This house, like many city dwellings, is heated by the system now widespread in Ecotopia—using solar radiation stored in a large watertank underground, from which heated water can be pumped through radiators in the living areas. Much of the south walls and roofs of Ecotopian buildings are devoted to the heat-receptors for these devices, but since they greatly reduce the cost of operating a house and also eliminate the chief need for energy from a central source, Ecotopians regard this limitation with affection. They also like to point out that the system can be adapted to heating wash water and the distillation of seawater, which is useful in coastal communities where summer water supplies are uncertain.
No survey of Ecotopian energy developments would be complete without mention of an extremely daring project which will be truly revolutionary—if it works. The photosynthetic chemistry of a green growing plant, as is well known, enables the plant to capture solar energy and use it in the plant’s own growth. Ecotopian scientists believe they have now worked out a process whereby, in specially bred plants, this process could be electrically tapped directly. Such an unbelievably elegant system would be nearly perfect from an Ecotopian point of view: your garden could then recycle your sewage and garbage, provide your food, and also light your house!
(June 1) Got back from the north this afternoon and found Marissa already at the Cove—sitting in “my” chair in the library, reading. It always surprises me how she fits into other scenes, without feeling like an interloper. Perhaps it is because Ecotopians have such strong ties to their own “family” turf, they feel secure everywhere? Or is it that the country is so small it is in some way all one huge extended family? At any rate she feels at home at the Cove.
We went up to my room arm in arm; very close and companionable. It’s marvelous to be wanted by her: she’s direct and solid and passionate, and it makes everything possible. I don’t quite know what’s different in making love with her. She uses her body in a direct and intimate way that enables me to do the same, somehow. She is in tune with herself, her own biological being, and through some contagion I find myself doing the same. I feel stronger with her than I usually have—I like my own body better too, have more trust in its functioning. I don’t worry about it getting cold, or sick, or tired, or not performing well sexually; I almost don’t “think” about it at all, the way I have in the past. And the sexual contact between us goes on getting better and better. We are perfectly open and loose and trusting; sometimes we lose ourselves, our self consciousnesses, in tremendous bursts of shared feeling—closeness and orgasms that are really different from anything in my life before. Yet we never speak of it; it just happens. And not that it’s weird—strange positions or anything. We sometimes fool around with oral sex in one way or another, and it’s pleasant for fun and games or preliminaries, but for the real contact we both like intercourse, the old standby. (Odd, because Ecotopians are supposed to be so liberated about sex, I had imagined them doing almost everything but straight fucking!) We seem to do it for hours, it just goes on, rising and falling in intensity, changing tone or emotional color, like a leisurely walk up a lovely mountain, in no hurry to reach the top. But then finally we reach it, sometimes without realizing we were near, and the view is splendid and the air is clear and I feel like I am really living at last—
Can it go on this way? At any rate it seems I can never get enough of her—I watch for the chance to drag her to bed, I’m almost shamefully focused on having her, on having more of this extraordinary kind of experience…. She is sleeping now, and I study her as she lies stretched out under my quilt. There is so much intensity in her—it brings out all of mine. When I am with her I feel more solid—heavier, almost literally, as if my feet are planted more firmly on the earth.
I realize the relation with Marissa is changing my whole idea of what men and women are like together. Things I used to take for granted with Francine now begin to seem bizarre to me. Men never snap their heads around to look at Marissa, the way they do with Francine—whose bright blonde hair is like a beacon. Marissa wears no make-up at all, never, and now that the fashion cycle with us has come round again to heavy lipstick and eye-shadow and so on, I first found her a little pale-looking, too reticent about herself. And yet what intensity there is in her eyes, the way she moves her mouth, the liveliness of her body! It is as if Francine possesses the signs or signals that are supposed to mean sexuality and vitality; Marissa just has sexuality and vitality, so she doesn’t need the signals….
I used to particularly enjoy going into a fancy restaurant or a cocktail party with Francine. It was like displaying a prize won in some contest. And she makes the most of it—breasts always seeming about to burst her dress; that special ambiguous look from me to the others, inviting competition and comparisons and flirtations. With Marissa, coming into a place is just coming into the place. We will relate to the people there individually or together, intimately or not at all, as it happens to go. Most people find Marissa attractive—she grows on you, subtly—but she never presents herself as an object to be struggled over, and she never pretends to feelings she doesn’t have. And yet she expects a great emotional commitment from me—we have had terrible scenes because she felt I was not living up to our relationship.
Yet sometimes I miss Francine: her frivolousness, her lightheartedness, her sense of social style and repartee—Marissa’s awfully serious, and sometimes I get angry that she won’t indulge in game-playing. Francine is game for anything, I suppose because to her nothing much matters. Is her appeal that with her I can be irresponsible, loll about on those enormous tits, be childish?
(So why should it be hard for me to be grown up?)
Here I am, 36 years old, involved with one gorgeous, playful woman at one end of the continent, and with one passionate, serious woman at the other. Marissa would hate everything about New York, and Francine would hate everything about Ecotopia. Lucky ladies, to have such a famous schizophrenic for a lover…. But how can I bear being so split?
Maybe I should have been a poet after all, as I used to think when I was a teenager. Maybe it’s only artists who can really handle their personal contradictions—by putting them into their work?
Under Marissa’s questioning (patient but unrelenting!) I have also been thinking back to my marriage with Pat. I don’t see, when I look at Ecotopian love relationships, or marriages, that awful sense of constriction that we felt, the impact of a rigid stereotyped set of expectations—that this was the way we were going to relate to each other forever, that we had to, in order to somehow survive in a hostile universe. Ecotopians’ marriages shade off more gradually into extended family connections, into friendships with both sexes. Individuals don’t perhaps stand out as sharply as we do; they don’t present themselves as problems or gifts to each other, more as companions. Nobody is as essential (or as expendable) here as with us. It is all fearfully complex and dense to me, yet I can see that it’s that very density that sustains them—there are always good solid alternatives to any relationship, however intense. Thus they don’t have our terrible agonizing worries when a relationship is rocky. This saddens me somehow—it seems terribly unromantic. It’s their usual goddamned realism: they are taking care of themselves, of each other. Yet I can see too that it’s that very realism that allows them to be silly and irresponsible sometimes, because they know they can afford it; mistakes are never irreparable, they are never never going to be cast out alone, no matter what they do…. And perhaps this even makes marriages last better—they have lower expectations than we do, in some ways. A marriage is a less central fact of a person’s life, and therefore it is not so crucial that it be altogether satisfying (as if anything or anybody was ever altogether satisfying.) Though people do split up in ways that are clearly very painful for them. But not the wrenching feeling of failure that both Pat and I had when we broke up—the feeling that utter disaster had overtaken us, especially her of course, but also me, really: or the feeling of fault, that we had somehow not done it r
ight, the way we were supposed to, that I had not given her what women were supposed to expect to be given (rather than finding for themselves or in themselves) and therefore I and we had failed, and had to suffer for it. No Ecotopian seems to carry that kind of guilt. And even though it seems to dilute something intense and precious in life, I am beginning to envy them a little, and also to see that their joint way of protecting themselves is stronger and more fruitful than the individual defensive way I have tried by keeping my relationship with Francine light and tentative and limited….
COMMUNICATIONS IN ECOTOPIA:
PRESS, TELEVISION AND PUBLISHING
San Francisco, June 2. As a working newspaperman, I am naturally curious about the press of other countries, and I have spent a good deal of time with Ecotopian editors, writers, and television newsmen and women. The conditions they work under would be intolerable for me or most of my colleagues. Nonetheless, I have gained a healthy respect for their integrity, hard work, and devotion to the public welfare as they see it.
The basic situation of the Ecotopian media is that, in the political confusion after Independence, laws were passed which effectively broke up the existing media corporations. Friends in the legislatures who had previously protected the publishing and broadcasting industries were no longer in power. Thus the fundamental Ecotopian press law forbade multiple ownerships under any circumstances: that is, the corporations that owned magazines, newspapers, TV and radio stations were required to divest themselves of all but one operation in each city. Generally (and mistakenly, as it turned out) they decided to keep their chief TV stations.
But a series of further confiscatory laws followed, narrowly regulating the types and amounts of advertising that were permitted, requiring augmented quotas of “public service” broadcasting, and so on. These laws worked out to give unfair advantages to small, independent entrepreneurial groups, who came forth in staggering numbers. In place of the one daily newspaper San Francisco formerly enjoyed, there are now six—representing every shade of opinion—plus numerous weeklies, monthlies, and special-interest newsletters. These service a wider area than the San Francisco paper covered earlier, for the capital city’s media have now, to a certain extent, become national in circulation. Still, papers are thriving in other cities as well: Seattle has four, Portland three, and even Sacramento has three. There has been an equal proliferation in the magazine field. This fragmentation does not seem to be as hard on the individual reporters and writers as might be expected. They do not yearn for the security of our big media corporations, but seem to enjoy the thrill of doing their freewheeling best for a small operation even though its days may be visibly numbered.
Television has been similarly decentralized and broken up. Each existing station was early forced into a great deal of local programming—though centralized news services were allowed. The government itself acquired several channels to be used for political programs—both local and national government affairs (as I reported in an earlier column) are more or less continually visible on TV: hearings, committee meetings, debates.
In such circumstances entertainment obviously was forced into a back seat. It consisted mainly of old films and a plethora of amateurish shows: rock music concerts, comedians, endless technical arguments about ecological problems. It is hard to imagine any large number of Americans watching such programs, which make little attempt at showmanship and are further dulled by the absence of the surrealist commercials we have.
How good is the news coverage in Ecotopia? Spot comparisons with our press from the months just before my trip reveal that Ecotopian coverage is surprisingly competent in those areas of the world it chooses to deal with. Because of the lack of diplomatic relations, of course, no Ecotopian correspondents can be stationed in the U.S., so information on U.S. events is skimpy and derived mainly from European press services. World news on the other hand seems to be excellent: for instance, the Ecotopian papers had run accounts of the latest American air strikes in Brazil more than a week before our newspapers had….
Although the general picture of the Ecotopian media is one of almost anarchic decentralization, a jungle in which only the hardiest survive, here too we find paradoxes. For the newspapers, which are even smaller than our tabloids, are actually sold through electronic print-out terminals in the street kiosks, in libraries, and at other points; and these terminals are connected to central computer banks, whose facilities are “rented” by the publications. Two print-out inks are available, by the way: one lasts indefinitely, the other fades away in a few weeks so the paper can be immediately re-used.
This system is integrated with book publishing as well. Although many popular books are printed normally, and sold in kiosks and bookstores, more specialized titles must be obtained through a special print-out connection. You look the book’s number up in a catalogue, punch the number on a jukebox-like keyboard, study the blurb, sample paragraphs, and price displayed on a videoscreen, and deposit the proper number of coins if you wish to buy a copy. In a few minutes a print-out of the volume appears in a slot. These terminals, I am told, are not much used by city dwellers, who prefer the more readable printed books; but they exist in every corner of the country and can thus be used by citizens in rural areas to procure copies of both currently popular and specialized books. All of the 60,000-odd books published in Ecotopia since Independence are available, and about 50,000 earlier volumes. It is planned to increase this gradually to about 150,000. Special orders may also be placed, at higher costs, to scan and transmit any volume in the enormous national library at Berkeley.
This system is made possible by the same fact that enables Ecotopian book publication to be so much more rapid than ours: authors retype their edited final drafts on an electric typewriter that also makes a magnetic tape. This tape can be turned into printing plates in a few minutes, and it can simultaneously be fed into the central storage computer, so it is immediately available to the print-out terminals.
Aside from this “professional” publishing, Ecotopia also supports a sizable “amateur” industry. Authors, artists, political groups, and specialized organizations have easy and cheap access to print because Ecotopia early developed portable, fool-proof, easily repairable offset printing presses, and deployed them everywhere—in schools, offices, factories and so on. Ecotopian children of eight know how to operate them with satisfactory results.
The variety of materials printed in this way is staggering: cookbooks (many Ecotopians are devoted to fine eating, no doubt one of their cultural links to the French), political tracts, scientific papers, comic books (these have a wide and weird development, being the chosen medium of some excellent artists), experimental literature, poetry, how-to-do-it manuals for crafts or skills, and so on. These range in style from the tawdrily homemade to the superbly personal and creative.
The Ecotopian fondness for a craft, guild, almost medieval approach to things also surfaces in their publishing, despite its modern technology. Each newspaper, magazine, or book bears a colophon—a listing of who edited the manuscript, typed it for the tape, ran the press, handled the binding, etc. When I said this seemed rather immodest in the modern world, I was told that vanity had nothing to do with it—the main consideration was to fix responsibility, which the Ecotopians try to decentralize and personalize wherever possible.
(June 3) Sitting around the fire at the Cove last night, swapping old newspaper stories, drinking mulled wine. Every once in a while somebody would stomp in out of the chilly evening and join us to warm up. But they still like to tease me. After a while Bert began it: “Come on, Will, tell us what’s the biggest story the Times ever suppressed.” “What do you mean by the biggest?” I parried. “Well, whatever you think was biggest. Bay of Pigs was pretty big, I guess, but that was a long time ago and anyway they did decide to run it, even if it took three days to get around to it.”
“I would have opposed holding up on that,” I said, frowning. “They ran it, as I understand, when they realize
d other papers would break the story. Even then the old man felt he was betraying the President.” A burst of unkind laughter greeted this remark, which didn’t surprise me, of course—you don’t find much sympathy for U.S. government policies or figures among Ecotopians. “After that the paper printed everything, as far as I heard. Do you know about the Pentagon Papers?”
“Yeah, they were okay on that one,” Tom agreed, “even if it was stale news.”
“Look, Will,” Bert said, leaning back with that intent expression he gets when he’s getting down to serious business. “What are you going to write about the Helicopter War? We think that was the most serious suppressed story since Independence. I know you were only 19 or 20 at the time: so was I. But there wasn’t a line about it in any of your major papers. Your underground papers had some stuff, but they never get anything straight—it all sounded like third-hand paranoiac raving.”
Dead silence, all eyes on me. I took some deep slow breaths. I know, even though I was just a reporter on a student paper at the time, that rumors had circulated for some while about trouble on the Ecotopian borders. A couple of young hotshot friends, a few years older than I, wanted to go out and track them down. But the wire service had a good man in Reno, and of course a whole bureau in Los Angeles, The editors thought that if anything important happened, they’d know about it all right. Soon after, the army had put through unusual rush orders for large numbers of replacement helicopters, but these were explained as part of the Latin American build-up that was beginning then. Besides, by then the shock of the secession had largely spent itself, and readers were tired of Ecotopia. Public attention was mostly on the chronic economic crisis. The public opinion polls showed that while nobody was happy about Ecotopia, nobody was too unhappy about it either. The likelihood that our government would risk a secret invasion seemed remote; I certainly hadn’t lost any sleep over it.