So in the midst of this novel/novella, I-as-writer (as opposed to the I-as-narrator function) ask myself, where as this is going? Sometimes I know, but other times I'm writing my way towards something and don't know what. This is one of those sort of stories. And, as I-as-narrator answered that, I initially thought, how ludicrous. But then I realized that was exactly the way this Brett Easton Ellis-meets-Shirley Jackson tale goes. And the path there is quite wonderful. I hope sometime to find out if you think so as well.
Such unexpected turns are one of the tasty reasons I love what I do—the thrill of being in the midst of pure story as it manifests from the what-it-is-not. If it can surprise, challenge, convince, and thrill me, I suspect/think/hope/pray it may do similar things for others.
· • ·
Showing posts with label unreality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unreality. Show all posts
Friday, March 12, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Stylized Denial: The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man
The final paper for Writing About Film. Take one of the films we viewed for class (or clip thereof—which threw Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys in as a qualified sources material—and compare it with another film.
This one didn't go where I wanted it to, but it arrived somewhere nonetheless.
~•~
ENG 317
December 8, 2009
Final Essay
The world of departed souls is said to be to the west—towards the setting sun. The path leads through a dim world of twilight. Another trail intersects this first; used by shamans as a shortcut to encounter the souls in journey to that other world. At some point along its westward travel, the path encounters water—a running stream, a lake, the great black ocean when the soul crosses to the sunless lands. At the brink, before this point is reached, the soul comes upon a lodge or passageway, where the guardians wait. When the soul reaches the lodge, it comes face-to-face with these guardians. Sometimes the guardians welcome the soul with laughter and drumming, and they carry the soul on to where it will ultimately pass alone. Often times the soul is not greeted warmly, fear and denial dominating what transpired in leading the soul to this point on its journey.
In Mary Henry's voyage from the river where the car she rode in plunged—killing all its occupants—she travels westward to Salt Lake City. Once there, she is drawn to a ruined structure on the outskirts of town that to her is hauntingly familiar. This is the Saltair Pavilion, and in Herk Henry's bleak supernatural tale Carnival of Souls (1962), it acts as Mary Henry's ghost lodge, through which she must pass en route to her ultimate destination.
Similarly—and more directly linked to our analogy of the journey of the soul—Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, shows us William Blake's westward movement from Cleveland to the Pacific Northwest and beyond the reaches of the living. Unlike Mary, Blake is lead by a guide rather than making the trek on his own.
The two films share many semblances. Both are shot in black-and-white, and both have distinctive soundtracks which use only a single instrument performed in a minimalist capacity and employed with deliberate effect to push its constraints. In Carnival of Souls, Gene Moore uses the pipe organ to create the eerie soundtrack which keeps the audience as unsettled as the protagonist, who, incidentally, is an organ player herself. This brings the sense of music into being part of the narrative created by the film and is a vehicle for Mary sense of place within the liminal space of her journey. For Dead Man, the weapon of choice is Neil Young's electric guitar, which fades and rises like a waning heartbeat behind William Blake's travel towards some unknown westward land.
Another trait both films share is their lack of adherence to a single genre. Like their main characters, the films exist in an over-lapping, in-between space of convenient labeling. Carnival of Souls is at once a B-grade horror film, a supernatural thriller, has grown to be seen as an art film, transcending the trappings of its genre. Dead Man is, on its surface, a Western, yet William Blake is no Shane, and the almost surreal Old West town of Mechanic is not a place we're likely to find Clint Eastwood; its theme is far closer to the religious ecstasies displayed in the paintings of the other William Blake—18th century visionary writer and painter who is the namesake of the protagonist.
In Carnival of Souls, the culmination for Mary Henry comes when she walks through the angular curvature of deep shadow at the Saltair, in a north-western direction, passing beneath a framed Arabesque arch. She looks across a barren salt beach, where the jutting piles of decayed docks rise like tombstones, markers of the afterworld. In a reprise of an earlier scene—where Mary played the church organ and fancifully imagined this one—white-faced ghouls rise from the dark water the lake that could as easily be her subconscious. A dozen ghouls amble to the pavilion and, amidst the framework of the decrepit ballroom, they begin to waltz. Circling back and forth, they leer, dancing to the organ music of a malicious merry-go-round.
Mary stands at the periphery, terrified of this totentanz. She has chosen to come to this place, but upon her arriving, denies her own part of this world. Having "seen" this waltz before—while playing the organ at church—she has called this world to her. The organ could be her heart, and she plays it hoping for more life, while all around her evidence of her death dances. When the music stops, the ghouls cease their waltz and turn towards her in sudden pursuit.
They chase Mary out of the pavilion, onto the white salty shoreline of the afterworld. Mary runs beneath the pavilion, among the pylons of the foundation—into the base foundation of her own consciousness—but everywhere she turns she finds a white-faced ghoul waiting. She's returned to her primordial mind and death courts her from every shadow.
The ghouls act as shepherds, herding Mary towards the lake. She runs from beneath the pavilion and out on the featureless salted shore, she stumbles, and the ghouls are upon her. Mary's fall is not so much to the salt and sand of the beach beneath her, but back through a liminal world to the place of her long-procrastinated death.
The denouement is two-fold. Three men, the policeman, the doctor, and the minister—male representation of the Three Fates—follow Mary's path along the beach to where she fell and discover no tracks beyond that point. Following their observations, there is a cut to back east, where the car Mary had been in—and plunged off a bridge into a river—is towed up from the water. Mary's body is, of course, inside.
When it comes to William Blake's moment of passage, he is delirious from his long trek through the dark woods of his own fear and dark night of the soul. Unlike Mary Henry, Blake's journey has had a guide, a psychopomp named Xebeche, a Wakashan who calls himself Nobody. Numerous times along the way, Blake has insisted that he's not dead, but in reaching the gate—both a literal as well as figurative—of a Makah village, he cannot walk through of his own power, his own body allied with his vocal denial of death. Blake leans awkwardly against a section of fallen tree, the rings—its lifespan and evidence of its death—visible around him. Nobody, having lead Blake here, continues his own role as spirit guide, and brokers a deal for Blake to pass through the gate. The solo guitar of the soundtrack pulses in a desultory staccato, as Blake stares up at a carved raven totem and his consciousness fades.
When Blake comes to, more than a dozen Makah stare at him like the faces of ancestral spirits. They appear concerned, confused, menacing. Blake has little choice now, and they seemingly witness his death finally catch up with him. His consciousness fades again.
Blake lays on a shale beach, birds can be heard overhead, the ocean crashing at his head. He is wrapped in funerary cloaks and attempts one last look around, bewildered and uncertain. As his perspective is our own perspective, we are left in this ambiguous state of understanding, having left one world—one film story—but have not yet arrived entirely in another. When he next opens his eyes, Blake is on a canoe laden with, Nobody says, cedar boughs. "It is time for you to leave now, William Blake," Nobody tells him, "Time for you to go back where you came from ... The place where all the spirits come from and to where all the spirits return."
Nobody pushes the canoe into the vast dark waters to the west, but Blake looks back, to the east. He watches helpless as Cole, a bounty hunter who has pursued him, approaches Nobody from behind. In a choreographic death, Cole and Nobody shoot each other—manifestations of Blake's higher and lower ideals; that which wisely guides and that which gives feral chase. William Blake's burial canoe is pulled out to sea by the tides as the staccato guitar pulses and then dies.
Carnival of Souls and Dead Man are cyclic stories which don't so much end where they begin but meander a pre-destined path before finally settling at the conclusion. Upon first-glance Carnival of Souls has a straight-forward understanding at its finish—that Mary died in the car wreck which began the tale, and her spirit continued on a path much the same as if she had lived—Dead Man's ending is left far more metaphysical and ambiguous: At what point did William Blake die? Shot in Thel's room in the town of Machine? In the forest where he fled? On the canoe drifting out to the open ocean?
In both instances the protagonists of these films have made stylized westward journeys through the twilight at the edge of the world to reach acknowledgment of their deaths.
Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey.
· • ·
This one didn't go where I wanted it to, but it arrived somewhere nonetheless.
~•~
ENG 317
December 8, 2009
Final Essay
Stylized Denial:
The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man
If I go first, I'll wait for you there,
on the other side of those dark waters.
―James Jones
The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man
If I go first, I'll wait for you there,
on the other side of those dark waters.
―James Jones
The world of departed souls is said to be to the west—towards the setting sun. The path leads through a dim world of twilight. Another trail intersects this first; used by shamans as a shortcut to encounter the souls in journey to that other world. At some point along its westward travel, the path encounters water—a running stream, a lake, the great black ocean when the soul crosses to the sunless lands. At the brink, before this point is reached, the soul comes upon a lodge or passageway, where the guardians wait. When the soul reaches the lodge, it comes face-to-face with these guardians. Sometimes the guardians welcome the soul with laughter and drumming, and they carry the soul on to where it will ultimately pass alone. Often times the soul is not greeted warmly, fear and denial dominating what transpired in leading the soul to this point on its journey.
In Mary Henry's voyage from the river where the car she rode in plunged—killing all its occupants—she travels westward to Salt Lake City. Once there, she is drawn to a ruined structure on the outskirts of town that to her is hauntingly familiar. This is the Saltair Pavilion, and in Herk Henry's bleak supernatural tale Carnival of Souls (1962), it acts as Mary Henry's ghost lodge, through which she must pass en route to her ultimate destination.
Similarly—and more directly linked to our analogy of the journey of the soul—Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, shows us William Blake's westward movement from Cleveland to the Pacific Northwest and beyond the reaches of the living. Unlike Mary, Blake is lead by a guide rather than making the trek on his own.
The two films share many semblances. Both are shot in black-and-white, and both have distinctive soundtracks which use only a single instrument performed in a minimalist capacity and employed with deliberate effect to push its constraints. In Carnival of Souls, Gene Moore uses the pipe organ to create the eerie soundtrack which keeps the audience as unsettled as the protagonist, who, incidentally, is an organ player herself. This brings the sense of music into being part of the narrative created by the film and is a vehicle for Mary sense of place within the liminal space of her journey. For Dead Man, the weapon of choice is Neil Young's electric guitar, which fades and rises like a waning heartbeat behind William Blake's travel towards some unknown westward land.
Another trait both films share is their lack of adherence to a single genre. Like their main characters, the films exist in an over-lapping, in-between space of convenient labeling. Carnival of Souls is at once a B-grade horror film, a supernatural thriller, has grown to be seen as an art film, transcending the trappings of its genre. Dead Man is, on its surface, a Western, yet William Blake is no Shane, and the almost surreal Old West town of Mechanic is not a place we're likely to find Clint Eastwood; its theme is far closer to the religious ecstasies displayed in the paintings of the other William Blake—18th century visionary writer and painter who is the namesake of the protagonist.
In Carnival of Souls, the culmination for Mary Henry comes when she walks through the angular curvature of deep shadow at the Saltair, in a north-western direction, passing beneath a framed Arabesque arch. She looks across a barren salt beach, where the jutting piles of decayed docks rise like tombstones, markers of the afterworld. In a reprise of an earlier scene—where Mary played the church organ and fancifully imagined this one—white-faced ghouls rise from the dark water the lake that could as easily be her subconscious. A dozen ghouls amble to the pavilion and, amidst the framework of the decrepit ballroom, they begin to waltz. Circling back and forth, they leer, dancing to the organ music of a malicious merry-go-round.
Mary stands at the periphery, terrified of this totentanz. She has chosen to come to this place, but upon her arriving, denies her own part of this world. Having "seen" this waltz before—while playing the organ at church—she has called this world to her. The organ could be her heart, and she plays it hoping for more life, while all around her evidence of her death dances. When the music stops, the ghouls cease their waltz and turn towards her in sudden pursuit.
They chase Mary out of the pavilion, onto the white salty shoreline of the afterworld. Mary runs beneath the pavilion, among the pylons of the foundation—into the base foundation of her own consciousness—but everywhere she turns she finds a white-faced ghoul waiting. She's returned to her primordial mind and death courts her from every shadow.
The ghouls act as shepherds, herding Mary towards the lake. She runs from beneath the pavilion and out on the featureless salted shore, she stumbles, and the ghouls are upon her. Mary's fall is not so much to the salt and sand of the beach beneath her, but back through a liminal world to the place of her long-procrastinated death.
The denouement is two-fold. Three men, the policeman, the doctor, and the minister—male representation of the Three Fates—follow Mary's path along the beach to where she fell and discover no tracks beyond that point. Following their observations, there is a cut to back east, where the car Mary had been in—and plunged off a bridge into a river—is towed up from the water. Mary's body is, of course, inside.
When it comes to William Blake's moment of passage, he is delirious from his long trek through the dark woods of his own fear and dark night of the soul. Unlike Mary Henry, Blake's journey has had a guide, a psychopomp named Xebeche, a Wakashan who calls himself Nobody. Numerous times along the way, Blake has insisted that he's not dead, but in reaching the gate—both a literal as well as figurative—of a Makah village, he cannot walk through of his own power, his own body allied with his vocal denial of death. Blake leans awkwardly against a section of fallen tree, the rings—its lifespan and evidence of its death—visible around him. Nobody, having lead Blake here, continues his own role as spirit guide, and brokers a deal for Blake to pass through the gate. The solo guitar of the soundtrack pulses in a desultory staccato, as Blake stares up at a carved raven totem and his consciousness fades.
When Blake comes to, more than a dozen Makah stare at him like the faces of ancestral spirits. They appear concerned, confused, menacing. Blake has little choice now, and they seemingly witness his death finally catch up with him. His consciousness fades again.
Blake lays on a shale beach, birds can be heard overhead, the ocean crashing at his head. He is wrapped in funerary cloaks and attempts one last look around, bewildered and uncertain. As his perspective is our own perspective, we are left in this ambiguous state of understanding, having left one world—one film story—but have not yet arrived entirely in another. When he next opens his eyes, Blake is on a canoe laden with, Nobody says, cedar boughs. "It is time for you to leave now, William Blake," Nobody tells him, "Time for you to go back where you came from ... The place where all the spirits come from and to where all the spirits return."
Nobody pushes the canoe into the vast dark waters to the west, but Blake looks back, to the east. He watches helpless as Cole, a bounty hunter who has pursued him, approaches Nobody from behind. In a choreographic death, Cole and Nobody shoot each other—manifestations of Blake's higher and lower ideals; that which wisely guides and that which gives feral chase. William Blake's burial canoe is pulled out to sea by the tides as the staccato guitar pulses and then dies.
Carnival of Souls and Dead Man are cyclic stories which don't so much end where they begin but meander a pre-destined path before finally settling at the conclusion. Upon first-glance Carnival of Souls has a straight-forward understanding at its finish—that Mary died in the car wreck which began the tale, and her spirit continued on a path much the same as if she had lived—Dead Man's ending is left far more metaphysical and ambiguous: At what point did William Blake die? Shot in Thel's room in the town of Machine? In the forest where he fled? On the canoe drifting out to the open ocean?
In both instances the protagonists of these films have made stylized westward journeys through the twilight at the edge of the world to reach acknowledgment of their deaths.
•
Bibliography
Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey.
Perf. Candace Hilligoss.
Criterion Collection 63, 1962. DVD.
"Carnival of Souls." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.14 Nov 2009, 12:31 UTC. 1 Dec 2009.
Curnutte, Rick. "Mad Poets: William Blake,Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man."
The Film Journal 1 (2002).
The Film Journal.
May 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.
Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch.The Film Journal 1 (2002).
The Film Journal.
May 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.
Perf. Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer.
Miramax, 1995. DVD.
Kawin, Bruce. "Carnival of Souls."Carnival of Souls
Criterion Collection 63 (2000). Print.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A gun up your ass:Criterion Collection 63 (2000). Print.
An interview with Jim Jarmusch."
Cineaste 22.2 (1996). Print.
Taubin, Amy. "Dead Man Talking."Cineaste 22.2 (1996). Print.
The Village Voice 14 May 1996, 41.20. Print.
· • ·
Saturday Night at the Speedway
The final paper for Reading Popular Culture is something of a magna opus for me. I wrote this, and the following two final papers for my other English course over the span of about nine hours (fairly continuous span with breaks for a bit of food, more coffee, and less-than-healthy amount of breaks for stretches and peeing; such is the life I signed up for in doing this— I've been in the real world, this stuff is easy).
I'm still waiting to do my paper on musical hijacking of popular culture circa 1990-92, but like that one, the idea for this one has long been germinating.
The date it was due was precisely the fortieth anniversary of the concert.
~•~
ENG 384
December 6, 2009
Final Essay
"New Speedway Boogie" was written and recorded by the Grateful Dead two months after the Altamont Free Concert, and appeared in June 1970 on the album Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter, lyricist and non-performing member of the band, penned the song in in direct response to a series of articles that had been written over the course of the previous summer by the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the column "On the Town" where Gleason first challenged the Rolling Stones to perform a free concert in the Bay Area of California and months later, after they did so, condemned most everyone involved with the event (never acknowledging his own role in antagonizing the Rolling Stones to stage the concert). In this context, "New Speedway Boogie" offers unflinching yet cryptic views of Altamont and—more importantly—the blameful aftermath of it.
In the opening lines, Robert Hunter directly addresses us as listeners, using a proper name in a generic sense, calling us "Jack" just as if we might be called "son" or "friend." But with this use of Jack, Hunter cites Ralph J. Gleason by name, even if it is not his commonly used moniker, and suggests he not continue to use his words to fuel any more fires, unless he has something more useful to impart.
The mountain, in this case, can be equated with the source of wisdom and understanding, a mythic place of retreat where one can rest a while to accumulate balance and objectivity. But just as quickly as we have ascended that mountain, we are sitting on a hillside, showing that our narrative guide isn't claiming superiority for having been to that mountain where wisdom may be found. In the lore of rock lyric analysis, the Marxist and/or Freudian baseline of measurement can be equated to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, it is difficult to make references to a hill and not come around to Lennon and McCartney's "Fool on the Hill." In this case, Altamont was a hill seated with 300,000 fools.
Once more—in a recurring theme not only to this song, but in much of Robert Hunter's repertoire—our story-teller assures us that they are not the authoritative voice on the subject, but they might know a thing or two nonetheless. The narrator has never done so, but has heard that being burdened with gold (ill-gotten or freely acquired) makes it difficult to move very quickly. However, a burden carried is still a burden no matter what the substance may be.
With Altamont, there was plenty of blame to go around and yet no one seemed to step forward and pick up any share of it. While it may be true that no one involved toted away sacks of money from Altamont, what weighed on the conscience of anyone who had been there was, in some respects, far heavier than lead.
These lines offer a pair of rhetorical questions and express uncertainty about purpose and distance to reach what is needed or intended. Both of these factors—viewed with the benefit of hindsight—are easily placed upon the era in which Altamont took place. Following the success of the Woodstock Festival, the counter-culture of the late sixties felt they had achieved what few other cultures had in history, that of staging a libertarian ideal society—albeit, for only a few days in a relatively small location. Altamont would prove to be the undoing of any naïve considerations that such a congregation could be staged at will.
During the summer of 1969, Gleason used his column in the San Francisco Chronicle to harangue the Rolling Stones about exorbitant ticket prices and accused them of having contempt for their audience. Since they had given a free concert in London's Hyde Park in early July, Gleason antagonistically baited the band into offering a free concert in San Francisco. The band responded with plans to perform in Golden Gate Park at the end of their tour.
Logistics and city ordinances prevented Golden Gate Park from being the site of their planned show, and, after a location at the Sears Point Raceway fell through, a last-minute—literally two days before the event was scheduled—the Altamont Speedway was offered as a suitable site for the concert. Even amidst the planning of the concert, Gleason kept his antagonistic attitude in print, "Are the Rolling Stones seriously going to appear next weekend? Your guess is as good as mine" (Gleason, "A Few Guesses").
At some point in the process, the Hells Angels were hired to act as security at the concert. The decision to use the Hells Angels remains a source of contention among all parties involved. The Angels had often been present at Grateful Dead concerts around the Bay Area, and having been involved with Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, were considered to be the "noble savages" of the counter-culture movement in California. But Altamont was no Grateful Dead concert, and Ken Kesey's workingman's charisma was far closer to the Angels disposition than the androgyne prancing and preening of Mick Jagger. In the Maysles' film Gimme Shelter, Angel Sonny Barger can be seen glaring at Jagger with an unstoned look that would make contempt and disgust seem serenely pleasant.
In a diatribe heard the day after Altamont on KSAN radio station, Barger claimed that the Angels were asked to sit on the edge of the stage and keep people away from equipment and performers. But Barger also claimed that at one point in the evening he held a gun to Keith Richards' head and told him to keep playing or he'd be killed—a claim that has no corroborating witnesses. Various other stories hold that the Angels were given $500 in beer to police the event, or, as Gleason reported afterwards, a "truckload." Whatever specific arrangements were made between organizers and the Hells Angels, as the day progressed, and beer and other substances were consumed, the Angels seemed less like a security force and more like domineering vigilantes; like outlaw bikers. The pool cues they wielded—as ubiquitously seen in the film Gimme Shelter—were pre-loaded with lead weights, brought along with obvious intention on using them.
In a brief essay written for the Criterion Films release of Gimme Shelter, Stanley Booth shares a first hand opinion of the day. "The violence at Altamont, being completely unexpected, came afterward to seem inevitable." That sentiment is shared by many, regardless of their proximity to the event itself. Forty years later Robert Hughes quotes, "'It was a day that was oppressive and dark,' recalls Chris Hillman, whose Flying Burrito Brothers shared the bill, 'and the ending was the worst scenario you could imagine.'"
Even before mid-afternoon, there was something menacing in the air. "The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, 'I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!' He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept").
During the Jefferson Airplane's performance, singer Marty Balin jumped off the stage into a melee of Angels and audience members in an attempt to break up the fight. As Gleason recounts, "One of the Angels decked Balin and when Thompson [the Airplane's manager] asked, 'What did you do that for?' replied, 'He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel.' Paul Kantner, still onstage, asked, 'What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!'" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept"). Upon their arrival, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were told about the Hells Angels beating up Marty Balin and that the scene was rapidly deteriorating—had gone from terrible to horrid. The Grateful Dead elected not to perform and quickly departed. But they would not remain silent about the event for long.
Once again citing an unauthoritative stance, our narrative guide offers up another paradox, this time in almost strictly folklore terms, of someone freezing to death as they feel the warmth of sunshine. It calls to mind a line in "Oh Susannah"—"the sun's so hot I froze to death, Susannah don't you cry."
We are also given another question, and even if it is rhetorical, it is asked with a sense of urgency as to what might happen if the question isn't at least addressed, if not answered outright.
Altamont is often cited as being the death of the sixties—the expiration of the ideal that seemed to have reached its epoch with the Woodstock Festival a few months earlier. In this light, the question asked by our nameless story-teller in "New Speedway Boogie" could be just that. Was Altamont the end of an era? Or was it just as likely that it exposed an era for what it really was—stripping away the Day-Glo paint and psychedelic visions for something cold and festering that lurks in the shadows the places sometimes better left unseen? Ethan A. Russell wrote, "Mick Taylor [of the Rolling Stones] responded when asked if he thought Altamont was the end of the '60s, 'Well, it was the end of the sixties, wasn't it? It was December 1969.'"
If, as Wavy Gravy stated numerous times about Woodstock, for a few days a cow pasture became a little piece of heaven (and Jimi Hendrix became the Celestial Gypsy at the summit of the psychedelic era), then for a few hours one dark evening, Altamont became a smoldering pit of hell (with Mick Jagger cast as Lucifer in brimstone).
Regardless of medium—film, essay, radio rant, song—Altamont seemed doomed from the moment it was pressured into conception. It would be easy to formulate the situation as being one of a rape victim giving birth. Ralph Gleason, in this scenario, would be the rapist, the Rolling Stones a willing, if slightly reluctant, accomplice, and Altamont the unwanted child born. The victim would be not only Meredith Hunter, but also everyone who participated, even with the best of intentions. But, since we are discuss myth and folklore, it is fitting to cite the proverb about those intentions—that this road with no signs nor lines to guide, is smoothly paved en route to some infernal place up ahead in the unknown darkness, The experience at Altamont scarred the psyche of people who were there, the era which spawned it, and the history and mythology of rock and roll itself. What "went down we don't understand" and even forty years later, we struggle with the questions it has left us.
"Perhaps Ralph J. Gleason was responsible for Altamont," Norma Coates wrote in an lengthy essay about the event. She doesn't shy away from indicting numerous participants: "Or Mick Jagger? Sonny Barger? Woodstock? All or none of the above? After all, one could, based on the evidence, argue that it was the venerable San Francisco Chronicle music critic [...] who goaded the Rolling Stones into performing a free concert at the Altamont Speedway..." From these cutting remarks, Coates lapses into the dialogue of folklore, and strays from the evidence she so recently cited. "As the story goes, the Stones danced a little too close to the devil, in the form of the Hells Angels, that fateful day. The Angels beat up a lot of people and then killed a young black man, while Mick Jagger callously sang and danced along to 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Thus, the 1960s ended, along with the utopian promise of that decade and the youth counterculture."
Coates condemns Gleason, Jagger, and the Angels, but misses the tiny fact that Meredith Hunter came to the foot of the stage armed with a pistol, which he fired shortly before his grotesque demise. Perhaps that day was fated to be the taint of an era? As was previous quoted, "The violence ... seem[ed] inevitable" (Stanley Booth); "A day ... oppressive and dark" (Chris Hillman); and from Gleason himself: "Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day."
If a pack animal—or, in modern terms, a motorized vehicle—ceases to haul what it should, the only immediate option is to pick up what is needed and move forward as best as is able. Concerning Altamont, the load to be shouldered is that of responsibility. But as Russell considers, "No one ever really took responsibility for what happened at Altamont. Not the Angels, not the people in the crowd, not the Rolling Stones. Each person involved seemed to conclude, each with their own reason, that somehow what happened had nothing [...] to do with them."
But even as no one wants the responsibility for the collision of cultural history with musical folklore at the foot of the stage in the Altamont Speedway the night of December 6, 1969, more than a few would like to offer their opinions on how it all went wrong and who should take the blame.
In a July 1972 Newsday article, Robert Christgau famously wrote, "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." But a paragraph later, Christgau gives us more than an apt summation of our interest in the complex metaphor of Altamont, instead of genuine facts in the transpiring of events, he lays a powerful cornerstone in musical folklore—that apocryphal rock and roll history that perhaps should have been but wasn't. "Denouement:" Christgau tells us, "An Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hells Angel while the Englishmen do a song called 'Sympathy for the Devil.'"
Not that actuality survives long in the midst of rock and roll mythology, but fact of the matter was, when Meredith Hunter was murdered, the Rolling Stones were playing "Under My Thumb." But doesn't the story sounds better—more gruesome and grim; more dire and bleak—if the song being performed was "Sympathy for the Devil"?
When Stanley Booth commented that the violence at Altamont later seemed inevitable, we can place in the confluence of events up to Altamont—and the lingering bitterness of its blameful aftermath—something else that seems more metaphoric than real. In February 1969 the Rolling Stones recorded the song "Gimme Shelter" in which Jagger sings—
Which brings us back to Ralph Gleason's quote of Ken Kesey. "Some things aren't true even if they did happen."
Even a cursory glance at the matter shows that Altamont was just that.
It happened. But it can't possibly be true.
Altamont Free Concert. By Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,
6 Dec. 1969. Performance.
"Altamont Free Concert."
I'm still waiting to do my paper on musical hijacking of popular culture circa 1990-92, but like that one, the idea for this one has long been germinating.
The date it was due was precisely the fortieth anniversary of the concert.
~•~
ENG 384
December 6, 2009
Final Essay
Saturday Night at the Speedway
Exposing Altamont in a Textural Analysis of
the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie"
Exposing Altamont in a Textural Analysis of
the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie"
"Some things aren't true even if they did happen,"
Ken Kesey once said.
Altamont is like that.
―Ralph J. Gleason
"New Speedway Boogie" was written and recorded by the Grateful Dead two months after the Altamont Free Concert, and appeared in June 1970 on the album Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter, lyricist and non-performing member of the band, penned the song in in direct response to a series of articles that had been written over the course of the previous summer by the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the column "On the Town" where Gleason first challenged the Rolling Stones to perform a free concert in the Bay Area of California and months later, after they did so, condemned most everyone involved with the event (never acknowledging his own role in antagonizing the Rolling Stones to stage the concert). In this context, "New Speedway Boogie" offers unflinching yet cryptic views of Altamont and—more importantly—the blameful aftermath of it.
Please don't dominate the rap Jack,
if you've got nothing new to say
If you please don't back up the track
this train has got to run today.
In the opening lines, Robert Hunter directly addresses us as listeners, using a proper name in a generic sense, calling us "Jack" just as if we might be called "son" or "friend." But with this use of Jack, Hunter cites Ralph J. Gleason by name, even if it is not his commonly used moniker, and suggests he not continue to use his words to fuel any more fires, unless he has something more useful to impart.
I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Like some say you better run away,
others say you better stand still.
The mountain, in this case, can be equated with the source of wisdom and understanding, a mythic place of retreat where one can rest a while to accumulate balance and objectivity. But just as quickly as we have ascended that mountain, we are sitting on a hillside, showing that our narrative guide isn't claiming superiority for having been to that mountain where wisdom may be found. In the lore of rock lyric analysis, the Marxist and/or Freudian baseline of measurement can be equated to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, it is difficult to make references to a hill and not come around to Lennon and McCartney's "Fool on the Hill." In this case, Altamont was a hill seated with 300,000 fools.
Now I don't know, but I been told
it's hard to run with the weight of gold
On the other hand I heard it said
it's just as hard with the weight of lead.
Once more—in a recurring theme not only to this song, but in much of Robert Hunter's repertoire—our story-teller assures us that they are not the authoritative voice on the subject, but they might know a thing or two nonetheless. The narrator has never done so, but has heard that being burdened with gold (ill-gotten or freely acquired) makes it difficult to move very quickly. However, a burden carried is still a burden no matter what the substance may be.
With Altamont, there was plenty of blame to go around and yet no one seemed to step forward and pick up any share of it. While it may be true that no one involved toted away sacks of money from Altamont, what weighed on the conscience of anyone who had been there was, in some respects, far heavier than lead.
Who can deny, who can deny,
it's not just a change in style?
One step gone and another's begun
and I wonder how many miles?
These lines offer a pair of rhetorical questions and express uncertainty about purpose and distance to reach what is needed or intended. Both of these factors—viewed with the benefit of hindsight—are easily placed upon the era in which Altamont took place. Following the success of the Woodstock Festival, the counter-culture of the late sixties felt they had achieved what few other cultures had in history, that of staging a libertarian ideal society—albeit, for only a few days in a relatively small location. Altamont would prove to be the undoing of any naïve considerations that such a congregation could be staged at will.
During the summer of 1969, Gleason used his column in the San Francisco Chronicle to harangue the Rolling Stones about exorbitant ticket prices and accused them of having contempt for their audience. Since they had given a free concert in London's Hyde Park in early July, Gleason antagonistically baited the band into offering a free concert in San Francisco. The band responded with plans to perform in Golden Gate Park at the end of their tour.
Logistics and city ordinances prevented Golden Gate Park from being the site of their planned show, and, after a location at the Sears Point Raceway fell through, a last-minute—literally two days before the event was scheduled—the Altamont Speedway was offered as a suitable site for the concert. Even amidst the planning of the concert, Gleason kept his antagonistic attitude in print, "Are the Rolling Stones seriously going to appear next weekend? Your guess is as good as mine" (Gleason, "A Few Guesses").
I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
I saw things getting out of hand,
I guess they always will.
At some point in the process, the Hells Angels were hired to act as security at the concert. The decision to use the Hells Angels remains a source of contention among all parties involved. The Angels had often been present at Grateful Dead concerts around the Bay Area, and having been involved with Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, were considered to be the "noble savages" of the counter-culture movement in California. But Altamont was no Grateful Dead concert, and Ken Kesey's workingman's charisma was far closer to the Angels disposition than the androgyne prancing and preening of Mick Jagger. In the Maysles' film Gimme Shelter, Angel Sonny Barger can be seen glaring at Jagger with an unstoned look that would make contempt and disgust seem serenely pleasant.
In a diatribe heard the day after Altamont on KSAN radio station, Barger claimed that the Angels were asked to sit on the edge of the stage and keep people away from equipment and performers. But Barger also claimed that at one point in the evening he held a gun to Keith Richards' head and told him to keep playing or he'd be killed—a claim that has no corroborating witnesses. Various other stories hold that the Angels were given $500 in beer to police the event, or, as Gleason reported afterwards, a "truckload." Whatever specific arrangements were made between organizers and the Hells Angels, as the day progressed, and beer and other substances were consumed, the Angels seemed less like a security force and more like domineering vigilantes; like outlaw bikers. The pool cues they wielded—as ubiquitously seen in the film Gimme Shelter—were pre-loaded with lead weights, brought along with obvious intention on using them.
In a brief essay written for the Criterion Films release of Gimme Shelter, Stanley Booth shares a first hand opinion of the day. "The violence at Altamont, being completely unexpected, came afterward to seem inevitable." That sentiment is shared by many, regardless of their proximity to the event itself. Forty years later Robert Hughes quotes, "'It was a day that was oppressive and dark,' recalls Chris Hillman, whose Flying Burrito Brothers shared the bill, 'and the ending was the worst scenario you could imagine.'"
Even before mid-afternoon, there was something menacing in the air. "The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, 'I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!' He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept").
During the Jefferson Airplane's performance, singer Marty Balin jumped off the stage into a melee of Angels and audience members in an attempt to break up the fight. As Gleason recounts, "One of the Angels decked Balin and when Thompson [the Airplane's manager] asked, 'What did you do that for?' replied, 'He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel.' Paul Kantner, still onstage, asked, 'What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!'" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept"). Upon their arrival, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were told about the Hells Angels beating up Marty Balin and that the scene was rapidly deteriorating—had gone from terrible to horrid. The Grateful Dead elected not to perform and quickly departed. But they would not remain silent about the event for long.
Now I don't know, but I been told
in the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or just stand and wait
with the sun so dark and the hour so late?
Once again citing an unauthoritative stance, our narrative guide offers up another paradox, this time in almost strictly folklore terms, of someone freezing to death as they feel the warmth of sunshine. It calls to mind a line in "Oh Susannah"—"the sun's so hot I froze to death, Susannah don't you cry."
We are also given another question, and even if it is rhetorical, it is asked with a sense of urgency as to what might happen if the question isn't at least addressed, if not answered outright.
Altamont is often cited as being the death of the sixties—the expiration of the ideal that seemed to have reached its epoch with the Woodstock Festival a few months earlier. In this light, the question asked by our nameless story-teller in "New Speedway Boogie" could be just that. Was Altamont the end of an era? Or was it just as likely that it exposed an era for what it really was—stripping away the Day-Glo paint and psychedelic visions for something cold and festering that lurks in the shadows the places sometimes better left unseen? Ethan A. Russell wrote, "Mick Taylor [of the Rolling Stones] responded when asked if he thought Altamont was the end of the '60s, 'Well, it was the end of the sixties, wasn't it? It was December 1969.'"
If, as Wavy Gravy stated numerous times about Woodstock, for a few days a cow pasture became a little piece of heaven (and Jimi Hendrix became the Celestial Gypsy at the summit of the psychedelic era), then for a few hours one dark evening, Altamont became a smoldering pit of hell (with Mick Jagger cast as Lucifer in brimstone).
You can't overlook the lack Jack,
of any other highway you ride
It's got no signs, no dividing lines,
and there's very few rules to guide.
I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don't understand
but I think in time we will.
Regardless of medium—film, essay, radio rant, song—Altamont seemed doomed from the moment it was pressured into conception. It would be easy to formulate the situation as being one of a rape victim giving birth. Ralph Gleason, in this scenario, would be the rapist, the Rolling Stones a willing, if slightly reluctant, accomplice, and Altamont the unwanted child born. The victim would be not only Meredith Hunter, but also everyone who participated, even with the best of intentions. But, since we are discuss myth and folklore, it is fitting to cite the proverb about those intentions—that this road with no signs nor lines to guide, is smoothly paved en route to some infernal place up ahead in the unknown darkness, The experience at Altamont scarred the psyche of people who were there, the era which spawned it, and the history and mythology of rock and roll itself. What "went down we don't understand" and even forty years later, we struggle with the questions it has left us.
"Perhaps Ralph J. Gleason was responsible for Altamont," Norma Coates wrote in an lengthy essay about the event. She doesn't shy away from indicting numerous participants: "Or Mick Jagger? Sonny Barger? Woodstock? All or none of the above? After all, one could, based on the evidence, argue that it was the venerable San Francisco Chronicle music critic [...] who goaded the Rolling Stones into performing a free concert at the Altamont Speedway..." From these cutting remarks, Coates lapses into the dialogue of folklore, and strays from the evidence she so recently cited. "As the story goes, the Stones danced a little too close to the devil, in the form of the Hells Angels, that fateful day. The Angels beat up a lot of people and then killed a young black man, while Mick Jagger callously sang and danced along to 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Thus, the 1960s ended, along with the utopian promise of that decade and the youth counterculture."
Coates condemns Gleason, Jagger, and the Angels, but misses the tiny fact that Meredith Hunter came to the foot of the stage armed with a pistol, which he fired shortly before his grotesque demise. Perhaps that day was fated to be the taint of an era? As was previous quoted, "The violence ... seem[ed] inevitable" (Stanley Booth); "A day ... oppressive and dark" (Chris Hillman); and from Gleason himself: "Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day."
Now I don't know, but I been told
if the horse don't pull you got to carry that load
I don't know whose back's that strong
but we'll maybe find out before too long...
If a pack animal—or, in modern terms, a motorized vehicle—ceases to haul what it should, the only immediate option is to pick up what is needed and move forward as best as is able. Concerning Altamont, the load to be shouldered is that of responsibility. But as Russell considers, "No one ever really took responsibility for what happened at Altamont. Not the Angels, not the people in the crowd, not the Rolling Stones. Each person involved seemed to conclude, each with their own reason, that somehow what happened had nothing [...] to do with them."
But even as no one wants the responsibility for the collision of cultural history with musical folklore at the foot of the stage in the Altamont Speedway the night of December 6, 1969, more than a few would like to offer their opinions on how it all went wrong and who should take the blame.
In a July 1972 Newsday article, Robert Christgau famously wrote, "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." But a paragraph later, Christgau gives us more than an apt summation of our interest in the complex metaphor of Altamont, instead of genuine facts in the transpiring of events, he lays a powerful cornerstone in musical folklore—that apocryphal rock and roll history that perhaps should have been but wasn't. "Denouement:" Christgau tells us, "An Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hells Angel while the Englishmen do a song called 'Sympathy for the Devil.'"
Not that actuality survives long in the midst of rock and roll mythology, but fact of the matter was, when Meredith Hunter was murdered, the Rolling Stones were playing "Under My Thumb." But doesn't the story sounds better—more gruesome and grim; more dire and bleak—if the song being performed was "Sympathy for the Devil"?
When Stanley Booth commented that the violence at Altamont later seemed inevitable, we can place in the confluence of events up to Altamont—and the lingering bitterness of its blameful aftermath—something else that seems more metaphoric than real. In February 1969 the Rolling Stones recorded the song "Gimme Shelter" in which Jagger sings—
Rape, murder, it's just a shot away‚ it's just a shot away . . .—it's seems only appropriately poetic a year later to hear the Grateful Dead reply in the last lines of "New Speedway Boogie":
One way or another
One way or another
One way or another, this darkness has got to give.
Which brings us back to Ralph Gleason's quote of Ken Kesey. "Some things aren't true even if they did happen."
Even a cursory glance at the matter shows that Altamont was just that.
It happened. But it can't possibly be true.
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· • ·
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· • ·
Friday, March 5, 2010
Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce
The final paper for Gothic Disturbances class was an argument essay. The way the teacher (I only name teachers on here who I am almost certainly never going to have again to avoid issues of favoritism or some lame finger-pointing game as that, and also for their own privacy...and, if you notice, I have not named teachers with whom I've had problems, only those I toss complimentary remarks about) explained it to class:
Following class I asked the professor if I could take him literally. My friend Sean Kilburn and I have long imagined a barbeque at the end of all things in which only those people worthy to sit at a table and break bread with are invited. So I wanted to set this argument paper at the barbeque... The professor responded with, "Most people I'd say no to about that, but if you think you can pull it off, go for it."
I received the mark of an A++ and commentary that more academic papers should strive for a readable narrative. Even with the flaws I leave showing in this, it's still a damn fine idea manifested in word.
~•~
(1st draft)
English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
April 27, 2009
Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce
That's not a very cheery note to read at a cook-out, but this is a Phildickian barbeque, and, as Phil Dick reads from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I fill my plate with ribs and sauce, pull a draught of beer, and sit down at the picnic table with Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanisław Lem, and Dr. Sigmund Freud. We eat barbeque ribs. The kipple eats at the corners of our shared reality. We each have a few questions we want to discuss, but don't have long to share this time together.
"Kipple?" Dr. Freud asks.
"A sort of Escalation of Chaos," Kim Stanley tells him, "The First Law of Kipple is 'kipple drives out nonkipple.'" (DADOES)
Phil obliges by flipping the pages of his book, staining the edges with dark red sauce, and continuing our journey into his text with all the fervor of a speed-addled pulp writer.
"But what is the etymology of this word, 'kipple'?" Dr. Freud asks.
"There really is none," Stanisław says. "Phil made up this word."
Dr. Freud arches an eyebrow. "How very interesting. Do you often make up words to signify what you intend to say? A replacement for something deeper, perhaps?"
"The way Mercer is a Christ-like character in this novel?" I ask in return.
Phil grumbles at us, "Transcendental despair. Without empathy," Phil tells us, "we would stand detached, spectators, acting out by our indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and moral island is not a man." ("Man, Android & Machine")
"Phil, you squander your talent by using these brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"You're just being a contrarian," I tell Stanisław.
Dr. Freud leans forward over the picnic table, "I would like to hear more about this, Voigt-Kampff apparatus."
"It's named after the German physicist Woldemer Voigt," I tell him, "Known for, among other things, the Voigt profile in spectroscopy—associated with a Doppler broadening. Quite relevant, considering the empathy box and mood organs. I suspect the word 'doppler' is linguistically connected to the doppelgänger which you wrote about." ("Empirical fits")
"No, no, no, young man," Dr. Freud says admonishing me. "Not the same word at all. Doppelgänger means 'double-goer,' while the Doppler effect is named after my fellow Austrian, Christian Doppler. A sound-alike word—a homonym." (OED)
"Hmm," I feel embarrassed, but quickly recover, "Homonym, a sound-alike word. Android, a look-alike human. Interesting connection all the same. And, synchronistically," I add, "I believe Doppler was a professor in Prague when he wrote a number of his theories." (Doppler)
I'm met with mostly blank stares, but Phil's groan indicates he catches the connection between Doppler and the doppelgänger of the Prague Golem. But Phil doesn't comment, only reads another passage from his novel.
"To play the—What's that you called it? Contrarian?—to play the contrarian again," Lem says, "If the androids are programmed with the information that they are human, I cannot see why they are persecuted; if the androids are intended to represent a model of discrimination, such as the Jews under the label of a 'final solution,' then the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something the novel does in places." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"The androids as Jewish victims, Stanisław?" I say, "I don't see that at all."
"No?" Stanisław asks, with a tone that prods for more from me.
"Still," I finally say, "Voigt-Kampff. With such an austere name such as that, it's easy to see why it could conjure images of fascist goose-steppers in a national socialistic Germany—no offense, Dr. Freud."
Dr. Freud shakes his head and I continue.
"Luba Luft singing before Deckard goes backstage to kill her is certainly reminiscent of the Nazi officers having Jewish performers sing for them before being sent to the showers and ovens. They had no empathy for their victims, and Deckard shows none for Luba Luft."
"What follows backstage is a key scene which illustrates that Phil is not writing about politics, he's writing about ontology," Kim Stanley says. (Novels of PKD)
Stanisław comments, "But these reality breakdowns create a confusion between androids as a wronged lower class and as inhuman menace—" ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"I think Phil deliberately creates this confusion—androids as victim or menace," I tell him, "He always refers to them as 'he' or 'she', never as 'it', thus, leaving the matter ambiguous. The humans in the novel feel alienated to themselves, as well as the world around them, preferring to withdraw into the artificial worlds of the Penfield Mood Organ, the empathy box, and the false religion of Mercerism. They don't—and seemingly don't want to—interact with the 'real' world."
"And why do you think that is?" Dr. Freud asks.
"Because the real world involves responsibility and emotional feeling."
"Ah, but isn't that too simple a formulae?"
Kim Stanley offers more clarification than I do, "The more contradictions there are in the androids, the more the novel succeeds in unravelling our easy biological definition of humanity, replacing it with a difficult spiritual and moral definition. Phil gives us two oppositions—Human/Android and Human/Inhuman." (Novels of PKD)
"Like the superimposing of Herr Freud's heimlich and unheimlich over virtually every theme in the novel—from the casual mention of designer lead codpieces to the twisting of the real and unreal when Deckard is accused of being an android with implanted memories working for a department that doesn't exist by an android working in a police department that doesn't exist," I add, not sure if my theory is true or even if that pretzel-logic even made sense. Nevertheless, what someone reads into the text is, in many ways, just as important as what the author intended to be there. We're all just offering our personal reading of the words Phil strung together for us to follow.
"As the novel begins," Kim Stanley says, " but the action of the narrative first forces the two apart, and then leads us to conclude that the first one is inessential, the second vitally important." (Novels of PKD)
"So by that context," Stanisław grudgingly admits, still not feeling it is so, "The contradictions I mentioned dissolve. You are saying that it is not illogical to think that androids can be at once innocent and malicious, on different levels conscious and unconscious of their own natures." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
Dr. Freud nods. He makes a rare statement, speaking aloud what I am thinking, "Beings both human and threatening to human society. Much like we all are."
Phil himself mumbles, "What is vitally important is the theme of mystical identification via empathy..." but none of us are listening to him at this point, "When the Deity takes a trashy or even fake form, it says something about man's present, unredeemed state—his ontological condition—not an aspect of his state but is—esse—his condition." (Exegesis)
The kipple at the edges of imagination consumes the cook-out of our shared reality. Kim Stanley Robinson and Stanislaw Lem have already disappeared—were they ever here at all?—and Dr. Freud licks the barbeque sauce from his fingers burning away like an drug-induced electric dream.
Before Phil disappears he tosses me his sauce-stained copy of the novel and flashes a cryptic smile. "One day, I'm going to write a book that will reach people outside the science-fiction ghetto. Something more than a recycling of life into a novel..." ("Horselover Fat & the New Messiah")
I look to where the novel has fallen open in front of me.
Many years after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written—about the time the film Blade Runner was released—author William Gibson compared Dick's novels to taking a hit of some furious unknown psychotropic drug and spending 48 hours trying to find some way back to Base Reality. ("With a Strange Device")
The Base Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one in which reassures you that you've made it safely back home, only to reveal, when you open your front door, that home isn't where it was last time you were here.
The recursive layering of the heimlich and unheimlich juxtapose one other to the point that there is no differentiating one from the other, until, reaching some temporary penultimate truth, a static-stasis is reached wherein reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
In the years since this novel was written, what is commonly accepted as the Base Reality has seen environmental destruction and awareness on a scale Dick himself would likely be surprised by; the world's first cloned animal being a sheep named Dolly; our own personal versions of Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes in the form of small handheld devices with Phildickian names like iPod and BlackBerry (is it so far-fetched to say these machines control our emotions by their induced sensations and even generate a electronic empathy?); and daily accounts of false reality being perpetrated upon us by the Mercerian façades that are our spiritual and political leaders (sometimes in the same persona) to the point that is is difficult—if not outright impossible—to determine what is reality and what is the simulation of reality.
Our journey to discover meanings in this novel is akin to an attempt to answer the question posed in its title: "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"
To make that journey of discovery we must first determine who the androids are, what the difference between being an android and being human is, and empirically verify that the sheep in question are indeed electric.
Again, recursively turning back to author William Gibson drug-addled comment, at this point in our post-Androids world, we could all use a strong dose of the PKD drug to shake the scales from our withered eyes. But—alas!—we have a limited supply of that now, while the layers of pseudo-reality—environmental, scientific, religious, pop-cultural, emotional, spiritual, artistic, reflected, and re-reflected—are increasing and unlimited. Our machines become more important than reality and reality becomes less than our machines.
My own journey through this bewildering reality finds me sitting in front of my own empathy box—my scrying mirror that connects me with the world—I sit before my computer and write this. I sit. I write. I wait. Hoping to feel something real.
This is real. These words. Subjectively, anyway. So long as I hit SAVE on my machine; my empathy box. But eventually even this created reality will fall, like Deckard's love for Rachael, into kippled-oblivion of recycled electrons.
Imagine you're at a cocktail party with the author of the work you're using as primary source. Also present are at least one opposing critic of that work and one or two critics who agree with your argument thesis.
Following class I asked the professor if I could take him literally. My friend Sean Kilburn and I have long imagined a barbeque at the end of all things in which only those people worthy to sit at a table and break bread with are invited. So I wanted to set this argument paper at the barbeque... The professor responded with, "Most people I'd say no to about that, but if you think you can pull it off, go for it."
I received the mark of an A++ and commentary that more academic papers should strive for a readable narrative. Even with the flaws I leave showing in this, it's still a damn fine idea manifested in word.
~•~
(1st draft)
English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
April 27, 2009
Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce
The entire planet had begun to disintegrate into junk, and to keep the planet habitable for the remaining population the junk had to be hauled away occasionally . . . or, as Buster Friendly liked to declare, Earth would die under a layer—not of radioactive dust—but of kipple. (8:87)
That's not a very cheery note to read at a cook-out, but this is a Phildickian barbeque, and, as Phil Dick reads from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I fill my plate with ribs and sauce, pull a draught of beer, and sit down at the picnic table with Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanisław Lem, and Dr. Sigmund Freud. We eat barbeque ribs. The kipple eats at the corners of our shared reality. We each have a few questions we want to discuss, but don't have long to share this time together.
"Kipple?" Dr. Freud asks.
"A sort of Escalation of Chaos," Kim Stanley tells him, "The First Law of Kipple is 'kipple drives out nonkipple.'" (DADOES)
Phil obliges by flipping the pages of his book, staining the edges with dark red sauce, and continuing our journey into his text with all the fervor of a speed-addled pulp writer.
"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more." (6:65)
"But what is the etymology of this word, 'kipple'?" Dr. Freud asks.
"There really is none," Stanisław says. "Phil made up this word."
Dr. Freud arches an eyebrow. "How very interesting. Do you often make up words to signify what you intend to say? A replacement for something deeper, perhaps?"
"The way Mercer is a Christ-like character in this novel?" I ask in return.
Phil grumbles at us, "Transcendental despair. Without empathy," Phil tells us, "we would stand detached, spectators, acting out by our indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and moral island is not a man." ("Man, Android & Machine")
"I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voigt-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments. [...]
"I'd like to watch," Rachael said, also seating herself. "I've never seen an empathy test being administered. What do those things you have there measure?"
Rick said, "This"—he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires—"measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so—called 'shame' or 'blushing' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate." He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. "This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of—" (4:46)
"Phil, you squander your talent by using these brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"You're just being a contrarian," I tell Stanisław.
Dr. Freud leans forward over the picnic table, "I would like to hear more about this, Voigt-Kampff apparatus."
"It's named after the German physicist Woldemer Voigt," I tell him, "Known for, among other things, the Voigt profile in spectroscopy—associated with a Doppler broadening. Quite relevant, considering the empathy box and mood organs. I suspect the word 'doppler' is linguistically connected to the doppelgänger which you wrote about." ("Empirical fits")
"No, no, no, young man," Dr. Freud says admonishing me. "Not the same word at all. Doppelgänger means 'double-goer,' while the Doppler effect is named after my fellow Austrian, Christian Doppler. A sound-alike word—a homonym." (OED)
"Hmm," I feel embarrassed, but quickly recover, "Homonym, a sound-alike word. Android, a look-alike human. Interesting connection all the same. And, synchronistically," I add, "I believe Doppler was a professor in Prague when he wrote a number of his theories." (Doppler)
I'm met with mostly blank stares, but Phil's groan indicates he catches the connection between Doppler and the doppelgänger of the Prague Golem. But Phil doesn't comment, only reads another passage from his novel.
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major—but inferior—segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism— (3:30)
"To play the—What's that you called it? Contrarian?—to play the contrarian again," Lem says, "If the androids are programmed with the information that they are human, I cannot see why they are persecuted; if the androids are intended to represent a model of discrimination, such as the Jews under the label of a 'final solution,' then the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something the novel does in places." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"The androids as Jewish victims, Stanisław?" I say, "I don't see that at all."
"No?" Stanisław asks, with a tone that prods for more from me.
"Still," I finally say, "Voigt-Kampff. With such an austere name such as that, it's easy to see why it could conjure images of fascist goose-steppers in a national socialistic Germany—no offense, Dr. Freud."
Dr. Freud shakes his head and I continue.
"Luba Luft singing before Deckard goes backstage to kill her is certainly reminiscent of the Nazi officers having Jewish performers sing for them before being sent to the showers and ovens. They had no empathy for their victims, and Deckard shows none for Luba Luft."
On the stage Luba Luft sang, and he found himself surprised at the quality of her voice; it rated with that of the best, even that of notables in his collection of historic tapes. The Rosen Association built her well, he had to admit. And again he perceived himself sub specie aeternitatis, the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed. If the androids had remained substandard, like the ancient q-40s made by Derain Associates—there would be no problem and no need of my skill. I wonder when I should do it, he asked himself. As soon as possible, probably. At the end of the rehearsal when she goes to her dressing room. (9:99)
"What follows backstage is a key scene which illustrates that Phil is not writing about politics, he's writing about ontology," Kim Stanley says. (Novels of PKD)
Stanisław comments, "But these reality breakdowns create a confusion between androids as a wronged lower class and as inhuman menace—" ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
"I think Phil deliberately creates this confusion—androids as victim or menace," I tell him, "He always refers to them as 'he' or 'she', never as 'it', thus, leaving the matter ambiguous. The humans in the novel feel alienated to themselves, as well as the world around them, preferring to withdraw into the artificial worlds of the Penfield Mood Organ, the empathy box, and the false religion of Mercerism. They don't—and seemingly don't want to—interact with the 'real' world."
"And why do you think that is?" Dr. Freud asks.
"Because the real world involves responsibility and emotional feeling."
"Ah, but isn't that too simple a formulae?"
Kim Stanley offers more clarification than I do, "The more contradictions there are in the androids, the more the novel succeeds in unravelling our easy biological definition of humanity, replacing it with a difficult spiritual and moral definition. Phil gives us two oppositions—Human/Android and Human/Inhuman." (Novels of PKD)
A pause and then Harry Bryant's face appeared on the vidscreen. "What's doing?" he asked Rick.
"Some trouble," Rick said. "One of those on Dave's list managed to call in and get a so-called patrolman out here. I can't seem to prove to him who I am; he says he knows all the about hunters in the department and he's never heard of me." He added, "He hasn't heard of you either."
Bryant said, "Let me talk to him."
"Inspector Bryant wants to talk to you." Rick held out the vidphone receiver. The harness bull ceased questioning Miss Luft and came over to take it.
"Officer Crams," the harness bull said briskly. A pause. "Hello?" He listened, said hello several times more, waited, then turned to Rick. "There's nobody on the line. And nobody on the screen." He pointed to the vidphone screen and Rick saw nothing on it. (9:107-08)
"Like the superimposing of Herr Freud's heimlich and unheimlich over virtually every theme in the novel—from the casual mention of designer lead codpieces to the twisting of the real and unreal when Deckard is accused of being an android with implanted memories working for a department that doesn't exist by an android working in a police department that doesn't exist," I add, not sure if my theory is true or even if that pretzel-logic even made sense. Nevertheless, what someone reads into the text is, in many ways, just as important as what the author intended to be there. We're all just offering our personal reading of the words Phil strung together for us to follow.
"As the novel begins," Kim Stanley says, " but the action of the narrative first forces the two apart, and then leads us to conclude that the first one is inessential, the second vitally important." (Novels of PKD)
"So by that context," Stanisław grudgingly admits, still not feeling it is so, "The contradictions I mentioned dissolve. You are saying that it is not illogical to think that androids can be at once innocent and malicious, on different levels conscious and unconscious of their own natures." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")
Dr. Freud nods. He makes a rare statement, speaking aloud what I am thinking, "Beings both human and threatening to human society. Much like we all are."
Phil himself mumbles, "What is vitally important is the theme of mystical identification via empathy..." but none of us are listening to him at this point, "When the Deity takes a trashy or even fake form, it says something about man's present, unredeemed state—his ontological condition—not an aspect of his state but is—esse—his condition." (Exegesis)
With his laser tube, Rick systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba. He did the job thoroughly, saying nothing; Phil Resch watched without understanding, his face showing his perplexity.
"You could have kept the book yourself," Resch said, when it had been done. "That cost you—"
"Do you think androids have souls?" Rick interrupted.
Cocking his head on one side, Phil Resch gazed at him in even greater puzzlement. (12:135)
The kipple at the edges of imagination consumes the cook-out of our shared reality. Kim Stanley Robinson and Stanislaw Lem have already disappeared—were they ever here at all?—and Dr. Freud licks the barbeque sauce from his fingers burning away like an drug-induced electric dream.
Before Phil disappears he tosses me his sauce-stained copy of the novel and flashes a cryptic smile. "One day, I'm going to write a book that will reach people outside the science-fiction ghetto. Something more than a recycling of life into a novel..." ("Horselover Fat & the New Messiah")
I look to where the novel has fallen open in front of me.
"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization." (6:65-66)
Many years after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written—about the time the film Blade Runner was released—author William Gibson compared Dick's novels to taking a hit of some furious unknown psychotropic drug and spending 48 hours trying to find some way back to Base Reality. ("With a Strange Device")
The Base Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one in which reassures you that you've made it safely back home, only to reveal, when you open your front door, that home isn't where it was last time you were here.
The recursive layering of the heimlich and unheimlich juxtapose one other to the point that there is no differentiating one from the other, until, reaching some temporary penultimate truth, a static-stasis is reached wherein reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
In the years since this novel was written, what is commonly accepted as the Base Reality has seen environmental destruction and awareness on a scale Dick himself would likely be surprised by; the world's first cloned animal being a sheep named Dolly; our own personal versions of Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes in the form of small handheld devices with Phildickian names like iPod and BlackBerry (is it so far-fetched to say these machines control our emotions by their induced sensations and even generate a electronic empathy?); and daily accounts of false reality being perpetrated upon us by the Mercerian façades that are our spiritual and political leaders (sometimes in the same persona) to the point that is is difficult—if not outright impossible—to determine what is reality and what is the simulation of reality.
...he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. (18:212)
Our journey to discover meanings in this novel is akin to an attempt to answer the question posed in its title: "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"
To make that journey of discovery we must first determine who the androids are, what the difference between being an android and being human is, and empirically verify that the sheep in question are indeed electric.
Again, recursively turning back to author William Gibson drug-addled comment, at this point in our post-Androids world, we could all use a strong dose of the PKD drug to shake the scales from our withered eyes. But—alas!—we have a limited supply of that now, while the layers of pseudo-reality—environmental, scientific, religious, pop-cultural, emotional, spiritual, artistic, reflected, and re-reflected—are increasing and unlimited. Our machines become more important than reality and reality becomes less than our machines.
My own journey through this bewildering reality finds me sitting in front of my own empathy box—my scrying mirror that connects me with the world—I sit before my computer and write this. I sit. I write. I wait. Hoping to feel something real.
This is real. These words. Subjectively, anyway. So long as I hit SAVE on my machine; my empathy box. But eventually even this created reality will fall, like Deckard's love for Rachael, into kippled-oblivion of recycled electrons.
•
Dick, Philip K.
Freud, Sigmund. "Das Unheimliche."
Gibson, William. "With a Strange Device."
· • ·
Bibliography
Dick, Philip K.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey.
—. In Pursuit of Valis:Selections from the Exegesis.
Underwood-Miller.
—. "Man, Android and Machine."In Science Fiction at Large,
ed. by Peter Nicholls.
"Doppelgänger." Oxford English Dictionary.Freud, Sigmund. "Das Unheimliche."
Gibson, William. "With a Strange Device."
In Wing Window (Seattle fanzine).
"Horselover Fat and The New Messiah."Interview with John Boonstra.
Hartford Advocate.
Lem, Stanisław. "Science Fiction:Hartford Advocate.
A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions."
In Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd,
ed. Bruce Gillespie.
Olivero, J.J., R.L. Longbothum.ed. Bruce Gillespie.
"Empirical fits to the Voigt line width:
A brief review."
A brief review."
Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy
and Radiative Transfer.
and Radiative Transfer.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick.
UMI Research Press.
Štoll, Ivan. "Christian Doppler—Man, Work and Message".
In The Phenomenon of Doppler.
The Czech National University.
The Czech National University.
· • ·
Tantalus Muse
This is a piece I'd really like to rework a bit and lengthen.
From the aforementioned misliked Nonfiction course. I guess I didn't mislike it all-in-all, just misliked the way it was taught and the fact that workshopping stories in a Creative Writing Program seems to inherently be:
"Teacher, I can't read this story because the grammar is so bad it's unintelligible."
"Oh, don't worry about that—you don't need to correct it—just push through that and comment on the story."
"But if I can't read to understand it, how can I tell if there even is a story!?"
"Well, that's the assignment..."
Oh, Sisyphean Fates, how you taunt me so‽
The assignment was to write a story (nonfiction) about something you remember one way but found out was, in fact, different than your memory.
I, of course, had just the story...
~•~
(2nd draft)
CRW 309 Creative Non-Fiction
TANTALUS MUSE: The Red-Haired Girl
12/3/08
Final Draft
When I was five years old, my family went to visit my aunt for two weeks, at the end of summer. She lived in a house along the Atlantic shore in Virginia. Her back yard was a wide flat manicured lawn that fell away suddenly in rocky cliffs at the water's edge. There, a pier ran out into the ocean like a long fingertip that pointed into the gray-blue flux of forever. At high tide, the waves would crash up against the rocky shoreline, spraying their salty mist into the cool air, the beads of sweat of its long endeavors. I remember watching the crashing waves for hours wanting to linger on a single wave dissipating into mist, but before I could hold onto the falling drops back into the sea another wave would come along and smash into the remnants of the previous.
I'm sure I watched those waves for hours.
A few minutes, anyway.
My Aunt Gertrude had a proverbially quaint-and-lovely tea garden behind her house next to a koi pond that wrapped around three sides of a small swimming pool. The fourth side of the pool was bordered by a bunk house, long thin deep green fingers of hollyhock vines crawling slowly up its dark fired brick walls. A few sprawling Southern Oaks held a canopy of shade over the garden, towering over a few maples, a single red cedar, and not-so-closely trimmed hedges lining the courtyard. Saw palmettos guarded ever corner, threatening impalement to a three-foot tall five year old, should he venture off the cobblestone path. In the middle of the courtyard of the tea garden the adults would all sit around a glass-topped black iron table and talk about the boring things adults tend to talk about.
I remember the place so vividly—I can still hear the cricket chorus in the evening tune down as the bullfrogs started their nightly swollen throat-song contests that would go on for more hours than most people would believe or ever bothered to sit around and hear—the smell of wet brick and soil and rain and roots. I remember one afternoon out by the bunk house and pool—fallen reddish leaves on the slate cobblestone blown by summer breezes to scrap away days that lasted forever—I first saw my cousin, the red-haired girl.
I guess she was my cousin. I didn't think of her as my cousin at the time, but in the memory, that's the impression I have. When I was five, I didn't make such differentials. She was older than me or my sister. More like my brother's age, I guess. My sister was nine at the time, my brother, fifteen, so I guess my cousin I saw at Aunt Gertrude's would have been about seventeen, maybe eighteen years old.
She had coppery red hair and wore a white summer dress the turned soft yellow or dark amber in the sinking shades of daylight. I followed her through the tea garden and around the wooded backyard, out to the shoreline of the crashing Atlantic. I'd wait for her along the grassy lawn She was nice, and didn't really play any games with me, but didn't mind me following her around like a lost puppy dog, plastic Batmobile in one hand and chewing on my shirt collar. That was a habit I had then. Pull the front of my shirt collar up to chew on until it was soaked with slobber. I didn't mind that sort of thing when I was five. And neither did the red-haired girl.
I remember she thought it was cute that I followed her around, and although I remember we talked a few times, I don't remember the sound of her voice. I remember her smell, like sweet rotten cypress and honeysuckle, and the way she moved, her bare feet seeming to not touch the ground where she walked but getting dirty none the less.
A sure sign that you'd had a good day was seen in how stained and dirty your feet were at the end of it.
Following around the red-haired girl those last days of summer when I was five is a memory that still speaks to me in a wordless language of invisible symbology, a feeling steeped in faith and intuition. Reassurance; the calm certainty that everything is all right. Not so much safe and secure as balanced and still.
Sitting by the koi pond and watching the mammoth goldfish in the dark green waters of the garden pond with the red-haired girl is one of the most blissful places in my memory. And deeply imprinted me in so many ways.
•
There is something very wrong with that vivid slice of the past.
Here is the verifiable evidence of this deeply curious memory: Aunt Gertrude's house wasn't in Virginia, but was, in fact, on a barrier island near Savannah, Georgia; our visit was in Spring, not late Summer; my mother's oft-told story of how I almost drowned when I dropped my plastic toy Batmobile into the swimming pool and dove in after it was in no way exhaggerated.
And there was, in fact, no red-haired girl present at Aunt Gertrude's.
For years after that visit I thought about my cousin, the red-haired girl, and wondered, as years passed, what sort of life she had. When I was older than she would have been when I met her, I asked my mom about her. My mom's a genealogist and historian and she always has the story behind the various weird family members.
"That time we visited Aunt Gertrude," I asked my mom, "Her . . . daughter, I guess it would have been. Maybe sixteen, eighteen years old," I told her, just like my memory held in place, "Whatever happened to her?"
"Aunt Gertrude's daughter?" my mother asked, looking at me like I had a sprouted tentacles from my head.
"Yeah. Isn't that who had the house my the shore, with the tea garden and pool?"
"Yes, Gertrude's house had that wonderful little tea garden in the back courtyard and the pool you dropped your Batmobile in and almost drowned trying to get it."
My mom loves bringing up the highlights of my brushes with death. The local ER had a ward named after me.
"That's the place." I tell her.
My mother's expression of crazed disbelief didn't change. "Aunt Gertrude doesn't have a daughter. I don't know who you're remembering . . . "
Even after several attempts at clarifying, my mother drew a blank on who I was talking about. My brother and sister weren't any help, neither of them remembering anyone at all that I could be remembering.
A figment. A ghost.
I clearly remember spending many hours of each day for two weeks following around and talking to someone who apparently wasn't real in any consensually experienced part of the universe.
Was my memory of a guardian angel? A creepy fetch-spirit? Manifestation of the divine? A succubus come to prey on a little boy?
Hmmm, I don't mind the sound of that.
But then I think, things don't need to have happened to be real.
Memories are real even if the events in them didn't happen in that way. Stories are real, even if they aren't true. Storytelling is creating something that didn't previous exist.
And the non-existent red-haired girl started showing up, wearing various guises, in my stories. Like a shirking shadow of thought, a wisp of impossible memory, my Tantalus Muse would come and tell me a story. I'd write them, but it sometimes seems more like transcribing the words of someone else.
Maybe the red-haired girl is in some other version of this universe and I'm the figment in her memory. Maybe she's the storyteller, that little red-haired girl, in that other universe, and I'm just a character in her tale. The threads of the plot stretch out into the darkness of possibility, and I step forward to find out what comes next.
· • ·
From the aforementioned misliked Nonfiction course. I guess I didn't mislike it all-in-all, just misliked the way it was taught and the fact that workshopping stories in a Creative Writing Program seems to inherently be:
"Teacher, I can't read this story because the grammar is so bad it's unintelligible."
"Oh, don't worry about that—you don't need to correct it—just push through that and comment on the story."
"But if I can't read to understand it, how can I tell if there even is a story!?"
"Well, that's the assignment..."
Oh, Sisyphean Fates, how you taunt me so‽
The assignment was to write a story (nonfiction) about something you remember one way but found out was, in fact, different than your memory.
I, of course, had just the story...
~•~
(2nd draft)
CRW 309 Creative Non-Fiction
TANTALUS MUSE: The Red-Haired Girl
12/3/08
Final Draft
When I was five years old, my family went to visit my aunt for two weeks, at the end of summer. She lived in a house along the Atlantic shore in Virginia. Her back yard was a wide flat manicured lawn that fell away suddenly in rocky cliffs at the water's edge. There, a pier ran out into the ocean like a long fingertip that pointed into the gray-blue flux of forever. At high tide, the waves would crash up against the rocky shoreline, spraying their salty mist into the cool air, the beads of sweat of its long endeavors. I remember watching the crashing waves for hours wanting to linger on a single wave dissipating into mist, but before I could hold onto the falling drops back into the sea another wave would come along and smash into the remnants of the previous.
I'm sure I watched those waves for hours.
A few minutes, anyway.
My Aunt Gertrude had a proverbially quaint-and-lovely tea garden behind her house next to a koi pond that wrapped around three sides of a small swimming pool. The fourth side of the pool was bordered by a bunk house, long thin deep green fingers of hollyhock vines crawling slowly up its dark fired brick walls. A few sprawling Southern Oaks held a canopy of shade over the garden, towering over a few maples, a single red cedar, and not-so-closely trimmed hedges lining the courtyard. Saw palmettos guarded ever corner, threatening impalement to a three-foot tall five year old, should he venture off the cobblestone path. In the middle of the courtyard of the tea garden the adults would all sit around a glass-topped black iron table and talk about the boring things adults tend to talk about.
I remember the place so vividly—I can still hear the cricket chorus in the evening tune down as the bullfrogs started their nightly swollen throat-song contests that would go on for more hours than most people would believe or ever bothered to sit around and hear—the smell of wet brick and soil and rain and roots. I remember one afternoon out by the bunk house and pool—fallen reddish leaves on the slate cobblestone blown by summer breezes to scrap away days that lasted forever—I first saw my cousin, the red-haired girl.
I guess she was my cousin. I didn't think of her as my cousin at the time, but in the memory, that's the impression I have. When I was five, I didn't make such differentials. She was older than me or my sister. More like my brother's age, I guess. My sister was nine at the time, my brother, fifteen, so I guess my cousin I saw at Aunt Gertrude's would have been about seventeen, maybe eighteen years old.
She had coppery red hair and wore a white summer dress the turned soft yellow or dark amber in the sinking shades of daylight. I followed her through the tea garden and around the wooded backyard, out to the shoreline of the crashing Atlantic. I'd wait for her along the grassy lawn She was nice, and didn't really play any games with me, but didn't mind me following her around like a lost puppy dog, plastic Batmobile in one hand and chewing on my shirt collar. That was a habit I had then. Pull the front of my shirt collar up to chew on until it was soaked with slobber. I didn't mind that sort of thing when I was five. And neither did the red-haired girl.
I remember she thought it was cute that I followed her around, and although I remember we talked a few times, I don't remember the sound of her voice. I remember her smell, like sweet rotten cypress and honeysuckle, and the way she moved, her bare feet seeming to not touch the ground where she walked but getting dirty none the less.
A sure sign that you'd had a good day was seen in how stained and dirty your feet were at the end of it.
Following around the red-haired girl those last days of summer when I was five is a memory that still speaks to me in a wordless language of invisible symbology, a feeling steeped in faith and intuition. Reassurance; the calm certainty that everything is all right. Not so much safe and secure as balanced and still.
Sitting by the koi pond and watching the mammoth goldfish in the dark green waters of the garden pond with the red-haired girl is one of the most blissful places in my memory. And deeply imprinted me in so many ways.
There is something very wrong with that vivid slice of the past.
Here is the verifiable evidence of this deeply curious memory: Aunt Gertrude's house wasn't in Virginia, but was, in fact, on a barrier island near Savannah, Georgia; our visit was in Spring, not late Summer; my mother's oft-told story of how I almost drowned when I dropped my plastic toy Batmobile into the swimming pool and dove in after it was in no way exhaggerated.
And there was, in fact, no red-haired girl present at Aunt Gertrude's.
For years after that visit I thought about my cousin, the red-haired girl, and wondered, as years passed, what sort of life she had. When I was older than she would have been when I met her, I asked my mom about her. My mom's a genealogist and historian and she always has the story behind the various weird family members.
"That time we visited Aunt Gertrude," I asked my mom, "Her . . . daughter, I guess it would have been. Maybe sixteen, eighteen years old," I told her, just like my memory held in place, "Whatever happened to her?"
"Aunt Gertrude's daughter?" my mother asked, looking at me like I had a sprouted tentacles from my head.
"Yeah. Isn't that who had the house my the shore, with the tea garden and pool?"
"Yes, Gertrude's house had that wonderful little tea garden in the back courtyard and the pool you dropped your Batmobile in and almost drowned trying to get it."
My mom loves bringing up the highlights of my brushes with death. The local ER had a ward named after me.
"That's the place." I tell her.
My mother's expression of crazed disbelief didn't change. "Aunt Gertrude doesn't have a daughter. I don't know who you're remembering . . . "
Even after several attempts at clarifying, my mother drew a blank on who I was talking about. My brother and sister weren't any help, neither of them remembering anyone at all that I could be remembering.
A figment. A ghost.
I clearly remember spending many hours of each day for two weeks following around and talking to someone who apparently wasn't real in any consensually experienced part of the universe.
Was my memory of a guardian angel? A creepy fetch-spirit? Manifestation of the divine? A succubus come to prey on a little boy?
Hmmm, I don't mind the sound of that.
But then I think, things don't need to have happened to be real.
Memories are real even if the events in them didn't happen in that way. Stories are real, even if they aren't true. Storytelling is creating something that didn't previous exist.
And the non-existent red-haired girl started showing up, wearing various guises, in my stories. Like a shirking shadow of thought, a wisp of impossible memory, my Tantalus Muse would come and tell me a story. I'd write them, but it sometimes seems more like transcribing the words of someone else.
Maybe the red-haired girl is in some other version of this universe and I'm the figment in her memory. Maybe she's the storyteller, that little red-haired girl, in that other universe, and I'm just a character in her tale. The threads of the plot stretch out into the darkness of possibility, and I step forward to find out what comes next.
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