Remembrances: Who Laughs Last...

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The portrait is of a guy named Richard Bousley. It is dated February, 1967, which places it in the second semester of my sophomore year at the University of Michigan. I was still living at home then. In the following summer, my parents moved to Ohio. After spending most of the break in Ohio with them, I returned to Ann Arbor and moved into my first student apartment. Bousley was one of my two roommates. Jim Rutherford was the other.

I first started hanging out with Bousley in the ninth grade. After living in Ann Arbor through fifth grade, I had lived in Muncie, Indiana during sixth and seventh grades. Returning to Ann Arbor for eighth grade—a “new kid” all over again—I had palled around almost exclusively with another kid named Jim—Jimmy Malcolm—who had lived across the street from me during my grade school years, and coincidentally now lived in the same neighborhood where my parents took an apartment upon our return to Ann Arbor. But following eighth grade Jimmy’s parents moved across town, and I was alone in the neighborhood.

At the beginning of ninth grade, Dick Bousley was a “new kid” at Tappan Junior High School. We met in art class. Dick walked home from school by the same route as I. We soon became friends. Other than liking to draw, one of the first things we found ourselves to have in common was an appreciation of Elvis Presley. Only Dick had the haircut, however.

After a year or so, Dick’s family moved to another neighborhood on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. He was now a neighbor of Jim Rutherford, and the three of us soon formed an after school trio.

Dick’s house had a backboard mounted on the garage and we would play “horse” or two-on-one in his driveway after school. Sometimes Dick’s younger brother, Don, would be asked to make a fourth, so that we could play two-on-two games to 21. Don was kind of a strange, quiet kid, who was fascinated with extraterrestrials—the chariots of the gods, and all that.

Following high school, Dick enrolled at Eastern Michigan; Rutherford and I at the University of Michigan. But when Don graduated high school a year or so later, he enlisted in the army. This was at the height of the war in Vietnam. As I recall it, Don completed basic training and shipped out for ‘Nam right after Thanksgiving and was dead before Christmas. He died almost immediately and right around the holidays, anyway.

By this time, neither Dick nor Jim was still in college. I had new roommates in the apartment on White Street. But Jim and I attend Don’s military memorial service together. I remember it featuring much folding of flags and the shrieking of Don’s girlfriend, who was cursing at the honor guard with some kind of foreign accent. Jim and I then went to the funeral—rifle salute, and all.

After the cemetery, we went back to the rental house on Jorn Court that Jim was sharing with two other friends—Douglas Mount and Luther B. Weems. We didn’t have much to say, as I remember. We couldn’t really fathom the waste of Don Bousley’s young life. He hadn’t really asked much of the world.

We put the Country Joe and the Fish album on the stereo and played “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” over and over and over again.

And we laughed and laughed. We laughed until we were empty and could laugh no more.

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Readings: Apocalypse When?

Taking center stage in my current reading regimen is the novel Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson. Johnson has long been one of my favorite contemporary writers of fiction, and ToS is his biggest, and, imho, most important, effort to-date. Johnson has also published some very good poetry. Those who read non-fiction exclusively might be interested in looking into Seek, a selection of essays and magazine articles, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I have also read a couple of his dramas, and, quite frankly, was not blown away by them. But the rest of it, I vouch for.

Tree of Smoke is primarily about the war in Vietnam and the role of the CIA in Southeast Asia. It contains several interwoven subplots, between which Johnson vacillates, a structure which has annoyed some reviewers. Personally, I find his pacing very effective. The novel is over 600 pages, and I find that moving the focus from one character to another, in fairly short segments, keeps it from ever becoming tedious. I am currently approaching page 400 and already regretting that the saga will too soon end.

But I’m not here to write a review, as such.

Having recently had my interest in reading Spinoza piqued by a fictional character in a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, I found myself in the same situation with regard to one of the characters in Tree of Smoke. The character is “Skip,” a young, idealistic and patriotic CIA operative, perhaps a generic Christian, who has been drawn into the Agency by hero-worship of his legendary uncle, also CIA, who is known to the world primarily as “the Colonel.” Without going too deeply into the plot, it is enough for my purposes here to say that Skip finds himself in Vietnam, carrying out duties which, to him, as well as to us, seem both meaningless and mysterious. The Colonel, he believes, knows all, but discloses little. Both Skip and the Colonel are attached to a Psy-Ops unit. But what the “Ops” consist of is a mystery. Skip is billeted in the house a deceased French colonial, a physician, who somehow has managed to blow himself to pieces underground, in what may, or may not, have been a Viet Cong tunnel. (These tunnels seem to play an important symbolic role in the novel.) The dead physician’s effects and possessions are all still in the house, and Skip begins the task of boxing them up for subsequent removal by the next-of-kin. In the course of this, Skip becomes engrossed in both the physician’s library and his journals. When, finally, a relative comes for the physician’s things, Skip keeps (steals) a couple of items. Long story short: the physician has been a reader of the Romanian writer/philosopher, Emil Cioran, whose writings lay an egg in Skip’s brain.

As a reader of Tree of Smoke, having become convinced that an understanding of where Cioran was coming from must be important to understanding what happens to Skip, and, thus, to at least one essential element of what Johnson is driving at in writing the novel, I decided to read some Cioran. Searching the Cioran listings of the university library, I came across the title Tears and Saints. Since Johnson’s writings nearly always contain a religious subtext in which something resembling the Holy Spirit nags at the peace of mind of his protagonists, I decided to try this title first.

In the translator’s introduction, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston writes:

“Cioran explicitly focuses on the political element in the saints’ lives, but in his view their charitable deeds represent the least interesting aspect of their lives. What fascinates him are their tears, their thirst for pain and their capacity to endure it: in short, the pathology or, as he puts it, the ‘voluptuousness of suffering,’ for ‘suffering is man’s only biography.’ Behind this suffering, and their uncanny ability to renounce everything through ascetic practices. Cioran detects the saints’ fanatical will to power.”

And later:

“In mysticism, redemption and the saints’ will to possess God are in fact one and the same thing. That is why the formula for redemption need not remain confined to the spiritual domain and can easily be translated into political terms: the mystic’s spiritual union with God becomes a (small) nation’s fulfillment of a greater destiny: ‘Our entire political and spiritual mission must concentrate on the determination to will a transfiguration, on the desperate and dramatic experience of transforming our whole way of life.’ [Cioran, Romania’s Transfiguration, 47]”

Finally, Zarifopol-Johnston quotes Cioran again from Romania’sTransfiguration:

“All means are legitimate when a people opens a road for itself in the world. Terror, crime, bestiality and perfidy are base and immoral only in decadence, when they defend a vacuum of content; if, on the other hand, they help in the ascension of a people, they are virtues. All triumphs are moral…”

So, Johnson has one of his central protagonists, a CIA operative assigned to a Psychological Operations unit, under the command of his uncle, a Kurtz-like figure, becoming obsessed with the ideas of a Romanian fascist, who is himself obsessed with saints as the embodiment of suffering as will-to-power in an otherwise meaningless existence. The enemy is “the Void.” The danger is falling into decadence and nihilism, and Skip seems--two-thirds of the way through the book--to be teetering on the brink. He has passively rejected, through his inability to empathize, the love of a truly suffering woman named Kathy; the widow of a murdered Seventh Day Adventist missionary, who continues her charitable work among the Vietnamese war orphans, despite apparently having lost her faith and entered into a Dark Night of the Soul (Mother Teresa, anyone?). And Skip is lost in a mission, the goals of which are as invisible as are their moral foundations.

What does Johnson have in mind for Skip? As a symbol of patriotic, casually Christian America, will Skip become even more the fascist than he already de facto is? Or will he veer off in the direction of sainthood, persevering, but suffering, in his new-found acknowledgement of the agony of existence in a fallen world? As a symbol of America, where will Skip find his will-to-power?

Cioran, for his part, says:

“We would have been better off without saints. Then each of us would have minded our own business and we would have rejoiced in our imperfection. Their presence among us brings about useless inferiority complexes, envy, spite. The world of saints is a heavenly poison that grows ever more virulent as our loneliness increases. They have corrupted us by providing a model that shows suffering attaining its goal.” [Tears and Saints, p.14]

(Simone Weil, anyone?)