Warrior Creek

I was irritated recently to learn that I did not nearly die in the Enoree River as I previously claimed in one of the entries here.  I regret not only the historical inaccuracy but the time I spent trying to re-enact my near death experience in the wrong river.  First my brother #2, attempting to assist mewrong river in the historical re-enactment, took considerable time, riding here and there, with his son to locate the spot on the wrong river that resembled what I had spoken of.

He called to say he believed he had located the spot at MusGrove Mill.  The following absolutely sweltering day, my wife and I drove hither and thither through the countryside, through Enoree, the town proper, over hill and dale till we hit the interstate and driving back towards the historic town of Clinton, since every town there is now historic, saw a turn off to Musgrove Mill.  Victory, I thought.

The turnoff took us to my surprise to a parking lot and located near it a new building created by the National Forest Service—or some government organization like that—intent upon preserving the area in its natural state since it too was historic, an important or perhaps relatively insignificant, Revolutionary war battle having been fought there at Musgrove ford.  A helpful sign told us that fords were places of tactical importance since they allowed horses and people to ford the river relatively easily (that being by definition the nature of a ford) and thus holding this or that ford meant control over the movement of the Red Coats.

So we plodded in the sweltering heat through trees and brush down to the river proper so that I might find the precise location of my near death experience.  I was certain I had found it near some concrete pilings.  The wide expanse of the low river swept before me, and when I stepped into the water onto the stones beneath, my toes told me this was the place or very near it.  Slipping and sliding on my creaky knees I waded out as far as I dared, for the water became dark, deep and swift towards the center. 

For the purposes of the re-enactment I wanted to submerge myself and then pop my head out of the water as a symbolic manifestation of my having been saved.  But I dared not do it, and so contented myself by standing knee deep and waving my arms about in a panic stricken manner as my wife snapped a photo.  The photo did not turn out particular well since a still camera does not of course capture motion, and rather than looking panic stricken one might have surmised that, with both arms up in the air like that, I was being held up by bandits in mid-stream.

But all this was for naught because according to my mother I did not nearly die on the Enoree but on Warrior Creek, not far from the Enoree, but not the Enoree.  I don’t know why you make such a big deal of that, she said.  Why not, I said, a near death experience is a near death experience and not without significance, and besides, to set the record straight, the big deal really was that with her boo-hooings and goings on one might have felt she was the one who had nearly died.  To which she had nothing to say.

Something Egyptian

The old man’s claim to fame—of a very local variant—was his having built each house that we lived in.  Except for the very first, that had a tin roof and an outhouse and was rented for our first year or so back in South Carolina.  While we lived there, he built his first house on land adjacent to his adobemother’s house out of cinder block.  This made for quick, sturdy, and above all cheap construction but was not a style favored at that time or to my knowledge since.

One may make a house out of brick and it is an excellent house. But cinder block is used primarily in commercial construction, and is then painted because cinder block unpainted is rather ugly.  But the old man made it with his own hands, including I believe in this case the electrical, but without indoor plumbing.  It was a functional house and served the primary purpose of a house which is to keep out the elements.

He also built with his own hands, and the help of an electrician, the house in which we lived in California.  As I may have mentioned the original mortgage for this house was 12000 and was a kind of house in a box, lacking a better description.  All of the materials for the house were provided by a company, Whiting-Mead, so that, for example, all the wood was pre-cut to the dimensions of the house plan selected. This reduced considerably time and thought, both rather in short supply when it came to the old man.

But build the house, he did, and later he added on what we called a family room.  This had the table where we ate and the TV at the other end and in between a fancy fireplace of his own construction that had a place not just for a fire but also a grill for grilling meat and such.  The first time he lit a fire it did not however draw properly and flooded the house with smoke.  Over time, with much cursing and flinging about of tools, this defect was repair.  The building of this room took perhaps ten years.  Admittedly, most of it was there from the beginning, but finishing touches such as proper flooring were a long time in coming.  For years, before some linoleum got put on it, the flooring was simple and serviceable plywood.

The exterior of this house was covered in shakes painted grey.  Why, I don’t know.  But that they were part of the original package for the house in a box.

But the old man’s master piece, over the construction of which he would wax eloquent saying the The Lord had guided his very fingers, was the last one.  The adobe, as we called it, since that was what it was constructed of.  This house took perhaps five years to build as the old lady and old man lived in a trailer located on the property.  The bulk of that time went into the making of the adobe block directly from the earth of the property itself.  The old man would shovel the adobe into a cement mixer, liquefying it, then pour the adobe into molds, then remove the molds and let the adobe cure.

He made himself 10000 block and I must say I find something Egyptian about the feat.

Johnny-Come-Lately

Rousseau asks the reader to imagine infants born six feet tall.  And if we add to these creatures the emotions Freud believes infants and children feel, we have monsters indeed.  Or let us say we have adults but with no concern for the consequences of their actions and no sense really of their jawbonestrength.  If I were a woman I would of course be thankful that infants are not born 6 feet tall; we can all be thankful because the massacre would be enormous and the human race would come to a bloody pause.

I have seen a two year old wrench the bottle from its infant brother’s hand and run away to suck fiercely at it in some corner.  The two year old feels murderous but relatively small, somewhat portable, and surrounded by giants is not likely to commit homicide.  The feeling of having been abruptly uprooted and removed from the center of parental attention, however wavering, polluted, and pathological that attention may be by this obnoxious intruder and Johnny-come-lately may abate under ideal conditions, but is not likely to do so, as was my case, if one experiences one’s self as having been cast aside like an old shoe.

The face of the intruder will always remain the face of the intruder however much time and experience alter and weather that face. One cannot help but feel something darker and more mysterious than dislike because while one will always blame the intruder, one cannot help but wonder if something was and continues to be wrong (perhaps for example one’s nagging desire to strangle one’s brother) with one’s self to have been so early and precipitously handed over to the elements.

Why did he always get the larger ice-cream cone?  Why when disputes arouse was he invariably in the right and I in the wrong?  Why was he so confident and right when he said the world was flat, and I so dithering, and on the verge of wringing his neck, when I dared to contend otherwise.  Why when I said he had done it, did my father say, he didn’t care because surely I had done something that week deserving of the licking he was going to administer.

He had the higher IQ (if one believes in such things) I was told on more than one occasion.  He was tall, dark, and handsome.  I was pale, bony, red-headed and homely.  He looked more like my father; and I could have been my mother’s twin.  He studied only what he liked to study and success was a snap.  I did well in school but only because I was an “over-achiever.”

I knew a man, a professor of literature, who seemed always happy.  I said, why are you always happy?  He said,  with curious honesty, because my mother loved me.  There is nothing like a mother’s love.  True enough, but a mother’s love comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  And knowing our mother, I must believe my brother may have paid a highly complex price for having been the apple of her peculiar eye.

Bone Structure

The textures of brotherhood, in their yin and their yang, are buried very deep and out of sight.  2crowsRather like one’s skeleton one knows those textures are there; but one is happy not to see them in the way one might be happy to be spared ever seeing one’s skeleton. The sight and the experience of it would be very disturbing indeed.

While my father jokingly called me son number one, the second son is my brother number one. Brother 1 and I shared the same space or bedroom for about 15 years.  Shared is not quite the right word; rather we inhabited it as two young monkeys might the same tree.  While the tree provided shelter and sanctuary for both, we sat on very separate branches.  He tended to his business and I tended to mine.  Through long and unconscious practice we learned how not to get in the other’s way.

He did not tell me about his day and I did not tell him about mine.  While we caught diseases from each other and endured the other’s farts, we did not talk to each other about our worries, concerns, or ambitions. We did not talk either about the old lady or the old man or our other brothers when they came along. We had some of the same teachers in high school, but we did not talk about them.  We both liked to read but we didn’t discuss what we had read.  Nor did we talk about world affairs or the latest scientific developments.

He attended the same college that I attended. We lived at or around  the same school and for those two year I don’t think we dropped in on each other no more than a couple of times.  After that I had a nervous breakdown around the time he got married and started a family.

He was my mother’s favorite.  As I believe I may have mentioned, I know this because my mother told me so.  By the time my brother appeared, my mother had concluded that our father was not a proper man and that, consequently, she had to start over.  I accordingly was to be my father’s son, since I suppose she had decided not to abandon me by the roadside and my brother was to be her son.  My mother says that for the first 2 or 3 years of his life I followed my younger brother around as if he were the older brother and I the younger.

I don’t know if this is true or not (especially since the old lady’s primary purpose in life seemed to have been the emasculation of her boy children), but if it is true I suppose I did so to get whatever crumbs of affection that might come my way. The affection and attention that she gave to my brother and took from me accordingly was not compensated for by increased attention from my father, my  mother having apparently failed to inform him that I was now “his” son.

The Younger Brothers

I have 3 brothers acquired over the years.  One in 1948, one in 1952, one in 1960.  That makes 14 years between me, the oldest, and the youngest.  We are rather strung out.  Brother number 2 was born after the death of our sister, who died of the RH factor, after being on the earth for a week or younger brothersso.  But by the time brother #2 came along they had come up with stuff to combat the RH and he, success story that he was, was written up in some medical journal.

We are all rather nuts in some way or the other.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott says, if you have one mother and 8 children, you have eight different mothers.  This is true; we all have different perceptions of our mother.  But we agree, even with these differences, that she is crazy.  Or maybe she is evil.  We have discussed this matter and have not really reached a conclusion.

I think she is crazy.  Brother number 1 thinks she is Evil (or at times he thinks this).  Brother #2 believes she is capable of any manner of horrible acts.  And brother #3 would just as soon she went away.  Our different perceptions of her are probably related to the differing reasons we have for believing she is crazy and/or evil.

The thing that has kept us in contact with each other over the years as we went our different ways and to different parts of the state is the shared experience of having been raised by our crazy mother and impotent father.  Without these two we would not have much in common.

We are rather like those poor soldiers flung together in the same trench from different parts of the universe; and as they undergo the terrors of war, they bond, as they say.  After the war, they go their different ways and sometimes never contact each other again because really they had nothing in common except the shared misery of a miserable experience.

 One must face the fact that genetics is a crap shoot and just because you are related to another person by blood does not mean you have any deep elective affinity with that person as another person or soul.  Though of course you are probably all human beings. And in that respect, as much as you may dislike, fear, or simply hate, another of the same blood, you are bound by that blood to respect the fact that the blood relation is, in fact, a human being, something not as easily accorded a biological stranger.

This is no small or easy thing.  Many are much nicer and more pleasant, courteous and respectful to complete strangers than they are to members of their own family.  I think this much more the “norm” than many might imagine.  We say things to members of the family that we would never dare to say to others, unless we wish to get shot or be beaten to a pulp.  And we do not usually get shot or beaten to a pulp because we are family.

Sometimes this may well be a terrific mistake.

A Thing of Beauty

In 1967 I began to think about going to graduate school though I was thinking more about getting drafted.  When however I thought about the former, I realized I would need to apply and take the BirdGRE’s and get some letters of recommendation together.  I knew I could get one from my favorite teacher, but I was sort of lacking in that department till something showed up.

I took a class on Aesthetics; really it was a seminar, the only thing of its kind I had at college.  We met at the Professor’s house a couple blocks off campus, sat around in his living room and discussed Aesthetics.  Maybe we had eight people in the seminar.  I remember one guy talking with great enthusiasm about driving his little sports car at high speeds in the mountains and wondering if what he felt while doing so didn’t constitute an aesthetic experience.  We read stuff too like Plotinus and Kant.

The only “work” for the course was showing up for the seminars, writing some journal entries, and one long paper.  This was, by far, the most wide open and relaxed class I had taken.  I enjoyed the subject and I had gotten my hands on some Dexedrine.  So I took that and paced back and forth in our little kitchen in the apartment over the garage and thought up a whole paragraph in my head and then wrote it down and then thought up another and wrote it down.  The paper was exploratory and speculative though I had a general idea about where I was going….

 I wanted to disassociate the aesthetic experience from things people might call art—of any kind, and argue that it was an “everyday experience” that anybody could have because its primary locus was not the brain but the body.  So I concluded the guy’s sport car experience was an aesthetic experience, though my primary personal reference was basketball.

While I was not really tall enough to do it effectively I worked hard on my back to the basket game, especially on a quick turn around jumper.  On several occasions during pickup games especially, I did this turn around and had sort of an out of the body experience—I could sort of see myself with a little camera located over my head.  Somebody else had the ball, eye contact was made, and I would move away from my position five feet or so under basket out in quick movement towards the ball, so I caught it ten to twelve feet from the basket when I caught it in motion, mind you, and still in motion, and with the momentum of moving away from the basket, I caught it, turned in air, and made the fall away.

Once, maybe 30 years later, when I was over forty, I did the same thing in a pick up game at the “Y” and the guys, a bunch of strangers, spontaneously applauded when I successfully and surprisingly made that move.  Why not?  It was a thing of beauty.

So the Professor wrote on the paper that on the basis of it he would recommend me to any graduate school in the country.  So I picked up another letter of recommendation though I don’t believe I mentioned basketball in the paper.

De Sade

The ancient Greeks are probably just as bad as the people in the Bible.  They were all a bunch of pathological whacko-jobs.  Those guys in the old and New Testament who thought they were talking with God; well, they weren’t making it up.  Most of the ancient world was psychotic; that’s what you had to be to endure the endless shit going down.  But while I had plenty of intro to the Bible forced bastilledown my throat, I didn’t really get to read the Greeks in much detail till college.

Or let’s say, I had read quite a bit of them before college, but wasn’t ready till college to look at them with clearer emotions.  I was bowled over especially by the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Of course, in the Iliad, just like in the Bible, you find endless stretches of dullness where they make lists of things, like what armies were here or there or who was in them exactly, like the begat stuff in the Bible.  These lists suggest the value of list making at any time in human history as a mechanism for getting your feet on the ground and dealing with blasts of overwhelming anxiety.

But when Homer wasn’t making lists, he was talking about fighting.  And that’s what got me most.  Like with those Greeks, there was no breast beating or me-oh-my I have got to kill somebody or why-am-I-doing-this sort of thing.  No questions about meaning or guilt or any of that shit.  Just here I am and I am going to knock your fucking head off, and they would go at it till they were knocking each over the heads with rocks or whatever else came in handy.  No knights in shining army, just blood and dust till the day was done and they collected their dead.

And it didn’t seem to be about courage either.  Really no choice was involved.  So that wasn’t a question.  Odysseus at one point is getting the crap beaten out of him and he just starts talking to his opponent, pleading pathetically for his life, like hey, man, I am not ready to die and I have duties and obligations etc.  And he talks the guy out of killing him, and that didn’t mean Odysseus wasn’t sufficiently manly.  It meant he was and on top of that he was smart.

So maybe I was a proto-nerd because I was so knocked over with this stuff that I wrote an extra, un-required paper about what I was feeling and gave it to the professor.  She gave it back to me with no marks on it and said something like she had found it interesting.  OK, so maybe it had been filled with specious generalizations and based on extremely limited knowledge or whatever the heck had been wrong with it.  Or maybe I had come off sounding like a proto-fascists or something because as women since have reminded me the macho hood of those ancient Greeks was based on a society where women were treated like chattel, a sort of polite way of saying they were slaves.

Not till years later when I was reading the Romantics did I realize that back then in 1967 I had gone through a sort of literary rite of passage as it were.  All of the Romantics, well, most of them, had been bowled over by their first readings of the Greeks, which they usually did actually in Greek, while I read stuff in translation having, like Shakespeare, little Latin and no Greek.  I don’t know how to say it but the Greeks seem to breathe a clean and pure and cold air, while the air of we moderns is polluted and we in turn are sickly.  Almost as if all the pathology that had once been out there and accepted in the social structures and mythology of those days had moved right into our sickly heads.

It always gives me pause to remember that when, on the road to natural rights, the French knocked down the Bastille, one of the guys that game strolling out, was the Marquis De Sade.

Alien Lobotomy

It might have been a couple years ago, and I hear a couple of students talking.  And one says you know some people believe the pyramids were built by aliens and that’s where human life comes from.  And the other guy says, sort of pedantic like, well, that’s one theory. And I go to myself, for god’s sake and Jesus H. fucking Christ who the hell are these people that I am supposed to be teaching.

I wanted to grab the pedantic sounding guy by the neck and say, the idea that aliens built the pyramids, aside from being a statement based on profound ignorance, is not a fucking theory, but goddamn untrammeled and uncontrolled speculation of the most rampant kind.  Not that I am opposed to speculation, mind you.  The power and importance of what some people call speculative philosophy, meaning mostly continental philosophy since Kant, is under-rated by the master knit-pickers of English analytic philosophy, who have added nothing to the philosophical tradition except picked nits.

But something I did get out of college—and it goes along with ambiguity tolerance—is the importance of the fact/value, belief/fact distinctions.  Now I know these distinctions, arising as they do from empiricism, instrumentalize reason and make anything like wisdom, as a combo pack of knowledge and value, in the practical world impossible.  But that said, it alarms me to feel that many of my students today don’t know or care about these distinctions.  Marx—he too, is just another theory, and so is Freud, or Darwin for that matter; and because they are, like the question of the aliens and the Egyptians, just another fucking theory, it is pretty easy just to blow them all off.

But the real problem as I see it isn’t so much that students blow off scientific theories as theories but they don’t use these theories to think about themselves or to look into their own interiors in different ways.  While I stupidly set “The Truth” as the goal of my studies, I came with time to see the “Truth” is NOT OUT THERE.  No, it’s in here; or rather the determination to seek the truth is in here.  My goal was to have the strength to acknowledge that truth, whatever the fuck it was. 

For example, looking inside myself I realized that homosexuality made me uncomfortable.  Well, alienwhy not, when I went away to college, I knew what homosexuality was but in a completely abstract way.  I hadn’t knowingly seen a gay person till I got to college, and there was this one guy who hung out with the girls and had no hair on his legs.  So I mentioned the hairless legs to some guy as a matter of speculative interest and he said the guy with the hairless legs was a faggot.  Oh! Like things started clicking into place.

But during my seven years in the hole, during which I much doubted my own masculinity, I decided to look at the truth and did what I do on such occasions.  Read all I could get my hands on that had been written by gay guys.  I read Gide first and then Genet, and I’ve got to say the guy had me in the palm of his hand when he started out Our Lady of the Flowers, I think it was, observing how people hated other people’s farts but loved their own.  Real prison literature, from a guy who had nothing better to do than lie in his bunk with his blanket over this head smelling his own farts!

Brilliant!

I still get sort of ticked off to think that in my entire history as a student I never got back a single paper with the “Brilliant!” written across the corner of the first page.  You’d sort of think that a person who went on to get a PhD would have gotten one “Brilliant!” or maybe he got the PhD under blackholefalse pretenses or something.

My friend, who really was at Woodstock and who later became a schizophrenic, routinely got “Brilliants.”  He was in that English class for English majors in my freshman year and every paper he wrote got a “Brilliant” across the top and the same for his in-class philosophy exam.  And that was like throwing pearls before swine—or something like that—because he didn’t give a shit and was already dropping out by the end of the first year.

But really I was, I guess, incapable of being brilliant not because I lacked brains exactly but because I really didn’t know what brilliant was all about.  Being brilliant was writing back what the professor had said in such a way that he or she recognized his or her brilliance in what you had written.  This is no small thing since some professors are really brilliant, so it’s not really something you can fake.  It’s like you are playing back the song they played for you in such a way that the song is recognizable as their song but in such a way also that you open up new like meanings in it.  I think the French might call these little moments of new meaning apercu.

But of course I am being a bit snotty here.  Because being brilliant is not merely a matter of pleasing a Professor.  Beyond being brilliant in the professor-teacher relationship is what we might call advanced “brilliance.”  That’s where you write something for a professional journal, and you have read so much of the shit that the editors of the journal have written that you make them all think they are brilliant.  This takes fucking work and in the course of that you can get so fuddled up that you can’t be brilliant.

Instead what I got written across the corner of the first page of my papers was “Original” on two or three occasions.  I wouldn’t have known this was praise but for the “A” grade attached.  Because after the “original” I didn’t find lavish praise for what I had written.  It was like “original!” was the only thing that could be said about it.  Because being original is sort of the opposite of being brilliant; here the errant and untutored student decides to write about some idea that was not discussed in class or maybe not even written about anywhere.

Being original took its own kind of work, you had to write and rewrite, and provide examples and such to make a sort of framework for making sure the Professors didn’t think you were nuts or something.  It’s like while you were writing you had to take their heads and move it to another place so they could see what you were trying to see.  So one time I wrote a sort of theoretical preface to a paper on Passage to India, saying, in brief, that if a work of literature was indeed a whole and unified in its parts, I should be able to take a tiny part and working off that show the unity of the work.  What was the smallest unit I could work with? Why a single word.

So I picked the word “distinction” and went through the book and tried to find every instance of that word’s use.  Then I analyzed the immediate context of the word’s use, and, tracing it from the beginning of the book to the end, showed how the meaning deepened and changed as it went along…Something like that.

 I really didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what I was doing.  But I enjoyed writing it because it seemed to hold together and I was temperamentally unable to say back to the teacher what the teacher had said.

Speaking Chaucer

So, as English major, I have to take class on Goeffrey Chaucer and write a paper on Troilus and Criseyde.  This is a pretty long poem with the same name as a play by Shakespeare, though middle englishChaucer wrote before Shakespeare in Middle English.  I read the poem in translation and I hated it because the so-called hero, Troilus, was like in love with Criseyde.  I forget the particulars but every time the guy made it into an intimate situation with Criseyde where they might have consummated their relation in a physical way the fucker, Troilus I mean, would actually faint or pass out or something to that effect.

 So I started writing this paper on how screwed up Troilus was and how he couldn’t be a proper hero and so on if he fucking fainted when he had the opportunity to get some snatch (excuse me).  I even read some Freud on sexual hysteria to back up my claim and tied all that back into the religious theme of the poem because it did have a religious theme.  And I am typing away on this thing at around 4 in the morning of the day it is due and realize I have just written a pile of crap.

It was a sort of light bulb experience because a number of other things came together.  I realized that in attacking Troilus as an impotent and ineffectual jerk I was not talking about the poem “as a whole.”  I was making the mistake of actually identifying with a character, Troilus, and I wasn’t supposed to do that at all.  I couldn’t do that if I was to understand and write about the poem “as a whole.”  And I saw then rather dimly but more clearly later that my dislike of Troilus was an obvious projection of my own sexual problem.  Like I was the one who felt like passing out in situations with potential for fucking.  So actually writing on Troilus in that way I had been engaged in psychological self-flagellation.

 s I said, this was a major break through.  I would have to stop identifying with the characters if I were to write about the work “as a whole,” as, as it were, a whole universe in microcosm, complete down to its own laws of gravity.  The problem here was that really, unless you were an English major and had to write papers on stuff, if you cut off your identification with the characters you really didn’t have a whole lot of reason to read the book, except that it was a book on the must read list of books for English majors.

So I got a D+ on the paper but an A for the class because the professor gave A’s to everybody that had a beard because he was on LSD all the time.  And I didn’t learn how to pronounce Chaucer properly, his being in middle English and all, and that came back to bite me in the ass like 20 years later when I am taking my first orals for my PhD, and I am just flying along knocking them dead with my knowledge of the novel, until this jerk hands me some Chaucer and asks me to read it.  I mean hell it might as well have been in a foreign language because Middle English is nearly a foreign language.  And the fuckers have the gall to pass me through the orals, but with “reservations” one of them being that I should learn how to speak Chaucer properly.

Now why should I learn to speak Chaucer properly, you might well ask.  Absolutely no reason at all.  Just that if you were an English major you were supposed to know how to speak Chaucer in case somebody came up to you at a party and asked you to talk Chaucer, since you were an English major.  Like in the same way, I guess, that if you are a doctor and somebody has a heart attack at a party you, as a doctor, are expected to act like you know what you are doing. Well, in the 28 years since I fucked up that orals and sat through a whole class on how to speak Chaucer, nobody has ever asked me to speak Chaucer because nobody gives a shit about Chaucer or Middle English, except English Majors.

The whole thing is a like a sociological tautology.