“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year….We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies and odes,…for parliaments of love and poesy…nor for the advancement of science…Our occasion is simply a “friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. [In the hope that this love will thrive and persist,] I accept the topic which not only custom but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this day–the American Scholar. Year by year we come together to read one more chapter in his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on her character and her hopes.”

Those, roughly, are the opening words of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on August 31, 1837,” thereafter published under the title of “The American Scholar,” and venerated ever since as a classic document in both the realms of literature and of education. What am I doing getting up here in an academic robe and mouthing them as if they were my own?

Well, just as it was to Emerson, the title of this talk was given to me as one appropriate for the occasion. Thomas Patchell, your new president, invited me to speak on this topic at two oclock in the morning at McCarthy’s bar last June 4, after the cleanup of the English Department’s Year End Bash. I was too exhilirated or too tired or too drunk to say no. But from a more sober perspective there is a certain appropriateness. Though this is not Harvard, but Cal Poly, and though our meeting is sponsored not by Phi Beta Kappa but by Sigma Tau Delta, the Cal Poly English Honor Society, we too are celebrating the recommencement of the literary year and the survival of the love of letters in a less than congenial environment. And though the audience facing me tonight may not include the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and William Henry Dana, just back to Cambridge after his famous sea voyage to the Central Coast of California, it couldn’t be any more challenging to me than the one Emerson faced 156 years ago. He tells us that the custom of his audience prescribed that the speaker read a chapter in the biography of THE American Scholar. But since I’m a little short of Ralph Waldo’s measureless confidence, I’ll scale back the assignment and limit my scope to a chapter in the biography of the one American Scholar I feel qualified to talk about, myself. That will require about as much transcendental ego as I can summon up.

(more…)

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore…
The carpet now is moving under you
And its all over now Baby Blue.

Twelve people sat on the floor around a rectangular Oriental rug. The supper of brown rice and steamed vegetables was finished, and they were passing wooden bowls, chopsticks and teacups to the corner nearest the kitchen. The host, Peter Klein, straightened his back, crossed his legs, and took charge: “I’ve been reading about carpet designs. They’re all symbolic. The harder you look, the more meaning you find.” He felt warmed by the regard of his guests, mostly ex-students.

“For instance?” asked Ginnie, a thin young girl wearing a homemade beaded vest and strong wire rim glasses.

“See that outer border that looks like a row of crooked fingers?” said Peter. Those are waves. The sea surrounds everything. Now look at the next border with those jagged things alternating with those Y-shaped dealies. What do you see there?” As he used to in class, he waited out the silence.

“They look like pine cones and katchina dolls to me,” said Beth in a low, cultivated voice. Her mouth retained the suggestion of a slight smile, and she kept her eyes on Peter as if there were no one else in the room.

“Interesting idea,” he replied, but I think they’re actually heads of wheat and goblets, signifying harvest. Food and drink, the bread and the wine, communion.”

“I thought this was an Oriental carpet,” said Ramon, the art student whom Ariel had introduced for the first time tonight. There was a touch of irony in his voice.

Peter replied, “The rug is a Sumac. It comes from the Caucasus, on the border of Europe and Asia, where ancient trade routes and Christian, Moslem and Eastern cultures intersect. See these large cruciform shapes? They’re like the floor plan of a cathedral. And these feathery flames inside the crosses? They represent the Phoenix, the Arabian bird that dies every thousand years in a burst of flame and then is resurrected, like Christ.”

Peter stopped lecturing as he felt attention shifting toward the phallus-shaped pipe being lit by one of the guests. As the sweet fragrance filled the room, he centered himself between two diagonal axes of the Sumac pattern and waited his turn. The carpet was left to him by Tante Clara, his mother’s aunt. His wife Leona and he had recently agreed that apart from the bed, it was the only furniture they really needed. To simplify their lives and prepare for their eventual departure, they had sold or given away the rest, making most of their rent-controlled university apartment into a storage facility and crash pad. (more…)

[A lecture to freshmen on the last day of a year-long class in “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture” at Stanford University–June 3, l986]

Sisyphus’ setting, with its flaking rock and its hot barren landscape is the last of a long series of images of hostile wastelands we have been contemplating. Barren deserts, steamy jungles, blasted battlefields, rocky islands, polar ice floes, gothic swamps, wind-swept marshes, blackened cities make up the backdrop of much modern European literature–a setting appropriate to the period that brought us World War I and II and which may yet bring us nuclear winter. Most of these demonic landscapes are symbolic, representing as we have learned, the burnt-out quality of the modern: its loss of spiritual faith, loss of intellectual and moral clarity, loss of aesthetic pleasure, loss of belief in society, the family, the self.

But this symbolic imagery of physical desolation has a literal meaning as well, one that we have not encountered much in the works we discussed. Western culture, and probably world culture as well, has been involved since the beginning of the modern period not only in its own self- destruction, but in the destruction of the earth, the environment which has bred and nursed it. In “From a Plane,” a short poem included in your miscellany of poetry, Denise Levertov recognizes from the air “the great body…torn apart/ raked and raked by our claws” –treated by us like Lear and Gloucester by their ungrateful children. (more…)

[published in THE STANFORD MAGAZINE, Winter 1986]

Though it was Friday afternoon, I was in no hurry to get back to the yard.

This was the last day of my part-time employment with the Stanford tree-trimming crew, a job I’d taken during the summer of 1985 to help make ends meet on an English lecturer’s salary. I had enjoyed the job’s remoteness from my regular sedentary occupation, its involvement with the physical resources of the university, and the opportunity to work in exceptionally large, beautiful trees.

So my partner on the tree crew waited below, while I swung back and forth, suspended on the climbing rope, and stared up through the canopy of the tree we’d been working in all day.

When I finally came down, however, I got a reprieve: The foreman dispatched my partner and me to another “short job.” A large oak on the campus property of a Stanford professor was showing some rot at the base of its trunk; it needed to be cleaned and patched. “Marx,” the foreman said, “I think you’ll like this tree.”

The tree in question was hidden from the street by a thick hedge. We walked down a narrow driveway that tunneled though the hedge and came out on a sight that stopped me cold.

Near the edge of a sloping lawn rose a colossal creature with a massive trunk, serpentine limbs, and deliquescent twigs. Its gnarled and attenuated forms seemed to crouch, grope, and stretch, filling every inch of the hedge-enclosed yard. (more…)

A plenary lecture to “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture.”

Stanford University March 11 1985

I first came across Candide when I was seventeen, the age of its protagonist  at the beginning of   the story.  I can remember that simple title staring out at me from the spine of a thin volume  on  the  musty shelves of Baron 1 s, the used bookstore that I frequented with my sidekick Weiskopf  on  Friday  afternoons–after  our  last  High  School  class  and before we took the subway downtown to hear music at Jazz on the Wagon,  the one place in Greenwich  Village you  could get  into without I.D.

I had heard the name Candide before; it was known in the grapevine as one of those books–intellectual, bohemian and intimate–that our parents wouldn 1 t approve of, books with titles like You Can’t Go Home Again, On the  Road,  Howl  and  The  Catcher  in  the  Rye.   I  slipped  the  book  down from the shelf, noticed the “privately printed” inscription, the mannered art-nouveau illustrations of thin bare-breasted girls, the sixty cent price, and I took it to the register.

From the opening sentence,  I was entranced.   Here was another Holden Caulfield, still a sincere, naive and gentle child, cruelly punishe9 for simply following  his  natural  desires,  abruptly  booted from a secure nest in what was just beginning to feel like Paradise, and set adrift in a human jungle of repression, hypocrisy, violence and greed.  I could relate to that heavy tale–especially since it moved along so lightly, with a little sex and a lot of laughs on almost every page.  I too felt adrift in a world of wandering  hands  and  kicks in the backside, of atmospheric H-bomb tests and classroom  shelter drills, of Anne Frank and  Joe McCarthy.

I finished reading the book at two in the morning on the Staten Island ferry, where we would ride back and forth across New York harbor when the jazz club was too crowded. Thereafter, Candide became another one of those few voices which confirmed my adolescent sense that I lived in a pretty screwed up place-despite the assurances of Doris Day, Dwight Eisenhower and Dr. Norman Vi.11cent Peale that middle-class America was indeed the best of all possible worlds. (more…)