Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?

Editor's Note: I found this old post on one of my original blogs going back about 10 years, but I always liked this writer. And so, I share this with you ... DLM

By Thomas Pynchon
The New York Times Book Review

As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into "literary" and "scientific" factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever "beyond" the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one's own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of a long-ago high-table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, "If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution." Such "intellectuals," for the most part "literary," were supposed by Lord Snow, to be "natural Luddites."

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and think." Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

Historically, Luddites flourished In Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It Isn't clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C.P. Snow's use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined as the counter-revolutionaries of that "Industrial Revolution" which their modern versions have "never tried, wanted, or been able to understand."

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in "Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution," Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial "revolution," in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in "Luddite" they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged -- this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 -- folks would respond with the catch phrase "Lud must have been here." By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname "King (or Captain) Ludd," and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick -- every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it's important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He'd show up at her place. "Sorry, Rev, got some knitting." "What, again?" After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let's imagine logically and coolly, vowed to invent a machine that would make the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete, and so he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted cleric's frame "was so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years."

Now, given that kind of time span, it's just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault. But the words "fit of insane rage" are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work -- to be "worth" that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass -- the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero -- who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. "Are you not near the Luddites?" he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. "By the Lord! if there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers -- the breakers of frames -- the Lutherans of politics -- the reformers?" He includes an "amiable chanson," which proves to be a Luddite hymn so inflammatory that it wasn't published until after the poet's death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein's creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. "I resolved. . . ," Victor tells us, "to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large," which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor's own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. However much of Frankenstein's longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details, but we're left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.

This is one of several interesting similarities between Frankenstein and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, The Castle of Otranto (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelley's preface was written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to Frankenstein in her own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.

The novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind "with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie." Walpole had been awakened from a dream, "of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle ... and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a gigantic hand in armour."

In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle's resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from pieces -- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite oversized -- which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in Frankenstein, are non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto's patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that has remained code for "miraculous," on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and comics, down to Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.

To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes, "Well, the airplanes got him." "No. . . it was Beauty killed the Beast." In which we again encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological.

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature -- of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself -- then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, "I have affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart." The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In science fiction, where entire worlds may be generated from simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of these cases we know better. We say, "But the world isn't like that." These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."

This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies -- conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns -- exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions -- most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of "human" as particularly distinguished from "machine." Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age -- curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the "future in their bones." It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk -- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

The word "Luddite" continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come -- you heard it here first -- when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!


New York Times Book Review, 1984


From Spermatikos

What Would Water Do?

The water would run to work,
but turn, gone amok at the work corner,
toward the One-O-One
to drink a red eye and puff a smoke
in the early morning Ra

The water would pick up
trash along the way
but wait for more force
to finish the job

The water would arrive
on time and unplanned,
feeling out each empty
bottomland space
since every handmade
space is disorganized
differently

The water would percolate
in the apocalyptic heat,
catch the wind
and go fly a kite

The water would commit
murderous rage and recede,
unpleased, unsatisfied,
moving on the moon

~ Lincoln City, Oregon


Disparate de Miedo (Folly of Fear)

Mr. Death hangs over
as they tumble.
Time will get them.
But not today.
Senore rises
in an angel's robe,
Aretha Franklin
singin' praises,
man with a sword,
face sketched
in a tree.
Wind blowing to the West.
Away from destiny,
which is too easy
to deny.

~ Telluride, Colorado

Disparate Feminino (Feminine Folly)

Spreading the blanket
like a firemen's net,
six women in jest
with two male jugglers.
Dancing in delight,
each long-dressed lass
has a different opinion
on the topic.
The jugglers,
they've got it so lucky,
all those women working
to make them happy.
But note: in the net,
the husk of a dead donkey,
Goya's coy brush with death
hanging in the air.
If Autumn came any earlier
there would be a counselor,
a policeman,
& tax collector
at the door.

~ Telluride, Colorado

Bedford Toll Plaza

And the more I drive up
The interstate, the more the evidence
of love gets pissed away into the snow.
Pee free or die,
So the state flag Of New Hampshire
May one day say.
The pattern runs hot
And steam runs loose
From a new day's snow
On a hothouse day
In which a solar storm
Would electrify A lake of fire
In the sky
The pattern: A tree,
maybe an off-ramp signage shadow,
with pecked And puckered knotty holes,
Where owls perch and eagles play.
I took that last quarter
To the phone booth ...
Oh, if not for so many lonely
And cynical Winnebegos
That drive, ceaselessly,
To bridge the great divide.
The real question isn't
How to turn lead into gold,
But how to turn gold into soul.

~ Bedford, New Hampshire



~ From "The Kachina's Son," by Douglas McDaniel

Media Arts in War, Part Uno: A reflection for the Fourth of July

What has happened to artistic expression since Sept. 11 as it’s transmitted through any kind of media (or anyone claiming to be a medium), from the political satire of "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" to the mega-bombastic sequel to the classic post-apocalyptic thriller in any theater near you. To the episodes of “Survivor.” To every creative impulse that every tried to be a light in the darkness; to all those media images that are flowing through us now: How do we respond? How do we deal creatively with our own struggle to find the appropriate voice? How do we know the right thing to say, when we see death, so much death? He do we contend with what David Byrne of the Talking Heads once anticipated in “Life During Wartime”:

“Ain’t got no speakers
Ain’t got no headphones,
Ain’t got no music to play.”

After many knee-jerk reactions to Sept. 11, including a slew of benefit performances
by rock stars and actors, there was a shaky sense of assurance. After an alleged victory over the Taliban, followed by their resurgence, Americans crawled out of the foxholes and flooded back into the malls, then the floods and economic crisis of late 2008 flooded right back out. Nevertheless, Sunday’s gladiatorial epic, otherwise known as the NFL, stormed right on through from Super Bowl to Super Bowl. Like a country immune to war, then, not so immune. A country dotted like a push pin map of the Stars and Stripes remains as a menacing reminder of who we have become ... and then the election of 2008 ... as if every now and then the electorate feels guilty for its leadership and responds.
For several years, anything that strays from a patriotic vision was likely to be, with the force of a fully diligent flight crew, wrestled to the ground and whisked away: A terrible beauty was born. But where does it stand now?

~

Seth Butler, out of a concern for air pollution on North Shore of Massachusetts and a need to burn film for a photo essay for a class at Montserrat College, loaded a roll of film and fired.
He pointed his weapon, a truth-telling device, at the churned and weathered brown spires of the Salem Power Plant. Since photos never lie, or, at least, a picture beats a thousand words, he figured in some small way the images might flesh out of the mystery and wonder of the place. He thought the suspected poisons made possible on a daily basis by the plant might be explicated by his pictorial essay, and through this kind of truth we might all be saved from this inconvenience, or, at least, that we might all enjoy some breathtaking pictures of the alleged poisoning taking place.
In fact, such satanic mills have been fodder for artists since William Blake. In fact, power plants and factories will always be great targets for interesting photos. Especially now. Technological wonders perched on American shores will always make great targets. For artists. And for terrorists.
Which, for Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, became part of the problem.
After Sept. 11, as a he snapped on the lens and took in the fall New England air, he looked at the monumental smokestacks, trying to see what the relationship was between himself, the lens and the world at war----not so much the brother-against-brother battle, but man-against-nature war.
“I was just struggling with how to deal with it,” he says.

~

If the medium is the message, then the date, Sept. 11, is the portal where we pour all of our pain, and then, put it on display. The message is our mantra, our artistic Alamo. Lest we forget, every shark-eyed cub reporter tooling around the town halls of Salem, Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead has felt a nearly subconscious duty to post that date, Sept. 11, at least once or twice, like staples into the newsprint, glossy or cheap, of whatever passes for local media.
One reporter, well after the attacks, typed “Sept. 11” in four times within the text of an article that had absolutely nothing to do with the war or terror, real or imaginary.
(Well, actually, even in some tangential way, it was hard to fail to find some way the war against terror might apply to each and every thing we did in a daily lives, from trips to the mall to articles written under intense deadline.)
Plagued by nightmares before a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in New York City, the writer provided repeated semi-accidental advertising for our national numeral of
mourning, anger and fear, for all of the shell-shocked sensibilities, destructive or creative, which launched our nation into a heightened state of awareness (whatever that means) on Sept. 11. To write Sept. 11 in copy, in short, became our patriotic duty as muckrackers and documentarians for our times.
For example, so far this chapter has used the date five times. The date, Sept. 11 (OK, that’s six) flows like water, like shorthand, or better yet, a link to the streaming media of shock, horror, and yes, nationalistic fervor, our personal bond to (what it believes to be) justice and (unbelievable) vengeance. By expressing oneself in this way, in times of mass hypnotic states of hysteria, war, famine and scary bad TV, we discover the most constructive choice in terms of reacting to the world around us.
I mean, why send a missile when maybe a simple e-mail note or a Hallmark card would do? “Hey,” we write, “Remember Sept. 11, and get well soon.”

~

As they say, the medium (Or, the media) is the message. So is writing the date, Sept. 11 (seven). On posters, stamps, newspaper supplements, whatever we can get our hands on.
But what is the most appropriate way to express oneself on the big blank page of life during a time of national trauma, and yes, tight security? The Urizen archons of control, the warlords and the convergent media paradigms, are all in sync with the Union at War.
What if you are a dissenter? A pacifist? With dark skin? Maybe even a Canadian. Or worse, an Islamic art dealer who needs to take a plane to Paris?
A Hub taxi driver?
A Quaker who just woke up one day, and, feeling his or her oats, decided they had
something to say?
A photographer on the North Shore of Massachusetts who pointing and firing near
some power plant smokestacks?
Better think twice. First figure out if it’s naughty, or, nice. Think twice before you click.
But then the reversal came true, especially after the release of "Fahrenheit 911" before the election of 2004. Slowly and surely, as the war became less popular, a whole new sense of media emerged.

~

Seth Butler, age 22, photography student at Montserrat, isn’t an idiot. As a cub photojournalist he knew that when firing off snapshots of satanic mills in Salem during wartime, it’s best to let the most immediately available authority in on what you are up to.
“I went up to the police officer out front of the plant, gave them three IDs, and warned them that I was shooting photos for a project,” he says.
Butler thought he’d received permission, at that point, since he was on public property, to start firing away with his telephoto lens. The guard at the gate said sure, whatever.
“But then this guy pulls up,” a security guard, he says. “I just wanted to do my work. They told me I had to leave.”

~

The bombardment of the global media, crashing all day, all night upon the New England shores, lighting up the giant video screens of Times-Square (still standing) and the pubs of London (last time checked), and yes, your living room, became overwhelming. Our sense of freedom and free expression, in every aspect of our daily lives, from Paris to Portsmouth, became critically impacted. Especially so for those of us in the curious position of being at the seacoast front of a new kind of war when the media buzzword, as in “terror,” is the message, and the enemy could be just about anyone.
“Since Sept. 11, as a photographer,” says Ron DiRito, a teacher at Montserrat whose specialty is art and media and its context and meaning in society, “I don’t think they understand what it’s like for us. I think the rest of the country doesn’t have the same kind of …,” he pauses, looking for ways to explain how it feels to be at the front of this new war, then, completing the thought: “ Everybody in New York understands it better than other people in the country. The physical distance changes our perception of something. There is this overwhelming sensibility.
“We have learned to tolerate each other better, but on the other hand, there is that thing going on, you don’t know who to suspect. This is still relatively trying to be
understood. I don’t think we have processed it culturally and socially.”
But, once it did, America's appetite for violence in the media soared ...

~

“They watched me leave and get back into my car,” says Seth Butler, spurned photojournalist after being unable to capture very much of any possible dangers,
through photographic realism, of the alleged poisoning of the sky at the Salem power plant.
As he moved on into an intersection, at a speed of 15 miles per hour, the legal limit, a white pickup truck sped in front of Butler’s vehicle and slammed on the brakes. “He must of have going thirty five when he went by me and stopped,” he says.
“This cop says, ‘Some people want to talk to you.’ ”
Another police car pulled up, and then another. The local arm of the security state was coming down on Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, like something out of a
Raymond Chandler novel.
“A large black SUV with tinted windows pulled up next. I kept my hands in clear view,” he said. “I had the film …,” he laughed nervously, visibly shaken, as he spread photos of American flag imagery upon a table in the media lab basement at Montserrat.
“I was in possession,” he admits, “of concealed film.”

~

For all practical intents, seemingly, the latest CD by Madonna was for several years rendered not so much obscene but most certainly oblique. On the surface level (which really the only level you can really make money in the entertainment business) it’s a commercial question. What were audiences looking for?
Perhaps everyone had seen enough. Time, though, has proven just the opposite, as the apocalyptic thriller jumps out of the horror box into its own category virtually demanding Oscar consideration. The sentiment immediatel after the attacks exploded so cinematically onto the real world’s stage. But things have changed. While it was hard to know what to feel, at first, the natural inclination toward unity, even for writers, artists and performers, who are often malcontents and social renegades, even they seemed to join up and salute to the brave new paradigm: grieve now, kick ass later. Trhen kick ass, on screen, bigger and bigger.
Oh sure, there was that initial sense that pyrotechnic violence on theater and television screens was a thing of the past. But that was naive, it has been proven.
“A lot of people had the same impression, that it seemed like Hollywood, not the real thing,” said David Goss, director of fine arts at Gordon College, of the terrorizing video of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prior to the terrible events of that day, and the subsequent season of terror that followed and continues to this day, the main concern for the planners of fall concerts, for example, might be quality, recognition, publicity, recognition, ticket sales, recognition, who might get top billing, and oh yeah, recognition. But now, everything has changed.
“People are feeling uneasy about what they once considered to be so exciting,”
Goss said.
But that's all different now. You can rate films in terms of tonnage of TNT now.

~

My first night in Ipswich was Sept. 18, 2001, and it revealed something … at least in terms of the ripple effects (tidal wave, actually, in hardy Ipswich sea-shanty talk) of the post-Sept. 11 realization. I was feeling world weary. So much moving from town to town. I just wanted to be an old tree, not a burned out leaf in the crosswind of global or civil war. All the same, on that day, Sept. 18, I was feeling thankful for having found some shelter in the storm.
More out of accident than a sense of patriotism, I wore my blue Ralph Lauren, “Polo Jeans Company, RL,” baseball cap, which features stripes, but no stars, because Mr. Lauren is the only star to be allowed on this particular head-based insignia. I was a human billboard for Ralph Lauren, patriot … even if most people only recognized my tribal signifier: red, white and blue.
I had a beat up used copy of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” in my back pocket, as well as a childlike curiosity about this strange town called Ipswich. Down the street I went, toward the town center, a babe in the woods beneath a dusky sky of implied imaginary terror.

~

Was the media really ready to fess up, since Osama-style violence is only the copycat caricature of three, hmmm, maybe four late ’80s get-the-terrorist films, two of those starring Bruce Willis, who can walk on the White House lawn, most likely, any day of the week without an invitation. Are post-Sept. 11 tastes no longer able to stomach the video violence?
Yeah, right.
You only need to consider the many years conditioning, that is, what’s required to stomach a totalitarian storm of Christmas-season escapes into Star Wars, hobbits and pre-teenage detective wizards, Monsters, Inc., The Sopranos and on into the phantasm we go ... The Christmas of 2008 it became another of a long line of films with furies frames of evermore destruction. In the global mythic village, the plastic monsters and war toys are as real, within the own scale, as anything you can find in the jumbled up world. Just another mask for our national fascination with violence, which is still, quite surely, anything but satiated.
While the purpose of art has not changed, the art of re-purposing myth towards the designs of the machine are more than ever apparent. But money machines, still, easy to come by, for some, are less easy for others. Starving artists included. So then, the big money still wins. The purpose of mass entertainment (as opposed to art), taking its Dec. 7 queue from the way the film industry rallied to the cause in the 1940s, now becomes a mouthpiece for that very same machine.
And it’s only beginning: Coming to a theater near you – a lock-step, achy breaky heart sort of thing, with a plastic Bill Murray doll for the marketing tie-in. It’s a pull-upyour-bootstraps at the boot-camp sorta flick. With real napalm, and, real renegades to storm the unsafe gates of the Republic.

~

Just then, it happened: a spontaneous moment of humanity. A grizzled old man walked toward me. Small towns such as Ipswich, especially those that have made peace with nature, require us to say hello. It’s the decent thing to do. But a week after Sept. 11 everyone was being decent to one another. A crying of our lot in each and every eye.
But this time my fellow pedestrian and I appeared to be on a collision course. The man just came right up to me, took my hand and shook it, saying, “God bless you,
brother.”
I was taken aback. Maybe giggled out of a sense of surprise. I figured he saw my cap and was thanking me for my heroism. Yes, Ipswich is a friendly little place, but connections like these, random acts of humanity, were taking place all over the country.
For the first time in a long time we noticed each other, realizing we all had something – loss – to share.

~

As Boston political satirist Jimmy Tingle put it, in a post-Sept. 11 performance at the Wingate Street Micro Theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetss, “everything has
changed.”
As part of the performance, serious even for a satirist in less apocalyptic climes, he read from a poem he had written in reaction to Sept. 11, “911: Prayer for America.”

There’s a hole in the tip of Manhattan
A hole in the soul of America
A hole in the center of our psyche
A hole in the foundation of our confidence
There’s a hole in the faith of our country
That fills churches in search of our God
There’s a crack in the national mirror
empty chairs around the family table
dark houses of our missing neighbors
Vacant desks of our absent workers
On our streets,
There's a wail from the widows with candles
sobs from the orphaned with pictures
the face breaks on the lawyer of the dead women’s husband
flags and flowers for the public servants
There’s a hole in the soul of America
Afraid with the televised pictures
Numb with the morning papers
Grieving for the land they loved
Grieving for the land they lost
Grieving for the innocent victims
Grieving for the broken families
Grieving for the friends still weeping
Grieving for the ones who fight fire
Grieving for the ones who fight crime
Grieving for the volunteers by the thousands
Grieving for the City that never Sleeps
Grieving for the City on a Hill
There’s a hole in the soul of Humanity
And I pray for all of our leaders
Good people and well intentioned
Condemned to retaliation,
Doomed to retribution
Sentenced to seek revenge

~

It happened again in the local café. Strangers meeting eye to eye, recognizing the shock and the grief and pain. We all had good radar for it, at least until Thanksgiving.
We were awakened out of our complacency, if for just a few weeks, months or years, 10 depending on your sensitivity to such things as alcohol, Duncan Donuts coffee or intensive psychotherapy.
Times such as these bring out the best, and also the worst. It has always been that way. In 1916, a small contingent of Irish patriots (today we might call them terrorists), took over a post office and ended up dying in a martyrdom of British bullets and fire.
The poet, W.B. Yeats, reflecting on the shock waves the event created in Irish society, wrote the following: “All is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.”
America became terrible beauty, then the bloom came off the thorny rose bush ...

~

After his 45-minute roust, Seth Butler, spurned photojournalist, put his Greenpeace passions aside over the Salem power plant, and started taking photographs of American flags. But rather than puffing up his frames with a patriotic fervor, his eye seemed to be finding something else. An irony. A horror. A beauty. A terror. And more than anything else, a sense of alienation.
“For the first time in my life, I was feeling like a stranger in my own country,” he said. “They basically insulted me. They asked me why I wasn’t in Vermont (which is where his family lives). I was being very open about the whole thing. I was being very civil about the whole thing.
“I’m trying to deal with an event, a problem, over air quality, carcinogens, a serious matter. I ended up being shut down. I tried to work from farther away, and ended up trying to look at it in different contexts.
“But never did I think that I was going to run into the FBI as a college student.
“This was history. I didn’t want to give up. Somebody needs to be working, recording. It doesn’t stop, and I’m not going to either.”
Of the flag photo project, a follow up to his season of hope, terror, frustration, whatever, Butler has decided to call the series “Tattered.”
A terrible beauty was born.

~

During those fall nights and days in Ipswich, I worked the late-night copy desk at The Salem Evening News. More than anything else, I remember the horrible anxiety I felt each time the 10 p.m. news came on in the newsroom. It got to the point where I was afraid to look over my shoulder and at the television. But still, I got all of the sound. Each night, the local anchorpersons would gleefully report the day’s horrors, the new death count for the September 11 attacks, and, of course, handy health tips for the best way to deal with the anthrax threat.
One night I decided to ask another copy editor, who also lived in Ipswich, about the “God bless you” guy. He told me a story that I did not expect.
He said the man was a kind of local loony. Somewhere along the line the man, who had been a boxer but decent civil servant, lost his marbles. Something to do with a divorce. Figures.
In fact, he had been coming up to people in Ipswich and blessing them for years.
This stunned me. My impression, as first impressions often are, was incorrect. The “God bless you” guy’s greeting to me was just another day in the life of Ipswich. It had nothing to do at all with the sudden wash of compassion and kindness in American life.
He was always like that.
It was then that I realized this: While everything has indeed since Sept. 11 has changed, the biggest change of all, the one that I couldn’t detect, was within me. So, let me just say this: God bless you all, brothers. A terrible beauty, reborn, faded and then became, what?





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel

Surface and Wallpaper

That’s the situation
with the magazine
business in Phoenix,
all expressed oh so confidently
by the editor of a local fashion magazine,
who was trying to
elucidate
what kind
of fill goes

between the ads at his
publication.

Print journalism in America
is so far removed from
the First Amendment
it can scarcely raise
a mute defense
against
“surface, wallpaper.”

The skin-deep marketplace
dictates all.
Economic forces shape the printed word
in order to appear
before the overpopulated media frenzy
to promote “surface, wallpaper.”



And my career?



An attendance
at the end of the age of newsprint,
a more sophisticated form of wallpaper.

Thin pages of paper,
papyrus, as rendered
originally by Guttenberg,
then Hearst ... over.

Like wall paper burning off the screen for
the opening of “Bonanza.”



My first thought, immediately looking
at the “wallpaper” round the offices
of the magazine, tucked into
the rococo renaissance of
gilded logos at the Esplanade,
where even Donald
Trump gets shown the door,
was to ponder what kind of
lives go on there for those
covered in wallpaper.

If I
cared to take the time
to do a study, I would examine
what kind of flora adorns
the Esplanade: As above, so
below, the sages say.

The desert has been eradicated
for many miles, and so this shiny
coated surface is a curtain
of death, the death of the printed

sheet of paper for the
purposes of print media,
for all I can ascertain.

The “surface” and “wallpaper” ...
everything sucking
the planet dry, and the planet,
sucking back, has decided
to claim print journalism,
through the untimely
appearance of turmoil
in the real estate industry, one of
its first victims.

If you had read this far, certainly, you
need little convincing of this: originally, an
electronically charged posting.



But it’s worth railing on,
all the same. That’s because behind it all, there’s
something to live for. There’s something valuable to
know behind the notice that you can’t drink from
fountains, but hey, bottled water is still freely available.
There’s something valuable in casting a review of the
song cast by the Vampire, who’s sucking sounds ring
loud and clear, only to be filled with endless port thirsts
worth of water, all being poured like the waters of
Google myths, by vases into cracks in the earth, a
mystical sentence then, for endless words disappearing
beneath the land ... a sacrifice to the god of information.



The Biltmore shopping mall, across the street, is one
big mirror to the surface and the wallpaper. Notice the
mall-dressed manikin chicks as they glance at
themselves, half secretly, in the window shop
reflections. To see my own reflection is to live in a kind
of torment myself. I can't even laugh at the shallowness
of “surface, wallpaper,” if that’s all I’m looking for. So
trying to figure out how to fill in the spaces between the
ads is a pretty pointless event, I see. Anyone with a
global conscience is going to feel that way, if asked to
observe the surface of high-end consumer paradise, and
by swimming in these dry environs they will no doubt be
likewise lost in the despair, hopelessness and banality
cast by the controlling mechanisms of the ruling caste.
You the one, the order of the Red, which made a brief
goodbye at the nearby Biltmore Hotel with John
McCain's capitulation beneath the starless of skies of
Phoenix by November, 2008. But still ... the Vampire
sings: “Think surface, think wallpaper.”



All platform surfaces are even, yes, safe for high-heeled beings, but
there is nothing eternal about the surface of concrete.
And this is really, really valuable to know. Because the
days of such pleasantries are over. Nothing left to do
now but see what the most Dangerous Creatures on
Earth will leave on the silver plate after they are finished
with their feast. Forget about trying to keep up by
putting on new Euro-trash clothes (to feel better ... free)
Forget about getting a free drink of water. Realize that if
you are thirsty, you can always slip into some men’s
room and cup your own hands in the sink, like Pilot, I
guess, and drink from the basin bowl of “surface,”
enjoying the “wallpaper” as you blow your hands dry on
the electrified blower (this is the desert, there’s not a free
water fountain within 10 square miles; and you would
think we could save the juice and let ourselves dry
naturally.



Somewhere in the Middle East there's a bunch of
crazies dreaming up a way to crash this surface and burn
the wallpaper. But they are no better than the guys
dialing up dollar digits to make sure the enemy surface,
doesn’t gain supremacy so that they, themselves, can
cover it with their own name brand style of “wallpaper.”
So sip from your tippy cup, sweet babies, and hope you
are born with the right pattern and style on your faces.
The days of such pleasantries are over. Tip the cup of
vampire blood for just one last great sip of the concrete
basin. Drink. Drink! Your mangled engines may wine
and dine, and the pretty glossy sweet dallied lies may
glint for a month on your tabletop surface, but seek no
truth there, just empty descriptions of “surface,
wallpaper.”





An excerpt from Many Moons to Mythville,' collected road poems by Douglas McDaniel:

On meeting Edward Abbey on the Road to Mythville

I made Navajo land before nightfall, and I was an hour or so past the dingy distress of Tuba City. My last paycheck for my magazine editor's job was still un-cashed in my pocket. I had cut some contributing editor deal with my boss, but had failed to inform him about my plan to conduct business at large from an unknown origin. Ragged, irresponsible, yes, but inefficient I was most certainly not. Chances were good my only funds, about $2,000, wouldn't be wasted at such reservation trading posts as Kayenta or Dinnehotso. It was well past time for any possible bank to be open. My credit cards were a joke and my ATM card was sucked up by the machine because I'd typed in the wrong personal code three times. Which meant I was some kind of imposter. I was flying under the radar of networked commerce, without the membership of any club or any privileges of any kind.

Thoughts about Katsinas also kept me company. Those Hopi deities, religio-mythic gods shaped by genetic memories we now successfully suppress, signal me as power line towers crisscrossing the plateau, part of a strange and sinister networking paradigm. They inspire abstract thoughts about winged super beings. Better known as Kachinas, they are now popularly now rendered as merely commercial dolls for trading posts and Western art galleries, but were once said to conjure thunder, rain and perpetual corn from their Zeus-like overview atop the San Francisco Peaks. The Peaks can be seen overlooking the holy land from hundreds of miles away. I had from childhood thought of these power-line towers as representing the same kind of magic. In some quixotically networked way, they were. With everything else nature provided, even these well-engineered affronts to the red rock esthetic kept the imagination running hot as it melted and coalesced, like lava, into the land.

Even as the headlights in darkness made the road a narrow pipe of light, even as the grand mesas turned my thoughts toward introspection, the Katsina towers' metallic silhouettes against purple shadow lands invited daydreams about twilit spooks and medicine men and shape changers. Creation tales about the "First People," passed by spoken word alone to the local children by elder who learned the same way, were also a part of my database of memes. Certainly, like the Hopi, who believed themselves to have emerged from other worlds, my worldview followed those same power lines, off toward the blank horizon, off into impossible lands of unlimited electrical energy.

We failed romantics are funny that way. When we are most disturbed, most out of control, our muses spin wonderful and sentimental cosmic tales. We are truly ionized. The possibilities for a world filled with magic and true love and finding a hobby in potted plants, properly watered, are endless. Even when, in fact, what we are really up against are big rigs passing at chaotic intervals, with wrong-lane "chicken" games with oncoming Pontiac sedans with dents in the side, with the brake lights of pickups rusted by acid rain.

Maybe you have been there? I hope not. But maybe you can relate. Have you ever looked into the oncoming "brights" with your sense of resistance dangerously passive. Did you hedge against the temptation for a head-on collision? If so, well then, you'd have recognized the blue-black ravens navigating over my head, invisible in the night, hoping for a sign of food. In the grand scheme of things, we are all little sweet warm morsels of hope for dark angels overhead, potential fresh road kill for a predatory power that apparently doesn't give a damn. And may be just as blind as we in the great void of things.
As I tried to wash away, sanitize and underarm-protect myself from the unfortunate fumes of another species' idea of promise, I watched Native American children play by the long-straight roadside while mom and dad and uncle and Bennie push a shiny new sport utility vehicle toward the distant Kayenta gas station and trading post. Transition life approaches the crossroads.

I remember, coming over the hill as I could barely make out the skyscraper silhouettes indicating the gateway to Monument Valley, a ghostly red gas light glow representing the ad-hoc gathering of civilization and it's vested interests at the crossroads of Kayenta. A mythic site, in my mind, even to this day. And it always will be. Kayenta is a place to eat transition time as a kind of fuel for dreams. Unfortunately, the services that such peak moments of insight provide will often leave us, well, a bit tiffed in the head.
After a few hundred miles of staring into produce truck high beams late at night, anyone's visual acuity will go askew. Hallucinations will thrive just past the limits of your imagination. Sayeth William Blake: Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense … can discover. When there's not enough coffee in the world to keep the eyes from dropping off, then for just a split second, anything is possible on a list ranging from accidental death to revelation to the all inclusive opening of some flood gate to the netherworld.

Sure, I saw something, felt something, or at least believed I felt something supernatural. It made the tiny hairs on my arms tingle and my brain flash with excess electrical impulses. Enough to send enough volts up the Katsina windmill towers of my mind. That was real enough. Soul fright? Perhaps.

I can't determine if it was real or imagined. I don't want to think about that just yet. Barely matters, at this point. What's more pertinent to the issues surrounding such synchronistic stuff----when archetypal aboriginal myths leap out at you, when poltergeists kick over household appliances, or your sudden personal Jesus appears in the lumpy folds of a tortilla----is how you react, retreat or impinge upon the formless, but quite material void, during the rest of your available time that follows.

What recollections I can safely trust about that night? Well, certainly there was my camping out plan, which suffered from what even Henry David Thoreau would describe as lacking in reasonable attention to detail: an overabundance of simplicity. I had a sleeping bag, a couple of blankets, and a vague idea that somewhere out on the Reservation there was at least one unlocked fence gate off the highway leading to a solitary patch of ground. Surely, there was some way to get some sleep without having to be too close to the dust-eating back-drafts of freighters passing by. But, on this night, sleeping at some rest area along road wasn't the problem. I could have slept in the middle of the highway almost to dawn out there in Monument Valley. I would have been quite comfortable to roll over, if just once, for a passing semi on the way to Blanding, Utah.

I just kept on driving. Nobody said I couldn't. And that was a nice, springtime fresh kinda' feeling about the whole thing. I was more concerned with how much hell a little late night monsoon could raise on my packing job in the bed of the truck. Yes, it was a fair mockery of my content management skills to see a large part of my tarp blown back, still attached, causing wind resistance and drag like a parachute packed during a fire. A couple of the bungee cords had loosened, too, and all of my worthy possessions, that is, those that I considered worth taking into indefinite space, were exposed for all of the antelope, mule deer and hustling truckers to see. A couple of boxes of books were exposed, and an old John Lennon biography had its cover ripped off by the wind. A tattered image of his granny glass spectacles were out there on Black Mesa, destined to fade in a short eternity of sunlight, wind, rain and microscopic red rock pinpricks of dust.

Meanwhile, back on the road to Mythville, top-volume Neil Young and Crazy Horse jammed on my truck radio with a demolition tune, "Tonight's the night. Tonight's the ni-i-i-ight."

~

I was taking each strange step in my life with the profound belief that I was walking with at least a little grace on my side. It required what you might call the art of being slow, being silent enough to feel the things around you. I was reading a lot of Eastern mysticism, so my general thought processes were tending toward the airy-fairy, otherworldly and overly mystical way of interpreting things----certainly an explanation for the way Coyote, another word that I had for her, had been canonized into "Changing Woman," or, in Apache tongue, "Eshe Na Glese."

Of the many reasons I was on the road that night toward Telluride, Colorado, my orgiastic seduction into her dysfunctional sphere was the most viscerally apparent. That is to say, I thought I was in love with a goddess. But really, I wouldn't have put so much gas in the tank if it wasn't for all of the things I'd ever learned from Native Americans that I had run across during the first 35 years of my life, or, even more to the point, to having a student-tutor (or better yet, idolizer-to-idol) relationship with Ed Abbey, the aforementioned writer of irascible environmentally-tinged essays and a couple of reasonably entertaining novels, including "Desert Solitaire" and "The Monkeywrench Gang," while I was attending the University of Arizona 15 years before.

The first time I met Ed Abbey, he monkeywrenched a perfectly good draft beer, a Heineken, by taking the light and dark versions and pouring the two bottles into one glass. In my view, one of the more unnecessary acts of eccentricity I'd ever seen him perform----and it's a long list. I had met him in Tucson, Arizona for an interview for the campus newspapers, The Arizona Daily Wildcat, where I was a reporter who preferred to ditch a class than miss a story. Abbey's included. We met at The Big A, an off-campus burger joint that he always used for interviews. A strange fact by itself, in many ways, since it was a sports bar and he thought football was a pox on the earth (but then, what wasn't a pox on the earth, as far as Abbey was concerned?). Yes, he'd done many, many interviews at The Big A, and I can't tell you how many times I cringed whenever the next reporter deigned to describe Abbey's iconoclastic persona with the following observation: Mixing light and dark drafts of Heinekens.

The second time I saw Abbey was on the first night of class at the University of Arizona in 1982. The creative writing department at the UofA had snagged the writer to teach his wannabe writer fans how to write non-fiction. He had been brought onboard by Richard Shelton, a version of the Luddite-in-the-Desert form who wrote poetry when, that is, he wasn't making bad decisions about who to bring on staff to teach creative writing. The fact was, Abbey wasn't a great teacher. An experience, maybe, but he and anybody else in the genre of sages in academia could have stayed home, for all they brought to the table. Save for Tom Miller, who I recall fondly but can't remember why: Every creative writing teacher I ever met was simply dodging the inescapable truth that the gig was just another way to put off their own writing projects. With far better income than most writers can usually expect. On that first night in Abbey's non-fiction class in the Language Arts Building, he taught me one of the only things I can remember about so many of such classes. Well, actually, three.

They are, as he wrote on the bulletin that first night after being about 10 minutes late: "1) Write right; 2) Write wrong; 3) Write on." Short and sweet, it was, and the same could be said for that first night ala Abbey. A few minutes later the grizzled, jeans-laded author was distracted, as we all were, buy something going on at the plaza. He rushed over to the second floor window of the classroom, and, after seeing a bunch of anti-nuke protesters go buy with candles, exclaimed, "Hey, I gotta go see that!" And with that, he rushed out the door and did not return. We wannabe monkeywrenching writers, sitting there in a our desks for just a short, stunned moment, had probably right at that point started to wonder if perhaps the lesson on how to write about cactus and coyotes might be included on a syllabus. However, there was no such mimeograph to follow, from what I recall. Welcome to Abbeyville.

We caught up with him at the candlelight vigil in from the old ROTC building at the center of the University. He was singing with the anti-nuke protesters. That was Abbey, the spontaneous one, holding a candle and I can still see the light flickering on his beard and in his eyes. He was performing, for us, for his students, for those who had not known he was the latest new campus celebrity. Certainly, no foe to publicity of any kind, Abbey well understood the necessity of being an outlandish personality. His greeting card was his frequent call at public gatherings to blow up the Glenn Canyon Dam. But that was just part of the performance.

I believe Abbey wanted to teach for reasons other than to be a teacher, or, to derive a nice, safe income after his upcoming book, "Good News," failed to become the monster hit that "Monkeywrench Gang" and "Desert Solitaire" had proved to be a few years before. Nope, it was other things. Including the desire for connectivity in a social, most certainly the beautiful young co-eds who attended his classes. More than anything else, it was this: At that point in time, perhaps one of the few times, he wanted to be where the action was. In fact, he wanted to be the action. For all intents and purposes in my life, he was the living symbol of boundless action, apologizing to no one, and, accepting it as part of the deal, the heavy price that might mean.

~

As a teacher, he wasn't so great, but I believed he took an interest in me, even when I tried to write like him. Once we were given an assignment to write something on the "Wild Side." Everybody else assumed that meant practice writing about cactus and coyotes and the call of the lone wolf student writer. Always one to color outside the lines, I decided to write about downtown Phoenix as viewed from a general walk around the Greyhound Bus station. In the course of my study of the terrain, I went by the Phoenix Convention Center, and discovered a couple that had snuck off into some bushes to make love. This, of course, was too good to be true, considering my idea for the article, and I turned it in as a metaphor about Eden and life in the city.

Nobody in the class believed that it happened, though. My classmates, during another one of those awful roundtable critiques (always to be taken with a grain of salt) told me it was non-fiction we were supposed to be writing, not fiction. But Edward Abbey believed me. He came to my defense, saying, "This is all just an exercise. All of this is."

~

There was, in fact, one item distributed at his second class in mimeographed form that proved to be a great boon. The Edward Abbey reading list: Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Two nature loving Luddites, a city slicker, and the patron saint of the New Journalism. But there was one other name, a strange one, that took me years to appreciate: Montaigne. The French writer was one of the first to try to express himself, via highly literary means, and it was he who came up with the term essayer, as in essay. It means, "to try."

~

The whole point of all of this, this …desire to break out into great wide open and quite dicey period of time and space was because, let's face it, I was intending to write about it. Sometimes, since my thoughts tend to wander, my notebooks were my only mental connection to meatspace. Other times, such as those examples when I'd scribble poems at a coffee house before I went to work, or, at a bar where I was usually playing the role of the eccentric loner in the back, the Watcher of Human Behavior, it appeared that kind of output was, in fact, a desperate sort of performance art. A lonely artist, a cry for help, a pen warmed up in a sad and self-perpetuating hell out of some desperate need to initiate something more interesting. It was the raw data on what had been seemed to be so unsatisfying about life in the suburbs of sunny Scottsdale----with my wife, and a fundamentalist mother-in-law, no less, both making it their regular routine to remind me that I was in every way, shape and form, a "heathen," often to the point of leaving written reminders beneath my pillow that I was a scum, shouldn't be writing about rock music for the local newspaper, or, that new book by Salman Rushdie, and that I would soon be going to hell if I didn't publicly hand myself over the JeeeeeSuuuuus. So yes, I know a few things about life in the microcosm of authoritarian rule.

My poetry was one of the few positive channels for anxiety and their release. That is, until my soon-to-be ex decided to set them alight in the backyard barbecue. I think I still have some charred portions of those hand-written early versions to this day.

I was keeping a notebook on all my journeys, and made a regular point of telling anyone in range of my intention to go from place to place, recording the experience that pretty much began with the breakup, or series of breakups, that ended my marriage. The first book of poems was called, "No Joy in Mythville," which started out with many decently written ditties that used baseball as a metaphor for life (many of which were later published), but then degenerating into terrible tales of screaming fits in the middle of the night and running like hell----my "McGiver" period, based on my rather tactical modes for keeping ahead of my angry ex-wife by keeping track of all available exits at any setting, public or private. Reading back on all that stuff now, I realize that I failed to maintain a proper notice of the fact that they charted increasingly large experiential loops of extreme incidence. Signs of a satellite spinning out of orbit.

And it all started out so innocently. The first page of the first of these poetic diaries, "No Joy in Mythville," still survives with the following opening entry: "Myth embodies the newest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words." It was a quote lifted from a book on the teachings of an Indian guru, which I'd bought for a quarter at a Goodwill store, just one day after I'd shown up at my brother's door in a working-class neighborhood in Phoenix, swearing I'd never return home for any more punishment again.
That last part proved to be untrue. And late night retreats to my brother's house, or, a city park at 3 a.m. if I'd decided that, perhaps, my wife's rages for the evening had cooled. Always a tough call. Like sticking your finger in a volcano to see if the lava was still hot. Usually, a good way to check was to look into her eyes for any signs of a glassy bulge----a technique that I would recommend to police on the lookout for murder suspects in large crowds.

Sure, I survived all that. But then, it's hard to say what kind of unhinging took place immediately thereafter. I'm assuming, at this point, that personal command and control issues will continue to be, for myself, an extreme hotspot.


~


I remember the excitement, in those days, of being on the verge of something, and it didn't hurt that my psychiatrist right after the split had prescribed a soothing drug to keep me from going too far off "post-traumatic-stress disorder" meter. But I must admit, with that little pill, taken every night just before bed, was enlisted a security, a sense of assurance. I was tapping into some circuits I'd never known before, and it sure helped me to sleep on nights like the one under a starless sky that October in Monument Valley.

So I popped a pill, took a slug out of water out my Boda bag, and stretched out my sleeping quarters just beneath the front fender of my truck, thinking that if cats can draw warmth from the engine, who am I to argue? I looked up at the no-sky, thinking what it must look like out there when the stars were bright and there wasn't a fast food sign for two-hundred square smiles. All that night out there. The blackness. I stared. And blinked. Then stared some more. I don't know: It could have been an hour, maybe two, maybe no time had passed at all. I was there, looking away from the truck, and I noticed a shadow being created by my vehicle.

Had I gone to sleep? Was I seeing things? Maybe it was the drug and my imagination fired by the colorful dreams of so much change? Maybe it was my desire to find something otherworldly, saturnine, so that I could once again believe, that I had as a child, that I was destined for prophecy.

Maybe I wanted to recall the massiveness from within that I'd felt during nightmares when I was six years old: What was the dream? The universe in conflict with the point of a pin? I remember the boyhood contentment in the belief that I was either secretly retarded, or, gifted in ways my parents would never completely understand (later someone would say I suffered from some kind of "attention deficit" at an early age, that it was a miracle I'd learned to read and all, and that I was a lucky boy, since I'd formed what they called a "compensation."

Maybe I was wired differently. Or, I had just watched too much sci-fi television during the 1960s. One of my earliest memories was when my father allowed me to sit up----during one of those desert nights in a tract home in Phoenix----to watch The Man on the Moon. How fascinating, the possibilities that a child could conjure in those years. I could never miss the next week's episode conclusion, a teaser for the next week, for Lost In Space. Danger! Danger! Robot's arms waving...There were others. The Aliens, Star Trek, a show my father would watch until my mother would force him to turn it off, the ridiculous drek! There was the day we landed on the moon, my half-deaf grandfather trying to pick up the Houston Astros game on the radio in South Texas. But mostly, it was the dreams.

How shall I remember them now? They were more sensations than visions. It was as if infinity were creeping through me, and the mind, overwhelmed, were spinning in a kind of motion sickness. The universe. The head of a pin. That's what stays with me now. The precision of a point, a perfection. Then infinity, or, that is, a universe that is slowing from the entropy of the Big Bang. Who knows the layers of fact or fiction that the mind can place on the memories of dreams of early childhood. I know that the universe, the concept of infinity, of limitless distance, fascinated me as I played with my NASA action figures, with my G.I. Joes. I had a solitary mind: I could spend hours with myself in the back yard, dreaming some post-Disney fantasy in a time when anything that could be imagined could be conjured up on a screen? How could I keep still in class? How could I be happy in a marriage that kept me in chains, a dictatorial regime that led to her throwing more than one book of poems to the barbecue pit, and many, many roads to life never taken?

And the road to this particular road?

How far would I go for love?

And what, exactly, was that a light coming from the top of the hill off in the distance?

The road headed off in that direction, but the light was sitting still, a single beacon. I sat up, wondering if that had been there all night and I was just noticing it now. It could have been a motorcycle up there, at three in the morning, some guy having a smoke or taking a piss before speeding off to his leather-clad compatriots in Moab. But I kept looking at it, and, once awake and shivering in the cold of a damp Autumn night, decided it was best to pack up as quickly as possible and keep heading toward the Rockies, where I ultimately wanted to make my new home.

I tried to roll up my sleeping bag the best that I could, folding under the tarp, as opposed to tightening the bungee cords to secure it in the wind. I threw myself into the truck, gunned the engine, turned on the heater to full blast. I put my jacket, lit up a smoke. Checking the light again, I noticed that it was gone, or maybe in moving it had become obscured from my view. Checking the road behind me, I hit on the gas and was off toward Blanding, just about to cross the border into Utah. The sun wouldn't be up for a few more hours, and it was nothing but my headlights on the road, once again.

I grabbed a cassette tape from the floorboards and it turned out to be a spooky old tune from a hippie mountain band, Major Lingo, from Jerome, Arizona, a ghost town on the side of a mountain that overlooks the red-rock cathedrals of Sedona. They played electronic pedal steel guitar with menacing little arabesques. It gave the road a manic mood, and as I think about it now, an odd sense of premonition or synchronicity.

There was something in the way everything shifted around me.

Did I come come into the presence of the Kachina's son right there?

Should I convince myself, swear by the sudden drop in temperature in the flat-bed truck, the shadow passing through the back window, an intuitive kick of fear and the fall, like a cemetery stone chip, of a cassette tape to the floor?

It happened where the plains became flat and the sunrise, hidden in clouds and cold wind, had not yet risen over the curvature of the canyons. I felt a presence as I drove under a coal escalator leading over the road, and I thought I saw a wolf in the rearview mirror.

~ From "23 Roads to Mythville," by Douglas McDaniel

The Day of the Tornado


Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago. I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then). Hard to remember ...

I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.

Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in my expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. Nearly 40 years ago now. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!

Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."

Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.

Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with myself watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when I came home as I was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.

He was mad about something, dad was. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when my dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"

Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.

The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after my dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.

The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."

Then, I look out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.

Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of his grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the DNA.

So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted my hair and my mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.

There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.

Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.

Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.

Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How I believe it was the governor come to bless them with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing them but punishing the neighborhood with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.

It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on me, my family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people:

The day we faced the tornado: I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. Him ran outside. Him remembers pinpricks of dust hitting his face and his mother screaming to get into the house. Him, big heap tornado boy, leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold. The tornado high in view, A roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through him big father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood ... the change had begun.





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel:

There was an attempt, now complete, to save the world. Here are the results ...

Coming down the mountain, moving south, out of
Oregon and into the Jefferson valley, I could see the
clouds, wrung out by the winds, streaming across the top
of Mount Shasta, a white-capped behemoth overlooking
the region like a Himalayan monarch. Most mountains
do. They have that quality. They are monarchical. They
press against the sky and there’s no telling them
anything. They are in charge. We wait on them. They are
never pleased. Like the wind, they own the land, forcing
their will upon all inhabitants. And so on this day,
seabirds, white gulls of some kind (I wish I knew what
kind), were oddly trouncing around, sifting for food at
the road side rest site, placed like a dish of rest at the
mountain’s valley table. They seemed lost, as if the wind
had blown them there from far away. I asked the rest site
attendants, one was clearly retarded and the other one, a
Latino) if it was unusual for these birds to be there. The
retarded one mumbled something that was lost in the 50
mph winds. The Latino said the white gulls always come
in the summer. I thanked them and then walked away,
then realized: It was March.
The point of this passage was to get out of the rain.
And just this once, the sun burst through the clouds and
painted this valley in a way valleys are supposed to be
painted by the sun. Great broad clean sweeps of color.
At this rest stop along U.S. 5, I got out to take a piss and
a picture.
The wind was blowing hard, damn hard. I’d been
driving for six hours at least, after leaving Canyonville,
Oregon earlier that morning (a nice little place that I
eventually found a little disturbing, due to its bible belt
undercurrent that packed its more hermetic charms in
tight, its health food store, its cyber cafe, its large white
masons hall, all tucked in tight in a womb of paternal
Jehovah protectionism) and was about ready to go postal
about the weather. Really had had enough.
Six miserable months the storms, my sweeties, rendered
me into complete unreliable narrator-hood. Now, after
facing numerable challenges to my sanity as I have retraced
our steps to this dream of a life at the far end of
our continent, I have been reduced to madly running
through the Mohave desert in the cold and dark in order
to find a fucking telephone so that I could hear her voice
and know it’s going to be OK. But such assurances have
escaped me. Instead, after facing yet another horrible
Olympus on the road up and down the pass in
Tehachapi, California, where I determined the most
deadly foe to man isn’t the horror of nature, but instead,
the nature of the California drivers who hurl through the
world on some kind of high-octane hell without a care in
the world for who they run off the road, I descended into
yet another underworld to find I’m not worthy of this
mission.
Now, as I face this cracked mirror in a motel room in
Barstow, another place being cold-blasted by the hideous
wind, I am tortured by a lingering premonition ...





An excerpt from 'Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain,' a living novel by Douglas McDaniel: