PALIMPSEST/GORE VIDAL

Just finished reading Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir of his life in the late 40s, the 50s and into the 1960s. Gay and atheist, he’s an inspiration to me, a decidedly heterosexual American male and atheist, myself. I don’t know if he knows it, but all his own frailties show through in Palimpsest. I can see him being from time to time as petty and as vain as those he castigates and reveals in his memoir, but, then, so often, reading him, I also see myself, being the same thing. In fact all humanity is present in his memoir. None of us is free of the vanities Gore writes about. It’s been a long time since I laughed aloud reading a book, but Gore made me laugh, aloud and freely. Interesting—when laughing aloud in an espresso joint, where many tender sensibilities abound, one catches nearby talkers wince as they wonder if one is laughing at them. I noticed that more than once.

“When Orwell writes, ‘Spain,’ or Hazlitt, ‘Napoleon,’ one's eyelids droop, Surely this does not happen when I write ‘Ron and Nancy’.... At least my characters are inherently comic, or so I find them. Today, I wonder why I am so content, inhabiting as I do a body so keen to disassemble. Then I realize why, perfect day to one side: I do not want anything, I am past all serious desire for anything—at the moment, anyway. The Buddha was right: To want is to suffer.” —Vidal, p.174

Today has also been a perfect day for me after a troubled Sunday when everything in my life seemed empty and purposeless. How odd that those days still come at my age of 70, and they always come when I am still taking myself to task for not having succeeded at that or this, when I still think I want something more than a sunny, coolish walk beside the Columbia River in the glittering light. This morning, I was also a Buddhist. Like my wife.

“I recall now, something that Jack [Kennedy] had observed about the great of this world. ‘In this… uh… job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.’ He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness—as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn’t.” —Vidal, p. 378

“During my ten years in the wilderness, a good deal had happened in literature. The Beats had for a time flourished, and many of us were alarmed. Was this what writing was destined to be—an endless report on what one had done the night before while listing the names of the all-alike towns that one sped through on the ever-same road? Although, as writers, Kerouac and Burroughs were not much different from such conventional writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, I feared that their imitators would, like the executors of some inexorable Gresham's law, drive literature itself out the window. All this proved to be a false alarm. Their imitators were few, while the originals either died or did not continue, and literature went out the window anyway.” —Vidal, p. 410

The ten years Gore speaks of as “wilderness” are the years during which he vowed to make himself financially independent so that he could write whatever he chose to write and live as he wanted to live. He set himself five years but it took ten, still he accomplished it. And the novel continues to die a slow death. Though opera and classical music are further along in their decline, so the novel, a Johnny-come-lately compared to those two, is following slowly behind, leaving the stage. I would mourn their passing, but, if the hope of life is that someday true peace and prosperity could reign here on Earth, I can see no evidence that the arts have contributed to that peace or prosperity. No more than has religion. Could Plato have been right when he wished to ban poets from his Republic?

REASON IS A FARCE

I’m reading a bit, from time to time, in a collection of John Updike’s essays called Odd Jobs. In Updike’s critique of the Library of America’s volume of Franklin’s collected writings, imagine my surprise to come across an idea of Ben Franklin’s which very much predates one of my own conclusions.

It seems that Franklin was for a time a vegetarian, then, one day he was confronted by a piece of tantalizing cod. He writes, “When the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you…. So convenient a thing to be a Reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Such a sly wink in the words, eh?

It’s only in the last few or many years that I’ve concluded that reason is nothing more than an empty talker, a wheedler and excuse maker for, a justifier of the feelings which we try to pretend are not the true drivers of human behavior. All the endless hours of TV talk and newsprint spilled and book and magazine words arguing this and that, and all of it only to justify one’s feeling threatened or safe or to, as Franklin so nicely put it, justify one’s doing what one has “a mind to do” anyway. In short, there is no reason for doing anything except that one has a mind to do it.

But where Franklin wrote, “a mind to do”, I think we must all be honest and say that we have a “feeling to do”, even though we now all know that feeling is not in the heart but in the brain, in the limbic system. I’m serious here—we all pretend there is reason for everything we do, but I think we, most of us, act first and think later, or, at least, spend a lot of time trying to reason ourselves out of behavior and feelings we are bound to feel anyway. Can’t we always spot the man who’s just talking and we know that we can’t trust him further than we can spit a boulder? Wasn’t I a man much like that myself? That’s why you could trust President Carter when he said that, sure, he’d lusted in his heart after other women. He was admitting to having a “feeling self” which was not always in line with his spoken self. Any man who says he hasn’t lusted for a woman other than his wife is either a liar or totally out of touch with himself. And that’s a man to stay clear of—either way.

In the same collection of Updike’s writings is his critique of a many-paged volume of selected entries from Leo Tolstoy’s diaries. When one reads some of Tolstoy’s agonizing over the battle between his instinctual self and his reasoning, moralizing self, one understands that an honest man must conclude that his reason is no more than a nice piece of background music, elevator music, for the rising and falling instinctual urges of his animal self. Even if one does not act upon his feeling self, it’s usually the feeling of fear or some other feeling that suppresses the dangerous action contemplated. Then, of course, his good old wheedling self will come up with a noble reason for his not having done what he was afraid to do.

TAKING A WALK—
A BREAK FROM BLOODY WU LI HOLY WHIRLING GRAIL MASTERS

Something has come over me. I don’t understand it. I can’t explain it, but it must be something I want to do. Since for nearly three weeks now, I am walking every day, as much as an hour and a half a day, sometimes as little as 40-50 minutes, but every day I walk. I’m not even power walking; I’m just strolling, strolling down by the river (see photo) or all around Vancouver Central Park and Historic District near Fort Vancouver, or through the streets of downtown Vancouver which is a pleasant place without too many tall buildings. As the lady at the Visitor’s Center told me—tall building aren’t allowed in downtown Vancouver. Portland’s airport takes off and lands up the river from Vancouver, and there’s a small public airfield right on the edge of downtown Vancouver. According to her, that busy airspace controls the heights of buildings in downtown Vancouver.