LETTERS FROM
UNCLE RIVER
Uncle River, who knows how to keep the
reader interested, is an American
science fiction writer. Trained in Jungian Analysis and holding what he
believes to be the world’s only earned doctorate in Psychology of the
Unconscious, he has authored novels that
include Thunder Mountain, Ever
Broten, Prometheus: the autobiography,
King Freedom besides several short stories,
essays and critical pieces .His cultural Speculative Fiction has appeared in Asimov’s
Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, Interzone,
Absolute Magnitude, Telebones, etc. He also edited a literary journal, XIZQUIL . We came in touch with each other through
Summer Breeze and her Moongate Internationale.
Letters: 2000: 1
Blue Route, Box
90
Blue,
AZ 85922, USA
Jan.
29, 2000
Dear Ram Krishna,
Your letter of Sept. 19, and
interview from Poetcrit did indeed
reach me here in the Blue River Canyon, where I have been most of the time
since March. In fact, at present, I have
only been out to pavement once (for groceries and a visit to friends in a bookstore
in Springville, the nearest town of any size, 45 miles from here) since a two
week trip to Silver City in late Oct. – early Nov. My apologies for being so slow to reply to
you. All my correspondence has gotten
slow.
I have an odd opinion, half serious,
half play: that we are experiencing a period of “time compression” as a world
out of balance spins faster and faster in futile attempt to maintain, before
some (probably messy) shift that is simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough of
the Aeon. The “time compression” factor
has everybody dashing about more and more at a frenzy… and accomplishing less
and less by it. My response, to a degree
anyhow, is to slow down all the more,
not to panic in face of universal
sense of directionless urgency, not to spin off energy in frantic chaos. I find this difficult. Even here the world
intrudes too much. But I do find myself
with the luxury of more opportunity for quiet contemplation than most people
have.
And that too is odd. You say in your
letter that you are pleased my stories sell well. Actually, mostly they don’t. Editors I respect respond with compliments on
the quality of the writing and ideas… but mostly reject my work as not fitting
their readership. Editors I don’t
respect suggest I “improve” my work by eliminating what for me is the entire
reason to write all in favor of genre cliché and adding a lot of gratuitous
violence. I do get treated with respect
by editors and other writers I respect,
but I get very few sales. It gets
exceedingly wearing. And yet, with
little worldly success and an income about 1/5th or less of what in America is considered
“poverty level,” I have a degree of contemplative freedom that few today have,
a good deal of the time. And since I
refrained from bringing children into the world, knowing I had no means to
support them, and from incurring debts I have no way to pay, I can live in my
out-of-the-way primitive conditions with
a clear conscience… and at the moment plenty of good food, wood for the fire to
keep warm, and even enough money for electricity for light and to run this
computer that was my father’s which my family decided to pass on to me last
spring after I got back here.
I don’t remember now what I said in
my previous letter about William Burroughs, and I don’t know if you will
remember what you said about him in your letter last September. But I incline toad some further
thoughts. He seem to me to have been one
of the people who made a transition in American literature as to what
respectable culture would pay attention to.
His first couple of books, straight narrative drawn from his personal
experiences as a homosexual heroin addict were in a style and format largely
ignored as literature. With Naked Lunch and Nova Express, both of which I read over 30 years ago and have not
gone back to since, he bridged a gap, depicting a lot of fringe degenerate
behavior in a context that cast it in relation to the larger society of which
it was a fringe, and in a style of writing that got treated as literature by
respectable people… and thus controversial.
(What he wrote thereafter, as as a successful cult figure,seems to me
have become increasingly self-indulgent and boring, and I never read much of
it.) What I mainly recall of Burroughs from reading his Nova Express especially, in my late teens in the throes of the late
60s American cultural upheaval, was how he depicted the downfall of
civilization in everyone being required to spend so much time running about
from one bureaucratic office to another that they had no time left to do
anything productive…. Which, to a frightful degree, has happened in the decades
since.
But, as you respond to quite
passionately, that sort of thing is not the message most people took from
Burroughs’ writing. Rather to my amazement and thoroughly to my disgust…often
despair, what people mostly did was to shift from one extreme of pretending
nasty facets of human nature and our culture did not exist to the opposite
extreme of: Well, they do exist, so it’s all right to do anything you please
all the time. Insanity! And I think a peculiarly essential insanity of our
times, and perhaps especially (though by
no means exclusively) of America.
…I’ll enclose a relevant poem, my
most recent as it happens. (One line that refers to a somewhat crude American
colloquialism, I may need to explain. When someone has a rigid personality,
especially when that is coupled with a pretence
that the physical does not exist, people sometimes say they “have a
broomstick up the ass.” Thus my “church
of the rectal broomstick” to refer to one extreme…which all too often people
respond to not with increased consciousness, but with mere flopping over to the
opposite extreme, as with turning William Burroughs’ personal way of life into
a model.) …One other American
colloquialism that may or may not be familiar to you: “Honcho” is whatever
individual is in charge (usually male) by force of personality and/or social
position.
I think, too, of how, growing up in
the sort of thinking, caring, responsible family I did, when the “sexual
revolution” came along just as I was getting old enough to take notice of such
things, my parents and others I knew thought that what it would mean was that people would be free to share
information and to express feelings and that there would be a lot less people
in miserable marriages because they failed to get to know each other first, and
that we could nearly abolish people getting pregnant unintentionally solely
through sexual ignorance. Well, that’s
not what we got at all. On the one side, we have had 40 years of sexual
irresponsibility, and on the other side,
we have a reaction that wants to enforce ignorance… sexual and every other
sort. More insanity!
And people don’t see it. They would
rather adopt one fanatical side or the other of
questions, and insist that everyone who doesn’t adhere to their position
must be promoting the opposite fanatical position, and of course each side defines the other as evil. All of
which is all the more odd as most people, when one gets to know them as
individuals, are really quite nice and human.
Yet, they mostly also have little concentration span, and react in an
unconscious emotional way to excitement… of one fanatic’s creed or its
opposite…as a sort of psychic food. An
addiction actually. Adrenaline.
And that relates for me to the
difficulty I have with trying to publish my writing. I largely am faced with
the choice of “commercial” writing, which feeds and feeds on this cultural
adrenaline addiction, or “literary” writing which disdains the popular in favor
of faddish affectation. And once again,
I find an absurdity. Actually, I think
people would just as soon read something that is about something of some substance
written in a comprehensible style. But,
when it comes to publishing “categories” this is all but impossible even to
address as form all but eclipses content.
So, having failed utterly to find a
place in a world that has allowed you to have a family at the cost of your
digestion and excluded me from any sort of conventional position or living but
afforded me some real extended concentration, I try to use the peculiar
opportunity I have had in life as best as I can. To learn. To articulate what I learn. To
appreciate. What, if anything, I achieve, I don’t know.
Most recently, I have been going
through Ever Broten one more time.
Some people having read it and given me some feedback, I felt I needed to do
just a bit more work on the writing before I can lay it down. In particular, I
needed to make it more clear, places where Ever, my protagonist/narrator whose
chronicle it is, breaks his narrative to go off on philosophical ruminations,
why what sets him off does and how his
mental excursions lead to what he does next or learns by what happens. Were my writing from 50, let alone 150 years
ago or even were I some other nationality, I think people would not find this
facet of my writing confusing. But it is
something all but taboo in contemporary American fiction, to combine
straight-forward, eventful narrative with
extended philosophizing. Well,
anyhow, I’m doing what I can to make Ever
Broten read as well as I can. I
started in on it again Dec. 3, which was the 6th
anniversary of beginning the writing of it.
As of today, I am through Chapter 106, of 150 chapters. And when I’m done this time, I really do
intend to be done with it, until and unless I get to work on it with an editor
for publication…. Which who knows?
And then, this enormous piece of work will no longer be the central subject of
my creative energies, after so long a time.
And I don’t know what that will feel like, or what is to come next.
In the meantime, it is possible that
a small publisher in Colorado will bring out a collection of my stories within
the next year. Also, I wrote a short
book length piece, a sort of meditation/rant on the history of Western
civilization and of the development of personality, in the voice of Prometheus,
which Roy Fairfield (whose work you’ve seen in both Xizquil and Moongate and
who was my doctoral advisor 30 years ago and remained a friend ever since)
liked a lot, and has recommended to a publisher friend of his. But no response there, so I don’t know if
anything will come of it or not.
As for Xizquil, it has been two and half years since I managed to bring
out an issue, and no energy to get out another yet, though I do still hope to
produce at least one more, to fulfil commitments I feel I’ve made. If so, I do plan to include your “Tantra”,
but I have no idea when…or I have to admit even if … that will be.
Otherwise, the summer rains here were
torrential, but since they ended in September, it has been bone dry here except
one slight rain New Year’s Eve and a few inches of snow Jan. 2. I raise a big
cloud dust every time I chop wood.
It sounds like you are going through
something a lot of people I know our age
are, of parents and a lot of the older generation in deteriorating health or
dying, and children about grown and leaving home. An irony if I understand Indian tradition
accurately at this distance: Our age, as I understand it, in your country, was
traditionally seen as a time when, having fulfilled householder responsibilities
to raising children and doing productive work in the world, one was ready to
devote oneself to meditation and spiritual growth, but in our times, economic
and social structure largely turn that into a seeming antiquated anachronism….
And I believe that both the individual and society suffer as a result. The individual oppressed by a world too dense, and world
becoming ever more unbalanced through
eliminating its own means to perspective…. Oh well, we both know we are living in a crazy time.
You ask if I would be interested in
your suggesting that a few editor friends of your contact me in regard to my
poems or stories. By all means. I would be honored.
I’ll close for now. It’s a quiet, clear. Somewhat chilly evening,
with bright stars, and will no doubt freeze fairly hard tonight, though dry as
it is, when no too windy, afternoons are quite warm. I see no other manmade lights but my own, and
the computer fan is the only machine noise I hear at present. And saying that reminds me that I have a lot to be thankful
for in this odd life. I hope this finds
you well.
All best
River
PS—Also enclosing a story on theme of cultural/religious
self-righteousness, a sad tale, but one you might find worthwhile.
LETTERS: 2001: 1
Uncle
River
RR,
Box 90
Blue,
AZ 85922, USA
Feb.
15, 2001
Dear Ram Krishna,
Once again, I am all too slow a
correspondent. Yours of July 31 has been sitting in my “current” correspondence
folder all this time, not even the most overdue a reply.
At the moment, large clouds are breaking
up after a bit of a stormy spell—a lot of wind and clouds and some snow. There has been a lot more snow this winter
here than the past two. Quite beautiful, though also messy as it melts and
makes mud galore. But also much needed
to renew the thirsty ground after two drought winters. Between the good moisture and longer hours to
warm on sunny afternoons, grass is beginning to show a little green.
I have not been out to pavement in
over two months, and have probably not been more than a mile from right here in
a month and a half. I need to make a
supply run to town sometime in the next few weeks. I’m always a little afraid to go when I
haven’t in a long time. The world is so
used to itself—the endless mix of whatever enough people know in common for any
large society to function and madness of collective beliefs that clearly are
not true and individual reactions to such a condition. I think the world always is a lot that way:
The inefficiency of having and collective way to do things so much bigger than
anyone to make sense of it. But we live
in a time when it is all so big and so fast and there are so many people…
When I speak of simultaneous
breakdown and breakthrough, I mostly am not thinking on the scale of daily
socio-economic doings, which are largely a mess and likely to remain that way
for some time. The recent American
election being a particularly odd example, the more by comparison say to Mexico’s election. Rather, what I thinks
of is, on the one hand, the individual learning process, and on the other, the
historical process of cultural transmutation, which I believe is presently in
the midst of one of its periodic major shifts.
A process of longer than a lifetime, by which one way of doing things,
and more of perceiving reality itself by which to determine what to do and how,
metamorphoses to some other… which may be better or worse and likely some of
both, but which speaks to its own historical circumstances in some different
way than what came before.
When I came here, it is my place for
extended concentration and the creative work that come from it. Though I like my neighbors and like seeing
them occasionally, and am pleased to have company once in a while, I mostly
want to be completely alone, and become quite upset at much intrusion. A
neighbor say who wants company and somehow gets me over there three times in as
many weeks to a house where television is always blaring and there is endless
cigarette smoke and boring chitchat. I
become enormously upset, and then depressed when this happens here, where if I
can avoid it enough, I do write.
Yet when out in the world, I interact
with people daily. Well, I still don’t like television, cigarette smoke, or
chitchat. But I have much more
tolerance, regard nearly all interaction as something to learn from, and enjoy
some of it. Of course, I also don’t get any writing done while out most times.
My current stay here did follow
another trip out, of a month and a half, about two thirds of it with my family
in the busy, populous Boston area. My
first such trip since the one two years ago for a last visit with my father and
then his death. This time, what
occasioned the trip was that a nephew had a Bar Mitzvah. I don’t know if I’ve
ever mentioned that my heritage is
Jewish. Not practicing to speak of. The family tone was in some ways set by a
great grandfather of mine who ran away from home in Russia as a boy to avoid
becoming a rabbi and became a labor organizer instead. But my family has been nominally Jewish…
along with a few Christian ones that have permeated American culture in a
general (and grossly commercialized in the last two decades) way. I have never married. Both my brothers’ wives are non-Jewish. One
is Quaker, and that brother and sister-in-law and their three children attend
Quaker Meeting fairly regularly, the only ones of my family to participate in
any regular public religious practice…. They also light candles at Hanukka and
have a seder at Passover. But my
sister’s husband is also Jewish. And
their son decided to have a Bar Mitzvah. They bought me a train ticket so I
could come. And it was a wonderful event
with family and old friends, as well as an opportunity for me to get in a
visit.
Everyone I saw in that environment
said their lives are too hectic, and recently more so than ever.
I got home to discover that the
printer of my computer was gummed up enough that sitting while I was gone did
it in. Two months later, I still don’t
have a replacement though at last word, my neighbors’ 21-year-old son is about
to bring me one. A huge boon if so as he
can find me a much better deal than I could myself, in the thick of that
world…. One of the ironies of my feelings about life here is that the very
people whose social life I can tolerate very little of are very kind and
generous to me… and only mean well to want to include me in that very social
life! Anyhow, lack of a printer has
somewhat cut into my sending out submissions, including on Ever Broten,
for which I have not yet found a
taker. I wonder what it says about our
world that since 1987 when I first got a computer I have been through three
printers, while this manual typewriter which I bought in 1968 still works.
In the mean time, I got another story
accepted at Asimov’s (perhaps the
world’s leading SF magazine… it wins the most awards anyhow). I also had an article on “Solitude” appear in
the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Bulletin. Also, the
editors of BBR, the British experimental SF magazine that included my
“Mogollon New”, now have discontinued the magazine and are shifting to special
projects. They asked me to send them a
disk of 100,000 words worth of my stories from which for them to select a
collection to publish, which I have done.
We’ll see what comes of it. I
think something is likely to. And I have
managed to get some new writing done.
I’m glad you liked my “Love of the
True God”. It was inspired by my reading
of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of The Incas and by C.G. Jung’s comments following a visit
to an area of Africa at the time just recently converted to Christianity. Garcilaso was the son of one of the
conquistadores and an Inca princess of the Huascar line which was losing the
Inca civil war going on at the time of the Conquest. Thus as close to a first
hand account of the Incas as was written.
To Garcilaso, it was of great import that the king of Spain granted him
a license to use the word “Royal” in his title for publication.
Here’s another story. All best,
River
LETTERS: 2003: 1
HC
61, Box 408
Glenwood,
NM 88039
USA
Aug.
16, 2003
Dear Ram Krishna,
I have owed you a letter for a long
time. But my life has been very disturbed for a long time, and I have been
depressed a lot. And I don’t know what to say, at least partly because, with so
much disruption, it is hard to say I am doing anything as most energy just gets
wasted in things that turn out not to happen.
Well, some things do happen. And one
which did that I am very pleased with is
that I did send my poem, “Storm Time” to U.S. Bahri as you suggested. And he
did publish it in Creative Forum. I
was very pleased, and honored too since it was the only piece in that issue by
an American.
It also was most interesting to me to
read both the cultural views generally in that issue, and also what others had
to say of your work. For you, of course,
the cultural perspective of people in India is the base you are used to in which for people to view
your work. But for me, I have seen more of it in context of other work here in
America, or of what Summer would say or others here. One of the points I found especially notable
was the discussion of your working on the issue of the spiritual in the
sensual. It is a subject, perhaps
because there is an ancestral relationship if one goes far enough back to
Indo-European origins, that seems to me to be difficult for both Western
culture and Indian in a way that it is not for many African or Native American
cultures. But the historical divergence
also is long enough ago that India and European cultures (and more recently
American) have dealt with the difficulty in very different ways.
I have never been to India, so all I
know of it is at a distance. But I have
always tended to see the Indian version of the split as perhaps I would say
qieter, or gentler. Still there is a
split, with at least one tradition that I find troublesome, of middle aged men
abandoning families to go meditate. Not that Western men… and more recently
women have not done the same…or abandoned families for far less edifying
reasons. But my feeling for the Indian
tradition is that it is about letting go of what binds us. While my feeling about the peculiar Western
ambiguity toward Spirit and our earthly life is that it is more actively
antagonistic: bizarre combinations of religious fanaticism and a simultaneous
materialist religion of shopping, apparently never noticing the blatant
self-contradiction. That is a recent
American example, but an example of a tension in the soul between Spirit and
our earthly life with each other that has a long history.
There are many people in the West now
finding it important to their own spiritual vision in these times to seek a
reconciliation. That too has a history.
I think of a traditional Christmas carol I recall singing in schools as a child
with a line about, “God and Nature reconciled.”
More recently, in American at least with its mix, difficult but surely
real, of people from all over the world, there has been much attention by at
least part of the culture to views from other parts of our culture’s heritage
than the predominant European… and really, for all America’s democratic concept
of itself, upper class European as that is what long set educational
standards. There is much conflict now in
America about concepts such as “multicultural” and “diversity” in a lot of
ways. But part of what the conflict is
about, I believe, is whether to base our outlook in life on a split between
Spirit and our daily life or to treat the two as one continuous whole.
Thus it was interesting for me to see
someone discuss your poetry in terms of this subject of Spirit and earthly life
in our bodies and attempting to reconcile a split with historical tradition, in
context of India.
Again, I think of historical/cultural
parallels. For instance, in Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Grail hero, Parzival, is married and a
father, and it is sight of a dead raven in the snow reminding him of his love
for his wife who he hasn’t seen in so long that recalls him from distracting
confusion to complete his quest, and when he has, through human compassion, his
wife and children join him. But about
the same time that Wolfram wrote Parzival,
a monk of the then-new Cistercian monastic reform movement created the
now-better-known Gallahad, in an anonymous version of the story known simply as
The Quest of the Holy Grail. In that
version of the story, Gallahad’s prime qualification to be Grail Hero was his
chastity!
Both these versions of the Grail
story, which in many ways developed to try to reconcile the standards of a
warrior aristocracy with their ostensible Christianity that told them their
high-status profession as warriors was
intrinsically sinful, come from the High Middle Ages. When growing population of a successful way
of life exceeded its own ability to live well and then climate and political
dysfunction led to the period of crash in Europe now known as the Black Death
and Hundred Years War, what, emerged from the farther end of the disaster was
Protestantism, which split Spirit and body even farther that Catholicism had
(or often still does) and the enormous materialist release of energy in
material ambitious cut loose from even seriously trying to reconcile the
conflict, which thus led to the huge success but also monstrous effects of the
colonial era and Industrial Revolution.
And now, once again, with the effects
of success that has led to unsustainable excess, this time worldwide affecting
everyone at once, I find it notable how people of various heritages are trying
to reconcile disparate elements of life into some coherent whole.
But at the same time, I find it
difficult to pull myself together even to think about such things as daily life
is so discouraging. Both in personal matters and on the world scale.
My personal situation is that too
many things I try to do don’t work. I have never found a way to make anything
resembling a living at my work that allows me to live in any “normal” way in
contemporary America. And it gets endlessly tiresome and discouraging, as year
follows year, at least partly because what it means in all my interactions is
that I cannot afford to pay “my share” of what most Americans consider normal
ways to do things, which to me are impossibly wasteful. All of this is at least tolerable when I have
a satisfactory place to live, where I can write, walk, garden, contemplate
peacefully. But I have not had that now
since losing my spot in the Blue River Canyon a year and a half ago.
My friend Steve Haury, on the back of
whose land I am living here, and my theater director friend Jack Ellis, who
provided me a place to live in Silver City all winter, both have been very kind
in making a spot available to me where I could live at all. Neither of them are
well off, and Steve Haury in fact has been in very precarious financial straits
himself. But I have not been able to
concentrate in the way I need to really to write consistently from the depth
that seems to me to have much point. And also have not found much else to do
that either has much point to it or would give me any other sort of useful
place in the world. This has gone on
much too long now, and there has been much too much futility and wasted effort.
America’s wealth and power and
relatively sparser population means that the many people American society
shunts aside are still a lot better off than people in the same situation in
India, or most of the world. But one
cannot help but to fee the futility of so much of life just wasted in being too
marginalized to function.
Not to mention the moral consequences
of what it has come to mean for America to maintain its position of wealth and
power. I am struck by the contrast in
how I feel now about Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991, and what the current
American administration is doing. I opposed the Vietnam war, and do so very
young and very early, 1963-64, before most Americans even knew that any such
place as Vietnam existed. But now, by
contrast, I see America’s stance in Vietnam almost as childishly innocent. America got involved in the first place as it
emerged from World War II the world’s greatest power, replacing the French in
colonial Empire. The U.S. set up a classic colonial puppet government in the
Diem regime in Vietnam and assumed, when the Diem regime fell, that it could
install a successor. But then, before
that could happen, our own President Kennedy was assassinated. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was a Texan who
had staked his reputation on what was, in the early 60s, a brave position for
any politician from Texas, of supporting Civil Rights. He was distracted by his domestic programs,
and America was entangled in Vietnam before the administration realized that a
“mere” colonial police action was not going to work there.
Nasty, but still to a degree
innocently so, like a bullying child who just hasn’t realized yet that he
may be bigger than others but they still
might come to a point of putting up with him enough not to take any more. The first President Bush, in the Gulf War of
1991, was much more sophisticated, I believe, in his imperialism. The U.S. baited Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, and thereby won widespread
support in the Islamic world as well as
the rest of the world for the U.S. to beat him back, and the process for an
American military presence on Saudi Arabian soil. That was quite a trick! Imperialist, yes, but
brilliant.
This time, the U.S. went in when and
as it did because the U.S. national debt and trade deficit are so immense that
the only reason the dollar still is worth anything is that there is no
replacement world currency; and Saddam Hussein was selling oil to the French
and Germans for euros successfully enough for the euro and its economic base to
begin to become a real threat to the dollar, and thus to America’s preeminence
in the world. Also, the Saudi government
is so corrupt that their own people may bring
them down, and an American intervention in the country where Mecca is would be
even less tolerated by the Islamic world
than in Iraq. So the U.S. administration wanted to secure an alternative oil
source as well. (It also is trying to do
the same now in Nigeria, and has done its best to overthrow the Chavez regime
in Venezuela because they were bartering oil and thereby also evading trading
in U.S. dollars.)
The senior Bush and Colin Powell
argued against the attack on Iraq. They
wanted to work through the U.N. and international diplomacy, using America’s
enormous wealth and strength as reason for the rest of the world to allow us to
keep on top in more of a diplomatic and economic community. But Bush, Jr., and his administration made
the same decision, I believe, that Hitler made in attacking the Soviet Union:
“Act fast while the opportunity is available and you can conquer the whole
world right now. Move more slowly, and
the opportunity slips away.” Were Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq actually the object of the attack, this might have worked, nasty
as it was. The relative positions of the
U.S. and Iraq for size and power favor the U.S. in a way that Germany never
realistically could have had relative to the enormous Soviet Union with its
intense winters to match Iraq’s desert summers.
But Iraq really is not the subject. World conquest is. And the result of what that current U.S.
administration has done, a blatant play for world conquest, using the fact that
the U.S. has half of the world’s military budget to prop up an otherwise
worthless dollar as the world currency, looks to me not only nasty, but as
doomed as Hitler’s megalomania.
And that is the other part of the
picture. When I write something such as
that line you liked in my “Storm Time” of, “When Kali’s dance belongs to a
previous generation,” I am trying to look through what I believe our current
historical period is to the prospect that something might come out the other
side of a situation that I believe now is over the edge and accelerating very
rapidly to horrendous destruction on a
planetary scale. Partly, it is an attitude problem. And how quite a lot of people all over the
world are trying, from various heritages and their contemporary interchange
with each other, to address that problem
and to recognize our fellow humanity on this planet, is the most interesting
and positive aspect of the crisis of these times, as I see it. And that really is happening. But the crisis
itself, which has brought the attitude problem to a head, is, in my belief,
simply the fact that a successful way of life has enabled human population to
rise, as has happened before on as much as a continental scale, to an
unsustainable level.
One of the few world leaders in
recent history who I believe dealt with this problem in a cold bloodedly
realistic way was Stalin. To compete
with the West, he had to industrialize faster than he could and feed his people
too. So he arrested the most productive
and disruptively individualistic and worked millions of them to death as slave
labor building an industrial infrastructure.
Hitler did much the same, more efficiently. But Hitler believed his own
ravings. Stalin was sane enough to acknowledge that he was a monster! I do not
know any humanly acceptable way out of
the world ecological crisis of our species’ numbers. I do know ways I find
morally acceptable to live… and to die… in such a time. One can always do what constructive things
one can in whatever situation one is in as long as one does live. But what is
likely to resolve the crisis, to whatever it takes for the situation next to
stabilize, is monsters, madmen… which is
what I believe now mostly commands the
U.S. with its stupendous military might… and Nature itself. I heard recently that London, England
recorded a temperature of 100˚ (farenheit) for the first ever! And this past month, I have been watching
forest fires burning up and down the mountainsides here. Fire has always been part of the natural
cycle in this area. But the last two
years have been pushing toward extreme.
Another development in my life, and
an ambiguous one, is the publication of my Prometheus, for which I am enclosing a flier and an
interview. The reason why this is
ambiguous is that the publisher has been less than together. There have been interminable delays and
endless complications. Now, at last, I
have actually seen printed books. But it
remains unclear if any real distribution is ever going to happen (not to
mention enough ever to get paid to earn any fragment of a living from my work).
Still, I am pleased that at least a few people get to read this work. I also will ask, might you or someone you
know be interested to review it? I think of this at least partly because of
some of the articles I read in the issue of Creative
Forum. I was much struck thinking how what the Western colonial powers did
to others through colonialism, the same attitude first did to that culture’s
own populace. Some of what my Prometheus is about is the history of
the attitude and especially of the personality structure by which this process,
with its immense success and its equally immense alienation, occurred. If you or someone you know there would be
interested, I would see if I can persuade the publisher to send a review copy.
You ask, in your email of way back in Feb. that I have
filed to respond to for so long, if I might consider doing a critique of your
poetry. I don’t know if this is still at
all relevant to publication plans you had that time. I also don’t know if I can do something
useful to you or not. If some of my
thoughts in this letter about cultural/historical parallels are useful to you, please feel free to quote them.
Otherwise, I would consider trying to write something of the sort more
cohesive, though I am not very clear what, or what to base it on. (The last is partly because my living
situation has been so disrupted for so long now that I have had to get rid of
most of my papers, including most books, and don’t even have access to most of
what I have left, due to no place to put them.)
It has been cool and rainy the last
two days here. A huge relief as summer should have come a month and a half ago,
but instead it has been terribly hot and dry almost all the time (which is part
of why the fires, which usually come in early summer but end by early July, have been so bad this year
when they have gone on into mid August).
With all best wishes, despite
discouraging times both here and there,
River
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