Ancient Evenings


I got a letter from an old friend, somebody I haven't seen for a lot of years. Our friendship formed when we were working on a newspaper together. I was twenty-two or so, and he was about five years older I guess. He had sold his family newspaper to a dapper little grey-haired Yankee who drove a yellow Lincoln Continental. The little man cut expenses by combining two papers and making me the editor of both, so Charley left and got a job on a big daily.

I remember the first issue I put out, and how proud I was of my work. This little Yankee comes driving up in his yellow submarine and takes me to lunch. "Now, those people you wrote about on the front page are not the people our advertisers are trying to reach," he said. "Those people don't have any money to spend."

I had done a piece on the old people being warehoused in the community, and how hard it was for them to survive inflation on fixed incomes. I don't remember what I said to him, but I remember that I wasn't very tactful at that age.

When I wrote to Charley about what I'm working with, and mentioned Burroughs, he wrote back some reference to people sticking things up their asses, and that the pros call that kind of writing just winging it. And that is exactly right. Ash Fork is a straightforward example of winging it.

What happens with old friends, connected around barbecue pits and moments with the children on ancient evenings, long ago, when they try to reconnect? They are strangers again, and there is always the surprise of realizing that others are often times not really like us. When you are young it doesn't really matter because there is no store of experiences, no series of photographs of oneself, and one's life, in the way. Life is open before you, and you are rich with possibility.

Then the possibilities begin to close. I remember being 37 and thinking to myself, "If I'd stayed in the Navy I would be retiring now." And with it came the thought that I was too old to go back into the military. I didn't anticipate the Bush Administration, and the introduction of the Geezerker Brigades. These are special combat teams formed of old men who have nothing left to lose. When put into an urban jungle like Bagdad, they go berserk if somebody doesn't obey a traffic signal, much less if they throw trash on the street. And there is an added benefit when the Arab men begin to become more moderate by comparison, and mothers warn children, "Be good or the geezerker will get you."

There is a flowing away of possibility as life shortens down, flows from middle age to early told age to middle old age to an unqualified old age. Ancient evenings compress together and time does not stretch backward in a parade of years. Events are stored according to their emotional intensity, and some, because of emotional intensity, are kept covered, like a hood on a falcon. The hood can be taken off and the falcon will hunt.

Very few people know that Dick Cheney is a geezerker of such ferocity that he is actually kept hooded until he gets to the kill site, where the birds are disoriented and released, to fly drunkenly around while he blasts away and screams, "fuck you!" in preparation for more American diplomatic initiatives.

There is one large divide between western men, and that is the divide between control and democracy. On one side of the line is a hierarchy, best conceived of as a unitary government where all the power is at the top and dispensed downward. People who like that system usually have it in place in the family.

On the other side there is resistance to top down control, by democratic forces. This is extended into society as human rights, control over your own body, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

As an intellectual strategist of the Beat Movement Burroughs helped set in motion a counter culture of resistance to social controls.  But because it was bottom up instead of top down, it couldn't operate on top down principles, which force the inhibition of "bad" behaviors through taboos.  His use of evocative language was to break a taboo barrier.  Lenny Bruce was doing the same thing at the same time.  It was showing that a lot of what we all know, we are afraid to bring to consciousness for fear of being punished by loss of status.

Social control depends on enforcement of taboo lines by the only thing needed, which is the threat of ostracizing any individual who doesn't conform to them.   So the Beat Movement tried to set up a counter force.  If you're inside the control machine you can't ever see it, was the problem they faced.  People like Burroughs knew the control machine because they consciously moved into the collective shadow, which is the only window through which the collective consciousness can be viewed.

Burroughs became a kind of patron saint to a class of young internet users as well as to cutting edge musicians.  He was their godfather because he saw that the move into Space isn't men in rocket ships, but an evolutionary process.   He compared the idea of evolving into space in ships as being like fish evolving onto land in aquariums.  He also said that all technology is an exteriorization of an internal process.  The suggestion is that as these processes are able to reflect themselves in the technology, they become conscious.

The Beat Movement was a response to the expansion of the military-industrial-congressional complex, and the intellectual counter point to the forming of a rigid control system, leading to a police state. There is always a counter point to excess, and it is always a disgrace to decent people. Of self righteous indignation, Burroughs recalled: ... my grandmother struck a whore dead in the street with it.

Without Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, Burroughs would not have had an intellectual touchstone for his Western Lands series. Without that little Yankee in a bow tie and yellow submarine I might not have realized, later on, that he was just too little a fish to know he should lie about how to him, it was all about the money.

For me, I knew I was leaving newspapering when I was being considered for a daily columnist job and the editor asked me, "What are your career goals." I admitted that I didn't have any, even though I knew that was his holy grail issue, and he'd been going to management seminars around setting goals. "How do you know where you're going without goals?" he asked. He was alarmed.

"I just like to write; I don't care about management issues."

"You think having goals is a management issue?"

"Yes, I think so."

I still don't know where I'm going, but I have downloaded some organizing software for writing Ash Fork. That's a step toward pulling the project together in a finished form. When that's done I'll post it, and between now and then, I'll ramble on in sometimes disconnected thoughts and memories ...

Posted: Mon - February 5, 2007 at 04:08 PM