literature – Page 4 – A View from the Wheelhouse

Surf City-The Slow Death of Huntington Beach

Posted on August 2, 2013August 2, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

As a wide-eyed gremlin, I watched a surfer streak across a massive green wall and straight through the barnacle-encrusted, concrete pilings of Huntington Beach Pier. It was the 1964 Surfing Championship and all the big names were there. An unknown, Laguna Beach goofy-footer named Jim Craig took top honors for that awesome beast of a wave.

Even back then, there was civil unrest. I recall passing a broken storefront window on my way home.

After I moved away, the rapaciousness of developers and city leaders in Huntington had transformed the funky beach town into a surfing theme park-a vast, out door shopping mall.

In 1986, during the OP Pro surfing contest, the crowd got unruly, burned trash cans, overturned and torched police cars. It appeared some vestige of the town’s wild spirit yet remained, despite all efforts to redirect it into acceptable channels-where the only expression of freedom encouraged is a choice between what brand of surf trunks to wear.

It is pointless to get moralistic about the stupid outbreak of violence this past week. But whatever our judgements, the riot was a response to social engineering-where power imposes constraints that are integrated with city planning and architecture itself. With the city’s long history of capitulation to marketplace demands, citizens were disenfranchised and reduced to the role of passive consumers. But the spirit of rebellion won’t be stifled, though it fights targets as elusive as quicksilver (a telling brand name in this heady mix, and part of the corporate attempt to misappropriate surfing’s mercurial spirit.) Even the most chaotic and, on the surface, meaningless, events have a hidden logic, and the spontaneous explosion at this year’s surf contest was fueled by a long, bitter history of city mismanagement and greed.

Huntington Beach has long been a site of pilgrimage. People flock from the congested suburbs inland, to where the pier stretches into the sea as if it might extend man’s dominion ever further into pure emptiness itself. The theme of westward movement is encoded in our DNA and shapes our literature from Cather to Steinbeck, Kerouac and beyond. It is an Archetypal journey on which the soul travels from the world of endless toil and confinement to the promised land where we might, at last, find happiness in the spacious land of infinite surf, sun and fun, fun, fun.

Books I love

Books I love-Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

Posted on July 19, 2013July 20, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

You must give up your personal history.

This terse comment by Carlos Castaneda’s teacher Don Juan, in Journey to Ixtlan, contains the key to this spiritual travelogue in which he renounces his anthropological career to enter the sorcerer’s path.

The drawings done of Castaneda, partially erased by himself, speak more eloquently than revelations of his mendacity or alleged misogyny.

For the sorcerer, reality, or the world we know is only a description.

For novelists (it is absurd to argue which category this work belongs) the world is the reality in which they are immersed at the moment of creation.

My feelings were clear bodily sensations; they did not need words.

Yet he describes, at great length, terrifying encounters in the intermediate realm. When Castaneda is shaken by these experiences, Don Juan commands him:

Write! Write or you’ll die!

It is an imperative Castaneda takes to heart. Abandonment of personal history might contradict Don Juan’s statement about writing as survival but, rather than a bid for immortality, Castaneda’s account may be the final act of self erasure. It resulted, ultimately, in irrelevance. As he progressed to the rank of Nagual (teacher of sorcery), the fiction stylist was displaced by his persona-his double. As he was subsumed into the anemic New-Age genre, he became infatuated by his own image (or its absence) and got mired in convoluted explications of sorcery. Most fatal, he lost his sense of humor.

Unfortunately this seems to be the lot of many successful artists who find endless justification for their surrender to the allurements of the marketplace.

But Journey to Ixtlan is Castaneda in his prime. Take the hilarious scene where Don Juan and his sidekick Don Genaro-as antidote to Castaneda’s attachment to his worldly vehicle-make his car disappear:

“Where’s my car?”

Don Genaro began turning over small rocks and looking underneath them…

“Don Genaro is a very thorough man,” Don Juan said with a serious expression. “He’s as thorough and meticulous as you are. You said yourself that you never leave a stone unturned. He’s doing the same.”

Genaro, puffing and sweating, tries to lift a boulder.

We could not budge the rock. Don Juan suggested we go to the house and find a thick piece of wood to use as a lever…

Resigned to this insanity, Castaneda lends a hand; with a tremendous effort, they lift the boulder.

…Don Genaro examined the dirt underneath the rock with the most maddening patience and thoroughness.

“No. It isn’t here,” he announced.

Other passages are suffused with a beauty as stark and dramatic as the desert landscape through which they travel. In the chapter, Becoming a Hunter, the sophisticated anthropologist, Castaneda, admits to the reader his feelings of superiority over an Indian. Reading his mind, Don Juan says:

“We are not equals. I am a hunter and a warrior and you are a pimp.”

Don Juan then meets Castaneda’s angry protest at these harsh words with a masterful act of “not doing.”

…when it was pitch black around us he seemed to have merged into the blackness of the stones. His state of motionlessness was so total it was if he did not exist any longer.

It was midnight before I realized that he could and would stay motionless there in that wilderness, in those rocks, perhaps forever if he had to. His world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was indeed superior.

I quietly touched his arm and tears flooded me.

Castaneda has been maligned for having done his field-work exclusively in the UCLA library. But, for me, this only makes his work more impressive. No other writer so cannily expressed the manic spirit of the psychedelic era. I am forever astounded by the man who could transmute the dusty anthropological tomes of the UCLA library into supreme works of imagination.

Musings

Joseph Conrad’s Chthonic Folly

Posted on July 8, 2013July 11, 2013 by Dogfish Bay

Joseph Conrad started writing relatively late in life. He drew heavily from a long career as master mariner in the era of European, eastern expansion.

In A Personal Record he tells of the first impulse to write. Sitting idle in his room at Bessborough Gardens he remembers his initial encounter with the man who inspired his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.

Conrad was 1^st mate on a cargo steamer going up a Malaysian river to deliver supplies to a remote outpost. On board was a pony which the Dutch trader, Almayer, has ordered from Bali:

The importation of that Bali pony might have been part of some deep scheme, of some diplomatic plan, of some hopeful intrigue. With Almayer, one could never tell. He governed his conduct by considerations removed from the obvious, by incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic impenetrable to any reasonable person.

The same might be said for the whole colonialist adventure. But this misguided effort is constantly undermined by inscrutable forces antithetical to the rigid mindset of the European.

Conrad describes the limp pony as he hoists it onto the dock in a sling:

…his aggressive ears had collapsed, but as he went slowly swaying across the front of the bridge, I noticed an astute gleam in his dreamy, half-closed eye.

Upon releasing the sling, the pony immediately flattens Almayer and bolts for the dense forest- an outcome which Almayer meets with perplexing indifference.

But Almayer, plunged in abstracted thought, did not seem to want the pony anymore.

He embodies the ambiguous, often childish, desire for dominion over the remotest corners of the earth; a tragi-comic symbol of imperialist hyper-extension who, despite his convoluted plans, succumbs to uncontrollable forces and, ultimately, to dissipation.

Listen to Almayer’s halting, distracted monologue as he reveals to the narrator something of his frustrations:

“…the worst of this country is that one is not able to realize…” His voice sank into a languid mutter. “And when one has very large interests…” He finished faintly. “…up the river.”

Conrad was to later use such chthonic imagery and musical, fractured dialogue in his masterful indictment of imperialism: Heart of Darkness.

A Personal Record tells how the encounter with this “factual” character was instrumental in the birth of a long literary career; a career in which he brought to fictional art an unequaled degree of expressiveness. With the concision of the sea language in which he was so fluent-a language as pithy as poetic verse-Conrad condensed into the microcosmic image of Almayer all the absurdity and hubris of the expansionist age.

Conrad goes on to imagine meeting his alter ego in the Elysian fields and confessing:

It is true, Almayer, that in the world below I have converted your name to my own uses. But that is very small larceny…Your name was common property of the winds…You were always complaining of being lost in the world, you should remember that if I had not believed enough in your existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens you would have been much more lost.

Though a failure in his wind-born life, Almayer triumphs in the end through Conrad’s belief in the ability of his protagonist to express something deep and dark in the psyche of modern man. This ability is all the more poignant because of Almayer’s fictive power. It is a power that confers reality.

…if I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print.

Though I suspect Conrad’s Personal Record may not conform entirely to fact, his character attains a loftier status. He becomes a symbol of human folly that mere veracity cannot express.