Ecotopia
I learned that an ambulance which had been standing by would shortly carry away the wounded man (now neatly bandaged up) so I went over to speak to him. They had laid him out on a kind of stretcher made of red cloth with a white cross on it. His body was arranged in a startlingly crucifix-like way, with straps on wrists and ankles. Several women leaned over the stretcher, moaning and from time to time wiping his forehead with a damp rag.
“Oh, how you have suffered!” cried one. “I have done a man’s thing,” he replied, in a rather rote tone. “Your poor body has been hurt, you might have died!” the women said. “Do not think of me, think of our family: I bear wounds for them.” “We all suffer!”
At this, the young man looked at them in an almost pitying way. “It is finished,” he said quietly, and closed his eyes. From the way he spoke, I thought for a moment that the doctors had been mistaken, and he was dying. But apparently it was just a signal for the women to leave him—for after they did, he opened his eyes again and looked around in perfectly cheery spirits.
I seized the opportunity and went up to him. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like a man,” he said, relapsing into his former rote manner. “Once more I have survived.” “Can you tell me what the fighting was about?” “It was us against them, of course, to see who would win.” “No other reason?”
He gave me a curious look. “It also is to test ourselves—don’t you understand how good it feels to be frightened, and come through?” “Would you do it all over again?” “Sure. We will do it again, probably on the second full moon from now. —Are you a stranger?”
“I’m an American newspaper reporter,” I said, “writing articles for my paper. Can I take your picture?” I pulled out my camera, expecting no objection, but the young man replied, “NO! Absolutely not! Have you no decency?” At this a group of men nearby turned toward us in a menacing way.
“Excuse me,” I said, realizing I had made a serious blunder. I put the camera away quickly. (Later I learned that Ecotopians think photography has a dark-magic side, as a way of trying to freeze time—to cheat biology and defy change and death, so it would be especially out of place at such a time.) The Ecotopians, however, did not leave it at that. One of the older men asked me to come and sit beside him. He offered me a meat-stuffed pastry, and proceeded to lecture me on the meaning of the war games I had been witnessing.
Ecotopians, he began, had always regarded anthropology as a field with great practical importance. After Independence they had begun to experiment in adapting anthropological hypotheses to real life. It was only over a great deal of resistance that a radical idea such as ritual warfare had become legally practicable, even with the ingenuity of the best lawyers. But its advocates had persisted, convinced as they were that it was essential to develop some kind of open civic expression for the physical competitiveness that seemed to be inherent in man’s biological programming—and otherwise came out in perverse forms, like war.
They hoped that Ecotopians would not be forced to fight any actual wars, since they knew the utter destruction that would result. On the other hand, it seemed indisputable that man was not a creature built for a totally and routinely peaceful life. Young men, especially, needed a chance to combat “the others,” to charge and flee, to test their comradeship, to put their beautiful resources of speed and strength to use, to let their adrenalin flow, to be brave and to be fearful. “In America,” my companion pointed out with a smug grin, “you accomplish some of the same objectives with your wars and your automobiles. They let you be competitive and aggressive and allowed to risk smashing each other. Of course, you also have professional football. But it is only a spectator sport—and besides, the players do not possess lethal weapons. Though I admit we took some ideas from it.”
He went on to argue that Ecotopian ritual war games actually result in very few fatalities—something like 50 young men die in the games each year, a figure he insisted on comparing with our highway toll of about 75,000 a year and our war dead, which tend to average out to around 5,000 a year. It appears, by the way, that women never participate in the war games; but before our feminist militants leap on this point, they should know that the games were established as part of the Survivalist Party’s generally cooperation-oriented program, and that Ecotopians prefer to focus women’s competitiveness in other ways: through contests for political leadership, through organizing work—at which women are believed to excel—and through rivalry over men to father their children.
It is thus chiefly young men who participate in the games, and the meets are set up largely between neighboring groups, something like our high-school athletic contests but on an even smaller scale. The game today, for instance, was between two communes that occupy neighboring territories. One group raises sheep for wool and cows for milk; the other “farms” oysters in an estuary of the Bay. Apparently in the cities competition is usually between neighborhoods or work groups—factory against factory, store against store, as happens in our industrial bowling leagues. However, there are no leagues, pennants, and so forth. Each ritual session is a self-contained event, an end in itself.
“What about the cross?” I asked.
“Well, Ecotopia came into existence with a Judeo-Christian heritage,” was the reply. “We make the best of it. You will find many expressions of it in our culture still. In this case, obviously the young man is indeed suffering for his family or ‘tribe.’ We have a lot of poetry and music that focuses precisely on this suffering, as well as on courage and bravery. There’s also a little ceremony for when a wounded man comes back from hospital. You might guess what it’s called: the raising. He stands up and walks.”
It is clear, thus, that the abhorrent spectacle of fine young men deliberately trying to kill each other is a semi-religious rite and a practice not lightly instituted, no matter what we Americans may think of it. It may indeed have antecedents in the institution of bullfighting, in football, in the Mass, or in the ritual wars of savage tribes. But its senseless violence, the letting of blood without a justifying cause, must surely remain a blot on Ecotopia’s name among civilized nations.
(May 25) Goddamn woman is impossible! Got really turned on at the war games—stayed beside me during the fighting, explaining it to me in low, excited voice. Then afterward rushed away to the cauldron, drank an enormous cupful, looked around in an inviting fashion, and made no resistance when one of the winning warriors came up, propositioned her, and literally carried her away. (She weighs about 130, as I happen to know, but this didn’t faze him.) Not a glance in my direction.
Later, when rest of us were eating, she sauntered back, flushed and sweaty. Ignored my obvious ill humor. Later, when we went back to the Marshall hotel, she was relaxed and floppy, and I tossed her around on the bed a little roughly, wouldn’t let her up, more or less raped her. She seemed almost to have expected this. I felt odd when it began, confused between hatred and desire, but then they merged in a kind of hard, tightly holding embrace—a welcoming back on her part, and a deep acceptance of her on mine. I love her freeness, even when it hurts.
Just before waking up and writing the war-games story, had awful dream about it. Myself all painted up, ready for battle. Body greased and shining and beautiful—feel very alive, very strong. Women smile from the sidelines, I want to make love to all of them. Then there’s a terrible gong sound—reverberates in my head, and panic strikes. Grab my spear and rush off with the other men. But when we get to the fighting line and begin to feint and jab, suddenly they turn and look at me with amazement, realizing I am not one of them. Then utter despair seizes me, for I know this means they will not fight for me: I am not one of their Tribe, and I am out there alone, exposed to the sharp spears of the enemy, and my time has come….
Woke up sweating, hands clutched tight on dream spear. Wished I was home safe in New York.
Savages!
THEIR PLASTICS AND OURS
San Francisco, May 25. One surprising similarity between E
cotopia and contemporary America is that they both use huge amounts of plastics. At first I took this as a sign that our ways of life have not diverged so drastically after all. However, closer investigation has revealed that, despite surface resemblances, the two countries use plastics in totally different ways.
Ecotopian plastics are entirely derived from living biological sources (plants) rather than from fossilized ones (petroleum and coal) as most of ours are. Intense research effort went into this area directly after Independence, and it continues. According to my informants, there were two major objectives. One was to produce the plastics, at low cost and in a wide range of types: light, heavy, rigid, flexible, clear, opaque, and so on—and to produce them with a technology that was not itself a pollutant. The other objective was to make them all biodegradable, that is, susceptible to decay. This meant that they could be returned to the fields as fertilizer, which would nourish new crops, which in turn could be made into new plastics—and so on indefinitely, in what the Ecotopians call, with almost religious fervor, a “stable-state system.”
One interesting strategy for biodegradability involved producing plastics which had a short planned lifetime and would automatically self-destruct after a certain period or under certain conditions. (With typical biology-centered thinking, Ecotopians refer to such plastics as “dying” when they begin to decompose.) Plastics of this type are used to make containers for beer, food of many types, to produce packaging materials that resemble cellophane, and so on. These materials “die” after a month or so, especially when exposed to sunlight’s ultraviolet rays. I have noticed that the usually tidy Ecotopians have no hesitation about dropping (and stamping on) an empty beer container; it turns out they know that in a few weeks its remnants will have crumbled and decayed into the soil. Similarly, Ecotopian householders toss wrapping materials onto their compost heaps, knowing they will join there in the general decay into rich garden fertilizer.
Another line of plastics development led to a variety of durable materials, which were increasingly needed in place of metals. Metals became deliberately scarce in early Ecotopia, when the little mining and smelting that had taken place were replaced by an entirely scrap-based metals industry. An amusing aspect of this scarcity was the nationwide campaign to recycle junked cars, which had littered the Ecotopian landscape just as they do ours. These formerly worthless heaps of junk skyrocketed in value, and were hauled up from creekbeds, pulled out of vacant lots, unearthed in abandoned barns, and of course salvaged from scrap yards. In a parallel campaign, several billion beer and soda cans were collected and recycled.
Ecotopian durable plastics, which are used for minibus bodies, “extruded houses,” coins, bottles, and mechanical objects of many kinds, have molecular structures similar to those of our plastics, and are virtually decay-proof under ordinary circumstances—in particular, so long as they are not in contact with the soil. However, by chemical advances that have so far remained secret, Ecotopian scientists have built into these molecules “keyholes,” which can be opened only by soil micro-organisms! Once they are unlocked, the whole structure decomposes rapidly.
This weird but ingenious system means that even a large plastic object will, if left in contact with damp earth over a long period of time, eventually decay. Usually, however, when plastic objects are to be recycled they are broken up into easily handled pieces and thrown into “biovats,” huge tubs of a special earthen mush that soil micro-organisms find a good habitat. In time the results of this process are dried into sludge arid recycled onto the land. (It is in such vats that the contents of the recycle bins marked P are dumped.)
Whatever their advantages these plastics do not impress all Ecotopians, especially those who are fond of wood. It is recognized, of course, that since plastics can be molded they are capable of taking shapes that wood is not; and that they can be stronger, more flexible, and often more durable. Extremists, however, still take exception to any use of plastics, believing they are unnatural materials that have no place in an ecologically ideal world. These purists will live only in wood houses, and use only containers such as wooden chests, string bags, woven baskets, and clay pots. The defenders of plastics, on their side, have many effective economic arguments, and they have also produced plastics that have a less “plasticky” feel and look—with some success, it seems to me.
Nonetheless, I have the impression that despite the undeniable Ecotopian scientific achievements in plastics, the future may well belong to the purists. For in this as in many areas of life, there is still a strong trend in Ecotopia to abandon the fruits of all modern technology, however innocuous they may be made, in favor of a poetic but costly return to what the extremists see as “nature.”
(May 26) Got into big fight with Bert about the ritual war games story—not the story itself, but that I hadn’t gone over it with him as I had said. “Do you always go off and do things purely on your own?” he said crossly. “Don’t you think you might be missing something? Don’t you know what you might get out of collective work?” “Well,” I said defensively, “I was in a big hurry and you weren’t around, and—” “Fuck your excuses,” he said bluntly. “I offered to work with you as a brother. That was important. Do you have any idea how competitive and detached you seem to us?” He was furious, and I had the uncomfortable feeling he was right—I had missed an important opportunity. We talked for a while and I told him how I felt about it, but it will take some doing to get back onto a decent basis together. Which saddens me more than I would have expected; we have become friends.
Beginning to miss the kids a lot more than usual on this trip, and don’t know why. God knows I neglect them when I’m home—pass up my weekends with them whenever something unusual is afoot, then try to make up for it with presents. (Haven’t bought them anything in Ecotopia, though—nothing here worth carrying home. Or rather, there are many worthwhile things here, but none can be bought or carried away.) Have the feeling I’d like them to be here with me, see what I am seeing, meet the people I know. What would they think of Marissa? She would take their measure exactly, even their spoiledness (which wouldn’t get anywhere with her!) and they’d respect and like her. Fay once said, when she was about six, that she didn’t trust Francine. Marissa is easy to trust. But she never pretends there is no risk in it….
Spoke earlier today with Kenny, a kid living at the Cove. His mother is away for a week, and I asked him if he was lonely with her gone. “Why should I be lonely? Everybody else is here.” Suddenly tearful to think of my children so far away, without me, living what is after all a dangerous life and getting worse. It’s not just the crime and the crazed people everywhere, but the expectation that our children’s children will go on being poisoned by smog and chemicals. (Or will New York and Tokyo produce a race of mutants who can breathe carbon monoxide?)
What would their lives be like if they had been born Ecotopian kids? No ballet classes, stationwagons, shopping expeditions to department stores. They’d do actual hard adult work in gardens and shops and schools. They’d live in a welter of a dozen or more people, exposed to a lot of sexual vibrations and happenings that would make them grow up faster—and I guess stronger, though it scares me. (I want them protected—) But it would be a realer world than New York, I have to admit. In better touch with basic natural processes and the nitty gritty with fellow humans. It would be an incredible switch in their lives. But how do I know they might not thrive on it?
Some random notes that don’t seem to fit in plans for columns:
Have discovered what those wet-suit-like garments are. People call them “bird-suits,” and often embroider birds on them; also “unitards.” Not uniforms after all, but a new type of garment. Many Ecotopians dislike them, in spite of their technical advantages. (“Bird-suits” because they are said to be almost as good a body covering as a bird’s feathers!) Woven of some new combination of fibers—story confused, some say from keratin, which would mean bones, hooves, hair—some think from wood fibers. At
any rate the inner layer is woven, thick, spongy (quarter of an inch thick). Alleged properties quite magical: when it rains, surface layer cotton fibers swell and lie so tightly together that rain runs off; when it is hot, the inner layer fibers unkink, trap less air, thus allow faster escape of body heat, whereas when it is cold they curl up, trap more air, thus keep body heat in! (This why suits must be skin-tight, evidently.) Then there is another smooth inner layer, to feel good on the skin. I have tried them on, and in fact bought two to take home—even if I wouldn’t want to be seen on a New York street in them! Will be interesting to try in our zero temperatures—but I’ll take an overcoat along.
“Preventive transportation.” That’s how doctor Jake, Marissa’s cousin, sardonic of mind but optimist, describes bicycles. Claims that every heart attack costs the medical system, the patient’s living group, the patient’s work group, etc. something between a year and two years’ salary. Saving one heart attack can thus pay for something like 500 free Provo bikes. Besides, he claims that the bicycle is aesthetically beautiful because it is the most efficient means, in calories of energy per person per mile, ever devised for moving bodies—even jumbo jets eat up more energy, he says. (Looked me over as a physical specimen, said I was not in too bad shape for an American. “You’ll probably feel livelier after a few more weeks here. The food, the air, getting in better touch with yourself.” “What do you mean?” “Knowing yourself as an animal creature on the earth, as we do. It can feel more comfortable than your kind of life.” “Well, I’ll let you know,” I said.)
Foreign trade note: Natural rubber comes in from Vietnam and Indonesia. Plastics and plastics-manufacturing machinery seem to be major export. Some Japanese electronics imported. Books, records, videodiscs, musicians, performers from all over the world-except the U.S.! How do they do it?