Bypassing Rue Decartes
Writing about myself is of no interest if, in the process, I cannot see how it is more than just words - it is an effect of choices I have made. Choices I have had many opportunities to look back on, rework when and where I wanted, or just turn my back on them. Early on I chose to separate myself from my roots, because I learned early on they were not trustworthy. But separating is not he right word. I suspect that I was always on the look for alternatives,somehow came across situations that I figured could be alternatives. And my family, looking back, presented me with a variety of alternatives, oftentimes unwittingly As I moved toward and into my teenage years I took the ones I wanted. Nothing unusual here. I was the youngest by a number of years arriving unannounced and unneeded into a clan that could have continued to do well without me. Unneeded does not mean unwanted, but I was not needed for any current family agendas. Still their well established rules required that I be decently subsidized, In looking around me I learned that that was a reality many young men around me may have hoped for but to no avail. So my stories here record how I managed to head off rather widely on my own. And that was at a time when the country was passing through one of the most prosperous in its history.
What I write here is a look back at these worlds and how humanly rich they were. If there is a common element it became my choice for vocal roles as an outsider, voices for change within the institutions on whose periphery I lived. From small town New Jersey, to Yale, to a few years in Provence and Paris to twenty years in Berkeley and towns on very privileged edge of San Francisco Bay was like some kind of extraordinary gift that seems to have allowed me to face and take real risks without calling my wanderings to a halt.
BYPASSING RUE DESCARTES
Back in 1996 I was close to completing "Demons by Definition. This was the first of four books on the open and structured ways governments and groups use language to demonize their enemies. As we know so tragically they have learned how to make it work. The Soviets and the Nazis turned it into a fine art. They used it to get rid of millions whom they succeeded in labeling as enemies of everything good. First, of course they had to sell themselves as the necessary guardians of patriotism, morality, and the social values everyone believed in. This is easy to do - once you eliminate the free press opposition voices which they did. And simultaneously, day in and day out, they began describing their own wonderful accomplishments. The store shelves might be empty and the food shortages growing, as they were in Russia, but the daily newsreels picture happy farmers in flowering wheat fields and the workers feasting in the state factories common dining rooms.
But at the same time they created and demonized enemy classes against whose well-labelled evil was presented as inherent in them. The Nazis used race to demonize. The Soviets used social class. The Soviets connected the labels to the stated goals of Soviet theory. These people weren’t seen only as traitors or enemies. They called them 'vragi' - wreckers. People out to take away from you all the benefits the system is giving you.
In Germany, and in the American South, they drew on the common belief that these enemies were lesser people. Lesser races, which meant bolstering the new idea of race as an established, scientific fact. People who clearly incapable of their own personal hygiene, and in a time when cleanliness was still next to godliness that was tough talk And in times of social upheavals they were described as the up-heavers. Not like us. Members of exploiting class. Reactionaries. Jews. Communists. The Nazis made good use of these American-founded labels, Here in the U. S. uniting the populace against publicly labelled subversives has long been a road to power, as it was in Germany.
My own work here came to the fore with the understanding that language is not some force of nature, it is a human construct.. As For me the breakthrough came in understanding how the language itself - not just words but the language itself is transformed into a means of social manipulation came in seeing how a communities traditional patriotic and religious symbols could be summed up in a word or two. Words about things so valued that they were seen not just as moral and good, but moral and good beyond any question. And it is in that 'beyond question' that the real power lies. For if we are to survive as a people there are things we all accept that have to be beyond question. They're true when we go to bed at night, and they are all still true when we get up in the morning. In Nazi Germany the Jews were not only not like us, they were lesser than us. And both dangerously, cleverly predatory as well. How people you believed were cleverer than you could also be lesser than you was explained by posters showing them to be dirty and deformed.
From there is is a short step to seeing that the demonized are not - really cannot be - a part of our good world. You did not have to prove that Blacks were not like us, not on a level with us. It was not only obvious. It was obvious beyond question. There are always public issues that are not just accepted but are also raised into being true beyond question here and now because we need them to beyond question here and now. So we associate them with places, actions, symbolic behaviors that everyone knows are right, and right beyond question. Like standing respectfully for the national anthem at public sports events. People who do not do that are just not like us. As one who suffered through two hours of freezing rain in a football stadium sixty years ago to watch Harvard beat Yale the prospect of doing anything in a stadium is dreary at best and, more often, a butt-torturing at worst.
The real genius of the Soviet and Nazi propagandists was in singling out some of their nation's broadly and often long-honored visual and verbal sacred icons and associating the regimes with their sacred standing. As spokesmen for the sacred they could draw on these viscerally grounded symbols to separate the loyal from the disloyal, the human from the less than human. As the fanaticism of Hitler and Lenin made clear these were not just stratagems. The propagandists believed them to their cores. Using ordinary speech to weave the demonizing language in with the traditional moral and religious values the people hold sacred beyond any acceptable questioning was not a difficult job. I had seen how it was done in Nazi Germany. But I had not yet lived long enough in the old Soviet Union to see how the daily propaganda and KGB enforced rhetoric were used to have their transforming effect on tens of millions of people.
I am a writer. I am an outsider. I write for myself. I was lucky enough to realize that friends whose writings have guided me also wrote for themseves. Czeslaw Milosz who lived with and then broke with the Soviet system and who had become both friend and mentor to me gave a to one of his books that translates as “Native Realm. ” From an phrase from Hegel, apparently, that “self-reflection is the native realm of intellect.” Living, like him in a Berkeley world that in those years that was awash in self-revelation with nary a moment of self-reflection, it did provide a humane escape route from our local world of right thinking. I still turn to it in moments when I believe that hours of hard work have entitled me to time all for myself.
And in Bypassing Rue Descartes he walked me beyond any theorizing about violence to the deaths that slip unnoticed under the assassins' social theories. He connected the realities I lived with to the lethal realities of self-described right minds and clean hands. Or at least relatively clean. The necessary and forward march of right minds into historical inevitability can get a bit messy. All those cracked eggs.
By then Rue Descartes, the Rue d'Assas where I pretended to study, the Rue Jacob and Boul Mich where I lived had long since become part of what was becoming my wanderer's life. My freshman year at Yale was also full of people from the provinces, from families "with customs about which no one should ever be told." I had plenty of my own, all equally well-hidden. Ironically my life overlooking San Francisco, just as it was in Vilnius, is also full of blessings and incantations, objects and actions that reveal more of lived lives than ideas ever can. So back then I wrote to him - or to Carole in more likelihood - asking for permission to quite from the poem. Carole quickly arranged everything. So it stands at the head of the book, a monument of my indebtedness to them and as an admission of how much this man from the provinces owed him by the time I completed my text. In hindsight it was an almost prophetic choice since just a few years later I ended up in Milosz's city, teaching at Vilnius University. When I told him about it his face brightened, and then 'That is my university."
At the end of the writing I had come to realize that I could not think or write about the lethal crimes I described without, where possible, walking the very soil where the crimes had taken place. I had not yet come to realize how deep is my need to see and touch the places I want to describe. I guess this man from the provinces is still necessarily provincial and still in touch with my earthy origins. Summing it up I wrote that "the mindset that produced that terror is still alive and well. It knows no time or place. .... It will we with us as long as we can dream of the wonderful things that could be, ....as long we can hope to see these wonders realized if only we could convince others to live as we dream." As I have written more than once, come up with a grand plan today and tomorrow the executioners go to work. For someone with a willing attachment of some kind to the practice of religion it is a daily caution that keeps me living alone.
But not all plans are so grand. Some are almost invisible - the way that a language is invisible. In using a language we validate the human histories and the human baggage that both produced the language and in turn further validated the self interest that set it up. In the United States I suspect that the language of racism is our most fundamental, most controlling, and most evil example. For it presupposes that there is such a thing as race, a reality built right into our genetics, our human nature. As we know there is no such thing. The word race is a recent invention of about two hundred years standing. It's geographic forbears - words like Africa, Europe, America - were conquerors' labels imposed to subordinate conquered peoples to the invading conquerors. Ironically at the start of the nineteenth century the European nations that carved up Africa did so not in the name of their supposedly common European roots but very aggressively and purposefully each in the name of their own newly-invented national identity. But an identity that could be swapped for the older common identity - European - as a genetic and culture justification offered on the altar of their common religious roots for their genetic and religious right to carve up the continent.
Writing is where I am most at home. More at home now than ever before. But it is only one place. I think I spend an equal amount of time sketching and painting, again for myself. This means many hours in an object focused world, more object focused certainly than words are. And an object focus also means color conscious. Just this afternoon I spent over an hour in an art store on University Avenue in Berkeley hunting down the right watercolors to capture the objects I want to set singly on paper. I have trekked up to the sides of abundant streams pouring the spring melt down from the Eiger and Jungfrau. With water everywhere and the days so long large clumps of lupen and indigo were poking up from under the newly warmed stones. And then, to my chagrin, I realized that back down in Wengen I did not have the bright colors I would need to capture these bright but different shades of blue. Even more I had never imagined that blues could come in so many readily discernible shades.
Writing and sketching for me are individual and fully personal. And at this time they form a new and readily accessible window into what, for lack of a better description, I refer to very as my own inner or private life. Maybe it's the other way around. In any event it feels very privileged because no one cares what I am doing, no one depends on it for anything. It does seem to be a look back at the shape of my native land. To capture, in words or colors, what the hastening unwinding of my years leads me to find there.
Here I where I am free to write for myself. And I can do it with none of our self-anointed map-makers telling me "No, the land lies like this." I am no longer embarrassed to say that I write for my own benefit. I write to find the lay of my land because writing for myself feels safe. It has taken a long time for me to get around to writing so consciously for myself. All writing is some form of self-rhetoric, the promotion of some part of ourselves. But trying to dig into the personal sources that my life-long, self-concealing rhetoric has worked so hard to make impenetrable is demanding. I have looked into the newly cracked, open ice face of a glacier - a small and accessible one admittedly, I am not that venturesome. It looked like a bluish mirror. Did I see into it or was I just looking at reflections of myself? Not having an answer to that question, and acknowledging that there is no real way to find one, means recognizing from the start that whatever my I write here are only personal opinions. Sketches, in effect, as personal as my watercolors. And thus of much less interest to the many who value didactic writing. And of course I know full well that these looks to the past are pictures of me here and now. Whatever the past was, it is gone. And it is gone beyond any recall that is not current fiction. Painting it, in color or words, is a self-portrait, a mirror of myself here and now.
In looking back at earlier writing, some going back fifty years, I am embarrassed by how hard I worked in order to make my writing sound like writing. I pulled it off, it did sound like writing and on re-reading it still does. As though I wanted it to be by me but not of me. Back in Berkeley many years ago I asked Art Quinn, a dear friend and a master writer, to go over a manuscript I had completed. He gave it back to me one morning and in frustration almost shouted "You get to the point of starting to stay something --- and you STOP." So I started to try to stop stopping. It hasn't been easy. Most of what I have written came out of years of hard work and a lot of reflection. Even so, except for witty asides it still sounds impersonal, it was as though anyone could have done it. It is ironic that I needed nastiness in order to be personal.
Here I want to tie the work and those years to some of the images in my memory, a very personal and guarded place it turns out. But which now for some reason is newly available to me. It is a large and full place and the memories are detailed because my visual sense is strong. Some of the images are comfortingly human. But only some. For going on fifty years I have partnered myself with people working to support the rights of the many - including themselves - who do not have the standing, the clout, and the access to power needed in this country to have your rights respected. Their lives are not pretty. Progressively and fortunately I have slipped from relating through my public roles - which feel restricting - to presenting myself as an advocate. It is risky but there is something about risking it all that is so fundamentally appealing. And 'risking it all' is pretentious. I was born into a support system. Still taking risks and doing it alone and by myself is the only way I know to hold on to the sense of freedom that our life can stifle. Shortly after my arrival in Vilnius, even before starting any work there, I decided to take the bus to the Latvian capital of Riga. I knew no word of the language. I knew no one there. I didn't even know where it was on the map. And I was warned about the presence of the Baltic mafia. I nearly lost my 'papers,' my credit card was copied, and I found out that Americans - let alone Lithuanians - are not that welcome. But I had no agenda and wandered into its history - from its Hanseatic roots for one of my books to - much later - trudging through the snow to the Soviet film archives outside the city for newsreels about land confiscations.
For a writer advocacy can mean a lot of editorials. But these concrete encounters joined to the fact that even I couldn't stand their pompous tone made me start looking underneath the words. The words and the sentences and the ways they were put together, no great stretch of imagination in a land built on state propaganda. I started looking into the language itself. Language is not some force of nature, like sound and color. It is made up, a human construction that we have created to serve our own purposes. Obviously this first happened ages ago. But we keep updating it, all the time. My own focus has been on how we have shaped it to create cultural and religious supports for enslaving people as forced workers and repressing dissent from people who oppose what we are doing. This is where most of my writing has gone during the last twenty years. And I did not just come upon this by accident. It came from living with people some who were marginalized into usable objects, some who were straight forward victims of enslavement. I have been working to describe some of what I have come to understand about how language is manipulated in order to marginalize people from human standing into usable objects, and make it all sound like the daily work of civilized life. They did not start out on the margins. They were not marginal by nature. They were marginalized and they were marginalized on purpose. I cite this example of marginalizing, the first that I actually experienced, because it took place in a foreign context in which I really had no personal stake.
Back in the summer of '56 I recall going by train from Marseille toward the Basque country near the Spanish border. This was during War in Algeria. I was off to spend the summer with a small group of young students from France and Spain. We were going to be staying in a lovely Basque town just a half hour up into the Pyrenees from Biarritz. In principle we were there as students, it was billed as a summer school sponsored by some university or other. What we were studying I don't remember but obviously something that sounded proper enough so that our folks would foot the bills. So every morning there were a few lectures on something or other culturally French and rational all of which I forget. But it was really a summer lark. Biarritz was so close, the Atlantic water for me so surprisingly warm, and the entire context so embracing. I still remember the hours on the beach - the Plage de Minuit it was called - the rapid blooming of affections, the bullfights in Hendaye, my first, and in the evenings when it got dark enough for fireworks, the treks to the surrounding towns for their patronal feasts. And it really was as idyllic and romantic as this all sounds.
On the train trip there was a really thin, weather-beaten Algerian seated with his son across the compartment from me. The Algerians did much of the field work in those days and he showed the toll of work under the Mediterranean sun. At some point an official opened the door, came in and asked him to show some papers, which he did. But then the official asked to the boy's papers. The man seemed surprised and then protested. "He is my son! He is with me." So the official, with a here-we-go-again look, started lecturing him on French law, then threw up his hands, made what to me seemed like dismissive comments, and left. The man then shook his head and laughed in disbelief. "Papers for your son." You didn't need them in Islamic Algeria and he was Algerian. Well, whether Algeria was French or Algerian was then being resolved very violently, heaping up more corpses and filling more prison cells every day. It had been clear to just about everyone that to make the chant Algerie Francaise into an international reality the Algerians would have to be permanently marginalized - and in what they saw as their own country. And it was no accident that there were just the three of us in the compartment. Despite the numbers of summer travelers boarding the train at each stop and looking into the compartments for any empty seats in the crowded train, they would take one look at the worn Algerian and his kid, and keep going.
Living and working with the victims of planned marginalization moved into the central place in my life in 1999 in the Baltics. It is ironic that in order to begin to grasp the extent of the systematic marginalizing here in America I had to see it at work far away, in the Soviet Union. For ten years I ended up living with the effects of the KGB's fifty-year, systematic terrorizing of the Baltics following the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Meeting with people only in the sacristy in the church since now the broken windows had been repaired against the cold winds from Belarus; using a 350 year old historic church that only four years earlier still looked like the warehouse it had been turned into; and encountering people coming for Mass who never made eye contact, never spoke to anyone, and then left always looking down and greeting no one - to have done otherwise merited arrest. In the West we knew of Cold War politics and Soviet-Nato jockeying. We knew nothing of the people. They had long since been written off by both sides. We made promises to the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians, none of which we kept. We didn't even bother talking or thinking about the Balts. Living and working with people who survived years of systematic terror and still showed its effects really reset the emotional tone of my life. And in the process separated me from what I had seen as my need to be cautious in my writing. I had to live not only among the marginalized but with people across the margins. For reasons I do not understand at all it proved not only liberating but a move into a peaceful world and a peaceful life.
The experiences were also novel and really fascinating. Going from California to the Baltics and ending up really by accident in the files of the KGB was a rare experience. It was so eye-opening that it led my partner and me to produce and distribute an hour long documentary film on their 50 year occupation. We called it "Red Terror on the Amber Coast." Successfully producing a documentary film that is good enough to be accepted for national distribution to PBS stations around the country further pulled me into this commitment to advocacy that has become a key part of who I see myself to be. How much of this just happened to me unsought, how much perhaps was some survival stratagem, how much a function of putting privilege to good use, or even decency I do not know and do not care. Writing in advocacy for the marginalized and rejected is an instinctive part of who I am.
Czarist police headquarters in Vilnius, used by the KGB for their fifty-year rule of Lithuania. Their prison was in the basement.
My earlier writing some of which was actually marked by genuine journalistic advocacy also had equal amounts of a young man's self-promotion. At least it was diverse enough to have made it into print from New York Newsday to the San Jose Mercury News and from Commonweal to the Catholic News Service. Given the privileges I have had from the start I think I saw myself more as a kind of maverick than an outsider. But fifteen years ago I did write a memoir, "The Story of an Accidental Outsider." This was a delight to write but in retrospect I see it as a misnomer because my life as an outsider was no accident. But until recently those outsides starting with my early years in Berkeley were well chosen. The old Soviet Union was different. There was no ready access to the health care I was told I needed, and I went there anyway. And I did contract pneumonia in our unheated house during the first winter which required a several month return to California to warm up. Some of my work in Vilnius was with people written off as of no significance or note. I felt at home in it.
Putting labels on yourself or others is demeaning. It trivializes all that is indescribable in the human spirit. Being often on the receiving end of bigotry and its labels I know what it is like. And for that reason alone I do not like labels. But books and articles need names. Since it seems to fit, is tame enough, and does not lead with my chin, I have chosen the name Catholic Humanist for this page. I assume that there will be no shortage of targets amid the ideas and opinions presented here. Having been fired from more than one job over the years I might feel neglected or over-the-hill were there no jabs.
