In the
Shadow of Mt. Rainier
At the University of Washington in Seattle, buildings have been
kept away from a line of sight that runs southeast from Drumheller
Fountain. On a good day, this provides a clear view of Mt. Rainier
about
80 miles away. When I was there in the early 70’s, good days were
rare, but after the rain has washed away the particulates and a
stiff wind had blown away the rain clouds, it shone
magnificently white in the pale coastal skies
Mt. Rainier is a dormant volcano, one of a chain that typically mark
places where one tectonic plate collides with another. As the
heavier plate sinks underneath the lighter one, it melts, creating
pressure on the overlying crust--enough pressure to blow holes in the
crust, which we call volcanoes. In this case the two plates are the
North American Plate, which is moving west at 2 or 3 inches a year,
forcing the Pacific Plate to dive under it, much as a the hood of a
sedan does when it collides with the rear end of a truck. This plate
business that we know very much about has only been going one for
200 million years or so, less than 25 percent of the earth’s history.
Before that, the western coast of the United States ended just across
the Idaho line in Washington, where it had been for long enough to form
a broad costal plain, much like our Eastern United States. When
the North American plate began to move, it first crumpled up that
coastal plain into what is called the Kootanay arc, a broad band
of folded rocks that begins in British Columbia and disappears in
southern Washington. Some say it re-emerges in California as the
Sierras.
Still moving west about 100 million years ago, North America met
a good-sized island called the Okanogan micro-continent. The resulting
collision formed a chain of volcanoes running through the middle of the
state. Those volcanoes spewed out large rocks that still litter
the state. About 50 million years ago, the advancing continent ran up
against a second island called the North Cascade micro-continent
and the process repeated itself: oceanic plate driven under the lighter
continental plate leaving a chain of volcanoes to mark the edge,
including Rainier, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and, of course Mt. St. Helens.
Finally, the advancing continent lifted up a huge chunk of ocean floor
that we call the Olympics. There are no more islands handy for
North American to annex but eventually there will be. Its name will be
California, which is detaching itself along the San Andreas fault and
will eventually move north until it hits Alaska. I see no reason why
California could not become the fourth annex to Washington.
______________________________
Within the first few weeks after I moved to Seattle with my family, I
had a dream in which I walked through a city. Its streets were full of
decadence and chaos. Livid creatures invited my embrace and I was not
repulsed. I woke with a deep sense of release and contentment,
and I knew I would never feel as desperate as I had at Columbia
Basin. Cities have always given me this sense of freedom because
I think that in a city, anything can happen: any doorway could reveal
whole worlds. But in reality, that has never been the case. I have
actually been in cities, seeking adventure, I have found only boredom.
I have wandered into bars, ordered a drink, and waited for adventure to
unfold. But always, after watching the television and nursing a beer in
utter loneliness, I have gone back to my rooms, convinced that
if there are whole worlds behind closed doors in the city, to
find them, you need a guide
My oldest son was three and the youngest only a few months when
we moved into student housing in Seattle, pleasant duplexes several
miles from the campus. They had been built during the war, in a grove
old trees. I generally rode my bicycle to school and chained it to a
railing in the parking lot which sat about half-way up the hill to
the campus. My office was on the third floor of Padelford
Hall, which was then a new and handsomely appointed building
exclusively for English faculty and graduate student offices . It sat
perched above the eastern edge of the campus, like a European
castle. From the parking lot there was an escalator, covered by
plexiglass, that took you the rest of the way up. Once my feet were
safely planted on the moving stairs, I could turn around and gaze out
over Husky Stadium and Lake Washington—over dark green evergreens, blue
water, grey sky. Often there would be a spattering of rain on the
plexiglass so the whole scene would be drenched in moist northern
beauty, like a muted scene from a Bergman film--austere, yet luminous
with possibility.
During those rides, I thought a lot about how I came to be there and
whether I deserved it. I was 32 but I did not know what I was capable
of. Some days I would feel my dreams were coming true and
deserved to come true. From adolescence on, I had fantasies about
my intelligence. I can remember walking around the little town of
Ennis, tending my 4-H sheep in the back yard, imagining that I
could remember everything that had happened to me, or even that
in some mysterious way, I knew everything. I would imagine
myself on the radio show, The Quiz Kids, firing out the answers,
even though when I had listened to it, I didn’t now very many answers
at all.
To this day, it still surprises me when I don’t know something
and I will sometimes catch myself faking an answer rather than saying I
don’t know. When I started graduate school in San Francisco and
could finally immerse myself in literature, I fantasized that my mind
would explode in a great creative outburst and that things like
Dickens novels would begin to flow from my fingers. My 30th birthday (a
wonderful surprise party arranged by my wife and friends) was deeply
shocking to me, because I had heard that if someone had not won the
Noble Prize by the time they were 30, they would never do so. I had
written almost nothing but graduate papers, but when I did write poems,
they seemed to me so profound that I was surprised when I got back
rejection letters from magazines.
But as quickly my false self-confidence could change to self-loathing,
to a feeling of being an excrescence and a burden to the world. So some
rides up the escalator would be fantasies of another sort: that I would
be found out, that the taxpayers in Washington would find out that
their handsome office building and their wonderful covered
escalator were being fraudulently occupied by a confused and mediocre
boy who had come down out of the mountains without an idea in his head.
It was the same wherever I went on campus. The older part of the
Suzallo Library had high, stained glass windows exactly like a
cathedral. I had a study carrel in the newer part—my own little table
where I could keep books on carrel check-out. No one would bother
them, and I would go there every day to study, gazing out with awe and
gratitude across the campus where students walked along asphalt paths
under the huge evergreen trees. How was it that of all the people
in the world, most of them smarter than I, had I been selected to
have this bounty rain down on my miserable carcass?
I had no way to think about abilities in term of “gifts” or “calling.”
I had no altar before which to lay my abilities or my ambitions. I had
no way to submit my abilities to any tempering agency. I had nothing to
fall back on except the American Dream—that ambition and hard work will
carry the day. I still vaguely thought that people who wrote brilliant
books did it all by hard work and that if I worked hard enough, I would
write them too.
But I began to have a clue. For the first time I was around people who
knew more than I could imagine anyone learning by sheer
diligence. There might be such a thing as genius. In Padelford Hall
there was a lounge where professors and graduate students gathered for
coffee and academic gossip. Sometimes among the professors, academic
games would spontaneously break out, like rhyme capping, where
one person says a line of famous poetry and other says the second line,
or failing that, a line from the same poem, which the first then caps
with the next line from that passage. Some of these people were
not long out of graduate school—with perhaps only three or four years
more training than I. Dimly, I suspected that I would not be able
to do things like that, ever. When we talked about
things I had studied recently and even taught, their casual
knowledge outstripped my carefully acquired hoard that I knew was
slipping away even as we talked.
The demon self-loathing sometimes expanded until it filled my mind so
that I could hardly get my work done, though never to the point it had
when I lived inland. Once, the record will show, I consulted with the
counseling service at the University. When I called for an appointment,
I can remember the crisp voice asking, “Do you consider yourself an
emergency.” Clearly she was following a routine worked out over a long
period of time, and I felt comforted knowing that I was just one of a
vast hoard of distraught people with a complaint so common that worn
routines had been devised to process us. Before I kept my
appointment, I tried another stint of writing, this time beginning what
I thought might become—and did become—a novel. I felt immediate relief,
and when I reported this to the doctor at my appointment, he said the
obvious: “Well if that helps, you should do more of it.”
While I was confronting my private demons, the the 60’s broke upon us
all, in four waves: Viet Nam, Civil Rights, the Youth Movement, and
Feminism. Each of them affected me and each became part of my
conversation with God.
The Viet Nam protest movement was the most dramatic on the
surface. The protesters considered the University part of the “war
machine,” and vowed to shut it down. They barricaded the streets at
dawn but the police simply took the barricades down before the first
class. The protesters would march by hundred across campus,
chanting “Shut it down, Shut it down.” Sometimes they would come into
campus building and trash a classroom, flinging desks and overhead
projectors about. Once they came into a building where I was attending
my class in 14th century English poetry, on the fourth floor. A
pale young man was explicating an obscure poem, and his voice grew
higher and higher as the hoards mounted, floor by floor. In a
painful squeak, he said, “I don’t feel very comfortable.”
The professor, a brilliant medievalist who was known as a heavy
drinker, said, “Well I don’t suppose any of us do, but does anyone
share my conviction that we should keep going as long as we can.” We
nodded and the pale young man went on glossing vocabulary from the 14th
century--the century of the plague and the 100 Years War, the century
that saw the end of feudalism, the end of chivalry, the end of
Scholasticism, perhaps the most violent century in Western history
until the 20th. The crowd came to the floor below ours and
then turned back.
At the time, I thought of a picture in my Compton’s Pictured
Encyclopedia, of Archimedes sitting in a tent, staring at a diagram
sketched in the sand. A soldier looks through the door of the tent, his
short sword drawn. The caption says,” Don’t disturb my circles”
(in Latin, Noli turbare circulos meos), the words the geometer was
supposed to have said before he was killed in Syracuse about 212 BC by
a soldier who did not know who he was.
No doubt the professor thought of himself as defending the
continuity of knowledge against barbarian invasion. And through him, we
probably thought the same way. But mostly we were simply focused on the
job we had to do—to pass the courses, get the degree, get a job,
support our families. I was against the war too, and even wrote a
letter to a congressman, but I had a wife and two small children to
support and my first loyalty was to them and not to a cause no matter
how noble. I was still in the Navy reserves and could have been
called up if the Navy had been short of mediocre steam engineers.
I thought it through and decided I would go if I were called but that I
would not think about it any more.
Once the protesters took over a building for a few hours, across the
street from my office. “Throw us masking tape,” one of the
protesters shouted out a window, and students ran to the bookstore to
get them masking tape. They used it to tape X’s in the windows to
protect themselves from shattered glass in case the police lobbed
tear-gas in. They—and we--waited for the police to come, but they knew
how to play a waiting game. A young man beside me finally said, “Screw
this. I have to go do my laundry.” He left to do his laundry, and I
went back to my office. The protesters also went home a few hours
later. A few months later, Nixon ended the draft and the whole Viet Nam
protest movement collapsed overnight, revealing what I had suspected
all along—that the protestors’ energy had always had a large
component of self-interest. Still the protesters had led President
Johnson not to run a second time, and the war probably did end sooner
that it would have without the protest movement.
The Civil rights movement has always claimed more of my energies
than Viet Nam. In San Francisco, my first wife and I had volunteered
our time on Saturday afternoons to go into the Fillmore district to
take Black children on outings designed to help them learn to
read. We did this by checking out books on zoos or the Golden Gate
Bridge and then taking the children to these places and reading the
books to them onsite. Many of them did not understand that print
ran from left to right across the page, and I cannot believe we helped
them much to read, but I know that they and their mothers were
grateful, because I saw it in their eyes, and we were all sad when the
young black leaders ended the project, announcing at a tense meeting
that whatever we might be doing for the children’s reading
skills, our white values were doing something worse.
At my first teaching job, I had been a member of CORE (the Congress of
Racial Equality) and had marched in the streets of Kennewick,
Washington, demanding that the city pass fair housing laws, which they
did. I also organized a Black Students Union and—absurdly—served at its
first faculty adviser. This experience got noticed at Seattle by
William Irmscher, the Director of Composition and head of what was then
called the Educational Opportunity Program, the EOP. He offered me a
job in the program, and I took it. In this program—ubiquitous in 60’s
universities—normal admission requirements were waived for Black,
Native American Students, a few White students from poverty households,
and Hispanics (who were then called Chicanos). Once in the
University, they were housed in separate wings of dorms and enrolled in
classes together, including special sections of Freshman English,
taught by a cadre of sympathetic graduate students.
We were given two-weeks of special training by Dr. Irmscher and his
assistant, a stunning Black woman named Jean Hundley. We had an
anthology, called Mixed Bag, with splashy graphics and selections
by Lee Roi Jones, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and other
minority writers. We seemed to believe that as students would
become literate as they became revolutionary.
The summer after my first year of EOP teaching, I got hired to teach in
Upward Bound, an even more idealistic and demanding program. It
took promising high school juniors from the inner city and housed them
for eight weeks in the summer in a fraternity house with live-in
counselors. They got food, books, and a small stipend for clothes.
University professors and a few graduate students were hired to teach
them history, math, and English. One of the professors was Roger
Sale, the most intelligent man who ever took an interest in me.
After I got a teaching job in North Dakota, I invited him there three
times to speak. When he retired at the age of 67 he included
North Dakota in his retirement Odyssey. He later shared his notes from
Bible as Literature class when I was assigned that course again late in
my teaching career. His kindliness, diligence, and wit have been
a continual blessing for more than 30 years.
He was my mentor through those 8 weeks, and I cannot imagine how I
would have made it without him. Even with him, I barely survived.
Rousted out by the counselors, the students arrived at my
classroom at 8 in the morning, many of them groggy or hostile.
The room was like a small amphitheatre where the students sat in two’s
and three’s at long tables bolted to tiers of risers. Many
immediately put their heads down and went to sleep. Others stared at me
in heavy-lidded hostility. As in the EOP, the Chicanos were generally
the most cooperative. The Native Americans, “habituated to despair” in
Roger’s phrase, simply sat in silence until they were called to the
reservation for a funeral. Most never came back. One lanky and
muscular Black student called himself Harold the Pimp. With his
first stipend, he bought himself a broad fedora and fancy bell-bottoms.
Students were not allowed to carry knives but it was rumored that
Harold found ways to do so.
He managed to turn every writing assignment into a sarcastic critique
of my clothes and mannerisms. I thought it my duty to absorb a
certain amount of this as just punishment for the sins all White
people, but I did draw the line at behavior that disrupted other
students who were trying to learn. While other students were writing in
class, Harold would move among them, engaging light conversation. After
a few days of this, I asked him to stop. When he didn’t I asked him to
leave.
From the back of the room, he looked at me and said, “What are you
going to do if I don’t. “ Without thinking, I said, “I guess I’ll throw
you out.” “I guess you will have to do that, then,” he said. Without
thinking, I jumped up on the first row of tables and began to leap from
table to table toward the back corner of the room where he stood.
I did not know what I was going to do when I got there, and I did not
care. I was in a fog, as I suppose people are in battle, moving on
instinct, prepared on some level die but only wanting at that moment to
obliterate my enemy. At the last second, Harold turned and fled
out the door. I got down off the table and walked back to the front of
the room and asked if anyone else wanted to leave or needed help doing
so. No one did, and the lessons went on without incident, even
after Harold was allowed to return a few days later.
After my second year of teaching in EOP—a year after my teaching Upward
Bound--I was tagged to write a handbook for the program and
enthusiastically produced a manuscript so full of typo’s that Dr.
Irmscher summoned me to his office, scolded me roundly, removed
me from the program and sent me back to teaching upper-class White
students for my last year of graduate studies. But evidently his
secretary was able to salvage my work, because a clean
document emerged, and I still have a copy in the files.
Cleaned up, it seems to me like decent work. In it, I reproduce
verbatim one student’s work through the whole semester, with my
comments at the time and then in retrospect. I also talk a lot
about White guilt, which was always an important part of this teaching
and of the whole 60’s landscape and of the spiritual development I am
trying to describe. Those of us teaching illiterate minority students
had to ask: Were we teaching students to be fluent in the
language of the culture that was responsible for their illiteracy, to
say nothing of the war in Viet Nam, a war directed, as we saw it
against Brown people. We struggled every day with the possibility
that the logic of Standard English--the crisp subordination of major to
minor points, the insistence on unity, coherence, and
emphasis, the attention to analysis and nomenclature, the obsession
with the thesis sentence--was also at the heart of the war and the
racism and a dozen other social ills daily described in the underground
press.
The manuscript describes how, when I was teaching in Upward Bound, “I
still believed that non-white persons had through their status as
victims earned certain ‘rights’ one of which was the right to humiliate
white teachers more or less at will.“ I chose a less dramatic event to
narrate than my tiff with Harold, but I was thinking of his
abuse, which I had defended at the time by saying, “He need victories.
I don’t.” Then I went on:
That may have been true, but the deeper truth was that whatever
pleasure they could get from trivial victories over me would do them
far less good than some skill in knowing how to write. And because my
strategy was based on how much I could bleed rather than how much I
could teach, it was largely ineffective and terribly painful as well.
It had taken me a painful year to arrive at what now seems
self-evident: academic prose is not responsible for racism and can be a
weapon against it.
Because I had no deeper terms in which to analyze problems like this,
every passing social and moral issue became a muddy pond where I
floundered around until the next issue came along. Because I
could not think in theological terms, political and psychological terms
became absolute by default. Because I could not see racism as
evil, I had to see it as the result of American culture or the
conventions of academic prose. Because I could not see political
issues in any larger framework, I could not accept partial solutions. I
could not be content to teach as well as I could the skills that I had
been hired to teach and that most of society believed useful. I had to
believe that society had to become perfect before students could write
adequately. Because I could not identify with my students as children
of God, or as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, I had to
identify with them as victims. In the process I had to silently
repudiate my employers and the culture that had produced me. and
feel myself drawn down into a vortex of hypocrisy and
self-loathing.
My work in these minority programs led me to attend Black protest
marches and rallies, which alternated on campus with the Viet Nam
protest events. When the University scheduled a game
against BYU, whose sponsor, the Mormon Church, would not allow Blacks
to be elders, the Black Student Union called a rally in the ballroom of
the Student Union to organize a march across campus. The administration
had let it be known that small army of police were known to be
gathered in the basement of the administration building. It was
an hour when I didn’t have class so I went. I was eager to be part of
history, but I sat near a door so I could get out if violence
started. There were dozens of thug-like young men carrying
lengths of bicycle chain and short pieces of timber. All the Blacks
wore sunglasses. The president of the BSU, an elegant man in a leather
jacket, stood up and everyone grew silent. “I didn’t come here to fight
cops,” he said. “I’m going home.” Everyone went home.
Still, a few months later, the Moron church elders had a vision and
declared that Blacks could be elders after all.
My last bit of minority work came the summer before I left for North
Dakota when I was hired by the University Medical School to help teach
minority students for whom the usual academic requirements had been
waived. There were no Harold the Pimps here. These were hard-working,
ambitious students with at least some college, though without training
in the sciences. A brilliant Jewish medical researcher, named
David, headed up the program. Students took special classes that summer
in anatomy and biology to prepare them for the standard classes they
would take that fall. I attended these classes with the students,
taught a special section of study skills, and offered tutoring.
As usual, I loved the new challenge and threw myself into it, devouring
books on study skills, picking up surface knowledge of
anatomy and pathology, roaming the halls of the vast medical
school, peering into laboratories (including the terrifying
vivisection labs), attending demonstrations in the dissection
lab. I believed in the program and the students believed in me.
In fact, they believed so much in study skills (including “test taking
skills”) that I had to continually remind them that the most
important test-taking skill was to learn the material. Again, I
produced a kind of handbook, called Teaching Minority Students in
Medical School, which is still in my files.
I left at the end of the summer as my cadre of a dozen students was
about to start their classes. I learned later from David that most of
them had dramatically and traumatically failed almost all of those
classes. One student had lost the power of speech and was not
normal yet. David had shut the program down, driven to the position
that no amount of supplemental teaching and support could
help students learn material they did not have the background or
capacity to learn. “If you don’t have it, you don’t have it,” was
the way he put it.
I was sad about this, but I understood how it could be. I had seen the
personalities of some of my hardest working students distort as they
accommodated themselves to the academic culture. They entered the
program genial and relaxed if somewhat illiterate, and they emerged
tight and driven, though more illiterate. A hard-working Black
professor—a Chaucer specialist--suffered a heart attack and died during
those years. Success in the white world seemed to take it toll on
Blacks.
I have never thought my way through to the bottom of this, and it may
not have a bottom. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to prove that
these “catch up” programs for minority students “worked” well enough to
justify their expense. Probably they did in the minds of some and not
in the minds of others. In the end, we must act on principle. It
is good to lift up the poor and ignorant, and these programs did that.
Kindness and compassion are good things, and these were kind and
compassionate programs. It is good to rectify injustice and these
programs sought to do that. It is a good thing to help people learn to
read and write if they wish to do so, and if they cannot do that in
ordinary contexts, then it is a good thing—within reason—to create new
contexts. The money for programs like Upward Bound and EOP had to come
from programs for well-prepared white students, but I would be
surprised if anyone could prove that society was damaged by these
transfers of funds.
But if we ask why the poor and ignorant should be lifted up or why
social injustices should be set right, the answer may not be
self-evident. Certainly many ancient societies—including Greece and
Rome--did not believe any such thing and he hkonor them for other
achievements. Societies that do minister most to the poor and ignorant
seem to me are those most touched by the ethics embedded in the Old
Testament. Through that clotted mass of dietary and ritual laws
runs, uniquely, a thread of concern for the widows and orphans
the beggars and the outcast. If we ask why we should care for these
people, the answer seems to be that when many people over many years
read the Hebrew Scriptures, they were struck by the rightness of those
efforts. In other words, it has been revealed to us in sacred texts
that these things are good. I would have violently rejected any such
notion of revelation then, though I would not have been able to set my
beliefs on any firmer ground than that most of my friends believed
them. In fact the idea of absolute values grounded in revelation
seems odd to me even now, though I was found it eloquently developed
in C. S. Lewis’s compelling book, The Education of
Man.
But again the general principle seems to hold true: from one side of a
line, things look one way; from the other side of the line, things look
another, but there is no way to reason up to the line and then on
through it because whatever you use for reason will be dictated by the
side of the line you are on. When I was a secularist, I thought as a
secularist , I reasoned as an secularist. But then I put away
secular things, not because of any reasoning process but because I
found myself in acute personal despair and I wanted, at almost any
cost, to think in some other way. The non-secular way of thinking was
standing ready, having been kept intact by generations of the faithful,
so I stepped across the line and began.
In general, society approved of the Civil Right movement and the Viet
Nam protest movements, and so I turned out to be on the right side of
those issues, historically, But I cannot claim any great political
acumen. I went with the flow as most people do, holding pretty much the
same political views as everyone around me did. I had no gift
for--or no temptation toward—intense political passion. Political
issues never appear to me starkly etched. The left stands for equality
and the right for freedom. Those are both good values and the American
political system seems pretty well designed to hold them in tension.
There always seem to me good people on both sides of most political
issues and any attempt to choose sides seems to alienate me from side
or the other and to result in oversimplification, reductive
thinking, name-calling, and caricature that does violence to the
personalities of those who take another position. I often find myself
arguing with people with whom I fundamentally agree just because the
arguments they make to support my position seem so uncharitable or
simplistic.
The Youth Movement has, it seems to me, fared less well
historically. Certainly it was less overtly political and had more
religious overtones, so it drew me more into its center. Timothy
Leary had spoken at the University of Washington the week before I
arrived to begin graduate school. I read the accounts of his appearance
in the University paper as I walked along what was called “The Ave,” a
commercial district catering to college students a block from
campus. It teemed with theaters showing avaunt garde films, shops
selling drug paraphernalia, colorful clothing, witty posters,
second-hand books, and organic food. Street vendors on every corner
sold an underground newspaper called The Helix, with articles
explaining how a family could live on $15 a month, eating oatmeal and
mooching off one’s friends. Once or twice in each block, I would be
approached by a skinny kid asking if I wanted to buy some pot.
For a boy who had grown up in small mountain towns, trained to be a
chemist, joined the Navy, and then taken on the responsibility of wife
and children--all without drawing a reflective breath—it was heady
stuff.
Turn on, Mr. Leary said, Tune in, Drop out. But the way he (and the
underground newspapers, and much of the commercial media as well)
explained it, the “turn on” offered by drugs was simply a way of
tuning in to the music of the spheres that Plato heard and Pythagoras
before him. Drugs were just a condensed symbol a wider
consciousness that humankind has been seeking since it had any
consciousness at all. Dropping out did not mean irresponsibility,
it meant stepping out of the rat race, Everyone agreed the rat race was
bad. The only disagreement was over whether or not it was
necessary. In the glow of the zeitgeist, It was easy enough to
believe that all that we had been taught about having to get up in the
morning and go off to a dreary job was a bill of goods sold to us by
capitalists slave merchants who wanted our labor. If everyone simply
quit doing it, nothing bad would happen. Somehow the garbage would be
collected and streets fixed by people who liked doing that, or perhaps
everyone would feel like chipping in, once they had been freed. Eden
could be recreated. Original sin was just a kind of silly
misunderstanding, a wrong turn that could easily be set right.
And I did more than half believe it.
And if I could half believe it at the age of 32, having served three
years in the Armed Forces, having traveled over half the world, and
having two children and wife at home, it is easy to see how people ten
years younger, without the responsibilities of a family and without
wide experience in the world could embrace it fully. In the late 60’s
and early 70’s, , the baby boomers born after the war were passing into
their late teen’s and early twenty’s. Millions of innocent children
walked the land ready to listen to the pied pipers ready to tell them
that sex was for free and that ordinary consciousness was a drag.
Within the confines of the academic and journalistic world (who carry
large megaphones), the culture went a little off the rails. I remember
the columnist John Roche writing, sometime in the mid 70’s that “the
whole country went on a moral bender from 1968-1972.” Several things
contributed to that moral bender: The Pill, that made possible new
levels of promiscuity; LSD and the accompanying rationale for
conscience altering; The War protest movement, which brought young
people together.
Having lived through it, I can begin to understand how the political
leadership of Germany could have undertaken to exterminate all the Jews
in Europe,, How could Christendom have launched the
Crusades. Sometimes cultures go off the rails, taking people with
them. Perhaps there are cultural hormones analogous to physical ones.
Just as a person can become so intent on possessing a member of the
opposite sex that they will do unreasonable things, so the
zeitgeist can become so powerful that it becomes possible to think
things that later seem unthinkable. Or perhaps some cultural ideas
spread like an infection through television and popular media. It
could happen again. Perhaps it is more possible now than it was when
sub-cultures were more isolated.
To put the best face on it, one could say that the Youth Movement
had a religious dimension. It was connected the to deep mythical truth
embodied in the Book of Genesis. Our hopes for
recovering that Lost Eden lie so close to the surface that a
technological discovery (such as the Pill) is enough to
bring them to the surface. The book of Genesis--and Milton after
that--confirms our deep sense that humankind was “meant” to live in
peace and abundance. Our default setting is to love, but we seem never
able to revert to it. On some level, we know that half our
frustration with life comes not from its waste and brokenness itself
but from the sense that waste and brokenness is unnecessary.
The collection of half-truths called the Youth Movement appealed
directly to this very universal recognition that we are potentially
much more than we are most of the time.
Put in theological terms, it is all straight-forward. Humankind
was created to live in intensity and harmony. It fell into
sin but could still catch glimpses of the radiant world. Then, as
Blake says, in the juvenescence of the year, came Christ
the Tiger establishing something called the Kingdom of God. By becoming
citizens of this kingdom (that is, by becoming disciples of Christ), we
can have a larger access to our unfallen state and a larger measure of
the Holy Spirit and hope for a future when we will be fully
restored to it. All the esthetics, all the
morality, all the mysticism, all self-help mumbo jumbo I was
trying so hard to cram into my head, now seem to me to be confused but
well-intentioned glosses on this doctrine. I was, as Auden
says somewhere, trying to spell God with the wrong alphabet.
Everyone desires to know the mind of God and do His will, but
when this desire is not acknowledged and made explicit, it can become
perverted into a desire to become master of all we survey. The
Youth Movement took my legitimate desire to grow into the image of God
and made of it a Faustian desire to enter a higher realm, to
become a different person, with a powerful mind and silver tongue.
Everywhere at the University, I heard people talking in
gracefully shaped paragraphs. I wanted to talk like that, to have the
sentences cascading over my teeth, dancing with insight and wit.
I was aware that much of the time my own conversation stammered
or smoldered in resentful silence. By the time I had thought of
something to say on one topic, the talk had moved on to something else.
I could never catch up. I have not caught up yet.
The prescribed reading and the assigned papers, though I enjoyed doing
them and did them well enough, did not seem to light the fire I wanted
to feel, so I kept my eyes peeled for extra-curricular sources of
inspiration. I discovered a book edited by Carl Jung, called Man
and His Symbols and cut my classes for a day to read it. Jung taught
that our Collective Unconscious is the source of dreams, art, and the
highest reaches of abstract thought. He taught what Plato taught, that
beyond the hum-drum of this cave we call the world is a higher world
vibrant with beauty and truth, and we can enter this world through
concentration, desire, and discipline. I had read other books with the
same intensity and hope. At San Francisco, it had been the work of I.A.
Richards, that charming materialist who believed that reading
poetry tuned the brain; reading it, one could become better at skiing.
It was easy to believe there might be short-cuts, namely drugs. I had
never smoked pot, and when one of my students found me out, he
immediately gave me a free baggie with a little cartoon illustrating
the technique. I tried it, sitting in my office in Padelford Hall.
Without a social context, it was meaningless and I knew it was illegal
and could get me fired, so I never did it again. I even dallied with
the idea of taking LSD after some of the graduate school reading had
led me to believe that it might help to destroy the veil of familiarity
that obscured the deeper reaches of truth. In that case I was wise
enough to talk it over with my best friend at graduate school, Robert
Barton, whose brother had been my boss at Columbia Basin. In a long
conversation over coffee in the Student Union (I could point to the
table), Bob demolished my fevered logic in a few deft strokes and I was
never tempted again. Bob later gassed himself in his own car—as I had
fantasized doing—but before he died, he pulled me back from that
particular abyss, and I am grateful.
If I had been single, I might have succumbed. My family served the
function that Bacon assigned them in his famous essay: they were my
hostages to fortune. Pot was accessible and I suppose adultery was too
(though I never looked very hard), but I never forgot I had a
wife and children back in student housing. Diapers needed
changing. Medicine had to be administered for the constant round of
respiratory infections we all suffered in the Seattle damp. We were
living on the VietNam GI Bill and my Teaching Assistant Salary, about
$650 a month total. I might have liked to get high on pot, read Mao Tse
Tung and enjoy promiscuous sex, but that seemed incompatible with
caring for my children and achieving the very practical goal of getting
credentialed so I could get a job. If I had been born in 1947 instead
of 1937, might have succumbed. If I had not grown up in little mountain
towns—Big Timber, Crow, Ennis (especially Ennis) and I might have
succumbed. I escaped by the skin of my teeth.
In due time, I began my dissertation. Dissertation is a peculiar word.
It means to discuss formally, but its etymology suggests the opposite:
dis = away and serere = connect. In many ways it was a disconnecting
experience, though I am glad I completed it. From the beginning, I had
hoped I would do something with the poet Theodore Roethke.
I heard about him first in San Francisco State at a showing of a film
called In a Dark Time. It had been directed by David Myers and
released in 1963 just after Roethke’s death, and it puts poem of that
name at the center of a visual commentary on his work. I was completely
taken by the film and the poem and have carried parts of of the poem
around in my head ever since. At the time, the line “What’s madness but
nobility of soul at odds with circumstance” seemed wise as well as
euphonious. I knew that Roethke had lived in Seattle and
partly for that reason chose the University of Washington when I
decided to return to graduate school to study for the Ph.D.
Roetheke had made a living as a teacher at Bennington and then at the
University of Washington, but he was famous as one of the
confessional poets of his generation—poets like Lowell, and
Berryman and Plath, and Ann Sexton who been in and out of mental
institutions and who had used their neuroses as material for their art.
Berryman and Plath and Sexton had killed themselves. Roethke had died
in a friend’s swimming pool, evidently of a heart attack, but after a
years of consuming alcohol and prescription drugs at sufficiently
self-destructive levels to make him an honorary member of the club. By
the time I got to the Universtiy, Roethke had been dead six years but
his ghost haunted the place. He grew his poems out of elaborate
notebooks, and hundreds of those were stored in neat boxes and shelved
in of in a humidity controlled vault in the basement of the
Suzallo Library along drafts of his poems, his letters, his grade
books, even a pair of his shoes.
Many of the teachers in Seattle had known him, and everyone had a
story, even, Robert Heilman, the grand old man of New Criticism,
who was then coming to the end of his term as chair of the department.
At his annual party for the new graduate students, he told us how at
one of these gatherings, Roethke had begun to systematically pull pots
from the kitchen cupboards and fling them across the room. When
nothing—including his wife-- could pacify him, they called the cops who
took him away in handcuffs. At another party, a faculty wife described
in hushed tones how at the end of long parties in the 50’s, when
everyone was dazed with drink and fatigue, Roethke would begin long
brilliant monologues, riffing on the zeitgeist from every level from
the cosmic on down to the living room where he sat.
Roethke’s own illness probably went beyond neuroses into some version
of manic-depressive disorder. The most characteristics descriptions are
of him leaping on the desk and mowing down his students with his
arms held to simulate a tommy gun or of going on shopping sprees where
he would charge elaborate gifts for his friends, who would have
to take them back.
For me, and for many readers, the important thing about Roethke was
that he had been able to use his mental anguish as material for
poetry. Most of his early poems are about keeping the lid on despair
with a kind of stoic resolve. The middle ones draw on Roetheke’s
experience growing up in Saginaw, Michigan where his father ran a
greenhouse. Those poems use a kind of primitive language to
compare new growth (“the cut and wrestle of dry sticks”) to the
emergence of a personality from torpor and torment. The later
more meditative poems, he puts suffering into a spiritual context and
makes it part of the cycle of purgation and exaltation analogous to the
mystical experience of St. John of the Cross, whom he read
deeply. Naturally, I found Roethke kind of a soul-mate. I had
found that writing—specifically literary writing—generated a kind of
metaphorical balm that could pull me out of crippling anxiety. I
thought I had the same raw material as he did and perhaps could
do the same in my own terms.
But there was more. There were dark hints that he might have
actually cultivated the mental illness before he used as a
source for his art. He says at one point, “I pray for the death of
common sense.” I began to find evidence that had sacrificed (or at
least been willing to sacrifice) his sanity in order to break
into the metaphorical armory refrigerator door handle.
Clearly Roethke had been influenced by the romantic stories of the
French Symbolists, especially Verlaine and Rimbaud, homosexual
lovers who quarreled violently during the time they traveled together
in Europe in the 1870’s. Rimbaud had advocated the practice of
disarranging all the senses in order to break free from the prison of
ordinary reality. Roethke quotes Rimbaud and talks specifically about
some of the ways of doing this disarranging—going without sleep for
example. or staring at an ordinary object--like a refrigerator door
handle--while free associating metaphors for it. Thus mental
suffering becomes the price one pays for art, and those who are
unwilling to pay it consign themselves to bourgeois mediocrity and,
eventually, the death of the soul. Thus my own episodic suffering
was not something to be overcome but rather a badge of honor that
aligned me with Roethke and beyond him, no doubt, with Van Gogh,
Dostoyevsky and Michaelangelo.
By an active of creative misreading, I found encouragement in the very
readable biography of Roethke, The Glass House, by Allan Seager,
published in 1968, the year before I arrived in Seattle. In an
appendix, Seager, elaborates on Roethke’s second hospitalization for
mental illness, in 1946, and cites the work of a Polish
psychiatrist named Casimeirz Dabrowski, who published a book called
Positive Disintegration in 1964. As I reread the appendix now, I see
that Seager is attemping to explain the structure of
Roethke’s long and obscure poem, The Lost Son, not offering an
comprehensive theory of creativity. I see now, too, that Seager
ends the appendix by quoting Roethe’s wife, Beatrice: “When Ted
and I were first married, he thought it (mental illness) might be a
requisite, but over a period of years, he revised his thinking about
this, I believe. What are generally thought of as his best poems were
written when he was well and out of the hospital.” But in
1972, I passed over all that and focused on Seager’s paraphrase
of Dabrowski’s argument:
Stimulated by a lack of harmony in the self and in adaptation to the
strains of the external environment, the individual “disintegrates.”
Anxiety, neurosis, psychosis, may be symptoms of the disintegration and
they mark a retrogression to a lower level of psychic functioning.
Finally reintegration occurs at a higher level and the personality
evolves to anew plateau of psychic health. Dabrowski points out that
these new integrations of at the ”higher “ levels seem to happen to
people of high intelligence and marked creative powers.
Thus mental anguish could lead not only to artistic fulfillment but to
more profound and subtle personality. With such rewards waiting,
why should anyone not want to be miserable? This all fit perfectly into
the dark metaphysic that I was constructing for myself ever since the
1950’s in which my enemy was a mortgage and white picket fence and my
coat of arms bore the motto “shock the bourgeoisie.”
Surely all this could be made into a dissertation. My initial topic had
been to define an “esthetic of the Northwest” somehow integrating
Roethke imagery with the painting of Mark Rothko and the Native
American totem carving. I spent weeks studying geography and looking at
rainfall charts, but even I could see that was going nowhere, and
so I was happy to throw myself into a more outlandish
project—an “investigation” of the relation of mental illness to
art, with a focus on Roethke. My advisers should never have allowed me
to pursue either of these topics, of course. Even people
far more brilliant and less confused than I would not have been able to
do them in a lifetime, let alone in the compass of a
dissertation. Indeed neither one has been done yet. But the
60’s still reigned. The underground newspapers were willing to say
explicitly that all students could be Shakespeare if they would
only follow their bliss, and even sensible professors, such as my
adviser, must have half believed it and allowed students to wander
around in topics far over their head, sometimes for years.
About this time, one adviser (Richard Hauck) and then a second (Robert
Hudson) left to take positions in the East, so I wound up
on the hands of a sensible man, Richard Blessing, who took one look at
the garbled mess I had written and said, “Let’s do something with the
poetry, George. After all, what’s important about the man is that he
was a poet and we have access to the collection here.” So I spent
the next three or four months—five or six hours a day—in those humidity
controlled vaults, copying page after page of notes of the Roethke
papers on my portable Smith Corona, since Xeroxing was forbidden. I had
no focus, so I did not know what I was looking for and simply typed up
anything that struck my fancy. Those notes sit on my shelf yet—150
single-spaced pages. I hastily scribbled some kind of formless text,
which Dr. Blessing could only shake his head. But by then it was
time to bundle it all up, along with our shabby furniture and to go to
my new job in the Great Plains.
I had interviewed at Minot State College in North Dakota on my way back
from the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago in
December of 1971. This conference, held in December every year,
was known as the meat market. Probably it still is. Its
ostensible purpose is to allow scholars to exchange cutting edge
information in the field, but departments also used it to recruit new
faculty. In those days, there were no electronic clearing
houses on which actual openings could be posted. Graduate students
simply wrote letters—hundreds of them--to every college and university
where they thought they might have a chance. Many didn’t respond at all
and most said they had no openings, but a few offered at interview at
the MLA.
The bottom had fallen out of the academic job market in the three years
I’d been in school, and many of my friends did not even get an
interview. Some went anyway and hung out in the hallways. I had my
minority teaching on my resume, so I landed two or three interviews,
one with Dartmouth, who had a opening in their program for Native
Americans. The interviews were degrading for everyone. In those
days, they took place in the interviewer’s hotel room, the Chair
and senior faculty sitting on unmade beds and the candidate
sitting in a chair. Dartmouth gave encouraging signs and kept me
waiting in my hotel room half the night for a call, but when the call
came it was to tell me they were going to hire someone else.
Marquette, on the shores of Lake Superior, offered me a job teaching
English Education courses—that is, courses for prospective high school
teachers. Since I had never taught high school English, I did not
feel qualified but asked for a week to consider.
I left Chicago in a blue funk that I had not gotten the Dartmouth job
but stopped at Minot for an interview that had been prearranged for me
by the vice-president, Kasper Marking, who had been my boss at
Columbia Basin. I thought it was cheating to get a
Job through a contact, but I was willing to compromise my principles in
this case. I like to think I would have gotten the job anyway, because
it was right down my alley, teaching in something called The
Experimental College, a federally-funded program for training earth
science majors. They had been given their own wing in an old dorm and a
separate faculty encouraged to try all the innovative ideas that
were floating around at the end of the 1960’s. There was no set
curriculum. Teachers were called “facilitators.” We were to “interact”
with the students, offering them to brand new courses each
term, responding to their “innate curiosity.” I recognized the
phrases as jargon but assumed that I could have, if had wanted to,
translate it out of jargon into common sense. In any case, I had been
doing innovation since they day I began teaching—inventing courses,
trying new techniques, reading books like Why Children Fail and
Education and Ecstasy, shyly and slyly joining the chorus of
voices who claimed at all previous education had been wrong-headed but
could be set right by people with the right assumptions and attitudes.
At Minot State, the director of the program, Eric Clausen, asked me to
describe some courses I might teach in such a setting. I had a head
full of them—a course on birds integrating poetry with ornithology, a
course on language integrating English grammar with mathematics, a
course on the City and Country. By time I got back to Seattle I had a
letter waiting for me, offering me a job. It was the only offer I had
for work I felt qualified to do and I told my wife I intended to take
it. I did not present it as something to talk about, as I certainly
would now. I did not really try to convince her that it would be a good
thing. It was my job to support my family, and this seemed like the
responsible way to do it. My friends were taking jobs selling
hi-fi equipment. Their marriages were breaking up.
And it was thus as I came up smash against the fourth of the great
movements of the 60’s, the Women’s Movement. My wife had finished her
course work for the BFA in art, adding to the BS in art she had earned
at Montana State where we had met. Her long-standing perception of male
prerogative had been fed by the feminism what was part of the larger
cultural upheaval of the 60’s. That she would have to move to where I
had a job seemed to her part of a larger pattern of patriarchal
injustice. She told me this, and a good deal more, one night, as
we sat talking, after the children were bed, each of us sitting on one
piece of the only decent furniture we had—an lovely chair and love-seat
combination. Its wood structure had been carved and glued into
graceful lines but its springs were showing through the worn horsehair
seat coverings.
In some ways, that conversation marked the beginning of the end of my
marriage, though in a deeper sense it had ended in the spring of 1958,
in a sunlit corner of the library at Montana State College, when I read
a book (the book I had been looking for) explaining that the universe
could be infinitely old and therefore would have had time to evolve to
its present complexity, and therefore did not need God. At that moment
I declared my independence and assumed what is perhaps the most
reasonable attitude for an atheist to have: That the world exists to be
manipulated for my benefit. At that moment I cut myself off from
any larger spiritual truth, from prayer, from submission to spiritual
guidance. That decision created more pain, for myself and those I
loved, than any decision I ever made. At that moment I began to become
more callow, more self-centered, less patient, less wise than I would
otherwise have been. If I had had the resources that religious
practice brings, I might have less of a of a trial to my wife, and not
have confirmed so deeply the caractitures of men that were being
circulated in the 70’s.
I know that many people, including friends and family I love,
would disagree with this analysis. For them, the conversion created
pain and suffering. They will tell you that I became more “rigid,” less
“open” more “judgmental” than I was before. I probably did become less
accommodating, less long-suffering than I was before, but from my point
of view, that was only because my mind cleared enough that I could take
a stand on behalf of my own sanity and dignity and see that things
could not go on as they were.
As we talked late into the night, heard the words “This marriage
is over” coming through the air as clearly as if they had been
broadcast on a loudspeaker, though neither of us spoke them. “Nothing
is left but to go through the motions,” the voice said, and I went
upstairs to bed, determined to go through the motions for as long as my
strength held out. There were times in the next seven years when
I thought that the broadcast voice had been wrong, or that I never
heard it after all, though it turned out in the end to be right.
4224 words on Dec. 13, 2004
4976 words on Dec. 24, 2004
5520 words on Dec. 26, 2004
6223 words on Jan. 4, 2005
9339 words on Jan. 31, 2005
9483 words on Feb. 14, 2005