RUDIMENTS, pt. 386
(116 eden lane, avenel)
Long about 1966, I can
remember a Summer-long
daily reading on WBAI of
a book by William Morris,
entitled 'News From Nowhere.'
It was out of the blue to me;
I knew nothing of him, or the
Pre-Raphaelites even, except
for Algernon Swineburne
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
whose work I'd read - or
tried to. They were both
miserable failures, in my
eyes, and anyway I never
understood their entire
beef, but on the other hand
I always enjoyed their cultural
criticisms of the way things
were going. And then I
detoured myself into a
short study of 'Utopia' - the
concept. Thomas More. 1516.
In Greek, Utopia means 'no
place,' - so the joke is that
he knew it was unattainable.
'Sly, rueful self-acknowledgement
resides within that idea.' By
writing this, he did, in fact,
create the odd template for
later Utopias, which were
always marked by two
tenacious ironies : thinking
people are told by a thinking
person to stop thinking; and
changing the world is imagined
to depend on changing who
we sleep with and how.
(Certain vague notions of
prudery were always present
in these Utopias). As the radio
people read 'News From
Nowhere,' it ran on, day
after day almost as a crowded
word-jam of the verbose.
Samuel Butler did something
in the same vein, about the
year 1875, I think, with a
place he called, in the novel,
'Erewhon' - which was a
sort of backwards spelling of
'Nowhere' and reflected the
ethos of Victorian England
and its society. I listened that
whole part of the Summer. (I'd
taken over my parents' nice,
cool basement and turned it
into an art studio for the term).
They were changing the canvas
shades in the local schoolhouse
that Summer, and the head janitor,
Mr. Bomback, family friend,
knowing my interests and needs,
brought over about 20 of the hge
old window shades (canvas),
which I'd trim and clean and
put onto stretcher bars. Then
I'd gesso each one, and I had
a bunch of painting canvases,
from two-dollar stretcher bars
from the art department at,
believe this, 'Two Guys' a
local mass retailer with
that strange name.
-
Al these ideas ran me dry
and kept me busy as well.
What I had around me was
Avenel - hardly a Utopia -
but not yet as fussy either, as
these guys made out their
places to be : layers of rules
and pieties, an implicit
hierarchy of good guys
and regular people, the
good guys taking it upon
themselves to assume the
roles of 'betters.' (More like
'bettors' really - betting the
farm on the idea that their
crap wouldn't come crashing
down upon their heads).
The actual human condition
is more like one where the
distribution of bad and
good is constantly in flux,
so any blueprints towards
perfection are doomed to
failure. I ended up loving
all this stuff, and I wrote a
long piece about it once too,
just titled 'Utopia' - I have
it around here, filed. I also
have a two-page, wonderful
poem that I treasure, about
Dante Gabriel Rossetti walking
in the Civil War graveyard in
downtown Elmira. I wrote
that too. A gem. Yes. I'm
telling you, stuff like this
doesn't just 'happen.' I'm
directed, and believe you me.
-
Back to all that in a minute,
but first I want to detour :
For 7th grade I went to Iselin
Junior High School - it was
a brand new school, the latest.
It looked hideous (still does),
with a George Jetson-like
semblance of a glass-front
domed gym taking precedence
over all the rest of the school.
Each grade had a 'satellite'
wing of its own, doorways
to nowhere, cluttered with
scrambling and screeching
kids. A mess. Yet, for me,
I was just then entering
my 'thinking' stage of
life, right before leaving
for seminary, all I noticed
was that it was the centenary
of the Civil War, and in one
of the 7th grade rooms there
was an interesting Civil War
display. It captivated me.
I had a lot of interest in that,
and right then I started
widening out my scope
of inquiry. America had
always been a violent place.
Early settlers, taking the
various frontiers, killed
and decimated whomever
was in the way - tribes
and people by whatever
names they went by.
Massacre and slaughter
on both sides. Becuase of
that, to me the Civil War
was always justifiable. If
it had been fought over
dominoes or bread, it would
still have been the same -
cruel, vicious and, for the
most part, fought for the
sake of fighting. That was
America. As I phrased it,
'no violence, no Civil War.'
But, we had both so they both
had happened - the place
But, we had both so they both
had happened - the place
was like a huge blood-fued -
because violence was in
the American bloodline
along with self-righteousness
and a presumed sense of
always being correct.
Anarchic, random, insane
killing. If that's the only
way you think, that's the
only way you're going
to think. Nothing I
could do about it.
-
I was living through the
most curious days in the
world, and no one was
talking about a thing
except pap and pablum.
Not even the schools made
any semblance of a true
instruction. They were
channeled for childishness
and sport. Crazed, horny,
adolescent nut cases weren't
even addressed. The whole
place was going to Hell.
No one was taught a thing.
Utopia my ass.
-
There was some strange
overlap between the
post-Civil War nation and
these Utopian moments.
Everyone from Mark Twain
to William Dean Howells to
Washington Irving was
writing about guys who
went out somewhere,
representative of their
apple-picking present
(then) world, and fell
asleep only to wake up
in another time when
everything was changed.
Still there, but changed.
One of these guys, Edward
Bellamy pretty much wrote
the present day perfectly, in
1888 : "Bellamy's hero falls
asleep in in 1887, in some
contraption made to cure
his insomnia, and wakes
up in the year 2000!" He
enters a world of a pure
Communistic order. A
hyper-regimented society
where everyone works for
the government and retires
at forty-five, and where the
most fun you can have is to
go shopping by picking out
goods from a cataloque,
ordering them from big
depots via pneumatic
tube, and then having them
delivered at home. Bellamy
pretty much had Amazon
Prime down pat. For Twain
and the rest, this all came
from a post Civil-War
nostalgia for wartime
regimentation. Seeing all
this now (and people still
talk of and write of these
ideas, even as the mass of
mankind falls off the train
of literacy into the more
backward fields of cant
and meddlesome authority),
I'm still struck by that other
day. That past, which somehow
always seems to call me. I'd
I'd rather be a Civil War
veteran with my ears blown
deaf and one good leg
than live today.
-
Utopia? Bad idea. There was
no parsing than sentence -
and that's what it was, a
sentence, a life term - if
all you can end up with
are dead ends and crazy
kids. I grew right up and
out through Avenel and
Woodbridge with the
mythologies of war and
peace and life and death
driven into my head at
every step of the way. It
was all anyone ever spoke
about - church, duty,
honor, country. And then
it was assumed that every
red-blooded American boy
would just be happy to do
his military service and then
wander off into some asshole
suburbia where the vines
all grew ready-made pickles.
Man, that's some living you
got there. You-Topia fer sur!
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