenly impelled by angels (or so he claims) to write the biography of Jesus. So he gets out quill and papyrus and sets to work transcribing the angelic dictation; and Jesus, curious to see what’s gotten into his latest convert, takes a peek over Matthew’s shoulder and reads the opening lines of what will one day be a very famous gospel.

Jesus is outraged. “None of this is true,” he cries, or words to that effect. And then Judas (I’m pretty sure it was Judas and not Andrew) calms Jesus down with a Norman O. Brown-like bit of wisdom, something along the lines of: “You know, Jesus, in the long run it really doesn’t matter if he writes the truth or not. You’re a myth now, so you’d better get used to everybody and his aunt coming up with his or her version of who you are.”

Kazantzakis, trust me, wrote the scene much more poetically and marvelously than the way I just recounted it, but…

“All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.” Ernest Hemingway

Back to Norman O. Brown. In the late 1960’s, Norman was among the most famous pop academic writers in the world. Not only had he written Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, which made him famous, he had just published (in 1966) Love’s Body, a mainstream and academic bestseller exploring the impact of erotic love on human history; or was it the struggle between eroticism and civilization? In any case, here is one of my favorite blurbs from the hundreds of reviews that made Love’s Body so famous in its time. I will digress again (thank you, Norman) by saying if any book I ever publish gets a blurb even remotely as stupendous as the following, and said blurb appears in, say, the San Francisco Chronicle or even the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, drinks are on me.

“Norman O. Brown is variously considered the architect of a new view of man, a modern-day shaman, and a Pied Piper leading the youth of America astray. His more ardent admirers, of whom I am one, judge him one of the seminal thinkers who profoundly challenge the dominant assumptions of the age. Although he is a classicist by training who came late to the study of Freud and later to mysticism, he has already created a revolution in psychological theory.” — Sam Keen, Psychology Today

The myth and history web site known as Wikipedia says that Norman was a much-loved professor at UC Santa Cruz where he taught and lived to the end of his days (he died in 2002, or so they say). Wikipedia also reports that Norman had the nickname Nobby, which I would like to say I gave him, but I did not. At least I don’t think I gave it to him. On the other hand, I might have given it to him because that was not his nickname when I knew him, so it must have been affixed after I knew him. Thus we might say, “After I got through with him, he was known as Nobby.” That does sort of sound like I’m responsible for his nickname. You decide.

“Personality is the original personal property.” Norman O. Brown

Here are a few true stories about Norman that might as well be myths.

Norman loved to fool around with the order of letters in words and the order of syllables in words and the order of words in phrases. For instance, he began one lecture by…

But first of all, here’s a snapshot of Norman in 1968: a portly white man of medium height with curly brown hair. I wouldn’t say his hair was unruly, but it was certainly not ruly. Is ruly a word? If not, then from whence came unruly? These were the kinds of questions Norman would ask of us, his audience, and not answer. On second thought, his hair was unruly. In either case, he would cast his questions upon his waters, he the fly fisherman, we the trout finning below the surface of his stream of consciousness, and he would allow the flies (the questions) to drift along above us for a time to see if we might rise to the bait. If no trout rose, he cast again.

Norman had voluptuous lips and frequently wept in front of us, moved by something he felt, or moved by inner demons we could only guess at, or moved by God knows what (if you subscribe to the myth of God.) I knew several people (mostly guys) who were so freaked out by how fragile and vulnerable and weird Norman seemed to them that they dropped the class after the first couple lectures.

“Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.” Norman O. Brown

One day (getting back to Norman’s playing with the order of letters in a word) he stood (wearing a brilliant white Mexican wedding shirt tucked into fine purple corduroy trousers, his feet shod in black sandals, his toenails painted red) with his back to the audience for the first five minutes of his presentation. People began to squirm; a few walked out; and several more were about to walk out when Norman turned to face us. He ran his fingers through his unruly hair three or possibly four times, took three (I’m absolutely sure it was three) tentative steps forward, touched the tips of the fingers of his left hand to the tips of the fingers of his right hand, and gazed at this collision of digits as a lover might gaze at her beloved, or as an autistic person might stare at her fingers, and then he pursed his voluptuous lips, raised his eyes to the audience, and said so quietly we had to strain to hear, “Roma.”

Then he swallowed, licked his lips, touched his fingertips together again as described above, licked his lips once more, and repeated, “Roma.”

I looked down at my notebook and saw that I had written Roma twice. And between the first and second Roma I had unwittingly drawn a heart.

Then I looked at Norman (I usually sat in the seventeenth row, having a particular fondness for that number) and he said, “Roma spelled backwards is…”

He waited a moment for us to begin to figure it out for ourselves, and then concluded, “Amor.”

“‘Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry” James Joyce from Finnegan’s Wake

Norman began another of his lectures mid-thought and mid-sentence referencing James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. I could not, for the life of me, discern when Norman’s sentences ended or began or even if he was speaking in sentences. People ran for the exits as if a fire alarm had sounded. Soon there were only a few of us remaining in the vast lecture hall, Norman rambling on, his tired face alight with what might have been happiness or possibly incredulity to have struck such a rich vein of…something; and I gave up trying to understand him. I simply surrendered to his sound and subtle fury, and fell into a trance from which I did not emerge until…Norman’s voice rose to a girlish crescendo, fell silent for a momentous moment, and finished basso profundo with: “Finnegan’s Wake. Fin! Again! Wake!”

“Hearasay in paradox lust” James Joyce from Finnegan’s Wake

It was following Norman’s fifth or sixth or seventh lecture that I went to his office to show him a four-page play I’d written, a dumb show, a drama without words inspired by something he’d been harping on for a couple lectures. “The slave becomes the king becomes the slave.” In my dumb show, which, come to think of it, might have been choreography for a ballet, I was exploring passive aggression and aggressive passivity and the pitfalls of passion and the pratfalls of sexual positions, and (being nineteen) I thought the play was way cool, and I suspected that if anyone on earth would appreciate my play it was Norman.

I went to his office. He was sitting at his desk, weeping. He dried his eyes, rose to shake my hand, and invited me take a seat. I told him I was taking Myth & History. He said he recognized me. He said I often frowned ferociously at things he said, after which I would scribble furiously in my notebook. He said he often wondered which part of what he had just said made me frown. I said I was unaware of my ferocious frowning but wasn’t surprised to hear I frowned ferociously because ferocious frowning was my father’s habit, too. Norman said the older he got the more he reminded himself of his father, and also of his mother.

I then blurted that I found him captivating and perplexing and thought I was probably not consciously getting most of what he was trying to convey but I was apparently unconsciously getting some of it because he had inspired me to write a short play, which I then handed him. He read the pages, avidly, or so I like to think, then read them again. Then he looked at me and blinked appreciatively. “Yes,” he gushed. “The violence of Eros the inadequacy of the nuclear family to accommodate the sexual divergences of male and female energies of young and old I love the mother becoming lovers with her daughter’s lover only to discover her daughter’s lover is her father transformed. You’ve read Graves, Durrell, Duncan, Camus, Beckett. What do you want to do?”

“I want to write epic poems disguised as novels.”

He frowned gravely and pointed with the fingers of his right hand at the air just above my head. “A path of great danger,” he intoned, wiggling his fingers to incite the spirits. “Don’t be afraid.”

Todd lives in Mendocino where he prunes fruit trees, plays the piano, and writes essays and fiction. His web site is Underthetablebooks.com