Art as Cultural Activism

On September 5, 1981, the Welsh group that called itself "Women for Life on Earth" arrived on Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England. They had marched from Cardiff, Wales, with the intention of challenging the decision to site 96 US Cruise nuclear missiles on Greenham Common. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which said "We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world."

When their request for a debate was ignored they set up a "Peace Camp" just outside the fence surrounding the Royal Air Force Greenham Common Airbase. This surprised the authorities and set the tone for an audacious, lengthy protest that was to last 19 years.

The protesters refused to allow authorities to enter the camp, which became known as the Women's Peace Camp and gained international recognition with imaginative images such as eggs, spiders webs and children’s toys with which they decorated the chain link fences and contested area. In the end the UK and US withdrew their attempt to site the cruise missiles in Greenham Common.

*

During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, a number of Chilean working-class women created complex tapestries depicting the harsh conditions of life and the pain resulting from the disappeared victims of Pinochet's repression. These tapestries, or arpilleras, get their name from the Spanish word for the burlap backing they used.

Working quietly and using traditional methods, the women's arpilleras came to have a wide influence within Chile and internationally. The tapestries preserved the memory of los desaparecidos and the dictatorship's brutality, as well as the unemployment, food shortages, housing shortages, and other hardships of daily life attributed to Pinochet's rule. Preserving this collective memory was itself an act of art-as-protest, but creating the arpilleras also empowered the women, many of whom experienced a liberation through their work and became involved in further protests against Pinochet's regime.

*

Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Poland, emigrated to Canada, and currently lives in the US. He is particularly well-known for his guerrilla projections on official buildings purported to embody public values. Guerrilla, because his images were subversive and often projected without official permission. He sought, he explained, to unmask the buildings' existing rhetoric.

One of his first projections was a swastika on the façade of the South African embassy in London during Apartheid to implicate the British government and align them with the white Apartheid regime in South Africa. And to implicate the public building itself, which presented itself as an architectural emblem of moral value.

Later, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Wodiczko created a two-part projection in San Diego and Tijuana addressing the links between illegal immigration into the US and California’s economy, in which migrant labor plays a crucial role.

One projection is on the façade of a so-called Spanish style building in San Diego's Balboa Park, called the Museum of Man, which professes to be an anthropologically egalitarian repository of art and artisanry, but which Wodiczko sees as a muted celebration of western colonialism.

His projected image aligns a pair of white, male, well-groomed hands impatiently clasped, as if waiting for his meal. Above and to the right are two coarse outstretched hands -- manacled at the wrists -- but holding an ample basket of fruit, and, imprisoned as they are, ready to serve their colonialist master.

*

Rirkrit Tirivanija is a Thai artist. One of his installations consisted of the following: He bicycled around looking for space: empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, deserted K-Mart, abandoned Rite-Aid, haunted Burger King.

He rented the space and furnished it with stoves, cooking gas, freezers, fridges, microwaves, counters, bowls, cups, glasses, plastic cutlery, chopsticks, Tupperware, folding tables, chairs.
He purchased food: noodles, rice, potatoes, bread, soup, salad, tofu, fruit, green tea, bottled water, cocoa, curry spices. Comfort food.

He engaged the homeless as helpers.

Food prepared, he invited the homeless helpers along with the lined-up homeless to eat.
Continued through the day, into the night. Clean up, close for the night. Sleep on the premises.
Do the same thing for 60 days.

After 60 days he closed the space, got on his bicycle and looked for another empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, terrorized Rite-Aid, spooked McDonald's, gutted Gap, bombed-out Home Depot.
Select the space, rent it.

Feed the homeless for 60 days.

Close up, move on, find another space, repeat.

*

The preceding represents four examples of creating art in times of conflict. In every instance the art is problematic; not esthetic, as such; not even palpable in the instance of Tirivanija feeding the homeless.

What is the difference between art as it is usually constructed and what might be called crisis art, or cultural activism: the use of cultural means to effect social change or a wider social awareness?

Art that responds to a crisis is situational, hence created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined.

Crisis art is directed rather than disinterested; more closely related to art as process than product.

Crisis art is keenly aware of text and context.

Crisis art often works best collaboratively.

Collaboration contests the auratic view of the artist? "Auratic," coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to the artificial elevation of the artist to a position above his or her fellows.

Crisis art is "immoral."

Georges Bataille insisted that the strongest art must function as an “immoral subversion of the existing order”; because "morality" is in the possession of the existing order, and as such is never what it professes to be.

Crisis art is (to quote a still fashionable term coined by the Russian critic Bakhtin), "dialogic".

The idea is not that the artist stands above the fray paring his fingernails, bemusedly observing his creations. Dialogic articulates the more humbling notion that the artist interacts, even integrates, with the community, on a largely equal basis, each affecting and affected.

Crisis artists must swallow the poison in order to reconstitute it. Expel it as art.

The poison, currently, includes our crazily spinning, electronic-obsessed, war-making culture and its profit-mad institutions; along with the rapidly worsening environmental crisis. The image of swallowing the poison and expelling it as art is shamanic.

But can art actually have any appreciable impact on the lives of humans who are oppressed, disenfranchised, struggling merely to survive? Can art affect cynical politicians and their corporate brethren?

There are precedents that were successful against great odds: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; anti-slavery writings during the abolitionist period; French writers and artists helping to end the colonial war in Algeria; Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism and the Gulags; Act-Up's culturally activist response to the demonizing of gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s.

Do the kinds of strategies and calculations necessary for making and employing crisis art stand in opposition to the notion of the artist as dreamer, as creating from the deepest levels of consciousness?

Consider Goya, Blake and the French Revolution, the Mexican muralists, Grosz and Heartfield, Brecht, Picasso’s Guernica, B Traven, John Berger, Elsa Morante, Victor Serge, Clarice Lispector....

Surely these artists continued to imagine complexly, to -- as it were -- dream, even as they fought through their art against injustice?

Might socially activist art also be created for its own sake, its seeming ethical rightness, without calculating its effect?

If art of a certain strain is committed to process rather than product, it is especially difficult to sum up its final success. Was the art in the aftermath of Hiroshima successful? Was the art that characterized the takeover of Greenham Common successful? Were the arpilleras made by disenfranchised Chilean women successful?

Crisis art, dissident art, social activist art (largely synonymous) are perennial; one can't anticipate when an injustice or string of injustices, will invoke an art to register it.

But how will this art be appraised 40 years from now when the crisis that evoked it is no longer a factor?

Paradoxically, art produced rapidly under crisis conditions will sometimes have more lasting power and even esthetic appeal than the painstakingly created seemingly disinterested art that most people identify as quintessential. Crisis art has an energy and focus which more than compensate for its relative lack of refinement.

In the US there have been historical "moments" -- the Quakers, the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists, the Thirties Marxists, the Sixties counter-culture, Act-Up in the late Eighties and early Nineties -- but overall American writers have been contemptuous of socially-activist writing. It doesn't sell, it is more didactic than "esthetic." Moreover, why should artists be in a special position to address political crises?

Writers cultivate consciousness, contemplation, and in many instances learning. They view through a broader lens. If they have a reputation they can find a platform to make themselves heard and express their opinions precisely.

What good will it do? Wars, oppression, colonialism, profit-mania have been with us since human hegemony? And now authoritarian power is decentered, much less visible. Serious art of any kind has been rendered negligible in the market place, which in the US epitomizes the country's ethos.

With effort and intelligence, decentered power modules can be identified, as young dissidents and hackers have located and attempted to disable deliberately elusive nexuses of power and control.

Human history, however bloody and unjust, has not ceased; and, crucially, the planet we inhabit and have debauched is dying. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, with its people crammed into a delta of rivers that empties into the Bay of Bengal, which because of the Antarctic ice melt is behaving like an ocean, flooding ice paddies and entire villages. Animals and plants throughout the globe are becoming extinct rapidly. The sun, lacking sufficient protection from its ozone layer, has become toxic. Lethal bacterial agents set loose from leveled rain forests or industrialized seas migrate into the general population.

Possibly the hardest factor for concerned younger artists to accept is that there will always be an incommensurateness between their imaginative efforts and the result. The primary obligation is to not avert your eyes; to bear witness.


Harold Jaffe is the author of 18 books of fiction, "docufiction" and nonfiction, including most recently Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Paris 60, and OD. Jaffe is editor of Fiction International.

Need a Writing Prompt?

There are two types of writers: Writers who use prompts to navigate past their blocks and writers who don't. It's entirely possible that you will be both types of writer at different phases of your career.

If you are in the "need a prompt" phase, why not subscribe to Laura Davis? Once you subscribe you will receive a weekly email newsletter with a prompt that's partly psychological - to help you learn more about your particular blocks. Here's the latest prompt:

The Writer's Journey Roadmap
August 30, 2011

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."

- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Today's Writing Prompt:

What keeps you from writing that shitty first draft?

Laura Davis is a professional writer's guide. Her Facebook fan page is here.

If you are not currently in the "need a prompt" phase of your writing career, consider yourself lucky,

Go to Hell - with Dante

Want to create a course that might have students - especially male students - reading Dante's Inferno? Link it to a video game.

In the video game Dante is no longer a reedy, introspective poet but a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find that his beloved Beatrice has been brutally murdered. Her innocent soul has been taken captive by Lucifer, and Dante must chase the archfiend into hell, fending off wave after wave of advancing demons with a mighty scythe.

. . .

"A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start."

Eduardo Galeano on Brecht

From Century of the Wind, the third volume of a three volume tome of the history of the Americas, called Memory of Fire.

1942: Hollywood

"Brecht"

Hollywood manufactures films to turn the frightful vigil of humanity, to the point of annihilation, into sweet dreams. Bertolt Brecht, exiled from Hitler's Germany, is employed in this sleeping-pill industry. Founder of a theater that sought to open eyes wide, he earns his living at the United Artists studios, just one more writer who works office hours for Hollywood, competing to produce the biggest daily ration of idiocies.

On one of these days, Brecht buys a little God of Lucky for forty cents in a Chinese store and puts it on his desk. Brecht has been told that the God of Luck licks his lips each time they make him take poison.

meta-roles

We're workshopping a story today about a helicopter pilot in Allied occupied West Germany. It's filled with detailed descriptions of post-Nazi Germany, but also a twist which promises to get mixed reviews. The third person character, McKay, is also writing the story, which is being reviewed by his wife Suzan.

She is making various suggestions to McKay about revising the story. This is a meta approach attempting to make the reader an self-conscious party. The couple also discuss later details in the story, which foreshadows those events.

At the chapter's conclusion, Suzan asks McKay what she looks like as a character.

"Are we sitting down at a table? Are we drinking wine? Is it red or white? Do I look lovely tonight? Are you serious about sailing our boat to Hawaii?"

"Sitting down, red wine, very lovely, quite serious."

"Oh," she said. "Will you pour me another glass please?"

Interesting technique. But does it fly?

Regarding FI

Fiction International embraces the unique. That extends to various ways writers tackle narrative perspective. In the Freak issue, "The Dummy of the Ventriloquist's Dummy" is told through a dialogue between a ventriloquist and a pair of rebellious dummies. In "Haunting Your House," the narrator's benefactor is convinced his apartment is haunted by ghosts. We find that his apartment is indeed being visited, but by former Chinese tenants evicted and angry at the gentrification he represents. He just doesn't see them or their hatred, so they may as well be ghosts.

Thumbing through FI's Pain issue, I'm reminded that narrative can be told through letters and memoir just as well as third-person omniscient.

This is my first blog for Fiction International. I plan to make various observations on narrative process, which may be of interest to other writers. When I scribbled this out I was in a coffee shop with my reporter's notebook, also thumbing through some midnight story ideas.

One strikes me: a confrontation between two writers over proprietorship of written work. One is miffed when he learns that his colleague has annexed some of his material into one of his own stories. He essentially wrote through the scene. If one writer constructs a world, are others allowed to 'pass' through? I'll write it out and see how it develops.

Gods and Little Girls

Gods and Little Girls

What is worse? To die silently, as life seeps from your wrinkles or to walk panic stricken through the streets worried about the meal for your little chicks? From one side of the river the other looks so enticing. You have a meal in front of you now. Life is good isn't it little chicken? And I can stroke your hair and help you braid it. I can be here with you. Before, I worked while servants prepared your meal on a silver platter and you ate in solitude. Is that better?

I like that you're here.

I do too. Tonight I like it. Tomorrow, I will wake up gaunt of worry before the sun rises and roam the streets in fear that there will be no food for you. I will beg in doorways for work and scour the sea floor for crabs with the net of my hands. And I will not rest until there is enough to fatten you like dough.

And then we can be together?

Yes, then we can be together again. Beneath the stars, and I can share with you more secrets of life.

What is the biggest secret?

The biggest secret is that comfort is meaningless. Comfort is like trying to hold water in your hands. People work their lives to keep the water from leaking through their fingers. No matter how much money they make, or how much comfort they have, they always find more worries. Everywhere they turn, there will be a worry waiting, like a skull smiling at them. The great masters knew this and painted it on canvases that once donned our foyer walls. But some ignore this secret, and they will ruin themselves and the rest of us trying to be comfortable. But no matter how much they toss and turn, their beds will never feel right. They may live longer than I, even though I am old, and they may look young with balms, but they are dying inside as the air seeps from them.

Do they love?

You want to talk of love little chick? Everybody should love. Let me tell you a story about love. Your grandpapa and I loved across a thousand years. I think we loved each other before we were born. When our love was already written, and welcomed us to it. That is how old love is. Yes, chicken everybody should love. When we are born, angels wait for us to open our eyes and drape love around us like a velvet robe. And they are happy because love wants nothing more than to share itself.

Like me and you? Like when we nuzzle each other? Like when you wrap your shawl around me at night?

Yes chicken. Like that. Are you finished eating? You go ahead and finish. I want you fat. I am old, and have already had my fill. Your grandmother needs just a few morsels, nothing more than a mouthful. Let me tell you more about love. When you were born, I heard angels. They were on either side of my ears, and they whispered over me to each other about your beautiful brown eyes. I said, I know, she has her mother’s eyes. And they said, her smile, look at the dimples her smile makes. And I said, yes, she has her mother's dimples. They said, it’s as if her eyes and mouth smile at once. And I whispered to you, because I didn't want to seem like I was eavesdropping, the world is smiling with you.

Was mama beautiful?

She was beautiful. A mother always thinks her children are beautiful. But I have ears too. I heard them say as they walked on the path outside our home that she was the most beautiful girl in the whole valley. Some of the old superstitious ones said she was too beautiful. They came and said a prayer at our doorstep to keep out jealous spirits. You know, some people believe that spirits are easily tempted. Beautiful girls, they say, cause trouble in the heavens between gods. Jealous spirits like that are very dangerous. Some say they will put a scar across a beautiful girl's face to make her ugly, or cast them with disease or lure them into the water and drown them. Then they will try to take the form of the beautiful ones. But they cannot take human form and become even angrier and more jealous. That's why old superstitious women say prayers and light votive candles at the church. They say beautiful girls make spirits even more dangerous which is hard on the village. Don't look so frightened chicken. Those are just old tales. But that's part of life and you should know this.

Is that what happened to mama? Was she so beautiful that a jealous spirit hurt her?

No. Your mama died while you were being born. Those are just stories. The only spirits I believe in are good ones: angels who watch over all of us. I told your mama just after you were born that I would look after you. I told her that you would never have to worry. I would make sure you had a full belly, and the rain would stay off your head and the ground would not cut your feet because you would always have a pair of shoes. I told her I would also teach you about life, and teach you how to live a good, rich life that would be meaningful. And when you fell in love and married, that's when I would leave this life, and not a moment before.

Will jealous spirits hurt me too?

No, that's enough talk of that. You are beautiful like your mother. There are no jealous spirits, so wipe that worried look off your face. You're through with your plate? Okay, I'll have the rest. Why did you only eat half a piece of bread? You finish this bread, and I'll take the rest of this drumstick. Okay. Besides, there's another tale if you care to believe it, that children who are watched over by their grandmothers are especially protected from jealous spirits. It's one of the most powerful medicines in the world. Grandmothers are the best protection for little girls in the world. So you have nothing to worry about. Do you have enough blanket? Okay. Now let’s go to sleep before you start worrying again. I want to be awake before the household finds us in their doorway. Tomorrow I will find us a better place to sleep and a bed for you my darling chicken. Tomorrow we will have our own dinners and a roof over our heads. There, close your eyes and nuzzle your head in my chest. That's good. Let's dream about angels and love.

Can we make art with "fortunate failures"?

In the "Notes From the Underground" blog, James Curcio speculates about "fortunate failures":

You may set up a class on a div, and check it out in a browser and discover that it did something totally different than you had hoped, or you may apply a filter when producing an audio track, with similar results. Sometimes, those results are undesirable, and you backtrack. But other times, it drives things in a completely new direction.

That for me, is creativity. Not the intention that got you started in the first place.

Actually, both are creative. It's not a contest. You now have two potential artworks and are free to pursue both to their conclusions. One is serendipitous and the other intentional, not one good and the other bad or one legitimate and the other false.

We live in an age where satire doesn't work.

Satire is soooooooo Twentieth Century, given that it was invented by hippies and librul college professors and can't be understood anyway.

Satire said greed is good. And behold, it is.

Satire began with A Modest Proposal, which, if published today, would have inspired sales of cookbooks and a line of cookware suitable for roasting Irish babies.

Instead it inspired a generation of anti-abortionists, one of whom, while initially an ardent fan of satire, has now come to realize that satire doesn't work.

Satire, like leadership, is the ability to ignore and subvert the will of the majority while claiming to represent it.

Today people understand that if everyone in their social circle believes something, then it's true beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Today people propose modest proposals with a completely straight face, unaware that (once upon a time) a modest proposal was considered immodest.

And satire is just a synonym for wit.

Can University Presses survive this recession?

My local newspaper of choice recently printed an AP article about the possible demise of Louisiana State University Press. Seems in an era where universities are being squeezed of funding by their states, one likely victim will be the University Press.

Chancellor Michael Martin doesn't question the prestige the Louisiana State University Press brings to his school, with Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction and poetry, tomes on Southern history and culture and other noted works to its credit.

What it doesn't bring in is revenue, and, like cash-strapped colleges across the country, LSU is getting tired of propping up its press.

The school has said the 74-year-old original publisher of "A Confederacy of Dunces" doesn't generate enough money to independently function.

Fiction International understands the problem, which is why we began a drive to increase revenue. We applied a few basic accounting techniques to get expenses in line, then started (and continue) looking for subscribers. We created an online presence (including this blog) and went looking for past, present, and future contributors and avid readers.

The result is a journal that is - for now - making enough money to cover our publishing costs. A journal that is - for now - safe from the university's budget ax.

Who will be hurt most by this latest cost-cutting move by universities are the contributors, most of whom teach and need the publishing credit to retain their jobs. There are few markets for short fiction and poetry, and most are affiliated with a University, so losing fiction and poetry journals will be a severe blow.

If a university wants to save their publications, they need to find within their department an administrator who knows both literature and business. Imagine the revenue LSU Press would have if it had - for example - the publishing revenue from A Confederacy of Dunces when it was hot, instead of well after its money-generating days were over. (LSU Press quietly resumed publication of the Larg-Print version, while Penguin Classics publishes the version assigned by literature classes.)

So could LSU Press or any other university press make enough changes in their way of thinking about literature and the marketplace to increase their revenue enough to survive the recession? Yes they can.

Stories - 140 characters at a time

Can you distill a story to the size of a phone? That's the idea behind cellphone novels:

The cellphone grows more wondrous and indispensable to us every day. Talking is the least of it. We text and Tweet our heads off, send photos, watch TV shows, play video games. But in Japan, imperium of the future where all the above is old hat, the keitai (cellphone) has further spawned a wildly successful, populist fiction genre. Keitai shosetsu, the so-called cellphone novel, has been touted (in the pages of the New Yorker, among other places) and reviled (by Japanese literati) as the first narrative mode of the txt msg age -- the herald of a written-word future bent by wireless telecom's powers.

Pornography... and Censorship

Editor Harold Jaffe just posted a 1992 interview he did about Fiction International's Pornography & Censorship issue. The interview, conducted by Janice Wynborne of KPBS Radio, highlighted the difficulty of conducting an "adult" conversation about what consitutes pornography in our society.

The issue is still for sale - and, in fact, is now 50% off. See http://www.fictioninternational.com for more details.

"Orfeo" by Harold Jaffe

Image via bldg blog

The following is from Harold Jaffe's forthcoming collection Orfeo:

Orfeo
I am of the race that sang under torture.
--Rimbaud

I was about to exit when I felt the heavy hand on my left shoulder.

I knew it would be the left shoulder.

I’d been caught shoplifting the electric razor from WAL* MART.

I was handcuffed then maneuvered through the dazzlingly illuminated aisles, a burly plainclothes security guard on either side.

Shoppers turned to look, perfunctorily.

I caught the eye of a shopper’s child, a small dark-skinned girl.

She gazed at me, alarmed at what she took to be my plight.

Not wanting her to see my manacles, I didn’t wave but winked at her.

She looked uncertain.

I was led into the vast warehouse-like back area.

Seated on the straight-backed aluminum chair with my hands cuffed behind me under the glaring fluorescent light.

The security guard who’d put his heavy hand on my left shoulder wore a large heart-shaped orange nametag on his chest which said WAL* MART.

His head was shaved and he wore a musk-based cologne.

He turned his back to me and spoke into his cellphone.

I heard him say “shoplift.”

He slipped the cell in his pants pocket, turned toward me and held out a wide palm.

“Identification.”

I shook my head.

“Driver’s license, social security card, credit card, something with your contact information?”

I shook my head.

“US citizen?”

I nodded.

“Born in the US or green card?”

I nodded.

“Which is it?” he said.

“Your call,” I said.

He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

“You have a salt and pepper beard.

“That’s what it’s called, right?

“Salt and pepper?

“It’s all over your damned face.

“That’s green card, okay?

“What I want to know is what’s a salt and pepper bearded green card planning to do with a WAL* MART-brand electric razor?”

He took out a toothpick from his shirt pocket and picked at a tooth.

He put the toothpick back in the same pocket.

He said, “You’re not a salt and pepper terrorist, are you?”

I looked up at the sardonic flat face.

“I’ll tell you,” I said.

“If you tell me.”

He rubbed his thick palm on his beardless face, grinning.

“No salt and pepper here, bro.

“Smooth all over like a baby’s ass.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“I’m guessing you’re a baby’s ass who carries a sidearm, right?”

He glared at me then raised his right pants leg just high enough for me to see the ankle holster and semi-automatic.

It looked like a new-model Glock.

I said, “If I tell you I was planning to transform the stolen electric razor into a smart bomb and blow up WAL* MART would you unload on me with your Glock?”

He narrowed his gaze.

“Even a green card shit-eater would know not to even think of stealing from WAL* MART.

“Our security is flat-out number one in the free world.”

“I understood that Target’s security was flat-out number one in the free world,” I said.

“With Costco firmly in the number two slot.”

“Okay. Enough jerking off,” he said.

“You’re in deep shit, green card.

“I don’t think you realize how deep the shit you’re in is.”

“You married?” the other plainclothes security guard asked me unexpectedly, in a loud voice.

He wore a close-to-the-scalp crewcut and WAL* MART nametag and stood behind and to the left of the first guard.

“You have a wife and shit?” he said loudly.

“You look spooky with that beard sticking out your face but you don’t look gay.”

“Are you saying I look gay?” I said.

“I’m saying you look like a freak,” he said.

“A little crazy.

“My guess is you’re married with kids.”

I nodded vaguely.

“Well, congratulations, you just fucked your life up,” the first security guard said.

“How does it feel?”

“You want to know how it feels to fuck my life up?” I said.

They both glared at me.

“Give me your cellphone number and I’ll get back to you.”

“There won’t be any getting back, freak,” the first security guard said.

“Not where your green card ass is going."

They separated me from the chair and marched me, still cuffed, through the back area and outside to one of a series of unmarked orange customized SUVs parked abreast.

It was raining lightly, which for some reason surprised me.

I smelled the ozone.

With one hand on the top of my head I was pushed into the rear of a vehicle.

That was how it was always done on cop TV programs; I never understood why.

The rear was un-windowed and barred with low wooden benches on either side.

They sat me on a bench with my hands cuffed to a steel pole that ran above the bench from front to back.

Whichever WAL* MART security male drove, drove very fast.

I could hear them talking on their cells or listening to talk radio and wisecracking.

After about an hour the SUV stopped and they got out.

Ten minutes later they were back with fast food; I smelled the burgers and fries and heard them eat.

Even eating they drove recklessly fast, veering from lane to lane on the freeway.

After some time the driving changed and it felt like we were out of the city.

After another hour or so they stopped.

One of them separated me from the steel pole, relocked my cuffs and pushed me outside.

It was dusk, raining harder.

We were in front of a bunker-like concrete structure, in what looked like a deserted lot with tall weeds and rocks.

I couldn’t see clearly in the rain, but the structure looked as if it was built into the ground.

Two burly males in uniform grey shirts, pants and caps emerged from the structure.

They weren’t wearing nametags.

No words were exchanged between them and the WAL* MART males, who backed up then drove off rapidly

The two uniform males said nothing as they transported me in a freight elevator underground.

The elevator traveled slowly and I felt the air changing.

When the elevator opened, they put leg-irons around my ankles.

“Aren’t you going to remove my shoelaces?” I said.

“I tried to shoplift an electric razor from WAL* MART.

“I might want to hang myself.”

They ignored me.

They pushed me through a narrow corridor of cave-like cells which may or may not have been occupied.

They locked me in a small, low-ceilinged cell at the end of the corridor.

All around was the damp sweet-sour stench of earth.

“Have to pee,” I said as they were leaving.

“Your prob,” one of them said over his shoulder.

I shuffled to a corner of the cell and peed.

Then I removed my shoes and sat semi-cross-legged (the leg-irons impeded me) on the dirt floor against the wall in the opposite corner.

After a time I slept.

I dreamed of eight bighorned sheep-like animals cropping--or trying to crop--the hardscrabble grass.

The horned sheep moved with extreme caution even though no hunters were in sight. Close-up, the animals’ faces were bruised, even torn, with caked blood and what looked like rough sutures .

I was thinking--in the dream--about the number eight.

Why were there precisely eight of the gentle beasts?

I was awakened by a female voice haranguing me through the bars of the cell.

It was my wife; I wondered how she knew I was here.

I opened my eyes partially and rattled my leg irons but otherwise didn’t move.

She demanded why I would try to steal an electric razor from WAL* MART.

She said the cell stank of piss.

She demanded again why I would try to shoplift a razor from WAL* MART.

She seemed more chagrined than angry.

She said despite my “background” and education I’d always been a loser, but this was the last straw.

This was the lowest I could sink without being in hell.

She’d consulted an attorney and now she would sue me for divorce and custody of our daughter.

She said I’d dug my own grave and as far as she was concerned I could rot in it.

A grey-uniformed guard looked on expressionless.

After she left I closed my eyes.

I slept.

I dreamed of eight large pelagic, albatross-like birds with their majestic wingspan flying in formation, not over ocean but desert.

Moreover the desert seemed to be on fire, or blazing fires were scattered over the desert.

The birds would gaze down occasionally but kept flying because there was no habitable place to land.

From where I was located below I could see the great birds’ faces which weren’t the faces of pelagic birds but rather the round faces of infants such as barn owls resemble.

I was awakened by someone rattling the bars of my cell.

He spoke my name.

I opened then closed my eyes.

He was an administrator from the company where I worked.

A small, pale male, vaguely rat-like: I didn’t remember his name.

I remembered that he always seemed to be sweating.

As with my wife, I had no idea how he knew of my whereabouts.

The message he delivered was brief: the company would not employ thieves who attempted to steal from WAL* MART and so I was thereby terminated.

Whatever salary was owed to me would be transferred to my wife.

Then he left along with the expressionless guard.

I shouted after the guard: “Toilet.”

He didn’t respond.

I struggled to my feet and peed again in the far corner, though in truth there was no far corner since the cell was cramped.

I had to squat so that my head didn’t hit the ceiling.

Because the floor was earthen the pee soaked into the hardened dirt.

I noticed a soiled straw mat rolled up against the wall.

I unrolled it and lay down on my back gazing up at the low ceiling.

From every side the damp earth was palpable.

Occasionally a sliver or even small clod of earth would fall from the ceiling.

Moreover there was vermin, and why shouldn’t there be?

Neither the wrist nor the leg manacles hindered me overmuch.

I was having a small problem drawing breath.

I thought I could hear cell doors clanging open and shut down the corridor and on the floor above.

Maybe it was the floor below.

I think it was below.

Which would make it Hades.

Where Orpheus descended.

I will miss my daughter.

So You Say You Are a Writer

Then you will laugh and say "ouch"!

Salvation Mountain

Docufiction by Harold Jaffe

Jesus came to him in the cab of a Datsun long bed pickup.
Gloomy Monday, ten minutes before midnight, March 3, 1973, St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Dewey Birdsong was parked in his truck because he’d run out of money and had no place to go.
He usually made enough to get by shoveling snow in the long winters.
But this winter was uncommonly dry so he couldn’t afford to rent a room by the week as was his custom.
It was cold in the truck and he couldn’t sleep.
To keep his mind off the cold he prayed to Jesus, which he’d done before on occasion.
This time he prayed aloud, insistently.
Finally he dozed and he dreamed.
It was not a dream but a vision.
Lord Jesus came to him and said:

Go to the end of the earth and construct a mountain to testify to me.
It will be called Salvation Mountain.
But first you must learn to fly like a bird.
Three days later Dewey, with borrowed money, was driving west.
He stopped in Newton, Iowa, where he got work as a farmhand along with room and board.
In his spare time he set about building a hot air balloon so that he could learn to fly like a bird.
He spent seven years building the balloon mostly from nylon scraps and Styrofoam plastic harvested from dumpsters.
Painted bright orange, the balloon bore the billboard-sized message that God is Love, which Dewey inscribed in black latex house paint.
The problem was the balloon was about nine stories high and Dewey could not get it off the ground.
So he bid farewell to the Iowa farmer, his employer and landlord for the last seven years.
He mounted the balloon on an old Ford flatbed truck and drove west to the most desolate place he could find that was still more or less inhabitable.
The southeast tip of California.
An outpost called Slab City, in the Mojave Desert, between Niland and the
Chocolate Mountains, a few miles east of the massive inland Salton Sea.
There he tried again to loft the balloon and this time was successful.
He steered it to the Salton Sea, then farther west to the Pacific.
Then he turned the balloon around and headed back east where it suddenly lost altitude and plummeted to the hard desert floor.
Amazingly, Dewey survived unhurt.
Dewey said, “I just rutted out here, so I figured I’d stay put.”
Having flown once, Dewey Birdsong ceased working on the balloon and turned his full attention to constructing a mountain in the slabs of the Mojave Desert.
Located on the former Camp Locust Marine Corps base due east of Niland, Slab City received its name from the cement slabs which were all that remained from the former base buildings.
The slabs made convenient parking blocks for RVs, SUVs pickup trucks, and abandoned school busses.
Between November and April more than 3000 “snowbirds,” pensioners, and assorted misfits are drawn to the ungoverned life in the Slab City desert.
They don’t pay taxes or fees of any kind.
Who would pay for squatting at the end of the earth, where summer comes in March, lasts through October and the temperature climbs to 115 degrees?
Where there is no electricity, running water, sanitation, or medical facilities.
Where the stench from the decomposing sea is close to overwhelming for miles around.
During World War 2, General Patton used the desert base for war games to simulate the African campaign he would wage against Rommel
Later the crew of the Enola Gray would practice for Hiroshima by releasing dummy A bombs into the Salton Sea.
Though the base that occupied Slab City is abandoned, the US army still drops bombs at a desert “test site” three or four miles away.
Bombay Beach, the bereft hamlet north of Niland, takes its name not from its Bombay, India-like setting on the fetid sea but from the bombs that explode intermittently to the east.
Dewey Birdsong was fond of saying that he had difficulty drawing a straight line.
But after Jesus came to him in the Datsun long bed pickup on that freezing Vermont night he became infused not only with God but with an architecture that testified to God.
Dewey said that even now, twenty-six years after beginning the construc-tion of Salvation Mountain, he never knew what he was going to paint or sculpt until he held the paintbrush or chisel in his hand and Jesus instructed him.
Occasionally he would have to appeal out loud to Jesus to guide his hand.
Nonetheless, after working on the mountain for three years it collapsed in a wind storm.
Instead of giving up, Dewey cleared away the debris and began again substituting clay for sand and making other construction alterations deduced from his failure.
Dewey said, “With Jesus in me I can make a hundred mistakes and start all over with exactly the same enthusiasm.”
The mountain, which testified to Jesus, Dewey constructed out of straw bales covered in adobe, that is, a mixture of clay soil, chopped straw, and water.
With house paint he painted phrases from Scripture, biblical injunctions, birds, flowers and allegorical figures; layer on layer in a delirious medley of colors.
Dewey estimates that he’s used about forty thousand gallons of paint, all donated.
Seventy-five-years-old now, he still wakes up at five am, drinks a glass of water and gets to work.
He climbs the ladder and hoists bales of hay into large clefts in the mountain which he then cements with adobe.
In one large cleft he actually managed to insert the ruins of a mature ironwood tree, roots and all.
It functions as a buttress for the adobe overlay.
Still on the ladder, Dewey paints and sculpts his biblical quotations, flowers and symbolic figures on to the adobe.
He works until 11:30 or so.
The rest of the day is given over to reading scripture, feeding his animals (cats and dogs that people abandoned), greeting and giving tours to visitors.
If it cools off a little at dusk he will work on the mountain for another hour and a half or so.
A twenty foot stone cross painted bright pink marks the highest point of Salvation Mountain.
The centerpiece, just beneath the cross, is a massive red heart with the multicolored message: JESUS I'M A SINNER, PLEASE COME UPON MY BODY AND INTO MY HEART.
Dewey carved steps into the mountain’s side for pilgrims to scale and examine the display from different angles.
He constructed kivas or grottos at the base of the mountain, where pilgrims can rest away from the sun.
He himself lives in an old Dodge pickup with a shell, which was donated.
He still owns the Ford Flatbed truck which he drove west from Newton, Iowa.
Someone also donated an ancient school bus and a bicycle.
Another Samaritan donated a moped.
Dewey has painted and inscribed all of these vehicles with colorful biblical quotations and commands.
Dewey Birdsong, in his wide-brimmed straw hat, is tall, rail-thin, slightly stooped, with an eagle-nose, deeply sunburned face and illuminated blue
eyes under shaggy white brows.
When he talks with you in his soft voice he tends to look over your head, beyond you.
Despite the onerous work and his advanced age his long hands are slim and mostly unlined.

***

Dewey, you dreamt of Jesus in your Datsun pickup on the other side of the continent nearly thirty-five years ago.
That, you’ve said, marked the beginning of your quest.
Do you still dream of Jesus when you sleep at night?

Jesus is with me all day while I work.
At night I’m so bone-tired that I sleep very deep.
But I also float.

In what sense?

The way it is when I climb the ladder with the bale and the
adobe.
Only there’s no ladder.
And I don’t feel any of the weight of the bale and the clay.

Jesus is levitating you, making you float?

Yes sir.
It feels real nice.

Jesus does not tell you what to paint on the mountain the following morning?

No, huh-uh.
That comes when I’m on the ladder working.

How does Jesus communicate to you?
Through words?

Not exactly.

The Slabs draw a lot of different people.
Snowbirds, the homeless, even some dangerous types.
Outlaws and bikers, militia.
How have the people in and around the Slabs responded to Salvation Mountain?

Oh, real good.
Lots of Christian folks have expressed themselves very positive about the mountain.
Even the non-believers, they’ve been supportive to the mountain.
Folks buy me coffee and donuts in the restaurants.
People buy me groceries.
I don’t ask.
I can turn my back and there’ll be some groceries and two cans of paint right next to my truck.
See, it ain’t me.
It’s God’s mountain working through me.

I didn’t see a church in Niland or Bombay Beach.
Where are the nearest evangelical churches, Dewey?

Well, there’s one up in Mecca, just north of Salton City.
Another down there in Brawley.
But I’ve never went.
My church is right here.

Your mountain.

Jesus’ mountain.
I’m just real fortunate he chose me to build it.
Because without him I could not even draw a straight line.

Why do you think Jesus chose you rather than, say, an artist or
sculptor with knowledge and experience?

I’ve asked myself that same question.
I always kinda figured that God scraped the bottom of the barrel to have me build his mountain.
Maybe he just wanted to prove he could pick somebody that really couldn’t do it and then make him do it. [laughs]
Man, I was here without state permission.
The county didn’t never give me permission.
I had no right to be here at all.
But God got it done for me.
I think maybe to testify to his faith in poor folks.
The poor and the ignorant, like me.
Was it eight or ten years ago that county supervisors called
Salvation Mountain a "toxic nightmare” because of the leaded paint you used?
They talked about bulldozing the mountain and burying it in a hazardous-waste site on an Indian reservation in Nevada.
Has that problem with the supervisors been resolved?

Oh, sure.
Senator Barbara Boxer wrote to the supervisors on behalf of the mountain.
So did twenty-five museum directors from acrost the country.
You see, I never knew much about politicians.
But I knew they have a lot of power.
They just come in here like a fifty ton bulldozer, with lies, and they didn’t care.
They thought they could push me over easy because I’m clumsy, awkward, I’ve got no money.
But once they realized they were wrong, they backed off.
I still believe American politicians are better than in most countries.

I know you paint and sculpt every day.
Do you eat every day or do you sometimes fast?

I eat, but not much.
I used to fast but now I don’t have the strength to fast after climbing the ladder and working in the sun.
It gets pretty darn hot out here.

What do you eat?

Pretty much what good folks donate.
Whatever groceries I find by my truck, that’s what I eat.
I never fussed about food, even when I was young.
I never had enough money to fuss.
I never went to school the way everyone does these days.
I was ignorant, like I said.
I’m still ignorant.
But I love Jesus and through his grace I am building this mountain.
But it is actually Jesus building it with my hands, you see.

You’ve become famous, Dewey.
Salvation Mountain is reproduced in art books both in this country and Europe.
You receive hundreds of visitors.
They give you donations.
What do you do with the donated money?

Well, I used to keep it in my truck.
But then I was robbed a few times.
[smiles and shrugs his shoulders]
Now I have it in a bank down there in El Centro.
Do you want to see a book?
They just sent it to me, a big art book.
From Germany.

I’d like to see it..

See, there is Salvation Mountain on the cover.
And inside there are five more pages of the mountain from different angles.
Full color.
The photographers--two of them from Germany--were here for three days.
They stayed in a hotel in Calipatria.

Calipatria?
Near Mexicali?
Where the state prison is?

Uh-huh.
There’s a fancy hotel down there.
Holiday Inn, I think it is.

Handsome book, Dewey.
Very nice presentation of the mountain.
Taschen--they’re a well-known publisher.
Did they pay you?

No.
It don’t matter.
I have all the money I need.
More than I ever had, because I was always real poor, you see.
I don’t have a lot of expenses.
Except for my teeth.
I have this new set of teeth that I got done in El Centro.
What do you think?

They look good.
How do they feel?

They feel good.

You have a new set of teeth and you’ve become a world-famous artist.
You don’t mind that designation—artist?

At first when someone even mentioned me being an artist I’d correct ‘em.
No, no, that ain’t me.
But then it happened so often I got to feeling I should feel good about it.
Shoot, I don’t care what people call it.
If they want to push the mountain as art, boy, I’m glad you like that artwork. [laughs]
Just so “God is Love” is up there and folks can come and draw their own conclusions.

What about apprentices?
There’s so much interest in what you’re doing, I’m sure you can get some young people to help you with the hoisting and heavy stuff.

That’s true.
The heavy work is harder for me than it used to be.
Well, I did have a couple of young fellows volunteer to help me and they came from up there in Oregon all ready to do the heavy work.
Except one of the boys brought his mother with him.
She was a very religious lady, she took one look at the flowers I painted in all them colors and she scolded me.
She said: “You got to take them flowers down because you can’t preach Jesus pretty.”
“If you truly love Jesus,” she said, “you are going to be persecuted and people gonna hate you.”
Now that didn’t hit me good.
Jesus is a beautiful spirit so I always thought it is right that I preach Jesus pretty.
So what I done after she scolded me is I just started putting more flowers than ever on the mountain.
I guess I’m stubborner than a mule.
You tell me I can’t so something, look out. [laughs]
See, I’m such a loner it’s almost embarrassing.
I don’t know how to explain that really.
I love people, but I’ve been out here a lot of years and I hardly know anyone’s last name.
I love to smile at them and thank them for bringing paint and groceries.
But when I get too close to folks, they sort of want me to do it their way.
And most of the time their way is right.
But I still like to do it my way.
I’m-a-gonna make lots of mistakes, but let me make them with God lookin’ over me.

So you work alone.
But you and Salvation Mountain are all over the virtual world.
You have your own web site and blog, right?

[laughs]
Some young people from the LA area came up with the idea and I said fine, as long as they took care of it.
Which, I guess, they’re doing.
I don’t have a computer myself, but folks tell me it looks real nice.

It does.
You’re even on YouTube, videos of you constructing the mountain.

That’s what they tell me.
It makes me happy to hear because not everyone can make it all the way to the Slabs to see the real thing.

Do you think that all the interest in Salvation Mountain has to do
with a renewed interest in Jesus and the word of God?
Or does it have to do with the oddity of a person erecting a colorful mountain in a remote desert at the “end of the earth”?

I don’t rightly know.
I hope it’s about Jesus, because without him the mountain wouldn’t exist.
But it may not happen right away either, this true appreciation of Jesus.
As long as it happens sometime and Salvation Mountain is still standing.
You asked before about the donations.
Where the money goes.
About every dollar that’s donated I put back into the mountain.
The more it expands, the more it needs to be maintained, you see.

How much larger is the mountain likely to get, Dewey?

That depends on Jesus.

"Walter Benjamin"

"Walter Benjamin" is drawn from a series of Harold Jaffe's docufictions called OD, which addresses well-known humans who have died of an overdose of drugs either intentionally or inadvertently."






Found dead in his room from a deliberate overdose of morphine in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, after the group of Jewish refugees of which he was a part was intercepted by the Spanish Police on September 26, 1940. The group was attempting to reach Portugal, “officially” neutral in the Allies-Axis war.

He had a peculiar gait, described by an acquaintance as “at once advancing and tarrying, a strange mixture of both.”

Was it a “mixture” or a contradiction?

Was it contradictory or dialectical?

Was it impulse or calculation?

Was it another display of Benjamin’s much-commented-on-complexity?

With something of the comic, tragic and idiot-savant in the pot?


He thought of himself as a collector.

Walking aimlessly through Paris, collecting impressions.

Flanerie.

He read very widely, of course, but the books he meticulously collected were to be admired, not read.

When someone entered Derrida’s library and inquired whether the philosophe had read “all those books,” Derrida replied softly: “I’ve read just four, but very, very carefully.”
Benjamin collected objects that struck his fancy, with a keen eye always for the object’s non-usefulness.

He collected quotations all his adult life, pausing to write the words into a little book he carried in his breast pocket.

Wrote with his left hand.

Born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin.

The city he loved was Paris.

The first theoretician of the flaneur was Baudelaire, whom Benjamin admired and addressed in writing.


But how did Benjamin win over Bertolt Brecht, the most irascible artist-intellectual in Europe?

With the possible exception of Thomas Stearns Eliot, who because of unceasing constipation and his elevated caste, feigned patience.

Except, perhaps, towards Jews and Irish Catholics.

Walter Benjamin was a non-Jewish Jew.

Rather like Kafka with whom he identified.

Benjamin evidently never crossed paths with Eliot, who mostly remained in Britain, handling money, editing his literary journal, having quiet breakdowns . . .

Eliot, bent over his turtle soup, spoke softly, unctuously.

What little walking Eliot did made him think of fame and prayer.

Flanerie signifies a rich even delirious passivity, not thinking of anything in particular.


Hannah Arendt speculates that Benjamin was pursued by the “bucklicht Mannlein," the little hunchback of bad luck, well-known in German fairy tales.

At least in the ways of the world, Benjamin seemed incapable of making the right choice.

The little hunchback was always there pointing in the opposite direction.
When Benjamin refused on principle to compromise, he should have compromised.

When he suspended principle for the moment and did compromise, he need not have compromised.

He manifested potently (impotently) what he subtly demonstrated in both Proust and Kafka: that place at which weakness and genius coincide.

According to the sympathetic Hannah Arendt.


I nearly said “syphilitic Hannah Arendt.”

But that would have been Benjamin, wishing to be promiscuous but incapable, becoming syphilitic on his first deviation, which itself would be less than successful.

Lacked the thrusting power of his hero Brecht .

Lacked the courage (if that’s what it is) to enact his deviations as his hero Baudelaire enacted his.

He rarely completed what he set about.

What little he did complete was to him unsatisfactory.

Unsatisfactory as well to his student turned mentor/monitor, Adorno.


Another compulsion to flanerie was his, as it were, benign incapacity to locate himself.

He made a point of not going to the restroom while dining out for fear of not being able to find his way back to his table.

Which reminds us again of Kafka, born nine years before Benjamin, on July 3, at a period when the art of fasting had some purchase.

Moreover the most successful fasters had impresarios to present them to a restless public which naturally became more engaged the closer the hunger “artiste” approached death.

One such artiste, known as K, was especially refined at his craft and had established the Central European record of 42 days of fasting.

More than 42 days was unlawful because of the prospect of suicide, a prosecutable offence throughout Europe at that time.

K displayed his wasting self in a portable cage, barred, on a floor covered with grass, with a wooden bench and a low door at the left back corner which opened to a basin for excretions.

These of course became negligible as the fast extended.

The hunger artiste in his portable cage was transported from hamlet to hamlet, with an occasional stop in a city.

Sophisticated city dwellers for whom time was money tended to favor death itself rather than near-death, such as the hunger artiste presented.

At the termination of a successful fast there would be a small celebration.

Someone would play the tuba.

A pretty girl in a swimsuit secretly holding her nose would lead the rickety faster from his straw pallet to a table outside the cage bedecked with food.

For the artiste this was an intolerable moment.

The very thought of food made him dizzy with nausea.

Finally he would be prevailed upon to nibble a piece of bread, sip a thimble-full of mild tea.

Because of cultural factors not directly relevant to this discourse, the cynical attitude of the cities spread to the hamlets.

The general public grew more impatient with hunger artistes, as they did with other “performers” who, so to speak, toyed with death without actually dying.
As a result, K, in the 19th day of a new fast, awoke one dawn (he was never a sleeper) to find himself without an impresario.

After some nervous days, K hired himself out to a traveling circus, whose impresario could not be called enthusiastic.

To win him over, K offered to present his art for no pay, since his needs were minimal and money, of which he had little, meant to him nothing.

The graver difficulty was that the circus impresario had, he claimed, just one vacant cage, which was conjoined laterally to the cage of a young panther.

All night the hunger artiste listened to the panther pacing and growling.

In the day he smelled the raw meat and heard the panther savaging it.

Still he continued fasting, the sole occupation he knew.

Circus-goers, though not many of course, would pause by his cage, watch him for a brief time, occasionally comment.

The children would sometimes point at him then look at each other.

Usually these were nuclear families passing or returning from the fierce carnivores’ cages.

After several weeks the circus impresario removed the panther from the cage adjoining the artiste to a more spacious cage farther away.

The cage adjoining the faster’s cage remained empty, and as a result fewer and fewer viewers paused there.

After a time nobody paused by the faster’s cage.

Because the circus was otherwise thriving, nobody seemed to notice, until one day an overseer saw that not just the panther’s previous cage but the faster’s cage were empty.

An attendant was summoned to clean and prepare both cages for a newly captured brace of Bengal tigers.

As he was raking the straw in the faster’s cage he uncovered the faster himself, now shriveled to the dimensions of a starving child.

The attendant grinned vacuously at his discovery.

With what remaining strength he had, the artiste, without food for nearly fifty days, feebly motioned to the attendant, who squatted and, still grinning, lent an ear.

Before expiring, the enfeebled hunger artiste scratched out this almost inaudible whisper: I never wished to be a celebrated hunger artiste. I just could never find anything I wanted to eat.


Walter Benjamin did not deliberately kill himself with an overdose of morphine, as was widely reported.

He shot morphine into his left thigh because he never found anything else he liked to inject into his left thigh nearly as much.

The Colossus of Maroussi

Raconteur, beggar, censored novelist and occasional pornographer; Henry Miller's name came up of over pints of Newcastle with Trumanwater last night. Trumanwater is the only person I've ever met, besides myself, who's (nearly) read Miller's "Rosy Crucifixion" trilogy. I can't believe it's been almost 30 years since Miller died.

Henry Miller was an inspiration to me as a younger man, appealing strongly to my sense of romantic adventure, and portraying the life of the literary artist as funny, sacred, sexy, desperate and very much worth pursuing. No writer has made books, writers and writing seem so vitally important, so invested with the well-lived life. A generation ago, Miller was caught in the crossfire of the PC wars, and his reputation has suffered; many now see him simply as a sexist fool, but this is a grievously unfair caricature: while he does, without apology, embody the working class sexual attitudes of his milieu, there is far more to him as an artist.

What follows are the opening pages of Miller's lyrical and in some ways profound Greek travelogue The Colossus of Maroussi

I WOULD NEVER HAVE GONE TO GREECE
had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in
the same house with me in Paris. One evening, over a
glass of white wine, she began to talk of her experiences
in roaming about the world. I always listened to her with
great attention, not only because her experiences were
strange but because when she talked about her wander-
ings she seemed to paint them: everything she described
remained in my head like finished canvases by a master.
It was a peculiar conversation that evening: we began by
talking about China and the Chinese language which she
had begun to study. Soon we were in North Africa, in the
desert, among peoples I had never heard of before. And
then suddenly she was all alone, walking beside a river,
and the light was intense and I was following her as best
I could in the blinding sun but she got lost and I found
myself wandering about in a strange land listening to a
language I had never heard before. She is not exactly a
story teller, this girl, but she is an artist of some sort be-
cause nobody has ever given me the ambiance of a place
so thoroughly as she did Greece. Long afterwards I dis-
covered that it was near Olympia that she had gone astray
and I with her, but at the time it was just Greece to me,
a world of light such as I had never dreamed of and never
hoped to see.

For months prior to this conversation I had been re-
ceiving letters from Greece from my friend Lawrence
Durrell who had practically made Corfu his home. His
letters were marvellous too, and yet a bit unreal to me.
Durrell is a poet and his letters were poetic: they caused a
certain confusion in me owing to the fact that the dream
and the reality, the historical and the mythological, were
so artfully blended. Later I was to discover for myself
that this confusion is real and not due entirely to the
poetic faculty. But at the time I thought he was laying it
on, that it was his way of coaxing me to accept his repeated
invitations to come and stay with him.

A few months before the war broke out I decided to take
a long vacation. I had long wanted to visit the valley of
the Dordogne, for one thing. So I packed my valise and
took the train for Rocamadour where I arrived early one
morning about sun up, the moon still gleaming brightly.
It was a stroke of genius on my part to make the tour of
the Dordogne region before plunging into the bright and
hoary world of Greece. Just to glimpse the black, mys-
terious river at Dômme from the beautiful bluff at the
edge of the town is something to be grateful for all one's
life. To me this river, this country, belong to the poet,
Rainer Maria Rilke. It is not French, not Austrian, not
European even: it is the country of enchantment which
the poets have staked out and which they alone may lay
claim to. It is the nearest thing to Paradise this side of
Greece. Let us call it the Frenchman's paradise, by way of
making a concession. Actually it must have been a para-
dise for many thousands of years. I believe it must have
been so for the Cro-Magnon man, despite the fossilized
evidences of the great caves which point to a condition of
life rather bewildering and terrifying. I believe that the
Cro-Magnon man settled here because he was extremely
intelligent and had a highly developed sense of beauty.
I believe that in him the religious sense was already highly
developed and that it flourished here even if he lived like
an animal in the depths of the caves. I believe that this
great peaceful region of France will always be a sacred
spot for man and that when the cities have killed off the
poets this will be the refuge and the cradle of the poets
to come. I repeat, it was most important for me to have
seen the Dordogne: it gives me hope for the future of the
race, for the future of the earth itself. France may one
day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as
dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.

At Marseilles I took the boat for Piraeus. My friend
Durrell was to meet me in Athens and take me to Corfu.
On the boat there were many people from the Levant. I
singled them out immediately, in preference to the Amer-
icans; the French, the English. I had a strong desire to
talk to Arabs and Turks and Syrians and such like. I was
curious to know how they looked at the world. The voy-
age lasted four or five days, giving me ample time to
make acquaintance with those whom I was eager to know
more about. Quite by accident the first friend I made was
a Greek medical student returning from Paris. We spoke
French together. The first evening we talked until three
or four in the morning, mostly about Knut Hamsun,
whom I discovered the Greeks were passionate about. It
seemed strange at first to be talking about this genius of
the North whilst sailing into warm waters. But that con-
versation taught me immediately that the Greeks are an
enthusiastic, curious-minded, passionate people. Passion
--it was something I had long missed in France. Not only
passion, but contradictoriness, confusion, chaos--all these
sterling human qualities I rediscovered and cherished
again in the person of my new-found friend. And gen-
erosity. I had almost thought it had perished from the
earth. There we were, a Greek and an American, with
something in common, yet two vastly different beings. It
was a splendid introduction to that world which was about
to open before my eyes. I was already enamored of
Greece, and the Greeks, before catching sight of the
country. I could see in advance that they were a friendly,
hospitable people, easy to reach, easy to deal with.

The next day I opened conversation with the others--a
Turk, a Syrian, some students from Lebanon, an Argen-
tine man of Italian extraction. The Turk aroused my an-
tipathies almost at once. He had a mania for logic which
infuriated me. It was bad logic too. And like the others,
all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him
an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress
was their obsession. More machines, more efficiency, more
capital, more comforts--that was their whole talk. I asked
them if they had heard of the millions who were unem-
ployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked
them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable
the American people were with all their machine-made
luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sar-
casm. What they wanted was success--money, power, a
place in the sun. None of them wanted to return to their
own country; for some reason they had all of them been
obliged to return against their will. They said there was
no life for them in their own country. When would life
begin? I wanted to know. When they had all the things
which America had, or Germany, or France. Life was
made up of things, of machines mainly, from what I
could gather. Life without money was an impossibility:
one had to have clothes, a good home, a radio, a car, a
tennis racquet, and so on. I told them I had none of those
things and that I was happy without them, that I had
turned my back on America precisely because these things
meant nothing to me. They said I was the strangest Amer-
ican they had ever met. But they liked me. They stuck to
me throughout the voyage, plying me with all sorts of
questions which I answered in vain. Evenings I would get
together with the Greek. We understood one another
better, much better, despite his adoration for Germany
and the German régime. He too, of course, wanted to go
to America some day. Every Greek dreams of going to
America and making a nest egg. I didn't try to dissuade
him; I gave him a picture of America as I knew it, as I
had seen it and experienced it. That seemed to frighten
him a little: he admitted he had never heard anything
like that about America before. "You go," I said, "and
see for yourself. I may be wrong. I am only telling you
what I know from my own experience.""Remember," I
added, "Knut Hamsun didn't have such a wonderful time
of it there, nor your beloved Edgar Allan Poe. . . ."

There was a French archaeologist returning to Greece
who sat opposite me at the table; he could have told me a
lot of things about Greece but I never gave him a chance;
I disliked him from the time I first laid eyes on him. The
chap I really liked most during the voyage was the Ital-
ian from the Argentine. He was about the most ignorant
fellow I have ever met and charming at the same time.
At Naples we went ashore together to have a good meal
and to visit Pompeii which he had never even heard of.
Despite the overpowering heat I enjoyed the trip to
Pompeii; if I had gone with an archaeologist I would
have been bored stiff. At Piraeus he came ashore with me
to visit the Acropolis. The heat was even worse than at
Pompeii, which was pretty bad. At nine in the morning
it must have been 120 degrees in the sun. We had hardly
gotten through the gate at the dock when we fell into the
hands of a wily Greek guide who spoke a little English
and French and who promised to show us everything of
interest for a modest sum. We tried to find out what he
wanted for his services but in vain. It was too hot to dis-
cuss prices; we fell into a taxi and told him to steer us
straight to the Acropolis. I had changed my francs into
drachmas on the boat; it seemed like a tremendous wad
that I had stuffed into my pocket and I felt that I could
meet the bill no matter how exorbitant it might be. I
knew we were going to be gypped and I looked forward to
it with relish. The only thing that was solidly fixed in my
mind about the Greeks was that you couldn't trust them;
I would have been disappointed if our guide had turned
out to be magnanimous and chivalrous. My companion
on the other hand was somewhat worried about the situa-
tion. He was going on to Beyrout. I could actually hear
him making mental calculations as we rode along in the
suffocating dust and heat.

The ride from Piraeus to Athens is a good introduction
to Greece. There is nothing inviting about it. It makes
you wonder why you decided to come to Greece. There is
something not only arid and desolate about the scene, but
something terrifying too. You feel stripped and plun-
dered, almost annihilated. The driver was like an animal
who had been miraculously taught to operate a crazy
machine: our guide was constantly directing him to go to
the right or the left, as though they had never made the
journey before. I felt an enormous sympathy for the
driver whom I knew would be gypped also. I had the
feeling that he could not count beyond a hundred; I had
also the feeling that he would drive into a ditch if he
were directed to. When we got to the Acropolis--it was
an insane idea to go there immediately--there were sev-
eral hundred people ahead of us storming the gate. By this
time the heat was so terrific that all I thought of was
where to sit down and enjoy a bit of shade. I found my-
self a fairly cool spot and I waited there while the Ar-
gentine chap got his money's worth. Our guide had re-
mained at the entrance with the taxi driver after turning
us over to one of the official guides. He was going to
escort us to the Temple of Jupiter and the Thesion and
other places as soon as we had had our fill of the Acropo-
lis. We never went to these places, of course. We told him
to drive into town, find a cool spot and order some ice
cream. It was about ten thirty when we parked ourselves
on the terrace of a cafe. Everybody looked fagged out
from the heat, even the Greeks. We ate the ice cream,
drank the iced water, then more ice cream and more iced
water. After that I called for some hot tea, because I sud-
denly remembered somebody telling me once that hot
tea cools you off.

The taxi was standing at the curb with the motor run-
ning. Our guide seemed to be the only one who didn't
mind the heat. I suppose he thought we would cool off a
bit and then start trotting around again in the sun looking
at ruins and monuments. We told him finally that we
wanted to dispense with his services. He said there was
no hurry, he had nothing special to do, and was happy
to keep us company. We told him we had had enough for
the day and would like to settle up. He called the waiter
and paid the check out of his own pocket. We kept prod-
ding him to tell us how much. He seemed reluctant as hell
to tell us. He wanted to know how much we thought his
services were worth. We said we didn't know--we would
leave it to him to decide. Whereupon, after a long pause,
after looking us over from head to foot, scratching him-
self, tilting his hat back, mopping his brow, and so on, he
blandly announced that he thought 2500 drachmas would
square the account. I gave my companion a look and told
him to open fire. The Greek of course was thoroughly
prepared for our reaction. And it's this, I must confess,
that I really like about the Greeks, when they are wily
and cunning. Almost at once he said, "well, all right, if
you don't think my price is fair then you make me a
price." So we did. We made him one as ridiculously low
as his was high. It seemed to make him feel good, this
crude bargaining. As a matter of fact, we all felt good
about it. It was making service into something tangible
and real like a commodity. We weighed it and appraised
it, we juggled it like a ripe tomato or an ear of corn. And
finally we agreed, not on a fair price, because that would
have been an insult to our guide's ability, but we agreed
that for this unique occasion, because of the heat, because
we had not seen everything, and so on and so forth, that
we would fix on thus and such a sum and part good friends.
One of the little items we haggled about a long time was
the amount paid by our guide to the official guide at the
Acropolis. He swore he had given the man 150 drachmas.
I had seen the transaction with my own eyes, and I knew
he had given only fifty drachmas. He maintained that I
had not seen well. We smoothed it out by pretending that
he had inadvertently handed the man a hundred drach-
mas more than he intended to, a piece of casuistry so
thoroughly un-Greek that had he then and there decided
to rob us of all we possessed he would have been justified
and the courts of Greece would have upheld him.

An hour later I said good-bye to my companion, found
myself a room in a small hotel at double the usual price,
stripped down and lay on the bed naked in a pool of
sweat until nine that evening. I looked for a restaurant,
tried to eat, but after taking a few mouthfuls gave it up.
I have never been so hot in all my life. To sit near an
electric light was torture. After a few cold drinks I got
up from the terrace where I was sitting and headed for
the park. I should say it was about eleven o'clock. People
were swarming in all directions to the park. It reminded
me of New York on a sweltering night in August. It was
the herd again, something I had never felt in Paris, ex-
cept during the aborted revolution. I sauntered slowly
through the park towards the Temple of Jupiter. There
were little tables along the dusty paths set out in an
absent-minded way: couples were sitting there quietly in
the dark, talking in low voices, over glasses of water. The
glass of water. . . everywhere I saw the glass of water.
It became obsessional. I began to think of water as a new
thing, a new vital element of life. Earth, air, fire, water.
Right now water had become the cardinal element. See-
ing lovers sitting there in the dark drinking water, sitting
there in peace and quiet and talking in low tones, gave me
a wonderful feeling about the Greek character. The dust,
the heat, the poverty, the bareness, the containedness of
the people, and the water everywhere in little tumblers
standing between the quiet, peaceful couples, gave me the
feeling that there was something holy about the place,
something nourishing and sustaining. I walked about en-
chanted on this first night in the Zapion. It remains in my
memory like no other park I have known. It is the quin-
tessence of park, the thing one feels sometimes in looking
at a canvas or dreaming of a place you'd like to be in and
never find. It is lovely in the morning, too, as I was to dis-
cover. But at night, coming upon it from nowhere, feel-
ing the hard dirt under your feet and hearing a buzz of
language which is altogether unfamiliar to you, it is mag-
ical--and it is more magical to me perhaps because I think
of it as filled with the poorest people in the world, and
the gentlest. I am glad I arrived in Athens during that
incredible heat wave, glad I saw it under the worst condi-
tions. I felt the naked strength of the people, their purity,
their nobility, their resignation. I saw their children, a
sight which warmed me, because coming from France it
was as if children were missing from the world, as if they
were not being born any more. I saw people in rags, and
that was cleansing too. The Greek knows how to live with
his rags: they don't utterly degrade and befoul him as in
other countries I have visited.

The following day I decided to take the boat to Corfu
where my friend Durrell was waiting for me. We pulled
out of Piraeus about five in the afternoon, the sun still
burning like a furnace. I had made the mistake of buying
a second class ticket. When I saw the animals coming
aboard, the bedding, all the crazy paraphernalia which
the Greeks drag with them on their voyages, I promptly
changed to first class, which was only a trifle more expen-
sive than second. I had never travelled first class before
on anything, except the Metro in Paris--it seemed like a
genuine luxury to me. The waiter was continuously circu-
lating about with a tray filled with glasses of water. It was
the first Greek word I learned: nero (water) and a beau-
tiful word it is. Night was coming on and the islands were
looming up in the distance, always floating above the
water, not resting on it. The stars came out with magnifi-
cent brilliance and the wind was soft and cooling. I began
to get the feel of it at once, what Greece was, what it had
been, what it will always be even should it meet with the
misfortune of being overrun by American tourists. When
the steward asked me what I would like for dinner, when
I gathered what it was we were going to have for dinner,
I almost broke down and wept. The meals on a Greek
boat are staggering. I like a good Greek meal better than
a good French meal, even though it be heresy to admit it.
There was lots to eat and lots to drink: there was the air
outside and the sky full of stars. I had promised myself
on leaving Paris not to do a stroke of work for a year. It
was my first real vacation in twenty years and I was ready
for it. Everything seemed right to me. There was no time
any more, just me drifting along in a slow boat ready to
meet all comers and take whatever came along. Out of
the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the
islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the
fading light. I couldn't ask for more, nor did I want any-
thing more. I had everything a man could desire, and I
knew it. I knew too that I might never have it again. I
felt the war coming on--it was getting closer and closer
every day. For a little while yet there would be peace
and men might still behave like human beings.

We didn't go through the Corinth canal because there had
been a landslide: we practically circumnavigated the Pelo-
ponnesus. The second night out we pulled into Patras
opposite Missolonghi. I have come into this port several
times since, always about the same hour, and always I ex-
perienced the same fascination. You ride straight into a
big headland, like an arrow burying itself in the side of
a mountain. The electric lights strung along the water-
front create a Japanese effect; there is something im-
promptu about the lighting in all Greek ports, something
which gives the impression of an impending festival. As
you pull into port the little boats come out to meet you:
they are filled with passengers and luggage and livestock
and bedding and furniture. The men row standing up,
pushing instead of pulling. They seem absolutely tire-
less, moving their heavy burdens about at will with deft
and almost imperceptible movements of the wrist. As
they draw alongside a pandemonium sets in. Everybody
goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, dis-
orderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen,
no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is
created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event,
no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing
the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly
curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake
of experimenting, not to establish a better or more effi-
cient way of doing things. He likes to do things with his
hands, with his whole body, with his soul, I might as well
say. Thus Homer lives on. Though I've never read a
line of Homer I believe the Greek of to-day is essentially
unchanged. If anything he is more Greek than he ever
was. And here I must make a parenthesis to say a word
about my friend Mayo, the painter, whom I knew in
Paris. Malliarakis was his real name and I think he came
originally from Crete. Anyway, pulling into Patras I got
to thinking about him violently. I remembered asking
him in Paris to tell me something about Greece and sud-
denly, as we were coming into the port of Patras, I under-
stood everything he had been trying to tell me that night
and I felt bad that he was not alongside me to share my
enjoyment. I remembered how he had said with quiet,
steady conviction, after describing the country for me as
best he could--" Miller, you will like Greece, I am sure of
it." Somehow those words impressed me more than any-
thing he had said about Greece. You will like it. . . .
that stuck in my crop. "By God, yes, I like it," I was say-
ing to myself over and over as I stood at the rail taking in
the movement and the hubbub. I leaned back and looked
up at the sky. I had never seen a sky like this before. It
was magnificent. I felt completely detached from Eu-
rope. I had entered a new realm as a free man--every-
thing had conjoined to make the experience unique and
fructifying. Christ, I was happy...

This sea is the world where we live after we die

Chisso Corporation factory at Minamata, today.


During the 1950's and '60's the Yatsushiro Sea was contaminated with methyl mercury pollution from the Chisso Corporation factory complex at Minamata, Japan. Thousands of fish, fowl and humans living in the region were horribly disabled, disfigured (the toxin is also mutagenic) and many died from the resulting mercury poisoning of the marine ecosystem.

Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, in his novel "Deep River," treats these events allegorically, via his character Numada (a writer of children's stories):

Shinkichi's grandfather and grandmother had lived in a village by the Yatsushiro Sea. His grandfather had died eight years before, but in his vigorous days he had been known as a master squid-catcher, and he was famed as a fisherman throughout the village. He had, though, been very fond of his liquor, and Shinkichi's father had grumbled that drinking was what had killed him.

Shinkichi lived in Tokyo, and seldom visited his grandfather's house. Three years before, he had returned to the Ariake Sea for the obon festival of the dead. During the day, an elder cousin taught him how to swim in the glimmering Yatsushiro Sea, and at night they took him out fishing. He could not believe how much fun he had every day. When he looked out from the beach, the torches from the squid catching boats stretched out like a bridge of fire. On the night of the Feast of Lanterns, his grandmother and kinsmen lit lanterns and from their boats set them afloat into the sea.

All around them the candle-lit lanterns floated in the water.

"Your grandpa has become a fish and lives in this sea," his grandmother told Shinkichi with a serious face. "This sea is the world where we live after we die. When your grandma dies one day, I'll have them cast my body into the sea, and I'll become a fish and be able to see your grandpa again."

His grandmother seemed to believe everything she told him. When Shinkichi asked his cousin, "Is that true?" the elder boy with a sober look answered, "Of course it's true. That's what everyone in this village believes. My sister died when she was in elementary school, and swims around at the bottom of this sea."

Numada had written this fable as a tentative study while he was still in college, but it remained one of his favorites. He had gone on to write that a large factory was built near the village, and that waste from the plant had polluted the sea, afflicted the fish, and made the people of the fishing village ill. But he had cut out that part, feeling it was too painful a story for a fable. The villagers had complained about the factory, not because it discharged waste that made them ill, but because it had destroyed the next world where their ancestors and and their dead parents and relatives and siblings were living, and where they too would be reborn. Numada had wanted to include in his fable that journalists, who did not believe in a life to come, had emphasized in their reports of the problem not these ephemeral concerns, but the problems of environmental pollution and sickness.


Yatsushiro Sea at dusk