John Walters's Blog, page 74

California Writers: Henry Miller and Big Sur

(This post, as many of the previous ones, is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir “America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad”.)

The aspect of writing that Henry Miller opened up to me was voice.  Until then I had heard a thousand voices – I had always been a voracious reader – and certainly some of those writers’ voices were unique:  Henry David Thoreau, for instance, or Jack Kerouac.  But never had I heard a writer’s voice as clear as a bell one-of-a-kind as Henry Miller’s.  From the first few lines of “Tropic of Cancer” he had me hooked.  It was so free, so exuberant, so lively, so bawdy, so irreverent, so iconoclastic, so different, so strong, so vibrant, so poetic.  And the wonderful thing was that it didn’t make me want to go out and try to write like Henry Miller, as so many writers I had read in the past caused me to try to imitate them.  No, it made me want to write like myself.  It caused me to understand that the writer and his life and his voice were one.  It set me upon a journey to seek out the words hidden in my soul, a journey that is still ongoing.

I have written elsewhere of Henry Miller’s impact upon me.  What I want to touch on here is his own journey as a writer that caused him to wander from New York to France to Greece, from thence to traverse the United States and finally to settle in Big Sur.  His book “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch” says much about his attachment to Big Sur, though it doesn’t tell it all.  Doubtless Miller himself didn’t grasp what drew him to Big Sur.  It was somewhat in the nature of a mystical experience.

In my youth I was always drawn to California myself, but it’s difficult to explain why.  It was an ambiance, something in the light, a quality of the sun and air.  It was also its literary tradition, of course.  Long before I knew of Henry Miller I was pulled there by the works of John Steinbeck and Jack London.  But even before I knew I had to be a writer I ended up in California, in the Bay Area, seemingly by accident, when I followed my sister down to Santa Clara University to study.  What I found there were vestiges of the hippy movement, the Summer of Love, the Grateful Dead, Fillmore West, and the drug culture.  Experimenting with drugs caused me to short out, in a sense, and lose valuable years of my life.

But I digress.  I was speaking of Henry Miller.

What really drew Henry Miller to Big Sur?  The wild landscape?  The vastness of the Pacific?  The surrounding community of misfits and artists?  Perhaps it was a place that was remote enough so that the collective culture of the United States wasn’t in his face all the time, where he could contemplate the scenery, take walks, have visitors, and write what was still struggling to get out without the hindrance of the millions of clamoring voices of a big city.  The fact is, all of his artistic life he had wandered without a home, from place to place.  Perhaps the settling down somewhat appealed to him.

He didn’t return voluntarily to the United States.  He was forced to return.  He was in Greece and World War II found its way there and he had no choice but to evacuate.  I have been in that situation several times.  When I was in India I thought I would never leave, that I had found my place, but my visa options dried up.  When I was in Greece, as I have explained, I thought I would end my days there, and yet here I am again embarked on another journey.  Henry Miller doubtless sincerely intended to return to Europe after the war, but he never did.  He ended his days in the United States, in California, though not in Big Sur but in a house he bought, when he finally got a little money coming in from the sale of his works, in Pacific Palisades.

It is as I have said before:  home is an abstraction.  This is true not only for writers and other artists but for everyone, but most people hunker down close to where they came from and don’t move.  Some have no desire to venture forth, and live meaningful lives where they are; others would desperately like to make a change but lack the courage.  These live as undeveloped embryos, as caterpillars that never managed to make it out of their cocoons.  A writer, though, can ill afford such timidity.  A writer either goes forth to find his voice and his destiny or never becomes what he is capable of becoming.  I speak spiritually, metaphorically, of course, and not physically.  You don’t have to circumnavigate the globe to fulfill your artistic destiny.  Look at Thoreau:  he hardly ventured farther than his backyard of New England, and yet his words transcended neighborhoods, regions, states, countries.

I still want to visit the Henry Miller Memorial Library someday.  I’m sure I’d have a great time.  I know I would love Big Sur too.  I don’t think I have ever passed through there, though I have made innumerable journeys up and down the length of California.  If I did on one of my hitchhiking forays from the Bay Area to Los Angeles or vice-versa, I don’t remember it.  That’s why I think I haven’t done it.  The coastal landscape of California has made a profound impression on me: the redwood forests of the north, with pounding waves smashing upon the craggy shoreline in great glittering spray; the flamboyant tidal pools and offshore islands teeming with seals of the Bay Area; the unbelievably deep blue vast Pacific Ocean that seems to go on forever without end and reminds one of eternity.  For many years, the years of my youth as I wandered the West Coast this was as much home as any place was to me.  As I have said, I was drawn to California again and again; there was a mystique, a tantalizing glimpse of something more and better, a siren-call I could not ignore.  In the end, though, for me it was not enough.  I was at the beginning of my journey, not the end.  I had many places to go and many things to do.  I could not tarry in this illusion.  Remember, after all, who the sirens really were.  They were not benevolent muses; your ship would smash on the rocks and you yourself would be consumed and lost.

Henry Miller, on the other hand, when he ended up at Big Sur, had completed much of his journey:  his physical journey, at least.  He had many more words in him that had to be released, but by that time he could live anywhere; his voice was flowing; the compulsion to move ever on was not as strong.  So he stayed, and wrote, and thrived.

As for me, at this point I cannot say.  If I had the means and the freedom I would travel the west coast, but I have neither.  I cannot pack a duffle bag and stick out my thumb, trusting to find meals and places to lay my head when I need them, as I used to do.  The United States has changed, and I have changed.  I’m almost sixty years old, for God’s sake.  Neither can I cut loose and take off without a care, because I am responsible for others besides myself.  I have, however, thank God, come to the point where I can sit down and write anywhere.  I am no longer dependent on constant physical motion and changes for my inspiration.  I have been many places and done and seen many things, and I have enough inspiration stored up to last several lifetimes.  Sometimes I wish I knew what I know now when I was a young struggling writer, dirt-poor and hitchhiking from place to place.  I could have avoided a lot of grief, but on the other hand the longing to satiate the hunger that accompanies ignorance is an impetus that can propel us towards great adventure.  So it was in my case, and so it was in the case of Henry Miller when he left New York for France.  His circuitous route eventually led him to Big Sur, and there he found a modicum of rest for a time.

Where my destiny will eventually lead me I cannot say.  I have a feeling I will not stay here in San Diego for long.  I haven’t yet found my base, my home, my port in a storm.  I think about it sometimes:  how nice it would be to have a modest house with some land around it in a rural area, somewhere I could keep my books, come back to when I need a rest, invite my family and friends for visits.  I have no idea where that place might be, and I wonder if when I get to it I will know it, as Henry Miller seemed to know instinctively that Big Sur was the place for him to stay.

Book Review: The Lost World by Michael Crichton

I enjoyed reading “Jurassic Park” so much that I anxiously looked forward to reading the sequel.  As I explained in my review of that book, Crichton is not a stylist; his prose is very rudimentary, but he is capable of telling a gripping story.

Okay, let’s get this over with right from the start:  there’s no mistaking that “The Lost World” is an inferior book to its prequel.  It’s exciting enough, and it has the obligatory man-eating dinosaurs, and it’s set on a far-off island where hapless good-guy and bad-guy scientists and innocent kids flee from one catastrophe to another, but it’s just a pastiche of one disaster after another without much in the way of plot to hold it all together.  Worse, it is broken up in parts with long boring expostulations on evolution and chaos theory which completely bring the action to a screeching, grinding halt.  It’s readable, yes; I made it all the way through.  But then, once I start a book I hardly ever put it down until the end.  That’s why I give great thought to what I want to read before I start.

One problem I had is that, as I did with the first book, consciously or unconsciously, as I read, I compared the book with the film.  The book “Jurassic Park” held up well to the film; it was different, but equally as exciting.  “The Lost World” book, however, besides being nothing like the Spielberg film, is nowhere near as kick-ass and exciting.  For example, at the end of the film a tyrannosaurus rex rampages through San Diego gulping down passers-by as it searches for its baby.  This is completely missing in the book; all the action in the book takes place on the island.  That’s okay, as far as it goes, but somehow Crichton’s prose doesn’t come through as sharply as it did in the prequel.  The part where the trailer is being pushed over the cliff, for example, which in the movie is a spine-tingling Spielbergian thriller moment, is somehow pallid and ho-hum in the book.  In the film the team of bad-guy scientists, with their appropriately sinister agenda, are a fitting foil for the heroes; whereas, in the book the bad-guy team is pathetic – a couple of losers who never pose any sort of serious threat.

All right, you win a few, you lose a few.  That’s the trouble with sequels – they often don’t measure up to the original.  In this case, it’s a shame, as the story has so much potential for us dinosaur lovers.  I’m a sucker for well-told tales of lost worlds and civilizations.  The original Arthur Conan Doyle novel “The Lost World” was a great piece of work; it was intelligent and absorbing and kept me enthralled even though the team didn’t even make it to the plateau in the middle of the Amazon jungle until 100 pages had passed.  The Tarzan series was full of lost cities and peoples which Tarzan would discover in the middle of the jungle, or in the core of the Earth, and inevitably Tarzan would have to fight for his life against its denizens or their enemies.  The genre evokes wonder, mystery, thrills, and adventure.

In closing, I can’t say I would recommend Crichton’s “The Lost World”.  But then again, I don’t regret having read it; it was entertaining enough.  And if you find yourself with a copy of it on a rainy day when you’ve got nothing else to do, you could do worse than give it a read.

What My Beard Means to Me

Several days ago, on a Sunday, I decided to grow a beard.  On Monday, the company for which I have been doing blog articles called, informed me they were discontinuing the blog and, in effect, fired me.  It was due to no fault in my performance or the quality of my writing, they hastened to add; they simply had no need of a content provider if they had no showcase for the content.

That these two incidents happened one after the other is of profound importance.

It all boils down to why I wanted to grow the beard in the first place.  The simple answer is that I could.  I don’t mean that in the sense that the hair will physically grow on my face, although that is of course a prerequisite.  I mean it in relation to a fundamental state of being.  For a long time, as long as I can remember, I would look at rock stars in videos and envy them.  Don’t get me wrong; I have never wanted to be a rock star.  I have never, since I wanted to be anything, desired to be anything but a writer.  And I’m not speaking of modern rock stars either.  The example which comes to mind is George Harrison in the Concert for Bangladesh.  He had long dark flowing hair and beard at that time, though later in life he was clean-shaven with an almost-crew cut.  I would look at him and think that he could afford to let his hair and beard grow because he was self-employed; he wasn’t accountable to anyone else.  He could do his own thing because of his art.  And there I was:  a writer, and a good writer, someone who had gone through extraordinary, life-threatening experiences for the sake of his art, someone who had written honest, heartfelt, meaningful prose and had put it out before the world and…  The world was indifferent.  In a financial sense at least, I was a failure.  I had to work for the man, had to hold a day job, had to support myself and my family in a way other than that which my talent dictated.  And as a result of that, I had to remain clean-shaven and short-haired.  I had no choice in the matter.  That’s what I envied in George Harrison and other musicians:  their power of choice, the fact that their talent provided them their sustenance and their appearance was irrelevant.

Now, let’s clarify something here:  I’m not a special fan of the shaggy experience.  In fact, I like being clean-shaven and short-haired.  It’s simple, attractive, and clean.  I believe in being hygienic.  I shower every day; I wash my clothes regularly.  I don’t like filth, slovenliness, body odor, halitosis, untrimmed nails.  What I object to is the lack of choice, the fact that I have to tailor my appearance to suit the proclivities, customs, and conservativeness of others.

Therefore, because I had a job involving writing, because I was working at home, I decided to let my hair go and grow my beard for a while, just because I could.  It was a manifestation of my freedom.

And then, the call came, less than twenty-four hours after I made my decision.  It wasn’t just a disappointment; it was a moral crisis.  I didn’t know how to react to it.  I could take it docilely, or I could take it defiantly.  I could stick to my decision, or I could cave in and go into the bathroom and comply with the conditions of my surrender.

I thought about it yesterday as I walked in the San Diego November sunshine on my way to the public library.  I have chronicled in these pages what I went through in my last job hunt.  It took me many weeks to find the gig I had just lost.  I held on to it for months, working long hours six days a week to research and write their articles.  The thought of starting a job search again was almost more than I could bear.  And coupled with the search would be the divesting myself of the symbol of my freedom:  my hair and beard.

Does it seem trivial to you?  It did not seem so to me.  As I explained, it was not the beard itself that was important but what it symbolized:  the ability to support myself and my loved ones with the only real talent I have.

In the end, I decided to keep the beard, at least for now.  I’ll see how it goes for a couple of weeks.  I’ll search for more writing jobs; I’ll work on my own material.  If push comes to shove I will, of course, shave and trim my hair without a qualm.  If I were offered a decent day-job right now I’d do it immediately.  Yet beard or no beard something has changed.  I realize that I am not in a state of transition into becoming an artist; I am an artist.  Financial well-being has nothing to do with it.  When Henry Miller wrote “Tropic of Cancer” he was living in a state of abject poverty, and even after it was published he continued in that state for many years, in fact for most of the rest of his life.  I am free in mind and heart, as free as anyone else on the planet, and if I have to appear prim and proper, clean and trim, for the sake of supporting my family, that’s what I will do.  As for the freedom of appearance, if necessary I will bide my time.  But this crisis crystallized for me what I’ve known all along about how to see myself as an artist.

In the meantime, at least today, the beard remains.  Tomorrow, who can say?  I would like to never have to shave it off unless it pleases me to do so, but I’ll have to take it step by step, one day at a time.  I have to be malleable, adaptable.  I have others in my care.  Life would be profoundly different for me if I were only concerned with myself, but that is not my destiny, and I don’t desire it to be.  I am content with what I have and I make decisions according to my present circumstances, not hypothetical might-have-been scenarios.

And where I am is here, Pacific Beach, California, United States of America.  I don’t know how long I will be here or where I will go next.  The adventure is ongoing.

The United States Considered as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Disparate Tourist Attractions

Recently I have been writing a series of articles about the United States, moving state by state, one after another, from west to east.  Because they are written for travelers, the articles deal mostly with places tourists might want to visit:  museums, zoos, aquariums, state and national parks, monuments, landmarks, shopping areas, strange anomalies, oddities, historic buildings, and so on.  I had to research what each state had to offer and then present it in an appealing way.  In the conclusions I would insist that the readers were really missing something if they didn’t visit.

I learned a lot about this country.  Well, all right, most of the basics I already knew, but there were a few surprises.  Every state I wrote about by the time I was finished I wanted to visit.  I would love to see all those places and do all those things.  Learning is a passion with me; I can never get enough of it.  And I never tire of traveling either.

Perhaps some people really have the leisure to wander from place to place taking in the sights, but for me it all had an air of amusement park unreality.  In a perfect world it would be wonderful to devote oneself to the idle pursuit of such trivia, but this world is far from perfect.

Since I came to San Diego I have done no sightseeing whatsoever.  Wait, let me correct that.  One day recently I went to pick up one of my sons coming in from Los Angeles, but his train was delayed.  With nothing to do I wandered into nearby Old Town State Park.  I was dumbfounded.  It was fascinating.  It’s a whole town square set up as it was in the old days, with many of the buildings turned into free museums in which you can see various facets of life in historic San Diego.  I was disappointed when my son sent me a message that his train had arrived; I could have wandered for hours.

But thinking of the country as a conglomerate of tourist attractions seemed as unrealistic to me as what you hear during election time from the different candidates.  That’s another thing that has been going on recently:  national elections.  To me it seemed another circus, another amusement arcade.  One candidate badmouths his opponent, the other retaliates, and at the same time the world burns.  They take time out from everyday life to frolic down the campaign trail, but it has nothing to do with what they have done before or will do after.  They have speechwriters and campaign managers and secretaries and relatives and aids and assistants telling them what to do, what to say, how to dress, how to wear their hair, how to use gestures to maximum effect.  They have millions and millions of dollars to spend on advertising that is meant not to proclaim truth but to sway the masses.  Reality gets put aside at campaign time.  It is impossible to cut through all the bullshit to the truth.  Campaigning should be forbidden.  Aspirants should announce their candidacy and then their ability should be determined by what they have done and said through their political careers, not by what they spout when they are on stage.

In a way the tourist attractions I described above are more real than political candidates before an election.  They are there.  They can be seen with all the cracks, crevasses, scratches, scrapes, and impurities.  A political candidate should be able to stub his toe and let loose with a string of expletives without it becoming a scandal.

I guess my point is that appealing and interesting and fun as all these tourist attractions are, they are not what constitute a city or a state.  It is the people that matter.  And it’s not all the glamour and glitter of the campaign trail that makes a politician.  What did that man or woman do when they were nobody, nothing, in their own eyes and in the eyes of others?  How did they comport themselves when no one was watching?  What do they think of when they are alone, in the dark nights of their soul?  How honest are they to themselves, let alone to others?

I muse as a poet, I suppose, and not as a practical person.  But then, the country and the world at large could use more poets, more minstrels, more monks, more mystics, more people with great hearts who will do great deeds and speak great truths.  How many of us believe that politicians speak the truth or will do what they promise at election time?

The point of all this?  I don’t know if there is a point.  If I went to see each and every one of those tourist attractions in all fifty states that I wrote about, would I know more about the country than I do now?  Perhaps.  But it would not be because of the bright lights and glitter of the amusement parks.  It would be because of the odd moments on the way when truth popped out in the lives of ordinary people.  Most of the time people just live, try to survive, get by the best they can.  To dwell too much on the touristic trappings is to miss the point, to miss the powerful pulse of real life.  I couldn’t do much about that in the articles because that wasn’t what I was commissioned to do.  So I present it to you now, a day after the presidential election, as a purging, a purifying, a catharsis.  Time to return to the real world, and get on with it.

Home

I sit here in the small rented house I share with some of my sons in Pacific Beach, San Diego, and I ruminate about home.  At the end of my memoir on my hippy travel days, “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search” I said this:  “Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular phase of the journey, not an absolute.”  The quote aptly describes out situation.  We are all aware that this is temporary accommodation, that eventually we will move on, individually or together.

We rented the house unfurnished.  It has two small bedrooms and a small living room, all with deep wall-to-wall carpeting.  The carpeting is a mixed blessing; it conceals the dirt but as we haven’t a vacuum we have no way to deal with what’s buried in the pile.  The bathroom is miniscule, but the rudiments are there at least.  The toilet, though, is the size of commode you see in children’s public stalls, rather unsuited for the size of full-grown male adults.  It has a tendency to clog when my sons lay good-sized manly turds, and it can sometimes take twenty minutes or so of vigorous pumping with a plumber’s friend to free the pipe once again.  Nothing to do about that.

The kitchen is decent; it came with all the necessary appliances, including a microwave.  In addition, there is enough room for a table and four chairs.  The table serves as my office now.  In the beginning, when we first moved in sans furniture, we slept on the floor and ate our meals hunched over the kitchen counter; this went on for weeks.  I’ll get back to how we solved our furniture dilemma.

A door through the kitchen leads to the garage, which we have converted into another bedroom.  When we first rented the place, before two of my sons arrived, the garage was rank, full of dust, cobwebs, and junk.  All alone in the house one day I took a ladder and rags and hot water and a bottle of Pine-Sol I found laying around and I scoured the garage from top to bottom.  Afterwards I used the garden hose to slosh the filth off the floor.  When I was finished I wiped snotty dust out of my nostrils for hours, and the shower water as it poured off me was black in the tub, but the garage was transformed.  Now it’s been turned into the largest bedroom of the house, quite a satisfactory man-cave.

We have a patio in the back as well, and at first we envisioned stocking it with patio furniture, but that hasn’t yet materialized.  One thing we did acquire, though, was a barbeque.  I saw the ad one night in the free items section of Craigslist, and my son and I hopped in the car and raced out to a distant suburb to check it out.  After finding the barbeque and ascertaining that it was in decent shape, we realized that it wouldn’t fit in the car.  We spent hours in the dark alley taking it apart, then hours more at home reassembling it, but in the end we had a working barbeque.  That’s our only item of backyard furniture.  Otherwise the place is populated with flies, spiders, and other insects.  The spiders especially are ubiquitous.  Shortly after we arrived someone moved into a small unit nearby and spent hours and a lot of energy cleaning out his tiny garden; in the end he had some serious festering spider bites.  He claimed the spiders were brown recluse, a very dangerous variety, but supposedly they aren’t found this far west.  We never bothered cleaning our garden, but not because of the spiders.  Actually, at first we didn’t have time to do anything about it, and afterwards I realized that the gardeners hired by the landlord who took care of the patch of garden in front also came around the back and swept up the leaves there too.  The aggressive spiders did bother me for a while.  One evening I went outside for some air, and by our outdoor porch light I saw the reflection of an enormous web with a big fat spider hanging in  the middle that stretched from the roof of our house all the way down to the ground and blocked the way to the alley in back where the garbage cans were.  That freaked me out some, I must admit.  In the morning I swatted it down with a broom, but for a few nights I had nightmares about spider webs.

I mentioned Craigslist before.  Craigslist free listings and garage sales have been the means to at least rudimentarily furnish our house.  Our kitchen table and chairs, couch, two desks, two bookshelves, and a fan for the garage have come from garage sales – good solid furniture at ridiculously low prices.  And apart from the barbeque, which is still working efficiently, we obtained for free a solid wood TV stand with cabinets which was standing out in an alley.

This is a peculiar American phenomenon, this recycling of furniture by offering it for a low price or even for free, and many people avail themselves of it.  The practice even extends to clothes and other items.  Americans reading this will figure it’s much ado about nothing, but I remember wondering, when I was living in Greece, why there was no such channel for used goods there.  In the midst of great financial hardship it would have helped many people cope.  But there  is a perverse pride involved, a pride against accepting used items.  Where it comes from I’m not sure, but Americans don’t seem to have it, and this is a strength of American culture, a practicality that manifests itself in certain strata of society.  All right, of course there are the snotty few who would turn up their horrified noses at the thought of such a thing, but for most it is normal practice.  I mean, why not?  If you need to move on and you can’t take it all with you, why throw it away?  Why not pass it on to others who can benefit?  I’m not aware of the situation in all of Europe, though I suspect it’s similar to Greece, but Greeks could use a lot less pride and a lot more cooperation in this area.

Anyway, that’s our home.  As I said, it is makeshift.  We hesitate to invest too much in it because we know it won’t last.  When we are finished here and moving on we will doubtless give most of the furniture away, as it has been given to us.  We all go about our business knowing in the future things will take another turn, but for now the arrangement suffices.

Book Review: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

My motivation in reading this book was not curiosity about the economic crash and depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It’s an interesting subject, sure, and I go for anything that piques my interest if I have time to read it.  Mainly, though, I wanted to relate what happened then to what is happening now.  Though he doesn’t draw direct correlations until a few short sentences at the end, it is clearly the author’s intent as well.

Considering this is the author’s first book and that he is not primarily a writer but an investment manager, it is an extraordinary achievement.  It tells its story mainly through the viewpoint of four characters, the heads of the central banks of their respective countries:  Benjamin Strong of the United States Federal Reserve, Montague Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of the Banque de France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank.  Each of these men wielded enormous power during a crucial period of economic history, and the decisions they made in response to cataclysmic world events propelled the world into a catastrophic plunge into economic depression and despair.  Though they tried their best to keep their respective countries afloat, they were clinging to outmoded economic models which needed to be revised to fit contemporary situations.  The theories and attitudes of these men are juxtaposed with that of one other economist, Maynard Keynes, who wrote a number of significant texts during this era but was not much heeded until after the Great Depression.

The book begins with World War I, then moves into the postwar years which spawned endless conferences during which the delegates would argue about the amount of reparations due from Germany and how the allies would repay the enormous war debt to the United States.  The European nations were devastated, of course, after the war, and resented the superior position of the US, which entered the war late and ended up ahead in the financial ledger.  Each country went through various crises in the 1920s, all to come to a head at the end of the decade with the crash.  Ahemed fixes much of the blame for the chaotic and ultimately tragic state of affairs to the stubbornness of the central bankers in clinging to the gold standard when it ceased to be of use in the postwar world.

I find economic textbooks rather boring, and prefer to get my understanding of economics in this way, through example.  With extraordinary skill the writer draws us into the conflict, and though financial concepts are at the heart of the drama, makes us care profoundly about the various characters and their attempts to put things right.  I won’t pretend to understand all the details, but at least I was afforded an overview that helped me grasp the most important concepts.

I don’t know enough about economics to compare the details described in the book with our present situation, but I will make one observation.  In the same way it is obvious in retrospect that the gold standard no longer worked in the postwar era and propelled the economies of the West downward, it seems clear the European Union’s stubborn clinging to the Euro is causing the downfall of one European country after another.  I have just come from Greece, which is being suffocated by the austerity strictures imposed on it by the EU.  By the way, I would have laughed a bitter laugh when I heard that the EU was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, but it was no laughing matter.  Just go to Greece and see how its people are being strangled to death by the EU.  I couldn’t help but think, while reading this book, that it would be far better for Greece to cut itself loose from the EU and start again.  There might be confusion at first, but it would give the Greek people a chance to start afresh.  As it is now, what do they have to look forward to?  More dearth, more closing businesses, more chaos and unrest.  After the Great Depression it was only when the various countries, one by one, took themselves off the gold standard that they recovered.  There is no shame in Greece admitting that it can’t keep up.  There is no shame in being a small country with a small economy.  Going back to the drachma would probably drop prices and cause an exponential increase in exports and tourism, thus jumpstarting the economy.  I have a stake in this; I have loved ones still there.  Something has to be done.  The situation cannot continue as it is.  The European Union has become some sort of idol, some sort of golden calf, but it is not working as it was envisioned to work.  It might have been started with the best of intentions, but for the weaker countries in the union it is a false god that is leading them astray.  An entity such as the EU is only as strong as its weakest member, which means at this moment in history it is weak indeed.  I hope that it can mature into that which it should be, but I fear that it is falling victim to the difference between ideals and reality.

In closing, let me emphasize that I heartily recommend this book.  It’s a great read, both for entertainment and for education.  More than that, it’s an important read.  Rarely does a book come along that can illuminate so clearly facets of reality that normally only “experts” understand, but in this day and age it’s important that we all grasp what is happening in the realm of finance.

Balance

After reading the last chapter, “Askew”, one of my sons who doesn’t live with me wrote and said, “Why are you so down on the US?  Sure it’s got problems, but I’ve built a good life here and in many ways it’s still the land of opportunity.”  We talked later via Facebook chat and I explained to him that first of all, that chapter was more about me than about the States.  My sons’ reactions to the States cannot be the same as mine, as they do not have my background.  They didn’t grow up in the explosive period of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  They didn’t spend their formative years in the shadow of the Vietnam War.  They didn’t initiate their awareness in this culture, leave, and then look on it again from the outside.  Instead, they did the opposite.  They spent their childhood and youth abroad and only entered the US to begin a life here when they were young men.  They were faced with limited opportunities in Greece, where they grew up, where they were discriminated against, bullied at school, and denied access to the best the country had to offer because they were half-American.  Don’t get me wrong – they had wonderful childhoods in Greece, and they look back on those days with nostalgia.  But there was a limit to the possibilities of their growth there; the box was too small; eventually they had to burst out.  And when they went to the States, yes, I must admit, for them it was one wide open door after another.  Their lives changed.  I’m talking about my two oldest here, who have lived in the States for years.  And it has turned out to be the same for the next two, who I brought here from Greece recently.  There is no comparison between what they had there and what they have here.  The United States is far superior for them.  The unemployment rate in Greece for young people is well over fifty percent.  My third son could not find a job; there were none, least of all for him, half-foreigner as he was with no ties to family-owned businesses.  Here he hit the streets and found a job inside of a week.  He’s off and running, working six days a week and loving it, loving being here.  My fourth son has entered twelfth grade in high school, and also joined the football team, and in every comparison he makes between the US and Greek school system the US comes out far ahead.  I have to agree with him about that.  Yes, there is much positive, much to be thankful for here.

My case is considerably more complex.  I am not coming here for the first time.  I have a history here, and it is a history of angst, of inner turmoil, of lack of fulfillment, of an unrequited search that in the end led me overseas seeking answers I couldn’t find here.  Geography, of course, had little to do with it, but as I quote Thoreau in my memoir “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search”:  “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.  Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some ‘Symmes Hole’ to get to the inside at last.”  This is in the last chapter of “Walden”.  He goes on to say:  “If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travelers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and explore thyself.  Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.”  If I had had the clear head and steady heart required, I would not have had to leave this land to go and seek my destiny in another, but I was a confused jumble of other people’s ideas and expectations, and until I got myself out into the farthest corner of the world I couldn’t think clearly and find my own voice.

Now, having returned, I realize that I can live anywhere, even here.  But that doesn’t mean that my old ghosts don’t come back and attempt to haunt me.  I can exorcise them, though; I have found my voice as a writer and if the old ghosts try to pull their tricks I will cast them into my keyboard and give them a sound flaying.  They have no more power over me.

I have returned to a United States that is new and different, but at the same time is the same old same old.  Though to me the thirty-five years I have been away is more than half my life, even to a fledgling country like the United States it is a mere wink of an eye.  A lot has happened, yes.  Circumstances have changed, of course.  But many of those old spirits with which I struggled remain, and it is to this I eluded in the last chapter.  Maybe if my sons return to Greece after thirty-five years they might have an idea of what I have been talking about – but no, it is not a valid comparison.  Greece, important though it is in the evolution of western thought, is a tiny country now.  Its Olympic gods are dead, and it founders in identity crisis, caught up in the very large ocean of the European Union.  The United States, on the other hand, is a vast entity with fingers in multitudes of pies all over the world.

Despite what I wrote in “Askew” and my own reservations about the US, which is much harder to define in its complexity than simply good or evil, for the time being I am meant to be here and I accept that.  It’s good for my sons and I am thankful for that.  It’s good for me too, and I am only just beginning to realize the many ways that that is true.  Great good abounds, yes, as I have said before, but so does great evil.  Just as there is every sort of terrain imaginable:  mountain, desert, forest, prairie, tundra, and frozen waste; just as there is every possible assemblage of humankind, from tiny village to overwhelming metropolis; so there is also every imaginable spiritual entity, from saints, sages, and intellectual geniuses to child beaters, robbers of the poor, and mass murderers.

The US itself is not good or bad; it just is.  It’s not just the sum of every individual in the country; it’s also the laws, customs, culture, and creeds by which they live; it’s also the land itself from which through its scars we can read its history, a history that goes much farther back than the founding of this particular country which at the moment claims it.

Each person is on their own quest for truth.  Well, let me qualify that.  Some have abandoned the quest; some have got sidetracked, thinking they have found their goal though they have only dug up fool’s gold; some have got trapped by their bad choices along the way and find it difficult to extricate themselves.  But we are all searching.  My boys see this country one way; I see it another.  But we are all meant to be here for now.  Our destinies have brought us here.  Whether eventually they will lead us elsewhere again, who can say?  For now, though, this is the place where we make our stand.

Whether this has answered my son’s question or not, I am unsure.  Even in my own mind it’s an ongoing topic for rumination.

Askew

I have been wanting to write this for a few weeks now but I haven’t, for two reasons.  First of all, I haven’t had the time.  I finally found a job.  It’s a freelance writing gig; I contracted with a company to provide them with five blog posts a day, six days a week.  Can you imagine coming up with thirty ideas a week?  Determined not to fall behind, I have been writing from early morning sometimes until nine at night.  They don’t pay me enough to compensate for the mental fatigue, the physical exhaustion, the time it takes away from anything else I need to do; I agreed to it anyway, however, because we desperately need the money and it’s the only solid offer I received.  I already wrote about my humiliating, demeaning job search.  For now I am content, but I have to forsake much else.

The other reason I haven’t written this until now is the fact that I couldn’t really put my finger on what exactly I wanted to say.  Usually when I sit down to write an essay I have the theme, the core of it firmly in my mind, though I may not have all of the details or organization.  This time, it has been more of a nagging uncertainty, an impression – almost like spots on the eye that disappear if you try to look directly at them.

So last night one of my sons and I were watching a movie on Netflix direct viewing.  For those who need all the details, it was “Enter the Dragon”, one of Bruce Lee’s last flicks.  As we relaxed I was sipping tequila.  One of the things I appreciate in the US, I might add, is the ready availability of affordable tequila, though I only allow myself a glass or two on the weekends.  Anyway, the movie being over, my son off to bed, and I sat down at my computer.  I was not drunk by any means, or even excessively buzzed, but had a pleasant feeling of release, of flow, of lack of inhibition.  I opened my mind and began to type whatever would come to me of what I wanted to say about my misgivings and apprehensions about the United States after being here for about four and a half months.  This is what I wrote:

How do I start this?  What do I say?  I don’t even understand it myself.  If I said I did I would be a liar, just as I sense lies around every corner.  But no.  It is more subtle than that.

I started off with high expectations, and even grandiose pronouncements.  I said in print that America had changed, that I was walking into a new land from that which I had left thirty-five years or so ago.  But things have happened which make me give pause.  Nothing I can put my finger on, mind you.  Subtle things.  Hints, suggestions.  The United States I knew back then, the violent, corrupt, crazed entity that I sought to escape, still exists.  It has only taken on another form.  It is not more subtle, only different.  It still leers out of the corners, out of the shadows.  It still pretends to be comprehensible, while at the same time it is of hopeless complexity.  It pretends to be the best when it is in some ways the worst.

In short, it is…  There we go again.  It defies explanation, but it befuddles the brain, it fogs the mind, it perverts the spirit, it defies any attempt to simplify it or explain it or put it in a box.  What is it?  I only know that if I could attain to the highlands again, if I could get outside the country and look down into the smoggy mess I would once more have clarity of focus, of perspective, of vision.  I might even be able to prognosticate, although I wouldn’t count on it.  I might be able to say all that I am beating around the bush about.  Something here defies analysis, that’s for sure.  And despite all the conspirators that I am sure lurk out there in the wings, nobody really has got to the crux of the situation.

That’s the problem, see?  Everything is askew, but nobody knows that it is.  Everyone thinks that all is just fine, thank you, and will continue so indefinitely.  Sure, there might be the odd financial crisis or international incident.  No matter.  Things will get back on course, set themselves right.  Things are never off course, as a matter of fact.  All proceeds as it should.  Everything is under control.  At least, as much as it can be in control as perceived through the reflection of a funhouse mirror.

Yes, disillusionment has set in.  Ennui has set in.  It hasn’t yet got to the point of despair, but not because I think that redemption is imminent.  I will never despair, no matter in what far corner I might find myself.

It reminds me of dreams I have had in the past, in which I find myself in the place I would least want to be in the entire universe or cosmos.  I realize I am there, and fight to get out, but in the end I wake up and rejoice that I was never really there in the first place.  So it is with the United States of America.  I am really here.  I will not wake up as if in a bad dream.  But what I will wake up from is the illusion that it is hell, or heaven.  It is, in fact, just a place on Earth like any other place.  A point of geography with distinct and marked and measured borders.  The borders are arbitrary, of course.  The land will live on long after the borders are gone.  Consider the Mesozoic Era.  Borders?  None.

I feel I must explain myself, what I mean by all this, but no, I can’t.

What I need to explain is my position in the flux of things.  Nothing is stationary, nothing is static.  Nothing remains the same.  But at this point of time I find myself in the United States, bursting with the revelation that it has not improved as I thought it had when I first came here several months ago.  If anything it has got worst.  It has got more introverted, more self-assured, more pompous, more oblivious to the rest of the world.  It lives here in the grand delusion that all is well.  Maybe not perfectly well.  There are, of course, homeless, and helpless, and heartless – but, let’s face it, there always are – and the American dream is still alive, right?

That’s the crunch.  In the face of all evidence, most of the United States still lives under the grand illusion, the grand delusion, that the American dream still exists.  But then we dissect it.  What exactly is the American dream?  It is, basically, prosperity at the expense of others.  I have fallen for it too, sad to say.  I dream of getting rich quick.  I dream of great prosperity.  I dream of some sort of idyllic life that can never be, because that life would have to be lived on the backs of others.

Something is askew.  Something is badly askew.  Everyone and everything is off-balance, dizzy, confused.

I have no idea what will put things right.  I don’t know what to do.  I just wanted to revise my earlier statement that all is well.

It isn’t.

There it is.  That’s what I wrote last night in my tequila haze, and I will let it stand.  In the coming weeks, months, years, clarification may emerge.

Stay tuned.

Book Review: Jack London, Sailor on Horseback by Irving Stone

We writers are often lonely people.  We labor away day after day, alone in our rooms at our keyboards.  Often those around us don’t understand what we are going through and what drives us to persevere.

How I acquired this book by Irving Stone I don’t remember, but it found its way into my hands at just the right time, when I had come to the realization that I was a writer.  As soon as I began to read it I was enthralled.  Jack London’s life was at least as adventurous as the lives of the characters in his tales; indeed, he felt that one had to live life to the full before one could write about it.  As a young man he sailed the Pacific in a sealing vessel, raided oyster beds in the San Francisco Bay area as an oyster pirate, rode the rails across America, journeyed to the Klondike in Alaska in search of gold; later, as a world-renowned author, he built his own sailboat and toured the then-wild South Sea Islands.

This book reads like a novel; it is utterly gripping and fascinating.  Indeed, it has been accused of taking liberties with and embellishing the facts.  Besides historical sources Stone relies heavily on Jack London’s autobiographical novel “Martin Eden” – sections of the text seem all but lifted out of it.  To fault the book for its limited value as a historical text might be justified, but to fault it as an inspiration for writers would be errant.

For a long time in his journeys London wandered aimlessly, without purpose or direction, but in the Klondike he found himself as a man and as a writer.  He was unlearned as far as the traditional educational system was concerned, but he was a voracious reader and possessed of uncommon intelligence and drive.  Once he determined to educate himself and to become a writer there was no stopping him.  He drove himself relentlessly to study and to write.  He would limit himself to a few hours of sleep a night and then would rise early and get to work.  He would set himself a daily word limit and would not stop until he achieved it.  He made a plan to acquaint himself with all important fields of knowledge and he devoured books relentlessly.  At first he received nothing but rejections from the editors to whom he sent his work, but he kept at it, sent the stories out again and again, refused to accept failure though he came to the brink of poverty and despair.

Finally, after a few years of intense struggle, he achieved a success that few writers of his time even came close to.  The breakthrough work was “The Call of the Wild”, still considered a classic and read by students and lovers of literature today.  He followed that with many popular volumes of stories, novels, essays, and so on, until he was the most famous and best-paid writer of his time.

He did not manage his wealth wisely, though, and was always in debt, forcing him to work ever harder.  He burned himself out at an early age, dying when he was only forty years old.  Some say it was suicide and some say it was an illness; nobody really knows for sure.  Stone offers his own version.

Undoubtedly Irving Stone presents London idealistically, and ignores his weaknesses as a man and as a writer.  But to benefit from this book one must approach it as a rousing adventure and as a study in determination.  It is invigorating, strengthening, inspiring.  When I read it as a young writer it caused me to persevere when I felt like quitting, to ignore the mounting pile of rejection slips and try again, to step out and live life to the full that I might afterwards be able to write about it with veracity.  It can inspire you too.  That is the value of this book.

Gladiators

I had always enjoyed watching football.  If the two teams know what they are doing, if they are playing with a modicum of unity, there is something fluid about it.  You might almost say it is something like a violent ballet.

When I returned to the United States that was something that had not changed – the American passion for football.  It is even bigger than the European passion for soccer, because there is more at stake – much more money involved, for one thing.  And the football craze goes down through the ranks, from pro to college to high school and on to the dirt lots where kids pile into each other in  mock combat.  European high schools, at least Greek high schools, lack the aspect of organized sport – to their detriment, I think.  If they adopted it, it would pay for itself; I’m sure of that.  The kids play organized sports, but for autonomous teams completely unaffiliated with their schools.  It gives them no purpose, nothing to cling to and say is theirs.  It becomes, as a result, much more of an abstraction.  Who cares who wins?  Then it boils down to the individual, not the team.  Most kids who play soccer in Greece dream of being a pro.  They don’t really give a damn whether their team wins or not as long as they look good.

Ideally, it is not so in America.  Team play is emphasized.  You can’t win if just one player is a hot shot and all the rest stumble around aimlessly.  I am not naive, however.  Football in American is big business, there’s no doubt about it.  But we’re talking about high school ball here; once you get past that level the situation gets infinitely more complex.

I was more than surprised when my fourth son, who recently arrived in the States to complete his final year of high school, expressed an interest in joining the varsity football team.  For one thing, apart from passing a ball back and forth at a park a few times in Greece, he had never played football in his life.  He knew very little about the game.  It would be enough of a culture shock, thought I, to enter the entirely foreign (to him) milieu of a high school in the United States.  There were other sports that were easier to learn.  At first I tried to dissuade him.  He would have none of it.  His fervor caused me to pause in my remonstrations.  He really, really wanted to do it.  All right, then.  I switched gears and determined that if he desired it so strongly I would support him no matter what.

See, here’s the thing.  My own experience with playing high school football was, shall we say, slightly less than satisfactory.  I loved the sport, as I say – to watch, and to play in informal games at the park – but I had no desire whatsoever to play it on the high school team.  My father insisted, however.  He had been a good player at his high school.  To prove it we had pictures of him in his football uniform, smiling and confident.  He felt that football built character, and he was right – but what he didn’t grasp and I had no way of explaining, immature and oblivious to most everything as I was in those days, was that it only builds character in those who choose to pursue it, not those who are forced to pursue it.  A huge difference is apparent; motivation is of supreme importance.  I had none.  Dutifully, however, I went to practice.  I had made a few feeble, half-assed efforts to get myself into shape before practice started, but as I didn’t really give a damn I didn’t follow through.  As a result, physically I was woefully unprepared for the practice regimen.  By the end of the first day every inch of my body ached; I could barely stagger home and throw myself on the couch.  The days to come didn’t get any easier.  My ankles developed agonizing pain.  I had to get them taped up before practice, and even then they hurt like hell to run on.  The trainers begrudged the time and tape it took to fix them up each day, preferring to concentrate on the star varsity players.  I was a sophomore, you see.  Not only that, I was on third-string, or even farther back if farther back existed.  I was totally unimportant in their eyes.  Be that as it may, I somehow stumbled, staggered, panted, bruised, groped my way through the practices and stood on the side during the games all year long, never wanting to be there, desperately wanting to quit, hanging on only because my father saw no alternative to me playing football as he had.  Before the last game of the season, something snapped.  We were doing warm-up drills.  Two players faced each other; one was supposed to run through and the other was supposed to hit him in the chest and drive him back.  We were starting fairly close to each other so there wasn’t time to build up enough momentum for a really solid hit; it was a pre-game drill, after all, and the coaches didn’t want anyone to get hurt.  I figured the hell with it.  I charged into the other player with all my strength; I hit him solidly and drove him backwards, almost knocking him to the ground.  Afterwards I was dizzy and saw stars, but I heard the coach say something like, “That’s the way to do it, Walters, why didn’t you show me any of that before?”  That was the only time I got any sort of appreciation or praise the whole season.  You would have thought they’d give me some sort of award just for hanging on, for enduring, when I hated it so much.  But you see, I didn’t deserve that either.  What would have shown real balls would have been to refuse to play in the first place.  And the next season I was offered a paper route, an entrepreneurship, a chance to earn my own money, just before football season started, and I accepted.  My father was disappointed, but as having a job and making one’s own way in the world was another of the principles upon which he expostulated, he could hardly remonstrate overmuch.

All that to say that when my son expressed an interest in football I was determined not to press him one way or the other, but when he was adamant I acquiesced.  He’d been training for a long time with pushups, pull-ups, sprinting, distance running, and so on, just on the principle of general fitness, so he was much better prepared physically for practice than I had been when I did it.  The first step was the preliminary physical.  Okay, no problem.  He passed with flying colors.  Then the first real obstacle presented itself – he had to have health insurance.  That which we had had in Greece was valid only for the European Union, so we had nothing.

In consternation we headed to an office at which a woman helped us fill out forms to apply for California government aid insurance.  Not only was the process demeaning – they take for granted in advance that you are some sort of reprobate and you’re not going to be honest – but it would take far too long.  He needed insurance within a matter of days.  The school offered one other option, some sort of policy that was for school sports only, offered by a private insurance company but affiliated with the school system.  It was expensive, but fine, if that’s what had to be done.  I had just borrowed from relatives extensively for plane tickets to get here; where to come up with the money almost instantly?  One of my other sons came to the rescue, and the insurance got paid.

Practice started, all went well, but then a week or so in my son complained of heavy headaches and dizziness after a particular hit.  Just about anything brought on a headache.  He couldn’t run; he couldn’t do any exercise at all.  The way the insurance was set up I had to take him in at our expense to have it checked, and then it would be reimbursed.  It used up most of our cash, but no matter.  He was diagnosed with concussion, had to sit out a week, and needed two follow-up visits to get cleared to play again.  The whole experience made me ruminate on the catastrophic state of the US medical system.  It’s too damned expensive, that’s what it is, but considering what is happening in Greece, which has a medical system which provides affordable care to all its citizens but is falling apart at the financial seams, I have no quick solution to offer.

Cleared once again to practice and play, my son resumed regular workouts.  Since then he has had his ups and downs, but he’s learning the rudiments of the game quickly.

Why do I spend so long expostulating on the game of football?  Because it’s an integral part of the USA which I have not had significant exposure to for many years.  American football means nothing to the rest of the world.  It is only an important sport in the United States.  Why hasn’t it caught on elsewhere?  The expense might be one reason, of the equipment, coaching personnel, and stadiums or playing fields.  But apart from that, it is even more quintessentially American than baseball, which has in fact blossomed as a sport in certain other countries such as Japan.  You won’t catch the Japanese playing American football, though.  Could it be because of its violence?  It is, in fact, somewhat of a war game, but from back in the days when armies would confront each other face-to-face on the field and blast away with their weapons and then charge.  War too can have its own kind of weird, dark beauty – when you are watching it.  That’s why war films fascinate us.  We can participate vicariously.  We can imagine ourselves as the good guy.  We can make all the right decisions, the heroic ones, without really making them, because it isn’t really happening to us.  Check out how people second-guess the players after a football game and you’ll see what I mean.  Let’s see how they’d do if they were down on the field.

Anything done well can appear elegant, but then only when you try to do it yourself do you realize the effort and expertise necessary to do it well.  So it is with football or any other sport.  You watch others do it; it looks effortless; you determine to do it too.  Only then do you find out what it costs.  It reminds me of once when I was playing a football game in the park with teams put together with whoever was standing around.  People standing around have not learned to work together.  It happened that I was the quarterback, and I envisioned myself as a hero; I would step back and throw a perfect pass just like they do on the NFL games I watched so often on TV.  On the first play I went back to pass and a whole gang of kids charged – God knows why we were playing tackle football without any protection – and they all hit me at once and I went down hard.  It turned out I badly sprained my ankle.  I couldn’t walk; I had to be helped home.  I couldn’t walk for days, in fact.  Hard reality had confronted my daydreams, and my daydreams had been found wanting.  So it is in many facets of life.