Readings: A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Man

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Considering that I have absolutely revered the man since he came onto the scene back when I was in college, I have written very little about Leonard Cohen on this blog. He ranks near, or at the top, of my personal patheon of  'sixties-era singer-songwriters. His only competition would come from Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell. Honorable mention goes to Neil Young and Van Morrison. But, no--Cohen is king. There have been several pop stars who have published books of poetry. But I think that Leonard Cohen may be the only one who was a published poet (and novelist) prior to becoming famous in show biz.

For my recent birthday, my daughters gave me a gift certificate to the bookstore that one of them works in. And my father gave me a bit of money. I used some of the money to buy Leonard Cohen's new CD. I used part of the gift certificate to buy his 2006 book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. I have been reading in that book this evening.

The birthday was my 65th. Some kind of milestone, I guess. The birthday following which one can no longer deny being old. That being the case, the poem from Cohen's book that I will be sharing below definitely resonates with me tonight. As usual, he says it perfectly. He speaks for "Sixties Survivors" everywhere, I think, in the poem,

TOO OLD

I am too old
to learn the names
of the new killers
This one here
looks tired and attractive
devoted, professorial
He looks a lot like me
when I was teaching
a radical form of Buddhism
to the hopelessly insane
In the name of the old
high magic
he commands
families to be burned alive
and children mutilated
He probably knows
a song or two that I wrote
All of them
all the bloody hand bathers
and the chewers of entrails
and the scalp peelers
they all danced
to the music of the Beatles
they worshipped Bob Dylan
Dear friends
there are very few of us left
silenced
trembling all the time
hidden among the blood -
stunned fanatics
as we witness to each other
the old atrocity
the old obsolete atrocity
that has driven out
the heart's warm appetite
and humbled evolution
and made a puke of prayer

Xxxxxxx
xxxxx***xxx
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In case you were wondering, that's exactly how some of us feel when we observe those who are left in power as we Boomers drop off the tree, over ripe; an invitation to bugs, scavaging birds and little furry rodents.
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Readings: Zeitgeisted

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Another book that I’m currently nibbling my way through in small, but nourishing bites is Young Man Luther: a Study in Psychoanalysis and History, by Erik H. Erikson. Normally, I have but scant regard for psychoanalytic theory; particularly Freudian theory, which I feel has been largely dismissed as over-wrought bullshit by this juncture. If I want to contemplate psychological theory from the formative years, I much prefer that of Jung. It was, therefore, my interest in Luther that led me to grab this book out of used book bin at a public library sale.

All of that said I am enjoying the reading of it. Erikson writes in a fluid style; is clearly an excellent historical scholar, and I find his ideas to be engaging. One of the concepts that Erikson deploys in his study of Luther’s personal development is that of the moratorium:

Societies, knowing that young people can change rapidly even in their most intense devotions, are apt to give them a moratorium, a span of time after they have ceased being children, but before their deeds and works count toward a future identity.

Erikson is the man who gave us the term “identity crisis.” This becomes most relevant to his exploration of just what made Luther tick. But as I read the following passage, it occurred to me that it seemed to have special relevance to my generation—the so-called Boomers—or at least, to that sub-cultural segment of the generation in the midst of which I spent my formative years:


It is probable that in all historical periods some—and by no means the least gifted—young people do not survive their moratorium; they seek death or oblivion, or die in spirit. Martin must have seen such death of mind and spirit in some of his brethren, and came to feel close to it more than once. Those who face the abyss only to disappear we will, of course, never know; and once in a while we should shed a tear for those who took some unborn protest, some unformed idea, and sometimes just one lonely soul, with them. They chose to face nothingness rather than submit to a faith that, to them, had become a cant of pious words; a collective will, that cloaked only collective impotence; a conscience which expended itself in a stickling for empty forms; a reason that was a chatter of commonplaces; and a kind of work that was meaningless busy-work. I am speaking of those “outsiders” who go their lone way, not those who come back to poison the world further with a mystical literature which exhorts man to shun reality and stay outside, like Onan.

I had many a friend who looked into that abyss of “empty forms” and were horrified when the abyss looked back at them. As it has shaken down, the antidote seems to have been to become a little less like John Lennon and a little more like John McCain.
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Reflections: Boomer Gold

I went to the public library this morning to return a book (Cion) and came home with Annie Leibovitz’s coffee table book, American Music. In addition to the expected genius photography of many of the icons of blues, gospel, bluegrass, country, rock, hip-hop and jazz, this book also contains short essays on the music and its cyclical inspiration written by the musicians themselves. The first such mini-essay is by Patti Smith, a singer-songwriter of my generation whose music never fails to totally eviscerate me when I can muster the guts to listen to it.

I am going to quote below one paragraph from Patti’s essay. This paragraph provides a snapshot, as if made with a pin-hole camera, of the shared experience of every post-WWII kid who came to self-consciousness in the 1950s:

It was difficult reconciling the images of Hiroshima with the image I had of our country. When I questioned my father, he would say, “I did my duty, but the rest is man’s inhumanity to man.” He seldom talked about the war, but on Memorial Day he served in the color guard, and after the parade and a prayer for fallen soldiers we would celebrate in the field surrounding the Veterans Hall. Our mothers served hot dogs and potato salad. Our father played horseshoes. When the sun went down, we gathered around a bonfire, roasting marshmallows and singing. We sang of the railroad, the Dust Bowl, and the Erie Canal. We sang “Heart of My Heart” and “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” We sang about Jesus and Davy Crockett. It was the end of the fifties and everyone seemed happy.

Just in time for Memorial Day. Dig it.

Readings: Boomin' Blackly

African American novelist, John Edgar Wideman, is perhaps not technically a Boomer. Born in 1941, he would have been starting middle school in the year that I entered kindergarten. But, then, he was educated and raised by the so-called Greatest Generation. And he also endured its racism.

Wideman’s new novel, dedicated to its title “character,” Frantz Fanon, the West Indian revolutionary exemplar, and francophone author of The Wretched of the Earth, begins with this 1956 Fanon quote:

The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life, the concrete and the objective world constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found the imaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feeds on the concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible only to the extent that the real world belongs to us.

Wideman then uses this idea in the first few pages of his novel. The voice is that of his protagonist, himself a writer, addressing an imagined Fanon:

Stipulating differences that matter between fact and fiction – between black and white, male and female, good and evil – imposes order in a society. Keeps people on the same page. Reading from the same script. In the society I know best, mine, fact and fiction are absolutely divided, on set above the other to rule and pillage, or, worse, fact and fiction blend into a tangled, hypermediated mess, grounding being in a no-exit maze of consuming: people as a consuming medium, people consumed by the medium.

Fiction writing and art in general are scorned, stripped of relevance to people’s daily lives, dependent on charity, mere playthings of power, privilege, buying and selling.

My society polices its boundaries with more and more self-destructive Manichean violence now that its boundaries are exposed not as naturally or supernaturally ordained but organized through various sorts of coercion by some members of the society to benefit themselves and disadvantage others.

Under what rock, whose skirts have I been hiding, you might be wondering, not to have learned these truths before I began zipping up my own trousers. A good question, Fanon. A more difficult question: if I truly understand all of the above, why am I still writing.

“Fiction writing and art in general are scorned…” Hmm. Where did I hear something along those lines said just recently? Oh, yeah!:

If they [Gen-Xers] would read, they could know more; but, as you say, they don't. The thing on my blog that inevitably gets the fewest comments is a quote from a serious book. Usually, it gets none at all.


Maybe it’ll all come out as a video game one day?

Reflections: From Boom to Tomb...

…or WHAT I DID IN THE WAR

The following shall serve as counterpoint to, and reality check of, my previous paean for my generation.

There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
~ John Lennon, Working Class Hero

I’m nearing the end of Cathy Wilkerson’ s autobiography, Flying Close to the Sun. That means that I’m nearing the climax of the story of her life as a revolutionary. It means that I’m nearing the part where Weatherman blows up the Greenwich Village townhouse of Wilkerson’s father, attempting to construct bombs to be used in the insurgency against the power structure; the explosion that kills three members of Weatherman and sends Wilkerson underground.

The lesson to be learned from Wilkerson’s confession is that the essence of every collective is coercion and conformity. In resisting the violence of Vietnam; in opposing the violence of racism; idealistic youth, in frustration, finally turned to violence as a means. The outside is the inside. The microcosm of SDS/Weatherman came to mirror the macrocosm of the military industrial complex against which it aspired to revolt.

In the end there was only coercion and conformity in society-at-large, and coercion and conformity in SDS/Weatherman. In the end, Wilkerson found that while a woman faced male chauvinism in society-at-large, a woman faced similar sexism in SDS/Weatherman. If she had to use her sexuality to ascend the ladders of the work world, she was also defined by her gender in the revolution. If pedagogy, Madison Avenue, and State Department briefings were thought-control, there was thought-control in the ideological posturing and in the self-criticism sessions of SDS/Weatherman. In the end it is coercion and conformity in school; coercion and conformity in the family; coercion and conformity at work; coercion and conformity in middle-class propriety; coercion and conformity even in church. The same pressure that impels one to join the revolution, forcefully reconfigures one to fit in: a round hole for every square peg in the collective.

All worldly relationships are power relationships:

The only truly free man is the man who finds himself totally emptied out by affliction and alone in a hole in the earth, or locked in his room, flat on his face, begging God to come fill the void where his ego formerly raged like a holocaust, fed by the inexhaustible fat of his gluttonous appetite for sin.

One could say that the Boomers’ collective dream of an activist solution began its slow death under the rubble of that townhouse, just as the morbidity of the ‘Sixties began to spread like a sepsis through the crowd at Altamont, while Mick Jagger wandered about helplessly on the stage, at a loss for a tune to fit the occasion:

We had met the Pig, and he was us.

Reflections: Who's Boomin' Who?

Boomers tend to hear a lot of vapid shit laid down against them by those who came after. They call us selfish and self-absorbed; we know that that's not where it’s at. We know that we put our actual, physical butts on the line--and we did it for others. If we talked, we also walked, and we marched, and we sat-in, and we got gassed, and jailed, and beaten, and harassed, and busted, and verbally abused by morons wearing Nixon buttons. Some of us got killed.

Today, there’s 24/7 blogging and incessant talking. Walking? Not so much.

We were brave and we were creative. We transformed pop music into an art form. We made movies that were worth watching. Many of us were spiritual seekers. We bequeathed to subsequent lame ass generations their sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Say 'Thank you.' You know you love it.

Today everybody runs. Everybody’s a hard-body. They all got the six-pack. But inside (where it counts) they’re soft, self-pampered pussies and impotent whiners. Mom-my! The liberals stole my lunch money! Wah! Wah!

Two of the books I’m currently reading, Black Glass, by Karen Joy Fowler and Flying Close to the Sun, by Cathy Wilkerson, both fellow Boomers, are bringing back to me the danger and excitement of just being on the streets in the ‘Sixties as a young person engaged in the movements for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

Here is an excerpt from Flying Close to the Sun which is a graphic and typical example of why I remain so fond of cops to this day:

On January 17 [1969], John Huggins and Hunchy Carter, leaders of the LA Panthers, were gunned down at a meeting of UCLA students, called to establish a black studies department. The Panthers had been invited by some students to provide a counterbalance to members of another black organization, Ron Karenga’s US (United Slaves), because some students had felt intimidated by the armed men from US that had recently insisted on speaking on their behalf to the administration. Several people at the time saw who had done the shooting, but those identified were not arrested. Instead, police jailed seventy-five members of the Panthers that night. One was the widow of slain John Huggins, even though she was the nursing mother of a three-week-old baby. John Huggins was a Vietnam vet who had left Lincoln University in Pennsylvania to work with the Panthers. Many suspected at the time that US had been infiltrated and as being used by the LAPD to get rid of the Panthers.
When news of the shooting reached us (SDS members), I was stunned. The police response, to do a sweep of Panthers and not arrest anyone from US, seemed strong evidence that informants or agents were somehow involved. [Flying Close to the Sun, pp.246-247]

And here is an episode that explains in part the genesis of my great love and respect for Cowboy Ronnie:

Militant demonstrations erupted on several campuses that April [1969]. In Berkeley, black students and white supporters went on strike, demanding an autonomous black studies department. Governor Ronald Reagan called in the National Guard. [Flying Close to the Sun, p.248]

Wilkerson writes of the aftermath of the disclosure of the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia. Check out the amazing words of the governor of the great State of Ohio, anticipating the kind of hyperbole that today is used to characterize al-Qaeda, spoken to vilify the sons and daughters of ordinary Ohioans who were demonstrating against the escalation of the war:

…Nixon announced the US bombing of Cambodia. … The response by hundreds of thousands of students on hundreds of campuses around the country is now legendary.
The government reaction to these uprisings is also legendary. Ohio Governor James Rhodes derided Kent State student activists, already in the midst of antiwar demonstrations, saying, "They’re worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people we harbor in America. I think we are up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group in America.” Days later, the nervous young National Guard troops under his leadership shot and killed four young students, shocking the country. [Flying Close to the Sun, p.356]

In her story “Letters From Home” in Black Glass , in which she imagines writing to a boyfriend who has disappeared in Vietnam, Karen Joy Fowler, who was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley from 1968 to 1972, recalls what it was like to be a college student on an activist campus in those days. (More reason to love cops. More reason to love Ronald Reagan):

By the spring of 1970… I had gone out to protest the Cambodian invasion and come home in a cast. The police had removed their badges, donned their gas masks, and chased us down, catching me just outside Computer Sciences. They had broken my ankle. Owlie [one roommate’s boyfriend] was gone. His birthday had been drawn seventeenth in the lottery, and he’d relocated to a small town in Oregon rumored to have a lenient draft board. Gretchen had acquire a boyfriend whose back had been injured in a high school wrestling match, rendering him 4-F with no tricks. …We heard that the National Guard was killing people on the campus of Kent State. I heard nothing from you. [Black Glass, p.111]

Long before Iran-Contra, more reason to love the memory of Ronald Reagan:

They didn’t want me at any more demonstrations. “When you could run,” Lauren pointed out, “look what happened to you.” But I was there with them when the police cordoned off Sproul Plaza, trapping us inside, and gassed us from the air. …Governor Ronald Reagan and all the major networks assured you that we had been asked to disperse but had refused. Only Poncho [PBS reporter] told the truth. We had not been allowed to leave. Anyone who tried to leave was clubbed. A helicopter flew over the area and dropped tear gas on us. The gas went into the hospital and into the neighboring residential areas. [Black Glass, p. 116]

So, go ahead—mock the Boomers. We can take it. We’ve heard worse than you’ve got. To steal a line from SNL, “We got chunks of guys like you in our stool.”