Fragment III—"My Intellectual Life, Part One:
The Early Start Good Fortune Gave Me in
My Intellectual Life; Its Brief Duration; and
Its Sudden End"
Editor's Note:
The reader will recall that Larsen had just finished asking his students seventeen questions about "Eveline," hopeing to allow them to "begin to see some part of the story's full complexity and beauty." So successfully had the questioning gone that the level of sound in the classroom rose. From that point, we now continue with "Fragment III."
..........In that way, then, went the first round of questions, the class, by and large, having a pleasant time, I, by and large, also having a pleasant time—pleasant enough that, as we continued with our work, the forbidden element of loudness began gradually manifesting itself, soon to reach the level at which it was to be noted with disapproval and alarm by the good Drs. Nose, Snoop, Correct, Cleopatra, and Muscle.
..........Nevertheless, the sheer joyfulness of the moment, combined with my passion for that moment's pedagogical and intellectual usefulness in digging into the revelatory depths of the story, led me to put out of my mind any thought of danger that might be creeping near. So I pushed onward to questions about "Eveline," round two: [20]
.........01) What literal reason might explain why "Few people passed"?
.........02) What symbolic reason might explain why "Few people passed"?
.........03) What is a cinder?
.........04) What causes cinders?
.........05) What might be the connotations of cinders?
.........06) What might be the connotations of the color red?
.........07) What is a field?
.........08) What is a field made of?
.........09) What does a field do?
.........10) What goes into a field? What else? When?
.........11) What comes out of a field? When?
.........12) What are children? What goes into children? When?
.........13) What comes out of children? When? What else? When?
.........14) What do children need that grain or vegetables also need?
.........15) If "the Waters had gone back to England," what has been left behind?
.........16) Assuming the Devines to be gone also; what, then, through association
......... of the sound of words, is missing? What else?
.........17) Remember the color brown. What word does "Dunn" sound like?
.........18) What does the word "dun" mean?
.........19) What happens to grain or vegetables after people eat them?
.........20) When grain or vegetables come out of people, what color are
......... they? When else? In the form of what?
.........21) When grain or vegetables come out of people, where can what comes
......... out be put? When else and where else? Why?
.........22) If put on fields, this substance is put there to create what?
.........23) If "Tizzie Dunn was dead, too," then, by sound- and color-association,
.........what is missing?
.........24) Eveline, and Ireland, are therefore dying because of lack of what,
......... what, what, and what?
.........In the classroom by this time, groans and laughter are coming from my students, and there are hand signals and rolling eyes. A desk is slapped by someone, much in the way a thigh might be slapped. There is a guffaw. The mood is festive, approaching the tumultuous. "Damn shit, pro, come off it," Steve Streather calls out from the back row. As usual, he is all but lying down in his desk, legs flung out, body near the horizontal. "Where you come up with this kind of shit, man?"
.........I leap at the—what do Drs. Nose, Muscle, and Cleopatra call it?—ah, yes, I leap at the "teachable moment."
.........The first, and absolutely critical, move: disarm the group and gain control again through an abrupt and seemingly complete change of subject. I find a tiny crack of quietness in the wall of sound and sneak my voice into it, like a knife into an oyster: "Streatherian One," I shout out loudly: "Why were all the hotel rooms already booked?"
.........The room falls quiet. "The fuck?" says Streather.
........."Why were all the hotel rooms already booked?" I repeat.
........."The fuck hotel you talkin' 'bout?"
........."Well, what if I call it an inn? Why weren't there any rooms?" A hand shoots up. Another. Voices call out. Sound returns to the room like water flooding into a bottle. I've had my quiet instant. Now I'll have to fight sound with sound, quickness with quickness.
........."Eveline" questions, round three: [21]
.........01) Why was there no room at the inn?
.........02) But if that's the way the story went, why did it go that way?
.........03) Was Bethlehem a town?
.........04) Did people live in it?
.........05) Did the people live in houses?
.........06) Is it likely that any of the people were kind?
.........07) Did any of them take Mary and Joseph in?
.........08) Why doesn't the story have it that way, then?
.........09) Why not in a store, a market, or a tent in the bazaar?
.........10) Why doesn't the story have it that way, then?
.........11) What is a stable?
.........12) What do the animals do there? What else? And what else?
.........13) What happens to the grasses and grains when they come out again?
.........14) What color are the grasses and grains when they come out again? [22]
.........15) Will the grasses and grains be put on fields again?
.........16) Why? To create what?
.........17) Christ descended from heaven and took bodily form to create what?
.........18) And he is associated with what? And what? And what?
.........19) Why?
.........20) For what?
"For life!" the class shouted. I called out the repeat, rhythm for rhythm, three or four times—"Life!" "Life!"—and then, at the split-instant of quiet after one of their responses, I added,
"Yes! Where there's shit there's life, for better or worse!"
which was repeated once by them and followed by my adding the second line—
"No shit, no life, for better or worse!"
this again repeated by the class one time, after which we all joined together, shout-repeating the whole,
"Yes! Where there's shit there's life, for better or worse!"
"No shit, no life, for better or worse!"
"Yes! Where there's shit there's life, for better or worse!"
"No shit, no life, for better or worse!"
"Yes! Where there's shit there's life, for better or worse!"
"No shit, no life, for better or worse!"
.........Whereupon, in the wonderfully apotheotic tumult of chant, shout, and desk-slap, at the very top of the class period's climax and the moment of its greatest success and effectiveness, I saw, filling the square window in the classroom door, her eyes wide, the shocked round face of Dr. Correct. Also peering in were Dr. Nose and Dr. Snoop, one behind each shoulder of Dr. Correct. And behind them, craning to see, stood Car Cleopatra.
.........The minute I looked at them, however, they disappeared. I imagined the four of them, along with Dr. Muscle, disappearing hurriedly [23] around the corner on their way to the offices of Deans Glad, Happyhand, Dank, Shark, and Rattle.
.........My offense, indeed, was not loudness alone, but the misdeed of loudness accompanied also by the worse misdeed of obscenity, a twin bill of error comprising, my accusers were to say, an unacceptable breach of decorum, "decorum" being, it seemed to me, nothing if not the reddest of red herrings and falsest of false pieties, [24] albeit an effective enough tool for their own focussed and particular purposes. In the letter of complaint that Nose, Snoop, Correct, Cleopatra, and Muscle prepared for Rattle—who forwarded it dutifully to President Penguin-Duck himself—they wrote: "It is unconscionable that the students of Actaeon College, whom faculty members are here to serve, should be subjected to such vulgar, offensive, intemperate language as Dr. Larsen, shouting at the very top of his lungs, was making repeated use of in his classroom."
.........More decorously, I should have shouted,
"Yes! Where fecal material exists, life exists, for better or worse!"
"No fecal material, no life, for better or worse!"
but that would only have puzzled Streather and the others. Would have been a damper. Nor did I think of it. Nor would I have wanted to.
.........The class was going much too well.
4) Also in sixth grade, I became, for a time, friends with Tom
Prior, and, through him, became acquainted with Denny Gudim. Tom,
with his parents, two sisters, and brother, lived on a farm west of ours a
so. An old man who was a relative on Tom's mother's side of the f
also. He slept in a little room off the kitchen, and I almost never
except in late afternoon when he would finally come out a
his way from the house to the barn for his chores.
I'm convinced that Tom had a bright
far from a standout in school; I lost
track life, but during the time
was being limited by
In the case
don't kno
embr
ab
4
............lectual gift, almost entirely as a result of the inspiration and exampl
.........came through my close friendship with Stephen Koch. Then, when h
......ver and I found myself at Carleton, it was as if a fuse had been lit,
...ard the end of my first year I had reached a point where there wa
. anted to do with my life and mind. I leapt into this new project
were wonderful ones for me. There was promise! There rea
strength I had fed on its own certainty of itself, and its c
read, and wrote, and the more deeply and widely I
history of literature and the wondrous, powerf
of those arts also that came along with it.
Wh [25]
.........I knew perfectly well that such intellectual gifts as I did possess had come to me primarily through luck—the cosmic bio-roulette we play in being born to whatever parents we are born to. On top of that, stretching the odds still farther, there is the unpredictability of history itself—an unpredictability, after all, pre-planted also inside your parents, whoever they may be, long before you yourself are planted inside them.
.........I was lucky on both counts, certainly on the history one. On the paternal side, my
family had been filled with thinkers and writers, the line reaching back into the middle of
the nineteenth century and beyond, constituting for me (or so I thought from fairly early
on) a background that surely must offer a significant kind of strength, a force that would
give me a natural head start, a push from behind, in anything having to do with education
or the intellectual life. Maybe this "force," if it existed, was only in myself, or perhaps it
existed only through the power of suggestion that came to me from among the dead, the
past. But soon enough I found that I'd begun taking it for granted, like knowing how to
walk or how to put your clothes on in the morning: that becoming educated and using
your mind to the best of your ability and in the best way possible was simply what one
did, in whatever way, field, direction, art, or o
.........When I started at Carleton College, in 1959, though,
many of my classmates, were the first in their families
the first stepping off into the deep waters. Later, wh
Iowa City, the same was true, and few of my cla
cated, whereas I was the fourth generation of
a great-uncle, in fact, Henning, in a framed
wall where I wrote my doctoral compreh
over my shoulder to be sure I was doi
Almost never, however, did I
fidence about them. I learned quick
ill feeling of some sort, or suspic
resentment or even a perman
only more would be lost
loneliness was inesca
pitiful omission, t
history was abs
the enemy of
only choice
silence, n
cultur
die
u [26]
.........When that happened, when the oxygen was sucked out of the
politics and vision also changed in such a way that with the help
than "a few quick and harmless words" bad became good, go
small case, I was no longer someone born into an educat
was a person under the onus of having been "privilege
of this kind put into place, there was nothing
to reclaim a meaningful degree of intellec
autonomy or a meaningful degre
that would allow individ
thinking, but ins
ful degree of re
own domest
of party, n
princip
nor eve
back
tru
s
...........................fter all, without any history there can be no present;
..................past, no present; without any present, no future. The same is true of human
.........ticularly if defined as organic units of history existing inside of time. One's
.......is one, and each passing instant determines more fully what one will
......ands to reason thereby, does it not, that the more fully achieved th
fully achieved the latter: the more fully achieved the past
present; the more fully achieved the present, th [28]
malice, and spite have their roles
fraternal triplets of idiot
bir
II
1
.........The first time I remember seeing with true clarity and depth into the authentic nature of art was on a summer afternoon in 1946, when I hadn't yet reached the age of five. [29]
.........The results of that experience have been inspiriting, profound, and lifelong. They have also, however, had the unforeseen and deleterious effect of making my life now—in this, the age of The Calamity—only more empty, regrettable, and bitter than it might otherwise have been. The reason is that now, in so vacuous an age as the one now given us, an age only of the linear, the shrill, the righteous, and the simple, I am driven almost to wish that I had never known what I do know. If my own ignorance were as pure as the ignorance of those who fill not only the halls of Actaeon but the entire nation around me, my life, I believe, would be far, far less painful than I find it now. As things are, I am the man who walked in sunlight for a day before being closed for eternity in darkness.
2
.........What caused my epiphany was this: I watched my father take a photograph.
.........Our car was parked along a gravel road somewhere outside of Northfield, Minnesota. I leaned against it and looked out at my father, who stood a fair distance away and slightly below me in a field of tall grass that came above his knees. A tripod stood in front of him; on it was his bellows camera. With a black cloth over his head and shoulders, he leaned forward to look through the view-finder.
.........The photograph was to include a line of trees in the mid-distance, the trees offering a certain contrast by merit of the field of tall grass reaching off toward them. Subjects such as this appealed to my father, who took a great number of them over the years, in varying seasons, lights, and weather.
.........Our car was a gray two-door coupé, a 1939 Ford. It was a two-seater, although squeezed into the back were two tiny jump seats. My father had placed a wooden plank across them to fill the space between, so that I could sit there too, between my two sisters.
.........What I learned on the afternoon in 1946 is this: an artwork extends outward from itself in every direction at once, and it extends also through time, with equal force and in both directions simultaneously. For more than six decades now, I have held it as a central tenet of my intellectual and artistic life that these twin characteristics are fundamental and essential, since without them no created thing can achieve its transformation into art.
.........Am I alone in understanding so simple but essential an idea? In the aftermath of The Calamity, there are all around me not the perceptive but only the zealous. And by merit of their zeal, they hold a view directly the opposite of mine: they maintain that the highest (and perhaps the only) measure of a work of art is the success of its existence as a simple straight line.
3
.........On that long-ago summer afternoon (silent; it was so wonderfully silent under the massiveness of the summer sky, in the heat of the day), this is what came suddenly to my understanding and never afterward left it:
.........For a work to be a work of art, it is essential
.........1..that it be deep;
.........2..that it be broad;
.........3..that it be inclusive (of every atom of life available to it); and
.........4..that, by merit of these and other yet-unidentified qualities, it be inevitably and perpetually captured within and simultaneously dedicated to an ongoing struggle both with and against the imponderable force of time.
4
.........As clearly as if it were just yesterday, I remember the feeling of the day and of the moment. I remember the heat, the stillness of the air, the dry, olive-dusty green of the crop-grass that rose above my father's knees, and I remember the darker, shadowy, moist-looking green of the trees in the direction his camera was looking, even the hint of gray-blue from the haze in the air when you looked across to where the trees waited, voluminous, dense, shapely, and silent.
.........One of the quintessentially important facts regarding the moment was:
.........that I was seeing these trees in the atmosphere and light of a summer afternoon exactly as my great-grandfather Laur. Larsen might have seen them in 1853, or 1862, or 1874. That I was seeing them, further, exactly as my great-uncles Nikolai or Jakob or Henning might have seen them in, say, 1889 or 1895 or 1904; or that I was seeing them as my great-aunts Karen and Ingeborg might have seen them in 1912, or 1928, or 1934, or even in 1941.
.........In turn, the immense importance of this fact has come to have not one but two quintessentially significant elements. One of these is positive and uplifting. The other is depleted of meaning and therefore despairing.
.........The positive:
.........1..From seeing the trees; from seeing my father photographing them; and from seeing them exactly as my forebears had seen them, I concluded that a work of art must necessarily extend not only forward but also backward through time.
.........And the negative:
.........2..My being lucky enough to have seen the trees in this durable, timeless, and fecund way caused me to be unprepared for life in the world surrounding me as I write these words now, six decades later, almost seven, when, in the unreverberant and vacuum-like emptiness of The Calamity's aftermath, this is the situation:
..........There are none left capable of seeing the trees in the way I saw them then, with this compound and inexpressibly lamentable result:
....................that it is no longer possible to see the trees in the way that I saw them then; and,
....................that it is no longer permissible to see the trees in the way that I saw them then.
5
.........(My father was six-feet-two, and in the manner of people with long limbs he moved in what seemed an unhurried way, never quickly or suddenly. When he took the photograph he was, as always, wearing long trousers. I never saw him, no matter now hot or oppressive the weather, in shorts of any kind. The same was true of his shirts, that they invariably had long sleeves. In hot weather, he would-like now, in the field of long grass-roll them up just above his elbows.
.........The shirt and trousers were made of khaki, which my father had grown fond of wearing during World War II, in the Navy.
.........As always when going into the countryside for photographs, he wore ankle-high boots of scuffed brown leather. These were the kind he would wear almost all the time after our move to the farm in 1947. His belt was navy style also, of canvas webbing with a metal buckle that allowed adjustment to any girth. On the front of the flat buckle my father had soldered a silver badge showing a ship's anchor over a background of coiled rope.
.........My father never wore a hat but preferred, like now, to let the sun beat down freely over his shoulders and head.
.........After the Navy, my father kept the habit of wearing aviator-style sunglasses like those he had worn in the South Pacific, with rims and temples of thin polished metal. Now, before disappearing again under the black cloth and leaning forward to peer through the view-finder, he took the glasses off and slipped them into the right front pocket of his shirt. In the left pocket, as always, in their slip-case of hard plastic, would be his Pall Malls.
.........(From the road, leaning against the car, I watched my father disappear under the black cloth. He reappeared and looked at the trees—without his sun glasses—then disappeared again for a much, much longer time.
I wondered what it was like under the cloth, what was happening there, what my father was seeing. I waited.
.........When he finally came out from under the hood for the last time, he stretched his arms back as if with relief. He tossed the black cloth over his right shoulder, put his sunglasses back on, tapped a Pall Mall out from the case in his left front pocket, lit it with the Zippo lighter he carried in his left pants pocket, and took in a deep breath of smoke. He made none of these movements quickly, but with his typical measured pace; if anything, he moved even more unhurriedly in the moments, like this one, following the completion of something significant or difficult. Holding the cigarette between his lips, he telescoped the camera bellows and locked them closed. Then he lifted the camera straight up from the ground so that the splayed legs of the tripod fell back together with a loose wooden clack that I could hear from the road. With the camera still attached to the tripod, he carried it the way he would a rifle or shotgun, up-angled and resting against his left shoulder.
.........He came out of the field slowly, the high grass making it look as if he were wading in deep water. As he approached, he looked off in one direction or another, sometimes pausing to gaze back at the trees, or to look in the opposite direction at something on the other side of the field, or, frequently, up into the sky at one compass point and then another. The appearance this gave was that he didn't quite want to come up out of the field, or that he was searching for other things to take photographs of and other points of view to take them from. In actuality, as I came to know later, he was looking at all of the surrounding things that would be a part of the photograph he had just taken even though they would not appear in it. That they would not be seen, as I also came to know later, served only to make them all the more immeasurably important.
6
.........(It's possible that I was wrong. The memory could have come about in a cumulative way, from recollections of several outings over a number of years. To a degree, I suppose, this must be true. On the other hand, the vividness of it makes me believe that at the very least its central outlines come from that single day. The field, the trees, behind them the river. The tripod, my father, the black cloth, the sun, the stillness, the haze. Me seeing as if through my father's eyes, in turn through the eyes of my forebears a hundred years earlier, who had been there also and had also seen what I saw. All of this coming together with the result that on that afternoon I began to understand the nature of space, time, multiplicity, and unity in a work of art.
.........How could it not have been so? How could I not have begun to understand, with advantages like mine, advantages such as the advantages I had?
7
(Everything belonged to the photograph and therefore everything was in it: the day, the light, the colors, the quietness, the scent, the air. My father opened the trunk of the car. Inside were his camera cases. One was larger than the other, but otherwise they were alike, each with a hinged lid and corners reinforced with metal caps. Each had an upper and lower compartment inside, cunningly partitioned into felt-lined shapes, boxes, and trays to hold cameras, film plates, canisters, light meters, even the wooden tripod with its elegant slender legs telescoped shut. The cases had fitted lids and stout metal hasps to keep them tightly closed. This was a good thing because of the road-dust that seemed to be everywhere in the car and around it, even inside the trunk, where thick accumulations gathered in the back corners and under the floor mats, even behind the curving section of pipe that went from the filler-cap down into the gas tank.
.........(This, this is what I began learning that afternoon: That everything belonged to the artwork,
not only the things put into it or contained inside it but the things that were left out of it, since once the artwork contained what it did contain, everything that was not contained nevertheless remained a part of what was in it by the simple necessity of all things in the universe being interconnected;
and in the artwork there would be not only the infinitesimal instant of the present but all of the long durability of the past, and not only all of the long durability of the past, but also all of the future with whatever it might bring, not bring, or fail to bring. And all of these, the past, the present, and the future, in however subtle a way, would themselves also be influenced in turn by the artwork, since the future cannot help but be determined by the past, and once the future comes into existence, the artwork will have become a part of the past and can never unbecome a part of that past; and since it exists also in the present it must furthermore be a part of the future, no matter what does or doesn't happen in the universe, no matter whatever does, does not, or fails to take place, and this explains why the artwork exists in all time.
.........(The oven-like heat inside the car from the sun beating down on its roof. And the dust: the dust that flew up if you slapped the upholstery; the gritty feel of the dashboard or the rear window-ledge or even the arm rests. The little triangular front vents, which my father swiveled open all the way so they scooped air into the car after he put it in gear and released the clutch and we began moving forward.
.........His way of driving along the back roads so slowly that I could hear the sound of the tires on my side of the car rolling over the gravel, shifting it slightly. His looking one way out his open window, into the middle distance, then out through mine in the other direction.. I was so short that he could see over me, though much of the time I kneeled on the seat, changing position so I could see out the front, side, or back. Without stopping or even looking at what he was doing, my father took another cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it when the dashboard lighter snapped out, its coils red. Still gazing out at a passing field, or a hill, or a herd of cattle, or a distant copse of trees, he pushed the lighter back in by feel, and in a moment, from the lighting of his cigarette, the most wonderful scent expanded into the interior of the car, for there was no place in the world where the smell of tobacco was more wonderful, fresh, piquant, and desirable than in the car when a cigarette was first lit, the scent mixing with the air as it came in through the windows, whether we were going fast or slow, or barely even moving, like now, when my father continued looking out over the sun-filled summer landscape that reached outward everywhere around us.
8
.........(And now more than sixty years later, every bit of it has been swept away and is lost and gone and will never back again and will never happen again.
9
.........In other words: The Calamity gathered. The Calamity arose. The Calamity metastasized. The Calamity went on existing.
.........As an intellectual, cultural, social disease, the genius of it could not be more perfect. The Calamity brings an end to cycles of growth. And so, as a result, the only thing perdurable is the Calamity itself. And every one of us is locked in, locked up, locked down in our idiot world.
.........Not true? But listen to them, listen to what they say, look at what they do, Drs. Correct and Me, Drs. Nose and Snoop, Car Cleopatra, Drs. Long and Muscle, Deans Glad, Happyhand, Shark, Dank, and Rattle, and—
.........The Calamity rose, towered, overwhelmed the richness, variety, and wealth that previously had been everywhere. In the scentless air and unfecund soil of its aftermath there came into being The Age of Simplicity. And The Age of Simplicity-since it is the Age of Simplicity-is unable to hear, think, conceive, or generate anything beyond or greater than itself.
.........And therefore it is perfect, a self-maintained perpetual machine, a robot able to create only replicas of itself and nothing else, each generation infinitesimally more simple than the last.
.........From The Age of Simplicity will therefore emerge (there are visible hints already) The Age of Tyranny.
.........As a consequence, inevitably, we are doomed.[30]
10
.........(Already, people think, feel, speak, do only certain specifiable things.
.........Already, things, thoughts, and concepts have been simplified.
.........Already, people think, feel, speak, create only single things at a time.
.........Already, the concept that something can be more than one thing at a time is taken to be absurd.
.........Already, the concept that something can be more than one thing at a time and thereby the greater rather than lesser is taken to be absurd.
.........Already, perception of irony and ironies has been lost.
.........Already, the concept that a thing can be more than one thing at a time and that the things that this thing consists of may themselves be contradictory is taken to be even more absurd.
.........Already, the concept that what is left out of a thing may be equally important to what is put in, or even more important than what is put in, is taken to be inexpressibly absurd.
.........All of which is to say that my own life has come to be measured (and come to be
measurable) not by its own characteristics, achievements, and abilities but by the
characteristics, achievements, and abilities only of others. And those
who thrive and grow healthy and
Age of Simplicity, unlike
who withers and sicke
finally dies
inside
i [31]
Editor's Note:
The close scrutiny made possible by methods of modern
scholarship-not only the conventional weighing of internal
literary evidence but also forensic chemical and molecular analyses
that can accurately determine similarities in paper and ink and thus
date time of composition-has by now led scholars to the generally
accepted view that the following pieces all belong to "Fragment
III." Large sections of the Larsen papers, obviously, were found
intact. At the same time it must not be forgotten how lamentably
ruined, how chaotic, how decayed almost to the point of
irretrievability was the condition of the author's Actaeon office at
the time of its discovery. Wind, flood, fire, and collapse having
played their parts, the small room contained shreds and leavings of
paper and other types of material in every imaginable state of
confusion, decomposition, and disarray. What follow are those
salvaged bits and remnants that have been identified with certainty
as belonging to Fragment III but that no one has yet been able to
reassemble in their proper places within the whole.
example. In a number of cases these ........................... within single people
whom, after all, I've known for almost four decades, more than a sufficiency of time for change to occur—in dear old Professor Razor, for example, or in the once-tolerable Professor Sanctimonious, or even, god knows, in President Peng
......................................................e even greater changes, in the sort
of people hired. Before the Calamity, and even during it, when only very few yet understood what was happening, the fruits of hiring were not in point of fact so bad. Mistakes were made, of course, sometimes bad ones, which is how we ended up with Deans Glad, Happyhand, Shark, Dank, and Rattle, along with Vice Presidents Hammerhand, Happyhand, and Hammerhead, fish of a feather, one might say, though only one of these latter is with us still, grace be to
.............................................rgues them to be gifted or dim, however, Hammerhand, Happyhand, Gladhand, and Shark were nevertheless still themselves, whatever models of mediocrity they may otherwise have been. Though even the blessings of blandness came to a gradual end as Calamity matured slowly into the thinner and meaner degradations of Simplicity. After which changes came in avalanche form and we began no longer getting people at all, one might say, good, bad, or indifferent, smart or dumb, but were taken over instead by walking, talking ideas, each (an immeasurably important fact) separate from the next yet simultaneously inconsequential enough so as never to intrude upon another.
.........These, then, were the beginnings of the Age of Simplicity, when in new hirings came the likes of Dr. Race, Dr. Class, and Dr. Gender, along with Dr. Black, Dr. Gay, and Dr. Gender. The list goes on—and went on. Dr. Asian and Dr. Blue Collar appeared in offices near my own, soon followed by Drs. Ethnicity, Hispanic, and Lesbian, all brought into my own department through the influence of Dr. Socialism, himself holder of seniority beyond almost all others. After a short hiatus, more arrived, even thinner (though widening wildly to the eye) than their predecessors, among them Dr. Correct, Dr. Post-Colonial, Dr. Theory, and Dr. Third World. With a charmingly alliterative touch, there came also, soon after, the Drs. Victim, Woman, and Worker.
One can imagine how aliena
myself, how entirely unl
shared b
or
n
r example, content could there possibly have been other than that some people should be women and that some people should not; that some people should be gay and that some people should not; that some people should be Hispanic and that some people should not; that some people should be Black and that some people should not; that some people should be lesbian and that some people should not; that some people should be Asian, and that some people should not; that some people should be male, and that some peo
was it, after all, that the new people would actually think? What would they do or show—for that matter, what would they teach—in their classrooms?
.........What could they think?
.........How w
..................r example, content could there possibly have been other than that some people should be women and that some people should not; that some people should be gay and that some people should not; that some people should be Hispanic and that some people should not; that some people should be Black and that some people should not; that some people should be lesbian and that some people should not; that some people should be Asian, and that some people should not; that some people should be male, and that some peo
.........ut whatever they thought, if nothing else, whatever they thought was simple
................................thinking that was pitched even farther toward simplicity.
....................................valent degree of simplification had been apparent
.............................................Colonial and Professor Third World. But
......................................................further, for they refined away not only
...............................................................e very concept of "either-or." No
....................................................................Theory and Correct anything like
.................................................................................far to The Pure Simple that
......................................................................................allest vestiges of choice,
..........................................................................................last, or distinction
...............................................................................................from their work.
...................................................................................................thinking. No
.........................................................................................................or another.
............................................................................................................zeal of
.................................................................................................................and
.....................................................................................................................k
.........Professor Theory's simplifying achievements, however, were bypassed by those
of Professor Correct, who pushed simplification still farther. While Theory hewed with
mono-minded zeal to his own single theory, there always remained the disconcerting
possibility for him that other theories might still existin which the concept of "or" still
functioned, not having been wholly purged so as to leave, as Theory wished, only the
triumphalist thought-concept of IS TRUE.
.........With Professor Correct, even this residual element of complexity
done away with, since the professor's field of study itself, The Correct
nature possessed no capability for expression in the comparative or
The Correct was expressible in one form only: the absolute. Prof
simplified his intellect so exquisitely that he was able to thi
of one single and unmodifiable concept, namely, the con
all people be forced into correctness no matter what.
.........The sheer giftedness of this develop
.............................................came about that my good fortune in being given an
early start in my artistic and intellectual life failed to be of any importance, do me any
good, bring me happiness, or even allow me in the remainder of my days simply to go on
describing (and, yes, emulating) the wondrous, durable, breath-taking complexity,
multiplicity, and harmony of artworks throughout history and of every kind but especially
those created out of language
.........For it could not have been made any more clear that everything I had learned, beginning in 1946 when my father stood in the field with his head under a black cloth-it could not be more clear that all I learned beginning that day and that I had cherished ever afterward was anathema to the new colleagues who began flowing into Actaeon in the earliest years of The Calamity, continuing on through the terrible and crushing Age of Simplicity.34
For it could not have been made any more clear that everything I had learned, beginning
in 1946 when my father stood in the field with his head under a black cloth—it could
not be more clear that all I learned beginning that day and that I had cherished ever afterward
was anathema to the new colleagues who began flowing into Actaeon in the earliest years
of The Calamity, continuing on through the terrible and crushing Age of Simplicity.[35 RE DATING OF AGE OF SIMP]
.............................................from early in my life that what made an artwork
significant and distinctive was that as nearly as possible it hold everything in it; and,
further, that those things not in it were nevertheless a part of it, and that those things not a part of it were nevertheless in it.
......... But instead of carefully and studiously putting things inin until the artwork grew
into an object of wondrous, life-inspiring complexity, my new colleagues, born of
Calamity and raised in Simplicity, did the opposite: they took things out of the work, and
once they had begun doing so, they continued with the mono-mindedness of true zeal,
taking out more and more, simplifying and simplifying, until at last every artwork had
it only one single idea. The process went further still
few truly gifted among the Simplifiers-towe
Theory and Professor Correct, wi
process of simplification c
beyond the reach of ord
absolute simplific
ation was reac
result that n
maine
ver
a"
......... (With the consequence that the strongest among my colleagues, discovering themselves free of any ideas whatsoever other than the single, irreducible idea of their each having only one idea; so that that one idea, being invincible because unarguable, protected its holders from the effects of any empirically-based intellectual check or balance; so, again, that they grew quickly the more zealous with certitude, the more unseeing with righteousness, the more absolute with faith, and, far from least, the more unspeakably dangerous to those who few who might choose not to follow, but, unconverted, to remain instead manifold, observant, and historic in mind and heart.
......... (So that once more I have gone into hiding and have grown newly cunning in the arts of secrecy, keenly aware of the danger that lies in writing what I now am writing; knowing that whatever words I assemble in defense of myself, attempting to reveal as clearly as possible how this dread late chapter in my life could conceivably have come about; that these words, with these purposes, must be kept from the eyes and ears of the countless enemies among the theorists, simplifiers, and broadeners by whom I know myself to be surrounded in this, our new, undesired, unhappy, and dangerous age.)))))))))))
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