Low-angled shadows in the dry country we’ve been through have left a kind of blue depressed feeling. —
Maybe it’s just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all I’ve said about all these things today I just have a feeling that I’ve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, “Well, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?”
The answer, of course, is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together.
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be quite as sloppy as the preceding six. What I’m trying to come up with on these gumption traps I guess, is shortcuts to living right.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
We arrive in Prineville Junction with only a few hours of daylight left. We’re at the intersection with Highway 97, where we’ll turn south, and I fill up the tank at the corner and then am so tired I go around in back and sit on the yellow-painted cement curb with my feet in the gravel and the last rays of the sun flaring through the trees into my eyes. Chris comes and sits down too, and we don’t say anything, but this is the worst depression yet. All that talk about gumption traps and I fall right into one myself. Fatigue maybe. We’ve got to get some sleep.
I watch the cars go by for a while on the highway. Something lonely about them. Not lonely… worse. Nothing. Like the attendant’s expression when he filled the tank. Nothing. A nothing curb, by some nothing gravel, at a nothing intersection, going nowhere.
Something about the car drivers too. They look just like the gasoline attendant, staring straight ahead in some private trance of their own. I haven’t seen that since — since Sylvia noticed it the first day. They all look like they’re in a funeral procession.
Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because we’ve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though what’s here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are.
I know what it is! We’ve arrived at the West Coast! We’re all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody’s in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. We’ve been out of it for so long I’d forgotten all about it.
We get into the stream of traffic going south and I can feel the hyped-up danger close in. I see in the mirror some bastard is tailgating me and won’t pass. I move it up to seventy-five and he still hangs in there. Ninety-five and we pull away from him. I don’t like this at all.
At Bend we stop and have supper in a modern restaurant in which people also come and go without looking at each other. The service is excellent but impersonal.
Farther south we find a forest of scrubby trees, subdivided into ridiculous little lots. Some developer’s scheme apparently. At one of the lots far off the main highway we spread out our sleeping bags and discover that the pine needles just barely cover what must be many feet of soft spongy dust. I’ve never seen anything like it. We have to be careful not to kick up the needles or the dust flies up over everything.
We spread out the tarps and put the sleeping bags on them. That seems to work. Chris and I talk for a while about where we are and where we are going. I look at the map in the twilight, and then look at it some more with the flashlight. We’ve covered 325 miles today. That’s a lot. Chris seems as completely tired as I am, and as ready as I am to fall asleep.
Part IV
27
Why don’t you come out of the shadows? What do you really look like? You’re afraid of something aren’t you? What is it you’re afraid of?
Beyond the figure in the shadows is the glass door. Chris is behind it, motioning me to open it. He’s older now, but his face still has a pleading expression. “What do I do now?” he wants to know. “What do I do next?” He’s waiting for my instructions.
It’s time to act.
I study the figure in the shadows. It’s not as omnipotent as it once seemed. “Who are you?” I ask.
No answer.
“By what right is that door closed?”
Still no answer. The figure is silent, but it is also cowering. It’s afraid! Of me.
“There are worse things than hiding in the shadows. Is that it? Is that why you don’t speak?”
It seems to be quivering, retreating, as though sensing what I am about to do.
I wait, and then move closer to it. Loathsome, dark, evil thing. Closer, looking not at it but at the glass door, so as not to warn it. I pause again, brace myself and then lunge!
My hands sink into something soft where its neck should be. It writhes, and I tighten the grip, as one holds a serpent. And now holding it tighter and tighter we’ll get it into the light. Here it comes! NOW WE’LL SEE ITS FACE!
“Dad!”
“Dad!” I hear Chris’s voice through the door?
Yes! The first time! “Dad! Dad!”
“Dad! Dad!” Chris tugs on my shirt. “Dad! Wake up! Dad!”
He’s crying, sobbing now. “Stop, Dad! Wake up!”
“It’s all right, Chris.”
“Dad! Wake up!”
“I’m awake.” I can just barely make out his face in the dawn light. We’re in trees somewhere outside. There’s a motorcycle here. I think we’re in Oregon somewhere.
“I’m all right, it was just a nightmare.”
He continues to cry and I sit quietly with him for a while. “It’s all right”, I say, but he doesn’t stop. He’s badly frightened.
So am I.
What were you dreaming about?”
“I was trying to see someone’s face.”
“You shouted you were going to kill me.”
“No, not you.”
“Who?”
“The person in the dream.”
“Who was it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Chris’s crying stops, but he continues to shake from the cold. “Did you see the face?”
“Yes.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was my own face, Chris, that’s when I shouted. — It was just a bad dream.” I tell him he’s shivering and should get back into the sleeping bag.
He does this. “It’s so cold”, he says.
“Yes.” By the dawn light I can see the vapor from our breaths. Then he crawls under the cover of the sleeping bag and I can see only my own.
I don’t sleep.
The dreamer isn’t me at all.
It’s Phædrus.
He’s waking up.
A mind divided against itself — me — I’m the evil figure in the shadows. I’m the loathsome one. —
I always knew he would come back. —
It’s a matter now of preparing for it. —
The sky under the trees looks so grey and hopeless.
Poor Chris.
28
The despair grows now.
Like one of those
movie dissolves in which you know you’re not in the real world but it seems that way anyway.
It’s a cold, snowless November day. The wind blows dirt through the cracks of the windows of an old car with soot on the windows, and Chris, six, sits beside him, with sweaters on because the heater doesn’t work, and through the dirty windows of the windblown car they see that they move forward toward a grey snowless sky between walls of grey and greyish-brown buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and debris in the streets.
“Where are we?” Chris says, and Phædrus says, “I don’t know”, and he really doesn’t, his mind is all but gone. He is lost, drifting through the grey streets.
“Where are we going?” says Phædrus.
“To the bunk-bedders”, says Chris.
“Where are they?” asks Phædrus.
“I don’t know”, says Chris. “Maybe if we just keep going we’ll see them.”
And so the two drive and drive through the endless streets looking for the bunk-bedders. Phædrus wants to stop and put his head on the steering wheel and just rest. The soot and the grey have penetrated his eyes and all but blotted cognizance from his brain. One street sign is like another. One grey-brown building is like the next. On and on they drive, looking for the bunk-bedders. But the bunk-bedders, Phædrus knows, he will never find.
Chris begins to realize slowly and by degrees that something is strange, that the person guiding the car is no longer really guiding it, that the captain is dead and the car is pilotless and he doesn’t know this but only feels it and says stop and Phædrus stops.
A car behind honks, but Phædrus does not move. Other cars honk, and then others, and Chris in panic says, “GO!” and Phædrus slowly with agony pushes his foot on the clutch and puts the car in gear. Slowly, in dream-motion, the car moves in low through the streets.
“Where do we live?” Phædrus asks a frightened Chris.
Chris remembers an address, but doesn’t know how to get there, but reasons that if he asks enough people he will find the way and so says, “Stop the car”, and gets out and asks directions and leads a demented Phædrus through the endless walls of brick and broken glass.
Hours later they arrive and the mother is furious that they are so late. She cannot understand why they have not found the bunk-bedders. Chris says, “We looked everywhere”, but looks at Phædrus with a quick glance of fright, of terror at something unknown. That, for Chris, is where it started.
It won’t happen again. —
I think what I’ll do is head down for San Francisco, and put Chris on a bus for home, and then sell the cycle and check in at a hospital — or that last seems so pointless — I don’t know what I’ll do.
The trip won’t have been entirely wasted. At least he’ll have some good memories of me as he grows up. That takes away some of the anxiety a little. That’s a good thought to hold on to. I’ll hold on to that.
Meanwhile, just continue on a normal trip and hope something improves. Don’t throw anything away. Never, never throw anything away.
Cold out! Feels like winter! Where are we, that it should get this cold? We must be at a high altitude. I look out of the sleeping bag and this time see frost on the motorcycle. On the chrome of the gas tank it’s sparkling in the early sunlight. On the black frame where the sunlight hits it it’s partly turned to beads of water that will soon run down to the wheel. It’s too cold to lie around.
I remember the dust under the pine needles and put my boots on carefully to avoid stirring it up. At the motorcycle I unpack everything, get out the long underwear and put it on, then clothes, then sweater, then jacket. I’m still cold.
I step through the spongy dust onto the dirt road that has brought us here and sprint down it through the pines for a hundred feet or so, then settle down to an even run and then finally stop. That feels better. Not a sound. The frost is in little patches on the road too, but melting and dark wet tan between the patches where the early sun’s rays strike it. It’s so white and lacy and untouched. It’s on the trees too. I walk back softly down the road as if not to disturb the sunrise. Early autumn feeling.
Chris is still asleep and we won’t be able to go anywhere until the air warms up. Good time to get the cycle tuned. I work loose the knob on the side cover over the air filter, and underneath the filter withdraw a worn and dirty roll of field tools. My hands are stiff with the cold and the backs of them are wrinkled. Those wrinkles aren’t from the cold though. At forty that’s old age coming on. I lay the roll on the seat and spread it open… there they are — like seeing old friends again.
I hear Chris, glance over the seat and see that he’s stirring but doesn’t get up. He’s evidently just rolling in his sleep. After a while the sun gets warmer and my hands aren’t as stiff as they were.
I was going to talk about some of the lore of cycle repair, the hundreds of things you learn as you go along, which enrich what you’re doing not only practically but esthetically. But that seems too trivial now, though I shouldn’t say that.
But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story. I never really completed it because I didn’t think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.
The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it’s a good hurt. It’s real, not imaginary, and it’s here, absolutely, in my hand.
– When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there’s some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if perhaps that isn’t the way you should go too.
In his pursuit of a concept of Quality, Phædrus kept seeing again and again little paths all leading toward some point off to one side. He thought he already knew about the general area they led to, ancient Greece, but now he wondered if he had overlooked something there.
He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught.
“Good heavens, I don’t know, I’m not an English scholar”, she had said. “I’m a classics scholar. My field is Greek.”
“Is quality a part of Greek thought?” he had asked.
“Quality is every part of Greek thought”, she had said, and he had thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.
Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?
A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He had thought he was done with that field. But “quality” had opened it all up again.
Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead’s statement that all philosophy is nothing but “footnotes to Plato” can be well supported. The confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.
A third path appeared when he decided to move on from Bozeman toward the Ph.D. degree he needed to continue University teaching. He wanted to pursue the enquiry into the meaning of Quality that his English teaching had started. But where? And in which discipline?
It was apparent that the term “Quality” was not within any one discipline unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition.
He became more and more aware of the
possibility that there was no program available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the candidate refused to define his central term.
He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in “Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods.” The examining committee included a professor of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells.
On the machine now everything is done except the oil change. I wake Chris and we pack and go. He’s still sleepy but the cold air on the road wakes him up.
The piney road goes upward, and there’s not so much traffic this morning. The rocks among the pines are dark and volcanic. I wonder if that was volcanic dust we slept in. Is there such a thing as volcanic dust? Chris says he’s hungry and I am too.