For some latent psychological reason, still dimly unaware to me, I’ve returned to a few books from my college days. Perhaps it is a return to the womb. The magic of the books when first read did not reappear again, not to be recaptured, my folly. I was disappointed. I had thought they were crackerjack when I read them as a young man. And so for equally dim reasons, I thought I’d read books that were valued for youngsters, such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. By chance, a visit to a book fair revealed an edition from the Sixties with afterwords by critics, to explain what I couldn’t figure out for msyelf.
One book, The Sea Wolf, was inspired by a film of the same name, made in the Forties with Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield and Ida Lupino. It has a stupendously fierce performance of a Darwinian sea captain (Robinson) and the film has dialogue textured with philosophical questions. With all three books in hand I began to nibble away at them. The first read was London’s and what impressed me was his command of the sailing lexicon of the day — jibs, windlasses, spritsails, all the sailorly seamanship of the day that at times I just blew threw it to get at the narrative. London was a sailor and that art has greatly disappeared in the world today, for it is an arcane craft and skill much like cobbling a shoe by hand. I got through the book with its Darwinian view of man as expressed by Wolf Larsen, really London, and it did make me think.
Larsen refers to man and the collective as “yeast,” each spore struggling and in competition with others; one is fatigued by the struggle; however, it is a struggle going on now in each one of our bodies.Today’s evolutionary psychology poses many of the same questions with a different perspective so that I come away believing, thinking that we really are not in charge of anything, just flesh and bone capsules and captives of our genomes working their way through the millenias in random evolution. Evolution, apparently has no estimated time of arrival. (Parenthetically, I was a classmate of Stephen J. Gould at Jamaica High School, Queens, sadly deceased, who went on to become a world famous evolutionary expert.) Who knows what our next fellow will become?
The book that had me annoyed at first was Defoe’s. I imagine the style of the time, it was loaded with semi-colons; it was as if the reader, me, was being punctuated every few words. Growing tiresome, I blew the book off with the hope that I might try it later on in mid-day when I might be more alert and patient. I am rereading it now and I have improved in my attitude toward it. London’s prose was more fluent, Stevenson’s was limber with an occasionaly semi-colon thrown in to annoy me as well. Styles of writing and expression have their fashion.
So I knocked off London first, tried Defoe and put it away and finally entered the world of Stevenson and was able to get through it and then back to Defoe which I am reading now with a better attitude as I said. And as I am awash with the survival of the fittest, buccaneers and English individualists some observations are emerging.
In all three books the sea, islands in the sea, the natural elements, nature, man against nature and man against himself as well as man against society all form a constellations of motifs and themes for the authors to hang their hats on. From what I have read from the 30 or 50 pages in Crusoe, there is a strong flavor of utilitarianism, rugged individualism, thinking out of the box, doing for one self, of being a divergent thinker in a dire situation, like a prisoner plotting his escape and all the devious ways he concocts to make that so.
Dafoe’s Crusoe is more of an adventurous Thoreau, his thinking is purposeful, not that Thoreau’s is not. One becomes aware of a life force trying to sustain itself in every way imaginable. I am vaguely aware of Luis Bunuel’s film of Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O’Herlihy in the early fifties. I may even have seen it but I cannot recall for sure. There is a survival energy in the book that propels it, although I am only half through it.
In The Sea Wolf London brilliantly recreates how a seaman restores a boat with his own hands, his wit and his physical energy that I associate to The Flight of the Phoenix (1967) in which crash survivors develop and rig a new plane from the debris of the old and escape their being being marooned. The cannibalization of the dead into the resurrection of the new is something to behold and such are the pages and scenes in London’s description of how a shipwreck is put together once again by one man’s determined effort to be more than a yeast spore. It is altogether a masterly piece of prose.
Long John Silver is the best written character in Treasure Island. He is ambiguous, somewhat complex, fascinating to behold, brave and most cunning, an Italian Machiavelli in his dealings with individuals and small groups. As a child I saw a few versions of the film, one with Orson Welles and the other with Robert Newton, a famous scene stealer, whose eye-rolling and gravelly voice was compelling. After all, he played Sykes in Oliver Twist, with gusto. All the other characters pale beside this pirate captain, except for Jim Hawkins who to me is Robin to his Batman.
So I have all three books gestating in mind, and for some reason I feel all three, a little less with London’s book, to be a product of industry, that is, the book as an industrious effort, perhaps reflecting the times, the Industrial Revolution itself. I can imagine Defoe brilliantly running a wool factory, a captain of industry to use the old term.
I’ved entered the Eighteenth Century with two of these books and the Nineteenth Century with the other, maritime worlds to a degree and inhabited by industrious, struggling, energetic and purposeful individuals making their way across the earth like ants scuttling across a bread crumb. To a degree, fatiguing. It is as if I am reading outer directed as opposed to inner directed literature, which has its pleasures. We have worry, confusion, fear and all the other human emotions but existential angst does not make its appearance.
Perhaps these three books are statements of a different kind of humanity, like comparing the acting styles of Gable, Cooper, Peck, Stewart with Brando, Hopper, Nicholson, Pacino and DeNiro. To wit, I entered into a different climate of opinion. The age of Freud had not dawned. In other words same old mankind, different sauce.
On Being a Radical Librarian
Back Story: The particulars — Jane is studying to become a librarian, all of it done through distance learning, library-speak. She comes to this with degrees in liberal arts and teaching, a children’s author as well as a former journalist. Having grown up in a Mormon family she is what is now known as a “Jack Mormon,” divesting herself of what was a deleterious conditioning by this cult founded by a charlatan from upstate New York. In my interactions with her now and then I see, detect and sense, the inhibitions and self-imposed restrictions which are the traces of her “religious” upbringing. A reader of Darwin and a reveler in evolutionary biology, our morning conversations are often intense as we explore each other’s ethnic and religious background. This blog is a reponse to this morning’s “chat.”
As conditioned as she is with my own brand of secular — atheistic –Judaism, for I am immersed In Jewish gravy, ethnicisms, enjoying the cultural values, lore and wit of the Jewish mind. I share with her that as a student teacher many decades ago a group of us visited an elementary class in a Catholic parochial school as well as a class in a Hebrew school. What stood out to me was that in the Catholic school students were in a receiving mode, well-mannered, taking in; in the Hebrew school, which a few of my college students found “disorderly” the children were raising their hands, making sounds as they struggled to get the teacher’sattention. Their eyes had betrayed them. I had experienced that same environment in Hebrew school — in short, I have no fear if I ask you a question, indeed, it is expected of me, although I could never bring it into awareness at the time, being shtooped with the latency period. The contrast to this one Catholic school was, to my mind now, the conformed acceptance of that which was conditioned and foretold, that to question was not as critical as to receive and take in.
Jane heard this and quoted a verse from John in which he says, to wit, go ahead and seek the truth and do not be afraid. What Jane liked about this was the air of freedom which said question — however, in her religious upbringing it was expected that you do not question. Imagine, Jane says, if Joseph Smith went to all the different religions and asked a pastor or priest if their religion is true — that the minister would shoot that down by saying, of course, it’s the truth; however, living with me, Jane went on to say that if she went to a rabbi and asked the same question about the validity and truth of Judaism, there would a variety of responses: 1) do you need an answer? 2) or, why are you asking? and the question itself would be accepted as appropriate as the rabbi might be vexed if an answer was given, for answers are doorstoppers of the mind.
Jane and I explored this further, my suggesting that it is highly unlikely if there have been many articles on librarianship that take on an analytical point of view. I suggested for her to take a mental ride with me: Imagine a documentary in which the camera establishes the opening shot of a library; that a close-up is made of the plaque that usually contains who the architect, construction company and citizens were that made it all happen for the communty. Finally the camera pans up to an inscription above the arched doorway. It reads: “Knowledge is death.”
I further queried Jane if that would keep people away; would some people feel annoyed by that? would librarians rush to get through the entrance or would some hold back? I suggested that we seek to become aware, but that most of us do not want that; we want to have our senses and pleasure principles sated — and why not? However, I imagined that upon entering this “strange” library, there were five books under glass, their pages opened to specific pages of note, and one had to pause here before going any further. I asked Jane what the five books might be: I offered a few titles — The Interpretation of Dreams, Origin of the Species, the Bible was definiely excluded — I might suggest the greatest play ever written — Oedipus Rex, and then I stopped. Jane was asked — you are asked — to supply the other two, the condition being that this work had to make you thoroughly aware, decondition your mind-set, shake you to your foundational roots. After this first challenge, I suggested to Jane that these brave new librarians might go ahead to one other glass case and here would rest the greatest of all works on awareness — I weakly suggested, The Flight of the Eagle,” Krishnamurti, but I was not sure. Only after this challenge is met would the librarian receive his degree.
Jane had opened our conversation with her observation that she noticed that people tend not to ask questions of the librarians as much but now went directly to the web for answers. She felt there was something similar to her own feelings as a child when she had the distinct feeling that to ask a question was to be shot down, or to vex the adult or annoy the authority figure at the time. Although she fully realizes that the librarian with the “answers” has no idea of what is being projected upon her or him, nevertheless, human beings live in, live out, in these projections. We are made up of projections — just try transference with your therapist. The point is that we place our hand above our eyes, for we dread the light more than we dread the dark, a good definition of humanity. I remember well as a kid walking into a movie theater on a very bright July day and having been blinded until my eyes adjusted to the interior darkness; I also recall the adverse effects of coming out of the darkness into the light of the summer day after the movie. I feel the dark into light is harsher. Perhaps the entrances to libraries should be enshrouded in black drapes and the inviting, more motherly, inscription might read: “Ignorance is bliss.”
Grossly speaking, generalizing, why does one become a librarian on more than superficial levels — job, salary, percs, order and regularity, constancy, job security? Is one participating in a greater good, that is, amassing knowledge, dispensing it, sharing insights, impacting on others — that is, is the librarian entering the occupation to condition or not to condition, to enslave with knowledge or to emancipate? For example, the library system that censors a book is revealing a reaction-formation, denying to others that which one finds of prurient interest. Recently, a library system in Virginia took The Diary of Ann Frank off the shelves because the newest and unexpurgated edition had Anne Frank speak of her vagina. Of course, the good libarians do not have this organ. And the old argument that they are protecting very young minds from “awareness” goes back to totems and taboos (See Freud).
The radical librarian does not salt and pepper his treasure trove. He neither conditions nor deconditions; this is not neutrality but the highest advocacy one can offer as a free human being. The radical librarian dwells in the soft light, fig-laden palm trees of the Question. Answers are anathema if doctrine and dogma, dicta. The free librarian is the caterer of a huge buffet. Isms are never served, religions kept off the tables. In that scary, sometimes shaky feeling we have when we enter, for rare moments our lives, the sacred arena of not knowing but willing to know, in Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country,” the librarian’s duty is just to simply pull the drapes aside.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture
Tagged conditioning, Darwin, librarians, The Flight of the Eagle