History of My Reading: I'm A Stranger Here Myself

“And the roses of electricity still open

In the garden of my memory.”

Apollonaire

photo by Paula Rhodes 1974 or 5

 At the end of March 1974, after I returned to my Cambridge apartment from my mother’s funeral and the eight weeks in Greensburg that preceded it, I started a new notebook.

 On the first inside page I wrote: “Write of other worlds, not this one.” I didn’t attribute it, but it was (as only I knew) one of the last things my mother said to me, in the midst of a stream of consciousness goodnight.

 I recorded my state of mind and the state of my affairs as April began.  Though I had many acquaintances beyond my apartment’s walls, I was more alone within it than ever.  My last housemate was moving out, to live with a new group of friends.  My time was untethered by any particular responsibilities other than the flexible mealtimes of my cats.  Various tensions from those weeks at the hospital and then the funeral (the slow motion loss, the guilty tedium, the sense of unreality in the midst of as real as it gets) were releasing, accompanied by unpredictable physical ups and (mostly) downs.  Plenty of tensions remained.  Yet I was not unhappy, I wrote--though too much was lost and was otherwise missing for happiness either.

 I was still collecting unemployment checks for a few more months, and had some savings left, so I resolved to work hard on my college novel.  I had worked out a plan and written about 80 pages the previous year, and now I would write to that plan—25 pages a week was my goal: 300 pages by my birthday at the end of June.  Though that still would be a fraction of the plan.

 I had plenty of doubts.  Could I? Should I?  Was I crazy to try, especially without support or encouragement of any kind?  Could I find the necessary temperament, the energy combined with the stillness? What could I draw on, in this Cambridge of ambition and acquisition, of drive haunted by compromise, of ego and insecurity and the reflexes of angst, of feckless frenzy and rolling confusion?  

These doubts were never really resolved and haunted me from time to time.  At other times I was entirely absorbed in what I was doing.

I was buoyed a bit by a used copy of a book titled The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt, originally published in the late 50s and kept in print by the University of California Press.  It chronicled and analyzed the early English novel in the 18^th century, of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.  Looking at it again now, I feel the same excitement at the birth of something new that was derived—and often improvised-- from many older sources, yet was particular to the time. 

 Among the characteristics Watt named as distinguishing the novel from other forms was especially relevant to my project: “…the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience… which is always unique and therefore new.”  I was also encouraged to learn that Daniel Defoe had begun as a journalist, essentially writing his own periodical, including reporting on crimes, something else that was relatively new in his time.

 Another characteristic of these early novels, Watt writes, is embedding the characters in a particular time and place.  Fielding seems to have regularly consulted an almanac to keep tracks of days and dates, as well as external events such as the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. This is something I learned from James Joyce, and it was especially important for my college novel, given that 1965 was so different from 1967 as to be almost another planet.   

 Also important to me, perhaps indirectly but very strongly, were the books about early to mid 20^th century art in Europe, primarily in Paris.  I had art books from Phoenix days and a few before that (mostly to do with Picasso.)  Now in the many Cambridge bookstores I searched for books of text as well as reproductions.  I often got them used or from bargain bins and hurt books tables.  I was especially alert to volumes in the paperback series Documents of 20^th Century Art: Dore Ashton’s book on Picasso, the memoir of a major modern art deader in Paris, dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Apollonaire on Art and a volume on Italian Futurism. Dada and Futurism led me to French Surrealism, which had its literary expressions and tradition. 

Though the artist I was most drawn to—Magritte—worked later and not in Paris, it was that sense of Paris as a willing home to an artistic community that became important to me, especially when cobbled together with my previous reading of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s time there, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the Paris of Henry Miller. Janet Flanner’s collection of her New Yorker “Letter From Paris” columns of the 1920s onward, Paris Is Yesterday, had recently been published in paperback.  (I had Suzi Gablik’s groundbreaking book on Magritte as well.)  I also obtained Andre Breton's surrealist novel, Nadja; I wanted to like it more than I did. 

This became my dream community, superimposed on the cafes, bookstores, newsstands and art print outlets of Cambridge.  At the same time I was absorbing the poetry of Paul Eluard and Apollonaire, who influenced the verse I was still writing.   

 My identification with this place and period was both vindicated and greatly strengthened when I came upon the name of Gino Severini, as a painter and theorist of Italian Futurism.  When I mentioned him to my grandmother, she immediately recalled a conversation she’d overheard many years before, among her husband’s Severini relatives, about the black sheep of the family who had run away to Paris to become a bum.  The time fit pretty exactly, and a penniless painter, even with famous friends (including Picasso and Apollonaire) and future fame himself, would fit the bill as a bum.

 Now it seemed I had blood in the game.  I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (on a press pass) every time I was in New York.  Besides buying one of the few books on Futurism then (derived from one of their exhibitions) I could see several Severini paintings, including the largest and most famous: Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin.

 It was about this time that I added Severini to my byline name (though at first only to my “literary” efforts), mostly to honor my mother and her family—for that had always been more the family than my father’s—but I was also linking myself to Gino.  When years later I read his autobiographical books, I felt even stronger resonance. 

This—along with writing poems and plays, writing songs and playing music—constituted my creative life. I pursued possibilities to extend it, by going through the laborious process of applying for fellowships (I recall going to the Harvard Square Xerox place to pick up my bound manuscript for the annual Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation grants, and seeing under the harsh florescent light the stacks of other applying manuscripts the night before deadline) as well as sending out poems and the occasional story: except for a single prose poem published in a local literary magazine, without success. 

 But I also pursued opportunities in the areas I had established some credits, a kind of journalism. I knew little of career-building, though I was soon to see how it could work as I watched friends and former colleagues swiftly ascend to the heights, but I did intuit (rightly or wrongly) one path I might follow: from writing for city weekly periodicals to national magazines, and then to book contracts.

 By this time I was mostly trying to write for magazines. I had written for Creem (I have an undated letter from the legendary Lester Bangs, probably from the previous year, encouraging me to re-start my relationship there. “I think you’re one of the best writers who has appeared in this magazine,” he wrote.  I don’t think anything came of this, though I’m not sure why.)

 But I had also entered the big time magazine world with an assignment from Esquire in 1972. I’d been called by a young editor there named John Lombardi, who liked something I’d written for Creem (I’m guessing it was my review of the early apocalyptic movie Omega Man starring Charleton Heston) and he probably found me through its editor, Dave Marsh.  He wanted me to research and write a story for Esquire’s annual college issue on one of Harvard’s better known dorms, Adams House, that was now co-ed (radical for the time), and especially the rumor that their swimming pool included nude bathing.  Without ever actually witnessing such an event, I did some interviews (yes, they said, but the nude swimming was no big deal), wrote the story and it was published.

 After I left the Phoenix in 1973, I learned from Dave Marsh that Lombardi had moved to Oui Magazine, a new glossy from Playboy, and they were assigning. I proposed a story on a singles cruise that advertised itself as employing computer matching, a hot trend of the time.  He assigned it, and off I went that December.

  It turned out to be mostly bogus: the computer matching was a fraud (so much so that the guy doing mine offered to “hand select” anyone who’d caught my eye) and the singles theme hadn’t filled the boat, so there were families as well.  But by the time I realized this, we were on the water and I was trapped for the week. We hit rough seas in a relatively small ship and this absurd floating imprisonment became a sickening one as well.  Still, I did get paid to visit Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-- for an hour each, but a memorable hour.  I wrote the story but in early 1974 the magazine had wisely passed on publishing it.

 In addition to my excesses in response to the Phoenix and other separations in 1973,  I was walking a lot more and lost weight I’d acquired from hurried restaurant meals, helped no doubt by the fact that for the first time I was dependent on my own cooking.  I also quit smoking, which set off a series of revelations.

  I discovered I was less addicted than habituated, so I was able to wean myself off cigarettes by concentrating on my primary smoking circumstances.  So instead of a cigarette next to the typewriter when I wrote, I kept a bowl of popcorn.  To accompany drinking, I chewed gum, or on Twizzler-type licorice.  That these were awkward substitutes was part of the plan.  I could soon do without them, though I kept the popcorn for awhile.

 In social situations I especially noticed the way smoking cigarettes became part of people’s conversational style—the pauses for inhaling, the cigarette itself “as a baton at the end of our gestures.”  

 So while I was in Greensburg those eight weeks, I wrote an article about quitting smoking and these observations, and sent it out.  By spring it had been rejected everywhere.  The dependence of magazines then on the revenue from cigarette advertising I’m sure had nothing to do with it.  But this attempt did start something in my professional life: the impetus for an article was my own experience.  

 My most promising new contact probably came through Janet Maslin, friend and former colleague at the Phoenix, who had been spreading her wings beyond that paper when I was editing there. Now she was the regular music columnist at a new magazine in New York called New Times (unaffiliated in any way with publications of that name since.)  She was pals with the film reviewer who also was an editor at the magazine, Frank Rich.  She suggested I get in touch with him—perhaps to review books.  I did, and in February I had heard back.  They had more book reviewers than books to review, he said, but he encouraged me to send article ideas.  I did but with no success yet that spring. 

 So while I continued to write pieces for the Real Paper locally for a little income (and go through hell to get paid) I had little excuse not to organize my life around writing those 300 pages of fiction.

 And so I did—with days of lethargy and nights of elation, 18 hour binges of work and sleep, with stretches of numb despair and high anxiety.  But as the clock struck midnight on June 30, 1978—my 28^th birthday—I had produced those 300 pages, or near enough. 

 I recorded this in that blue notebook while sitting in the place that had become the center of my life outside my apartment: the Orson Welles Complex, specifically this time, the Orson Welles Cinema lobby.   

 I could say that the three overlapping, interacting, competitive, conflicting and symbiotic parts of my life were creative, professional and personal.  I’m not going into much detail about the particularly personal here, but it’s fair to say that significant aspects of all three did their dance at the Orson Welles Complex, especially in these years.

 When I first arrived in Cambridge in 1970, the Welles was a single-screen cinema on Mass Ave between Harvard and Central Squares.  Cinema blossomed in those early to mid 1970s, with the availability of foreign films, the rediscovery (partly through the enthusiasm of French New Wave directors) of past decades of American films, a surge in creative Hollywood films and a growing recognition of film as art.  There was a surge as well in film schools and courses (though I didn’t know it at the time, the Orson Welles itself had a film school.)

 My devotion was guaranteed in that spring of 1970 when as part of a Godard retrospective, I saw Pierrot Le Fou three times, including the last screening in a mostly empty theatre with only hardcore fantatics, accompanied by the aroma of Gaulloises.

 A few years later—certainly by 1973—the Welles Cinema expanded to three screens, descending in auditorium size but not in quality of viewing.  This was also still the era of the double feature, except for some first run theatres.  So on any given day, there were six movies playing at the Welles.  At its height, on Saturdays with morning screenings and midnight shows, there might be ten.   

So for the first five years of the 1970s, I had a cinema experience and film education that is unimaginable now, just as it would have been unlikely if not impossible before.  I saw probably hundreds of good if not pristine prints of a wide variety of movies, well-projected, on big movie screens.  I saw new movies there, though not the same ones at the Boston commercial chain theatres.  More like Lucia, a Cuban film, or The Harder They Come, the Jimmy Cliff movie from Jamaica that introduced reggae music to many, which ran at the Welles for a year or so.

 

The Welles was one of four movie theatres in Cambridge, all of them showing foreign films at least some of the time.  But the Welles had the most films, especially in organized retrospectives.  It was mostly there that I saw almost all of Truffaut and Godard released to that point, a lot of Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Kurasawa, and of course Orson Welles. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Blood of the Poet. Hitchcock’s early British films, Chaplin from The Gold Rush to The Great Dictator, City Lights, Modern Times and Limelight (which had been banned until 1972.) 

I saw what was available of the astonishing early French filmmaker Abel Gance, the definition of innovator and the avante garde, including a version of Napoleon (with some scenes split into three screens)  and the 1938 version of the antiwar J’Accuse, much of it shot in World War I, featuring a harrowing scene of men who were really about to go into battle with many likely to die, essentially playing their own ghosts.  I believe there was a documentary on him as well, perhaps the 1968 The Charm of Dynamite.  

 Black Orpheus, The Blue Angel, Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, De Sica’s Umberto D.  Wuthering Heights, The African Queen, Borsalino, Bicycle Thief, Savage Messiah, Straw Dogs. 

 There were Bogart, Garbo and Brando retrospectives, the classic Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn comedies, and in the full flower of their 1970s revival, all the Marx Brothers movies except their first, The Coconuts, not yet available then.  There were comedy festivals, one which included Richard Lester’s non-Beatles movies, The Knack, the surreal How I Won the War, and the even more surreal The Bed-Sitting Room. 

Gena Rowlands in Faces

Newer filmmakers were also featured: the early films of John Cassavetes (Shadows, Faces, Husbands) and Brian DePalma (the eminently weird Hi Mom and Greetings, starring a very young Robert De Niro, as well as his 1974 Phantom of the Paradise.) I saw the elder Robert Downey’s wicked comedy Putney Swope there, and the original X-rated Flesh Gordon. Features were often accompanied by contemporary short films, and there were programs of silent movies, including Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

  Stan Vanderbeek was one of the experimental filmmakers who came to show and talk about their work.  Robert Altman was hot in the 70s—I saw The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller there.  I remember documentaries on and starring Henry Miller (The Henry Miller Odyssey) and Anais Nin (Anais Nin Observed.)  And I’ll never forget seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time there, and hearing for the first time in any theatre the screams of adults watching it.

 As part of my cinema enthusiasm, and especially under the influence of Truffaut and Godard, who always showed books and characters reading in their films, I started collecting film books, in the same way as the art books.  I was drawn mostly to books on the French New Waves and its directors, but there was a lot of other writing on film at the time. 

I particularly collected book versions of film scripts, which often included stills from the film, and sometimes interviews and criticism.  Most of these were in the Modern Film Scripts series, but there were others. Bergman’s and Truffaut’s filmscripts in particular became available in hardback and paperback editions. I saw these books for the first time at the f-Stop camera store that was attached to the Welles for awhile.

 Though we had the privilege of seeing these films on the big screen, we could only see them when the cinemas exhibited them—there was no video of any kind, and foreign films were rarely on TV, almost never with subtitles instead of dubbing.  So these script books were all I could keep.  Now with so much dependence on streaming and the disappearance of art film cinemas and video stores, when once again most of these movies aren’t readily available, these books are again all I have of them, unless I have the DVD or they are on YouTube. 

 I was writing and editing at the Phoenix when I met Larry Jackson, manager of the Cinema and the one who selected the movies shown. Later he was the manager of the entire Complex, but still programmed the films.  (Martha Pinson succeeded him as manager before she, too, moved to the administrative offices upstairs as publicity director, and Mary Galloway took over.) 

me at the typewriter some years later in that t-shirt.
Photo by Elizabeth Offner.

While at the Phoenix I'd written about some of the movies, and I especially recall writing a feature about a science fiction mini-festival, which I headlined “It Came From the Orson Welles.”  Larry liked that so much that it put it on a t-shirt.  In 1976 he instituted an annual science fiction marathon, using that phrase as its title. It continued for 11 years at the Welles, and afterwards at other Boston area theatres apparently to this day.

 By the time I left the Phoenix we’d become friends, and he continued to include me in Welles film activities. For instance, in 1974 I got to hang around “backstage” with Peter Bogdonavich and Cybil Shepherd when they introduced their film version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and accepted some semi-silly award from Harvard students.  I saw fame from a different perspective: both of them were near-sighted, so the crowds around them were mostly noise and a blur.  I thought it was admirable how they could keep their composure.  

Orson Welles and Larry Jackson, 1976?

I would tag along with Larry and other film friends to screenings elsewhere in Boston, featuring question and answer sessions with the filmmaker.  At one such university event, Larry leaned over to me and said, “There’s a lot of film students here.  One of them will ask what the shooting ratio was.”  Shooting ratio is the number of film feet shot vs. the number used.  Sure enough, the question was soon asked.

 Another of these forays however gave me one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life: a 1974 screening, probably at Boston University on a portable screen, of the as-yet unreleased new Cassavettes film A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands in a transcendent, bravura performance (which eventually led to an Oscar nomination.)

   The lights came up after this very powerful film to show Rowlands and Cassavettes standing in front of the screen.  For a mind-bending moment it seemed she had just stepped out of the movie.  I asked a question from the crowd, struggling with emotion, and I saw the empathy in Rowlands’ eyes.  Afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, I met them both.

Martha Pinson at the snacks counter

 Seeing films became an obsession.  When I wasn’t watching I was sitting in the Orson Welles Cinema lobby, living on coffee, popcorn and licorice, sometimes chatting with theatre staff, which included young John Semper, Manny Duran, Murphy Birdsall in the box office, as well as Mary and Martha.  John Rossi was usually there, but he seemed to be in a perennially bad mood so I kept my distance. (Rossi was nevertheless mostly responsible for a unique feature of the Welles: a mimeographed sheet for nearly every movie, with full credits and excerpts from interviews and critiques.  He didn’t seem to think much of me, but he did include a long excerpt from one of my reviews.)

 Most often I was just drinking coffee and starring off into space or scribbling in my notebook, as I was at the clock struck twelve, inaugurating my 28^th birthday.

 I was there so often that Mary or Manny would enlist me to help take tickets when several movies were starting at the same time.  My conversations upstairs with Larry included my suggestions for films to program (my greatest triumph: the double bill of Morgan! and Charlie Bubbles, two of my idiosyncratic favorites of the 1960s British New Wave) and eventually led to becoming the co-editor of the program book for the 1974 Boston Film Festival there.

 I was not the only one to be obsessed with film—the cultural moment might be indicated by the fact that Jon Landau gave up editing the record review section of Rolling Stone and writing about music there, to become its film critic.  I recall at least one movie we saw together at the Welles—it was a Welles in fact. He claimed to have seen 300 movies in one year.  Thinking about it, I probably came close.  I did have it bad.  One Saturday, starting with the morning show at the Welles, I saw 10 movies in one day, including a few on television…  And then I was sick in bed for a week.

  By late fall in 1970, the Orson Welles Restaurant opened. It seems to me the bar on the level above it didn’t open until some time later.  In any case, when I wasn’t at the Cinema, I was opening the thick wooden doors to the bar, which wrapped around and looked down on the restaurant below street level.  I ate at the Restaurant a few times—almost always the duck with orange sauce—but that was for special occasions.  If I ate there it was in the bar, where they served from the lunch and dessert menus.  Together the cinemas, the restaurant and the bar comprised the Orson Welles Complex.

 The social life of film and the Welles continued there.  In addition to Larry Jackson and Terry Corey, who also worked upstairs, I met other film buffs, some of whom were engaged in filmmaking. I even ran into David Axlerod, who started me on my cinematic journey with the Cinema Club at Knox College; he was in Boston for day or two, so naturally he stopped by the Welles.

David Helpern, Jr. Photo by Paula Rhodes

 Among the local filmmakers I met was one of the more successful at that point: David Helpern, Jr., who became one of my closest friends of my post-Phoenix days in Cambridge.  He introduced me to others, including filmmaker and photographer Paula Rhodes.

 David had just finished a one hour documentary film on director Nicholas Ray, whose most famous films included Rebel Without A Cause, Johnny Guitar and two Bogart films, In A Lonely Place and Knock On Any Door.  It was called I’m A Stranger Here Myself, which the documentary noted was what Ray said was the working title of all of his films, and appears as a line in Johnny Guitar.

 Nicholas Ray had a tumultuous and colorful career, often at odds with Hollywood, but his movies were admired by film buffs, particularly the critics and directors of the French New Wave (a short interview with Francois Truffaut appears in David’s film.)

 David had an even longer history with the Orson Welles Cinema than I, having been (I believe) both a student and teacher in its film school. (He was later co-editor with me of the 1974 film festival program.)  He involved several people from the Welles in making his film, including Murphy Birdsall (production assistant), and he acknowledged Larry Jackson, John Rossi and the Welles in general in the credits.  His producer was Jim Gutman, who had been the chief administrator of the film school.

 To introduce his film, he got Nicolas Ray himself to spend a few days in Boston. At the time Ray had been teaching at what was then Harpur College (where my ex-prof William Spanos taught), and is now the State College of New York at Binghamton.  Much of the documentary follows Ray as he works with students on making an actual film, part of which was later shown at Cannes.

 David invited me to tag along with him and Nick Ray, so I was present for all his public events, his radio interview, and shared a couple of meals with him. (One evening he and I were the last to leave the table.  At the time, the price of sugar at the grocery store was very high, so as we left I pocketed a few of the small bags of sugar at the table. He was amused by this, and pocketed some himself.) 

Ray was known as an especially sensitive director (he had a close working relationship with James Dean) and a sensitive man.  His talks were sometimes halting, but concise and articulate.  Hearing him speak softly about the ideals of filmmaking and art in general to a scattering of attendees after a very late screening in the Welles’ smallest theatre was almost a religious experience.

 I scribbled down one line: “Wherever you go in the world, the principal concern is ‘Who am I?  Where am I? Why am I?’  We need to find ways to say hello to each other and look one another in the eye.  To dream and try things.”

 He was 63 but seemed older, very weathered, but with a corona of white hair and the remnants of a noble face. (He’d started as an actor, and would soon appear in Wim Wender’s film, The American Friend.) He smoked incessantly, but what I didn’t know is that he was struggling with, or in the grips of alcoholism and drug dependence.  A few years later he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.  He died five years after his days in Cambridge.

 But the Orson Welles bar was more than a hangout for film buffs and those engaged somehow in movies, with ambitions for some sort of film career.  It was presided over by a cadre of waitresses, the most beautiful young women I’d ever seen in one place, and they were there every night.  I got to know some of them to some extent, so Buffy, Celine, Emily, Emily, Kathy, Laurie, Lori, Marie, Martha, Teri and others were my ambiguous Muses.

 Cambridge was deep in the throes of absorbing new mores and conditions brought on by the early 1970s women’s movement, known then as women’s lib. I had many conversations with other young men there—some of them complete strangers—about the confusions and ironies arising from that new consciousness, which had become for some men a nearly paralyzing self-consciousness.  We noted for example that while we were supposed to be getting in touch with our feminine side, we were watching some of the women of the Welles going off with men on motorcycles.

 Meanwhile my professional life was reviving somewhat. In August I got a letter from Frank Rich responding favorably to an article idea for New Times, and book review assignments from Suzanne Mantell at the new Harper’s Bookletter, a publication of Harper’s Magazine.

 My New Times idea resulted from a report I must have stumbled on, of research that found a biological basis for why some people like to stay up late, as I did, and it was a revelation.  The majority of people are born Larks, who are energetic early and then fade; a minority are Owls, whose body temperature rises slowly, so full energy doesn’t arrive until later.  I fit the Owl profile exactly—so it wasn’t a character defect but a matter of biorhythms.

 It got me thinking about other elements of the built environment that affect people but aren’t recognized as having effects, like lighting and temperature.  I might well have been thinking of my response to the awful lighting in the hospital where I spent so much time, and how my father kept the house heated too high for my comfort that winter.  Relating all this to people’s behavior and self-image, especially in the workplace, could be the basis for an article.  I don’t recall if I had to write a formal proposal but I eventually got the assignment.

 I did maybe a half dozen reviews for Harper’s Bookletter, the most notable being a plea to get Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape back in print. I complained—as I often did, and would again--that the editing had taken out my writing voice.

 I don’t think the Bookletter lasted very long, but I have kept one with Lewis Lapham’s cover essay on “The Pleasures of Reading.” He was then the editor of Harper's.  “On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice,” it begins.  "Most books don’t have it, but there are still so many that do."  It’s a long and lovely essay; I read Lapham every month in Harper’s as well as some of his books. I met him briefly in his Harper’s office in the 1980s, and he was a friendly generous and open man as well as a writer always worth reading. 

Books I was reading other than those I was paid to read evidently (from notes) included: Don DeLillo’s first novel Americana; a selection of Kafka short stories, and Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch; a novel I loved entitled Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino, which I picked up off the remainder table at Reading International. I wrote Sorrentino to express my admiration.  He wrote a gracious letter in return, urging me to keep writing despite the difficulties.

Also that year, Neil Young came to the Orson Welles with his first movie, Journey Through the Past.  I saw it at the press screening, and when the two weeklies panned it, I wrote a letter to the editor to both papers. They were both music critics, and suggested Young stay in his lane.  I suggested they both do the same, for it had cinematic qualities, however unconventional, that they failed to mention. I praised the cinematography and especially the sound, and called it authentic and surprising.  I recall Larry Jackson saying that I was the only writer who understood the film. 

 But they carried the conventional wisdom, and today it’s known mostly for the concert footage, especially from Buffalo Springfield, but there are sequences with Hollywood actors and one very visual scene that came directly from one of the director’s dreams.

 During the screening I sat in the aisle seat of the third row, and I could see Carrie Snodgress, Young’s partner at the time, and their two year old son Zeke standing near the side curtain by the stage and the screen.  I was absorbed in watching the movie when I felt a tug on the fringe of my jacket.  I looked down to see Zeke, with Carrie close behind him, taking him away.

  I was wearing my suede jacket with the fringe—I’d always wanted a fringe jacket like those I’d admired on The Range Rider and other childhood TV heroes, though this one had the added advantage of thick fleece lining against the Massachusetts cold.  Neil Young wore a more classic fringe jacket in some album photos.  That’s what I immediately thought of at the time—that Zeke had seen the fringe jacket and headed straight for it.

Neil Young, Larry Jackson and
Manny Duran in the OW lobby

 I met Neil Young in the theatre lobby (and found myself the center of some buzz when I was mistaken for Graham Nash) and later, looking for Larry in the Restaurant, I found him at a long table finishing dinner with Young and his entourage.  Larry invited me to sit down.  At some point I said to Young I’d heard him live several times and I hoped he’d make another live album.  He shrugged and said, how many times can you do “Southern Man?”  I said I was thinking more of “The Loner,” a song from his first album that I’d heard lived in Boston.  I loved that song: "He's the perfect stranger, like a cross of himself and a fox. He's a feeling arranger and a changer of the way he talks. He's the unforeseen danger, the keeper of the keys to the locks. Know when you see him/nothing can free him/step aside/open wide, he's the loner."

  “The Loner,” he said, considering it.  He soon did release another live album, and “The Loner” was on it.

 After dinner, I was among the party that piled in a car or two and headed up the coast to a roadhouse bar where a local band was playing.  Again we sat around a long table, now drinking beer.  I somehow wound up playing pool with Neil Young, a game I know nothing about except that, in my experience, a certain reckless confidence works wonders.  So it was this time, and I won (though really, only because he scratched.)

 We were still there when the band ended their final set, and one of Neil’s guys told them that Neil would like to jam.  They refused.  The guy put a $50 bill on the drumhead as they were packing up, but the answer was still no.  For some reason they gave up the chance to jam with Neil Young (maybe they were pissed that we made noise during their sets), and we lost the opportunity to hear him so close up.

 We headed for the car and the long drive back in the dark.  On the way, Neil spotted a lighted cross on a hill or atop a church and said that kind of thing freaked him out.  Crosses were evident in his movie, too, especially as carried by the Klan.  Back in Cambridge the Welles people and I were dropped off in front of the Cinema.  I tried saying goodbye to Young but he was glowering straight ahead, somewhere else entirely. 

I did have another rock and roll moment, though it was more in the nature of a non-encounter.  Janet Maslin invited me to grab a sandwich with her and then go to the Bonnie Raitt concert at the Harvard Square Theatre.  We ate somewhere in Harvard Square, and she explained that her husband Jon Landau was meeting with the opening act, a band starting to make some noise fronted by a guy named Bruce Springsteen.  He was frustrated because he felt their first couple of albums, which didn't sell well, had been badly produced, and Jon had helped make Jackson Browne a star by producing his breakout album.  But my conversation with Janet was so irritating and exhausting that I decided to just go home.  I'd seen Bonnie Raitt several times so I thought it was no big loss.

A few days later the Real Paper published Jon Landau's column that began with the most famous words in rock critic history: "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it is Bruce Springsteen."  Some of the column was personal and heartfelt, but it was that sentence--bannered on ads--that has lived on.  Landau's prophesy was a bit self-fulfilling, in that he did produce Springsteen's breakout album, Born to Run, and later became his manager.   It would be several years before I saw Springsteen live, at a theatre in Pittsburgh, and it was amazing.  But I missed my chance to be present for the concert that made rock history.  

 I returned to Greensburg in August for the wedding of my sister Debbie and Jerry Boice. Their reception happened to be on the evening of my high school’s 10^th anniversary class reunion.  So with two of my Central Catholic friends, Clayton and his wife Joyce, who were also at the reception, I headed a short distance down the highway to check out the free gathering in the bar of the restaurant where the reunion dinner would occur.  Since I had dated Joyce in high school, she reveled in the idea that people would be wondering which of us she was married to.

 I saw that the cheerleaders etc. of our class were now sleek married women, and most of the guys were already overweight.  I spotted one former friend who’d been timid and socially backward who was now a prestigious professor with that ageless middle-aged bearded look of the academic, standing aloof in the shadows, long drink in hand.  We didn’t stay long.

 When I got back to Cambridge I found that my apartment had been broken into.  Among the stolen items were various stereo components and, adding insult to injury, my typewriter. 

I continued to be absorbed working on the novel, completing another two or three hundred pages of first draft by the end of the year.  But money was getting tight.  So I tried to concentrate on paying work. 

 In late fall I was researching the Larks and Owls article for New Times, finding relevant research and professional sources to talk to.  Except for the ensuing phone interviews, I worked in the Widener Library at Harvard, with breaks at Harvard Square cafes.  Once at my favorite Patisserie (as I recorded in a notebook), I could overhear two conversations at nearby tables—a couple was talking about places they’d lived, while two women were discussing scientific research articles.  One person at each table said “Berkeley” at exactly the same time.

 I drafted a letter about a possible job to a friend who’d recently been hired at Rolling Stone—possibly the most pathetic job-hunting letter ever written, although I've had a few nearly its equal. “I need money, but I’m not up for another long-term suicide mission like the Phoenix.”  I revised it a few times but to no avail.

  In November, I looked out “into the blue twilight of Columbia Street on Thanksgiving afternoon.  Little traffic, a few people in the street.  Bare branches, old houses; it is, in repose, a European street.”  In fact even more international—along its lengths were new residents like the Portuguese speakers, holdover Irish, Jamaicans, educated young whites still experimenting and living on the margins. 

me and my shadow. Photo by Paula Rhodes

I noted the talismans of my blue rooms (teal bedroom and reading room, lighter blue study)--my "alchemist den": Magritte, Cezanne, Picasso, Klee, Gris, Matisse, Van Gogh, Vermeer repros from the Harvard Coop on the walls, a cave painting, photo of a Turkish sculptural head, photos of Groucho, Paul Eluard, George Harrison…a Cartier-Bresson photo of Brigitte Bardot or a lookalike at a café, photo of a Liverpool girl in a graveyard.

   On the mantle photos of my mother and sisters, a Gino Severini card, a program from my college play.  In the study, two photos of me—one as a small boy, one in college, both with the same gesture; a Marx Brother poster with an Einstein photo interposed as the fourth brother, photos of Catherine Deneuve, Truffaut, Vanessa Redgrave.  “Books, colors, music, some furry animals, some food in the kitchen and a tub for hot baths.  My home.”

 “I understand what I have to do,” I wrote. “Pay my bills to keep my blue rooms, the nice heat, the nice hot water, the electricity for the music, the nice food.  I will be commercial.  I will be journalistic.  I will be a cross of myself and a fox.”       

Declaration Cancelled, King Returns

In accepting a National Book Foundation medal in 2014, eminent writer Ursula K Le Guin gave a short speech that has come to be both prophetic and defining.  It was published later (in her last collection of essays, Words Are My Business) under the title of "Freedom."  I applied its main points to events in 2021 in this post, also called "Freedom," which I still stand behind.  But there was one line of the speech that came back to me this past week.

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable," she said, and paused.  "But then, so did the divine right of kings."  

You could hear the audience catch its breath, anticipating her next sentence, "Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."  And indeed, the divine right of kings to rule absolutely was opposed at various times and places over centuries--including very successfully here in the United States, beginning with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. It finally died in Europe in the ashes of World War I.  Though it lived on in other forms, and arguably still does in some parts of the world, it became so obsolete that even the concept is mostly unfamiliar.

And so, in 2014, the audience knew it was antique, and as a reality, unthinkable.  Maybe capitalism that is killing the Earth we know could also be made so obsolete.

But forget capitalism.  It turns out that the divine right of kings is back.

 After the Supreme Court decision announced on July 1, the divine right of the king has been retroactively enshrined in the United States.  It is a repudiation of the very Declaration celebrated today.

It is true that the Declaration itself doesn't address it directly, and there were those who wanted to crown George Washington as king after the American Revolution, but all the values supported by the words of the Declaration are against it.  

A corrupt Supreme Court has institutionalized corruption in the presidency.  Equal under the law now means some people are more equal than others according to the law, namely the Supreme Court justices and a President they like (for they did retain some power to decide against Presidents they don't like.)   

When scholars describe where the theory supporting this decision came from, I'm fairly sure it will involve institutions of the far right, and specifically those supporting (and supported by) Christian nationalism, which I posted about recently.  It's a different wrinkle on the concept maybe, but describing this as the divine right of kings has that dimension.  

So this Independence Day we also have the candidate currently leading in the polls who will embrace those rights, and that concept.  The monarch ordering "off with their heads!" may soon not be so funny. Among other things, malice and hatred have been empowered.  We know who is just waiting for that power.

Meanwhile, the most overpowering fact of this Independence Day is the overpowering climate--the intense heat, fires, storms, flooding--that are causing celebrations to be cancelled, or just otherwise dangerous.  Yet here in the United States of Denial, we talk about everything but, most markedly in our politics and policy.

On Turning 78

Not too long ago Margaret emailed this poem to me from another room. It’s called “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon:

 I got out of bed

 on two strong legs.

 It might have been

 otherwise. I ate

 cereal, sweet

 milk, ripe, flawless

 peach. It might

 have been otherwise. 

I took the dog uphill

 to the birch wood.

 All morning I did

 the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate.  It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks.  It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

 

 The details differ but these are our days now. They are made up of repeated activities almost ritually enacted. Some are personal habits, some are best practices prudently repeated, others are simply what we do now. Many of ours happen to be enforced by our ritually-minded dog. He has his own personal rituals as well, that sometimes become part of ours.

 We cherish these elements of the day, more often consciously at this age. They approach the sacramental. For we know that at any moment it could be otherwise, and that someday, it will.

 As it happened, shortly after I received this poem I dipped into a volume of interviews with poets done by Bill Moyers called The Language of Life (1995.) I flipped through the pages, reading randomly, until I came upon the interview with the eminent anthologist and poet Donald Hall, and remembered that he and Jane Kenyon had been married.  He was devoted to her.  An interview with her was also included in this volume.  Both were probably done when Moyers did another documentary just on them in 1993, in their New England country home, which had been in Hall's family for generations. 

 At the time, Donald Hall had just survived two serious cancer surgeries. It was between those two surgeries that his wife Jane Kenyon wrote “Otherwise.” Hall was 64, and told Moyers he didn’t expect to live to 70.

 That isn’t what happened. Donald Hall lived until 2018, a few months shy of his 90th birthday. But even though Jane Kenyon was nearly 20 years younger than he, she contracted a very aggressive form of cancer and died in 1995, the year the Moyers book was published. So Donald Hall lived nearly 20 years longer, but without her.

 So we live now, gratefully, in the charmed space before the coming catastrophes. When it seems catastrophe may be coming for this country and this planet, of a kind we could never before even contemplate, not even in the years of the nuclear arms race. And inevitably catastrophe will come for us personally. It may not come for years or a decade or more, but it can come at any time. 

 When we retired eight years ago we did not travel. Many people do, but we had no desire to travel. Personally, I traveled enough in my working life, and those experiences still haunt my dreams. I may still fantasize other places, but the realities of travel grow more difficult every day, and not even primarily because of age. Although I suspect many people our age are less keen on going places.

 In fact for us, all public life has diminished. Covid had and still has a marked influence. We shop for food, we go to the beach or the forest or the shores of the bay. We walk but usually in the neighborhood with our dog Howdy. Mostly we are at home: Margaret, Howdy and me.  Margaret and I are both introverts who had occupations that required some very extroverted activities.  Now we don't.  Howdy likes it that way, too. 

 There is Zoom, and Margaret is on that pretty frequently. I’ve seen my doctor on it, participated in a few conversations with her family, that’s all. For me the drawbacks of social media outweigh advantages I can see. 

 I do miss focused opportunities to communicate something more or less meaningful from my life—a legacy still alive. It’s a cliché now—that the old have a lot to tell, a lot to share, and an eagerness to do so, but usually no one who is interested in hearing it. I know it was a long time before I was interested in the lives of my parents before my time. Or anything before my time. It was a long time before it even occurred to me that they might have anything relevant from their lives to tell me about what I was going through in my own. And by that time, they were gone. 

 To some extent I was right—when I was principally concerned with “career” in areas they had no knowledge of, and of navigating relationships including those that might lead to marriage, the rules of the games had changed so much—and they were also related to those places and strata that my elders didn’t know. But later, approaching middle age say, there were probably a lot of common areas, experiences and so on. Or if I knew more about their lives—what they were like, what they thought and felt at different points in their lives, I could draw my own conclusions. 

 It’s also context: now that I’m interested enough to research the past, the years in which they lived their lives, I have contexts in which their answers might make sense. I would experience the story. (This too is not uncommon; apparently as we get older, we become more interested in the historical contexts and events of our parents’ generation.) 

 As for telling my story or any part of it, even in fragments sharing anything learned in my life, well: Now I am so distant from family, I don’t see the next generation in their middle years or the generation following in their childhood. Or my sisters as they follow me into the 70s. And I share so little with the worlds in which Margaret’s children and grandchildren live, I have little to offer them, though I have a small positive place in their lives, I believe. 

 My status as a writer is so distant in time now that it no longer exists, so even in that regard I am not ever asked to offer anything from my life and experience. It is also distant somehow in space, for I have seldom been asked in the 28 years we’ve been here. I gave one talk derived from the mall book to a church service, one talk about the Federal Theatre Project to a theatre audience, and that’s it, over nearly three decades.

 At this point, my byline hasn’t been seen regularly for nearly a decade, but even when it was, no one thought to ask me anything. So I project my memories through the Internet, or at least (so far) very selective ones. I have my say to cyberspace, where potentially millions could read it, but which only a handful do. Many of those I suspect are my contemporaries. We talk to ourselves. 

 As for legacy beyond my life, what could it possibly be, and for whom? My writing disappeared along with the periodicals that printed it. My book may be re-purposed as a history (I’ve given up hope that it will ever be considered as literature) but only for a few. A few—a few at a time—it all I can hope for. A reader here or then who stumbles across something on the Internet. I know it happens, I occasionally hear from them in some way. I have no idea how long the servers will keep my words accessible, but it could be a kind of legacy.  At least for awhile.  

 People don’t seem interested in legacy anymore, unless from someone famous, whose possessions become negotiable currency as well as talismanic objects. In this age of de-cluttering, people don’t seem to keep things: no more attics of generational keepings, nothing that becomes more magical as the years go by.

But my world and this world grow increasingly different.  I have as few hopes of relevance as of anyone listening.  I haven't stopped writing, however.  That kind of faith is hard to shake.  It's too much a part of me, a big part, a defining part.  For better or worse, richer or poorer etc.

 For me the past is present, part of the rolling present, part of the texture of the days. Some of it doesn’t last. I read of pasts I haven't experienced and that process can delight me.  I seem to have absorbed something added to my perspective, but that can matter only in its function of adding texture to today. It’s the same with legacy, I suppose. We have no control over anything but the present, and only within ever increasing limits. So we adapt and we live as best and as happily as we can, until it is otherwise.

Offering

Kowinski photo

Saturday morning and the trades

 are back trading out of the east

 offering their samples of cloud

 each the only one of its kind

 and each of them changing even

 as it is offered only once

 without a word except the one

 sound of hushing to say that this

 is all happening in secret

 this unrepeatable present

 only today for the lucky one

--W.S. Merwin

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 "The present age may be styled, with great propriety, the Age of Authors, for there never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardor so general to the press."

Samuel Johnson

 in 1753

With God on Their Side

 I don't plan to make a habit of this--commenting on the politics of the day--anymore, but I did start with Jung on the hysteria of Nazi Germany latching on to a magnetic hysteric.  Jung implies that the eruptions of the unconscious are fairly frequent in mass society, and I admit I still don't understand what's going on--maybe mass delusion and hysteria are the default positions for mass civilization.

 In my last post I postponed consideration of the church as a cultural counterweight to mass hysteria, as Jung proposed, and I haven't read further in Jung's writings to work out more exactly what he meant.  But though it may make intuitive sense, that seems to be quite the opposite of what's happening now.  The culture is being pushed to hysteria by the loudest voices claiming religion as their central belief.

On this I defer to a contemporary experts, constitutional separation of church and state watchdog Rachel Laser and author Katherine Stewart, in conversation with Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.  It's also a podcast, and the introductory article itself is illuminating.  I've added bold to some sections below.

From the podcast:

Katherine Stewart: "Let’s talk about what Christian nationalism is and what it isn’t. Christian nationalism is not a religion—it’s not Christianity. I think of it as a mindset, and also a machine. The mindset is this ideology, the idea of America as essentially a Christian theocracy or a Christian nation whose laws should be based on the Bible, and a very reactionary reading of the Bible. It’s also a political movement that exploits religion in this organized quest for power. As a political movement, it is leadership-driven and it’s organization-driven. It has this deeply networked organizational infrastructure that is really the key to its power. There has been five decades of investment in this infrastructure, and it’s the leaders of this network who are really calling the shots."

 Dahlia mentions some of the prominent players in Congress (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) and of course a certain candidate for President and his possible vp nominees, but she asks specifically about  influence on the courts.  (Another Slate article warns we very well could see a number of Supreme Court decisions this month that reflect the hegemony of far right and Christian nationalist ideas on the Court.)

Laser and Stewart trace the political history, beginning in the 1980s, of a patient legal strategy to "sideline and in some cases obliterate" the Constitutional prohibition against the establishment of a national religion. Besides gaining more taxpayer money for explicitly religious institutions, these efforts focused on abortion.

Stewart talks in more detail about their successful efforts to complicate and ban abortion, with ambitions to limit birth control and criminalize medical efforts to save women having miscarriages.  In doing so, they've actually gotten their particular language into the law. Then Stewart talks more about tactics, and this is especially illuminating:

"In the last 15 years, the rhetoric of violence has become more extreme... the calls for dominion, the calls for total domination, have become louder and more explicit. And part of that is a consequence of the rise of a spirit-warrior style of religion..."

Stewart traces the "theology" of the righteous taking over the "Seven Mountains" of culture, which include government, media, education and business.  Adherents of "Seven Mountain Dominion" include not only evangelical Christian nationalists but professed Catholics like Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, and one would guess, several of the Catholics on the Supreme Court, notably Samuel Alito.  

Outsiders don't understand the meaning of the "Appeal to Heaven" flag that flew over an Alito home, and that's displayed at Speaker Johnson's office.  "So when they fly it, they’ve reinterpreted it as taking a stand for the idea of America as a Christian theocratic nation rather than a pluralistic democracy. They see it as a call for profound, and even violent, revolution."

Laser adds: "PRRI [Public Religion Research Institute] did a poll on Christian nationalists, and they found Christian nationalists are about twice as likely as the rest of us to believe in political violence. That’s what we saw on Jan. 6 with the parading “Appeal to Heaven” flags that were at the insurrection. I think another important point to make here is the authoritarian nature of this Christian nationalist movement. This movement is rooted in the belief that America is a country given to European Christians, and that our laws and policies must reflect the same. If you believe that, you are antidemocratic, because democracy is rooted in equality. So the end goal of this Christian nationalist movement has to be the toppling of democracy to achieve their goal."

There is little question about what hysteric this movement follows, especially when "the former president screens a video called “God Made Trump” at his rallies..."

This may seem to be a mostly political exercise by cynical politicians and their consultants, whether or not they are true believers.  That's obviously part of it--can anybody really believe Trump is motivated by faith?  But leaders need followers, and Stewart says that established churches, their leaders and congregations are involved:

 "Another feature of this movement that is often overlooked is the pastor networks like Watchmen on the Wall and Church United, or groups like Faith Wins, that draw together and then mobilize tens of thousands of conservative or conservative-leaning pastors as movement leaders. If you can get the pastors, you can get their congregations. Often pastors are the most trusted voices in their congregations."

Of course escaping theocratic rule was a major reason those Europeans came to America, though quite often they were escaping rule by theocrats other than their own.  The ambitions of this theocracy-in-process is also reminiscent of how the Catholic Church ruled in Europe when it was the only Christian game in town and even monarchs feared opposing it, because the Church's word was the word of God, anything else was heresy, with beheading and burning at the stake not infrequent consequences for the slightest perceived deviations.  The divine right of kings, on the comeback trail!

Today in America we already have everyday banning of thousands of books in public schools, due almost exclusively to these Christian nationalist activists, however they disguise themselves without really fooling anyone.  And of course we have laws beyond abortion bans, governing medical care of women based on their theology, again disguised without fooling anyone.

This Christian right dominion movement is fueled by what has traditionally been called religious fervor and righteousness, but in this context it seems another form of mass hysteria.  Though these experts don't discuss it, that hysteria may extend to a different kind of denial of climate distortion: the notion (which surfaces after major disasters) that hurricanes, floods, fires, etc. and other climate distortion effects are God's punishment for the paramount sins as defined by the reactionary right (abortion, "diversity" etc.) and that the only way to prevent these effects is to follow the Christian Nationalist program.   There are variations of this kind of belief in many religious traditions.

So perhaps it is not religious institutions but the institutions of the American civil religion as embodied in the Constitution that is our counterweight.  Laser may be promoting her own organization with her final comment, but it pertains:

" The antidote to Christian nationalism is the separation of church and state, because it refuses to let Christian privilege into the law, it refuses to let conservative Christianity be the guiding principle in America. It insists that America keep to its promises that are embedded in our Constitution, of religious freedom as a basic human right. And that’s why Christian nationalists have gone after the separation of church and state, and that’s why their allies at the Supreme Court are on a crusade to eradicate church–state separation—because they are in lockstep with a movement that must get rid of church–state separation in order to accomplish its goals."

A Bitter Revenge

A former President of the United States was convicted of 34 felonies by a unanimous jury in criminal court, and most commentators I read or heard said that this will have little or no effect on his very good chances to be elected to that office again in November.  When in American history has something like this been even a remote possibility? 

 Yet, despite a jury trial with no procedural glitches, Republican Congressional and other elected government officials lined up against the judicial process.  Trump referred to the judge as “the devil,” and some of his supporters threatened retribution against the judge, prosecutors and the jury.  What other word is there for all this but hysteria?  

 The premise of this post and the two previous in this series (part 1 here, part 2 here) is simple: there seems to be no rational explanation for the current political situation in the United States, especially pertaining to the upcoming presidential election.  Attempts have been made to explain it in economic, political, cultural, even demographic terms, but none is sufficient.  Journalists are left to find new ways to say the situation is unprecedented, that it defies logic and certainly previous political norms.

 So it seems to me we need to broaden (and deepen) our exploration for answers, especially in the area that the modern West knows as the psychological.  The phenomena being manifested however has been well known to other ages and other cultures, dealt with under what we would call (but not all of them call) religion, and earlier definitions of philosophy.

 Since the rise of our current dictator-in-waiting, I’ve tried to account for these phenomena.  I found some  relevance in cult behavior, but this may be insufficient.  I recently turned to the essays of Carl Jung before and after World War II, analyzing the most notorious twentieth century outbreak of a thirst for authoritarian leadership in Germany and Hitler.  Jung applied a psychological term not much in use today: hysteria.  I find it very evocative.  It clearly bypasses rationality and reference to consensus reality.  And it fits the rise of Trump to a chilling extent.

 Jung writes of these phenomena in terms of the human unconscious, which is partly personal and partly collective, and its relationship to the conscious mind.  As a rule, an eruption from the unconscious that infects consciousness but is not recognized or evaluated by it, is dangerous to the individual, and when it is part of a mass phenomenon, to society as a whole.  This is particularly true when the eruptions come primarily from the darker unconscious, also known as the shadow.  

 Mass hysteria is galvanized and defined by the hysteric that demands it, and so in addition to image etc. this individual becomes a symbol.  How else to explain a person holding such sway whose speeches and so-called press conferences are largely incoherent? Especially one who has gone from “I alone can fix it” to “I am your retribution.”    

 One sign of being ruled by the unconscious is what Jung called one-sidedness, in which simplistic certainties dripping with self-righteousness replace the recognition of complexities. From denial, projection, etc. comes stereotypes of the Other as objects of hate. This is currently manifest on both sides of the American political divide, but most rabidly on the right, now quickly forming the American Reich.  Their hysteria is defined by their eagerness to override the procedures of the government of all.

 It is a sign of the extremes of the current situation that the American Reich routinely denies realities which pass all rational tests: even of the violent events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, caught by cameras and witnessed by millions on television.  Though not identical, this is related to the pathological lying that Jung identified as part of a particular kind of hysteric personality, such as Hitler’s.

 How have we gotten here?  We have individual responsibilities to look to ourselves, as well as to represent a conscious evaluation of our politics and society.  But Jung also identifies culture as a bulwark against rule by the dark unconscious, and that aspect is the subject of this post.

 Our American past is not free of eruptions of irrational violence, even if our histories gloss over them.  The country began with an invasion and cultural as well as physical genocide.  We still suffer effects from a century or more of the slavery of African Americans,.  There have been other periods and episodes of racial violence that erupted in various places.

 Our politics also has had episodes of violence and conspiracy, and of the urge (even in high places) towards authoritarian rule.  But we can also cite a political culture that was established with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and created a civic stability that became the envy of the world.  America had political and legal norms.  The rule of law under the Constitution was sacrosanct, the equivalent of a secular religion.

While attitudes and behavior we now define as racist and sexist, etc. were embedded in the culture, they were not essential to the founding principles, and therefore its culture.  In fact progress was made partly by repeatedly invoking those principles.

 The culture enforced rules on political behavior not completely enshrined in law, through the consensual behavior we call tradition.  There was always jockeying for advantage, but all parties were forced to obey rules enforced by the political system itself, and the public will behind it.  The Supreme Court became the final arbiter, and its interpretations of the Constitution at times may have been met with consternation by some, but they were accepted.

 So for example, duly confirmed vote totals were accepted by losers as well as winners.  The presidency was a high moral as well as political office, and though the office was held by men of questionable ethics, even the hint of criminal behavior would doom a candidate from the start.

 More broadly, there was a consensus reality accepted by all (or nearly all), and an accepted set of tests that said what was a fact and what was not.  And there was plenty of fierce debate within these strictures and structures.

 So what the hell happened?  People with a longer memory or deeper knowledge of history may point to prior precedents, but in my lifetime, the Vietnam War era exposed falsehoods and corruption in government and related institutions that damaged the sense of legitimacy.

 Trusted elements of the federal government (supported by large businesses and elements of academia with a common self-interest) were found to be lying, when they were not simply ignoring facts.  The cost was paid in blood and resources.  War protesters challenged their legitimacy, both in themselves and in contrast to the cultural principles everyone said they believed in.

 This war protest all began with conscious use of the research of facts, of applying ethical standards and of analyzing and speculating on structures that were responsible.  But as time went on darker elements of the unconscious joined in, as some became more desperate to end the war, and transform society. There were excesses resulting in violence, and visions of conspiracies that might have been fruitful speculation but were characterized more by the emotional power of unjustified certainty.  Recognizing complexity and ambiguity just wasn’t very satisfying.

 It is important to note that for all its challenges to the legitimacy of the three branches of government, the antiwar movement mostly respected the established norms of process—of elections and judicial decisions. And from the beginning, it dealt in facts as well as interpretations of their meaning.

 I’m not going to even try to follow the ramifications over the decades, but it’s pretty clear that in 2024 that politically both sides have in startling ways become their opposites.  The previously conservative right, that defended the establishment against the hippies and leftists, has become the insurrectionist, conspiracy-pushing antiestablishment totalitarian hysterics (maintaining however a still pious regard for wealth), more extreme than all but the fringe of the New Left ever was.

 The flip is sometimes remarkable.  Conservative America and the medical establishment once could only scoff and stare when hippie lefty types droned on about health food and organic processes, plant-based medicine and foreign techniques like acupuncture, meditation and massage.  Now that elements of these radical practices are fairly standard in establishment medicine, advocates, practitioners and “influencers” on YouTube promote supposed natural remedies, and turn out to be among the right wing deniers of Covid vaccines, absorbed as a convenient article of faith on the new right.

  

The answer to the why question is probably in the area suggested last time: in the conflict between what they know has been done to their lives that’s not directly their fault, and the deep shame (however unjustified) and various inferiority feelings they nevertheless have and desperately repress, even from their own consciousness, as well as undifferentiated anger at their plight as perceived victims of injustice or a national turn towards "evil."

 Judging from what this segment is visibly eager to suppress or reverse, they feel particularly threatened by cultural changes that get grouped under the term of diversity. This trend that has been going on in fits and starts for generations has sometimes been accompanied by conflict and violence, but now it is met by political power.  The difference is that this power embraces non-democratic means, which in itself for Americans indicates a dangerous eruption from the unconscious, an increasingly organized hysteria.

 Probably none of this would have emerged so strongly had not they had real grievances that were ignored or belittled, and real basis for feeling shamed and excluded. Or if instead of being cowed by them and trying to avoid controversy, politicians had shown some vision and conviction, especially when they weren’t facing an immediate election. Those in other political niches have their own shadow problems, and until they (or we) deal with those, this won’t get better.

  To some extent, we all feel threatened by change.  How we evaluate those feelings in consciousness makes the difference.  Whether we project, or on the other hand, feel empathy; whether we act out, or act to accommodate change.

 That’s some of the “why.”  The answer to “how” is partly, and I would still say greatly, in their self-created Internet-linked cult, in which they find mutual support, outlets and forms for their repressed rage, even a special language, and a drug-like feeling of power which lifts them from a knowing helplessness.  Radio made Hitler and television made Trump, but the membership of the American Reich is being made via the Internet, its social media and its algorithms.  This is dangerous for any group, who must remain conscious of what all this evokes in them.

 In dynamic back and forth, Trump and opportunists of the Internet (with lots of help from Russian and Chinese trolls) define for their passionate if quickly substituted beliefs, cobbled together from confronting new situations with hysterical interpretations of old doctrine and the grimmest hits of the past, plus fantasies of rebellious early America and the bluster common to dictatorships and organized crime.

 The Internet links huge numbers of people who may be otherwise isolated, and the speed and intensity of the communication can take hold at a level below consciousness, urging people to more extreme views as their unstated membership fee.  Cult behavior is even more personal—members who deviate can become immediate exiles.

 Add to the more active hysteria the “low information voter” (who may or may not eventually vote) who has little basis for choice other than feelings, which are usually negative, emerging without filter from the shadow of the unconscious. They see Trump as the champion of their own shadow, now liberated to express itself without the effective cautions of institutional culture.  (Low information voters also used to vote based on party loyalty, but as party and other supporting mechanisms fade, there seems to be less of this.) 

 This feeling of shared beliefs and truths, of belonging, becomes more important when other sources of identity (like the steady job in a community of intact families) are failing.  There is also the rush of battling common cause and a common enemy that must always be renewed.  It’s similar to the pumped-up “outrage” that some on the opposite side can get from demonstrations etc. as well as internal group sessions.

 So in a broad political historical sense, the mostly justified distrust of political institutions in the 1960s and 70s may have set the template for those who wish to take over if not destroy those institutions, not to expand democracy and diversity (as the 60s radicals advocated) but to establish White authoritarian rule dominated by a certain, mostly dark kind of Christianity.  The American Reich is still a minority, but seems dangerously close to taking power in a more significant way.

 Responding to this distrust of those who defend these institutions, new standards has been applied to electing officials, so that today there are more members of Congress and Senators who are ideologically rigid and otherwise more ignorant, added to those whose moral sense stops at what is good for their party.  They are representatives of the shadow.  This ideological fervor and partisanship has most alarmingly infect the Supreme Court, now effectively corrupted and politicized in ways that clearly benefit the American Reich.

 However it is worth saying that while the culture of American civic institutions has been badly eroded, it has not been eradicated.  The New York jury that convicted Trump on the evidence presented is an example of it, as are the many election officials throughout the country that have stood up to the bullying of the American Reich.

  

In the 1950s, Jung expanded on the dynamics of culture, the individual and mass society, especially in the writings that were translated and published in the US as a book in 1958, The Undiscovered Self.  Jung’s discussion of religion as a cultural counterbalance raises too many complicated issues to address here, especially in view of how much has changed since then, and the different context of the US.  Here, the civic religion of Constitutional freedom and democracy was strong, and for at least much of my lifetime, pretty much in tandem with the ethical teachings of institutional religion. But now both are divisive and often at odds, especially as civic education itself has been weakened.

 Particularly when established religion is no longer the basis of a cultural consensus, Jung writes, it is up to the individual to do the work of confronting the unconscious with personal religious experience.  The individual, he writes “needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

 Jung believed that modern people are susceptible to mass suggestion also because they tend to be insufficiently grounded in nature.  Beyond a mention or two in his 1946 essay, he elaborates on this in other parts of his work, and again, the topic is too complex and fraught with a different contemporary significance to be more than just mentioned here.

 Jung realized that the intellectual tenor of the time made a certain kind of rationalism the standard of validity, and that all this talk of the unconscious and so on was likely to fall on deaf and perhaps embarrassed ears.  So his outlook for the future wasn’t optimistic: “The underestimation of the psychological factor is likely to take a bitter revenge.”

  We may want or need to ignore the insanity of what’s going on—it makes for clickable sensationalism, but it fits into the everyday decadence on the rest of the front page.  Most of the time we have to ignore it to stay sane.  But that very insanity ought to be telling us that there’s more going on here than can be explained in newspaper columns and cable television roundtables.

 Jung believed that the possibility of the destructive contents of the unconscious expressing themselves in a “collective possession” is always present in society, even in our supposedly enlightened, rational times.  Nuclear arsenals made this possibility infinitely more dangerous even in his time, and now, we can add climate distortion.

 In the best of times, he speculates, it is held back by “the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.”  He suggests an optimistic estimate of its upper limit is “about forty percent of the electorate.”

 Perhaps ordinary political strategies and voting patterns will result in at least holding back this hysteria from power in the next election.  But it may take more than that—it may require some scrutiny from a different perspective, a wider view of what is relevant, as well as what is at stake.