Traveling


When I'm driving I'm alone with the stereo and whatever is in the seat beside me. Sometimes it's an empty bag, sometimes it's a hamburger, sometimes it's a donut and a couple of anacin. Sometimes it's something so well sealed in hard plastic I've given up on opening it while I'm driving, and it lays there humming contentedly in Chinese. I can plug in the iPod and choose music or conversation. I always keep a library of Terri Gross interviews, because the woman is a downloadable course in contemporary American intellectual history.

American cultural and intellectual history has been an interest of mine since I took them as history courses in college. People often say that they only had one teacher that made college worthwhile, and for me it was Sy Fullinwider, who taught those courses. The first class everybody was taking notes, and he seemed to be lost in his lecture, totally focused on what he was thinking about. Then he looked out at us like he'd just realized he wasn't alone. "You're taking notes?" he asked. Everybody nodded. "You don't need to do that. You'll either get the fundamental concepts or you won't. Relax. Notes won't help."

That was great news to me, but not to a lot of other people, who were gone the next class. They were in it for the grades, and the way to do that was take notes, memorize information, and be tested on whether or not you memorized it. There wasn't another class, ever, that wasn't rote and boring by comparison with hanging out with Sy while he talked about William James and Faulkner and berserkers in New York gangs in the early twentieth century.

Some other classes were depressing. I was editing a community newspaper while going to school, and was applying what I was learning in editing class to my pages. I asked if I could be excused from the laboratory, which was nothing more than learning to do the things I was already doing, and eventually apply them as I was applying them. I'll never forget the encouraging words of my professor and the dean, as they cornered me and explained, "You've got a chip on your shoulder and we're gonna knock it off." Which meant I had to quit my job as a journalist to stay in journalism school. I began to understand that the smart people are not necessarily the ones who prosper in hierarchal organizations. One of my friends, who was one of the three or four good writers in the department, concluded, "If the system won't work, neither will I," and went off to Mexico.

I think I had a lot of testosterone going but at the time I had almost no external view of myself. Now I know that the testosterone isn't just good for sexual aggressiveness, it has a potent role in creating art or whatever you create. In some way it is infused into the words, or the pictures, and it vibrates. It's like in "Don Juan de Marco" when Johnny Depp mentions his cock singing. The Sultan's wife wants to get this straight (!) and she asks, with hesitant expectation, "It ... sings?"

Blake nailed it: Those who easily contain desire have an easily contained desire. And there' s no more to it than that. But it sure is fun to watch the container breaking, and watching while people struggle against desire, trying to contain it in their faith, their belief, their creed, code and what is true. Most of the time there is a confusion between something's being true and something's being rewarded, or conversely, a confusion between the rejection of something because it is wrong, and it's being punished in some manner. This is how the cultural consciousness is created, but it is only true for those contained inside it. It is not connected to any universal truth.

"Turn the rat to the right at the next intersection."

"Yes doctor."

Sometimes the constant singing drowns out those who struggle along under a relatively narrow set of foundational beliefs which causes them to practice a good deal of self control. What is meant by self control is suppression of natural emotional reactions through constriction of muscle. There isn't anything else you can "do." You can extend muscle and you can contract muscle. Nothing else is subject to conscious control. But that's enough.

Ones and zeros are enough to take you to Jupiter and beyond.

The more laws you operate under, the more mechanical you are. That's not an opinion, it's the first law of Cybernetics, the science of the behavior of systems. The system with the widest parameters contains the other systems. So if your intention is freedom, you want to have a container stripped down to only the most necessary laws. I started out with an off the shelf container that had a lot of laws, you might say a plethora of laws.

If I'd stayed where I was as a kid the container might have held. It was a Southern Baptist container, and it was pretty strict. It divided everything right down the middle, pow!

"You, move over to the right. You, board the train."

"What about my children?"

"As a felon, you have no property rights, so they can't be yours, can they now?"

There was the white side of town and the black side of town, the white church and the black church, the white music and the black music, Jerry Lee Lewis and his cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart, the damned and the saved, and the other cousin, Mickey Gilley, drifting over into the middle, like WIllie and Waylon and the boys. Jerry Lee really is the killer, and I love to hear him play. Jimmy Lee is like Louis de Pointe du Lac hating what he is but unable to escape it. But it's Mickey Gilley who'd make an amiable companion.

But I didn't stay. I was moved out among Catholics on the Mexican border and Mormons in Utah and I suppose Buddhists in Japan -- I never asked -- but more importantly, I was out from under social controls, especially as a sailor living in Tokyo. When you live outside those controls, you have to develop your own containing principles. For example, one of my containing principles is, "The meaning of any communication is the response it gets. There is no other meaning. The impression that there is other meaning is in your head and is not part of the communication."

My field has always been communications, in some manifestation. When I left a writing job and moved to the Bay Area, and got fascinated with bodywork and hypnosis, a public relations pro I knew came to see me. She said, "Tell me what you're working on."

I said, "Bodies. I'm working on twenty-five people a week sometimes, combining deep tissue work with hypnosis."

She shook her head. "How could you go from being a writer to working with your hands?"

I said, "I always wrote with my hands." I was searching for a bigger container than I'd been able to find with my hands in the service of my thoughts. It made sense to turn it back around, and put the thoughts into the service of my hands.

"A sorcerer is an empty man except for a collection of stories which have a universal application." (Don Juan and Carlos)

This is a quote I find myself referring back to often, because it is foundational for me. I like the idea of nothing but a collection of stories, because that container is under only one law, which is that the story must have a universal application.

When I'm traveling I find myself not just driving along the highways, but traveling through the cultivated lands, and through natural lands. In a good story there's a balance between them. Ordinary events move alongside other events, which go unseen, and at some point they come together, like the tectonic plates under the earth, and the landscape shifts. Wisdom, like wit, consists in seeing both streams simultaneously.

It used to be just my mind that wandered, but lately I've been riding along, and finding it a good companion as it ages. You might say we've become inseparable. And sometimes I find other riders, who've cultivated property in the Western Lands, and we sit on the hill and look out at the maturing crop, moving closer to harvest time.

Sometimes we listen to Jerry Lee singing, "It's just one of them things that we all go through."

Posted: Thu - December 14, 2006 at 01:27 PM