Maynard did a Newsweek My Turn ("Searching for Sages"), said every college boy she knew had a trucker story about a driver who picked him up hitchhiking and spoke truth.  Visiting Boston some months later, I drove to Yale, found she was home in New Hampshire, drove there, called, stopped in and showed her my trucker story.  I was looking for readers and she was put off so I left, readerless but pleased.

In the fall of '69 as a college senior I had a column in the student paper called "Protection for Pepperland."  The first Mobe (of three--highly organized nationwide demonstrations, in October, November and December) was on October fifteenth and in Minneapolis we marched from the U of M campus several miles west to the federal building downtown, the broad avenue blocked off and filled, the first of us there before the last left--thousands upon thousands.  On Berryman's bridge (the poet jumped) over the Mississippi my fiancé lost a contact, felt it pop and said so so I stopped, spread my arms and heard a murmur "contact" run around as I stooped, picked it up and we moved on.  As if by magic, all of it, but the flaw in the golden bowl, the fact that this ceremony of innocence too would be drowned was already apparent.

Pepperland that Friday:

The truck driver saw my thumb and picked me up.  He surprised me by turning the conversation almost immediately from his "brand new rig" to student dissent, black rage, big government, Vietnam and the thousand other ills that the sixties have given birth to.  He talked sanely, with no noticeable prejudices, and after he had bemoaned the fact that everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams, he told me that "whoever planned this world, millions of years back, did a fabulous job of it, because it's all gonna fall apart at the same time, and there's gonna be nothing left over--no spare parts."

The new Newsweek has a feature on the middle class, the silent majority that is now speaking out, demanding a hearing.  That majority and its pronouncements do not make sense--they smack of "I believe this out of a desperate need to believe something.  Take this away and I drown."  The article is a frightening and bewildering guide to where we are right now.

"Alice's Restaurant" is a beautiful movie.  It pinpoints precisely the plight of the beautiful people--especially by the fact that it is a movie without an ending.  Alice and Ray are left with an empty church, and the dream which had come true for a while is again unpeopled; the kids have moved on.  There is no ending because there is no answer, just sincere questions and no, that is not enough--but it is all there is.

The Bibleand Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland, appropriately pulled out of context and twisted, can be made to say something about almost anything.  This time Alice:

" . . . but answer came there none,
And this was scarcely odd, because
Theyíd eaten every one."

The Walrus and the Carpenter had eaten all the oysters, but we have eaten all the answers, and now the logical conclusion of practically everything seems to be that there is a logical conclusion to absolutely nothing.

I'd like to use this column for the rest of the year (or however long it takes) to try to evolve an answer.  If I come up with anything, it will only be a new perspective, but I need that, and maybe you do, too.

I'd like to use some lines from e.e. cummings as a springboard:

"King Christ, the world is all aleak,
and life preservers there are none
and waves which only He may walk
who dares to call Himself a man."

"Who dares to call himself a man."

I think I'll go type up a list of questions
for Perceval to ask the fisher king.

What would detachment involve and how would sheer numbers better the chances?  Higher consciousness appear and spread?  Not likely.  If advance is everhigher exodus and sufficiency is to be communicable it must come reasonably in answers finally to ageold questions and the consummation devoutly to be wished here is that someone will draw inferences from the shared experience to the heart of the matter.  Something on the screen behind the scenes or between the lines could be overlooked.

I got my assignment at seventeen in '66.  I graduated in June, turned eighteen and left for college in August but first to get a jump on an English major took freshman comp in summer school, seven a.m. Monday through Friday and the prof hated it.  Marberry was young and leaned left in the department where my father leaned right and I was duly warned:  plays bridge all night, showers with his wife and actually recommended Naked Lunchto a female student, a sophomore no less; ". . . but I have to admit that he knows good writing when he sees it."

Living up to his billing Marberry one day set out to disinhibit obscenity not abstract but down to cases:  why can't you? and why shouldn't I? why don't we all say "fuck" in mixed company?  Discomfited us I must say and from this vantage point we cannot easily realize what a college freshman was in '66.  I had a lazy hazy Eisenhower boyhood.

We wrote a theme a week for six weeks, the first a response to a Tolstoy essay called "What is Art?"  I called mine "No it's not, Leo."  From ours and the eight o'clock class there were sixty papers.  Marberry gave me the only A and read the paper to both classes, said he liked its utter gall, which I guess callow didn't preclude.

I got five A's and the last theme was the big one:  what does it mean to be human?  After collecting the papers Marberry proposed a test of the premise that writing is holistic rather than cumulative, sequential--at a level rather than in bits strung together, and that this is evident at a glance ("You don't need to eat a whole apple to know it's rotten").  He went through all the papers, read a sentence or two, gave a grade and went on to the next, said we'd recognize it and remember what he had said but no one else would and he couldn't even if he tried and he would in fact grade the papers but thought that nearly every time his first impression would have been right.  When he got to mine he read the first paragraph, looked puzzled and said, "It's either an A or an F."  I smiled but when I got it back it said, "F--See me."

Marberry said he didn't think he could explain it but if I kept the paper several years and reread it I'd know what he meant that I had started off on the wrong foot, and meanwhile could start over, write another paper.  I did and got an A.  Thanks, John.  I kept it but in the fall of '69 my lady proved pregnant and at the Baptist college where I'd spent the sixties fighting the good fight this kicked me out.  Home was cold shoulders and my only thought was an aunt in Van Nuys, neighbor to Hollywood, so we dumped everything that didn't fit in my '62 Ford.  My aunt talked my father into tolerance if not solicitude and I was enrolled at the hometown university in January, but the Marberry papers were gone with all the others.

Years later I figured I might want something I'd written early and went back to the newspaper office for the issues I'd played a part in, especially the columns.  As luck would have it, the one after the trucker story saves the thesis of my freshman second attempt:

On the third (and far from the largest) planet in a small solar system in a minor galaxy nowhere near the center of the universe, there is intelligent life.  As far as we know, there is no life anywhere else.  We believe that a God big enough to contain the universe put that life on this planet and called the highest form of that life "man."  He created billions of stars and saved man for the sixth day.  David asked that God, "When I look at Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?"

It seems to me ultimately crucial that God, faced with the possibility of creating an entire universe from absolutely nothing, chose as the culmination of that creation man; that God, with an infinite number of possibilities before Him and no pattern at all to guide Him, gave His most complex creature that particular set of qualities we call "being human."

So there must be something extremely valuable about being human, something we should celebrate, something we should make every attempt to perfect.  The faults which separate us from angels are far less important than the virtues which separate us from, say, rocking chairs.  But what does it mean to "be human?"  What makes the experience worthwhile?  What is there about human beings which makes them the focus of God's universe?  From here on:  an attempt to define "the human."

First part of the attempt:  when we moved to Platteville, Wisconsin, just before my senior year in high school I met a girl who would be, before she graduated, homecoming queen, prom queen, girls' state representative, honor student, star in the class play and everyone's favorite babysitter.  I soon came closer to loving her than I had come to loving anyone else, but it wasn't her glory that brought me tumbling.

One night at play practice the director got on her back about something, and kept it up until she ran off the stage crying.  Right then, for the first time, I felt really close to her.  Just when she was embarrassed to have anyone see her, I saw her as beautiful.  And something about the way weakness functioned at that moment has a great deal to do with "being human."

She went on to tell how her news editor, moving from a music major to political science, needed an okay from Dr. Robert Berglund (known to the irreverent as "Dr. God"), "who, coincidentally, wanted to interview her."  He said the paper was pisspoor and "also mentioned that Chuck Myrbo was not qualified to be fine arts editor since he did not have the appropriate cultural perspective.  It was his conviction that Myrbo emphasized 'pop music' too strongly and was not upgrading the low cultural level of the Bethel community."

In response to male condescension more than anything else, I think, the editor made the music department the issue.  She wondered if we weren't "sending the dead weight of the campus to publicly represent us" and concluded that "the music department should update itself in student affairs or the community should begin utilizing in public relations its other fertile resources such as art, drama, athletics, student communications and government."  The news editor, similarly fired up and so lately a music major herself, reviewed a concert by the Minneapolis Orchestra, her credentials implicit--"aleatoric technique (the strings start on a chord and then glissando upward or downward so you feel like you're being stretched."

And she took most of the opposite page for an article tagged "Pop goes the music" and headed "Christ, you know it ain't easy":  "The current generation of kids--and some members of the older generation--simply will not listen to 'traditional church music.'  They find the current musical forms more involving, meaningful and aesthetically pleasing than the forms that the institutional church is currently using.  Although this fact may be anathema to traditional church musicians, it is nonetheless a fact."

I don't think I upheld any policies or tried to antagonize anyone.  I thought it was a student paper and I guess I took the bill of rights for granted.  I was apolitical, student teaching and in love and there were the war and the music.  As for the majority of the students, when I submitted the next Pepperland in a writing class where we critiqued each other's stuff, the guy who got it said "This doesn't mean anything.  It makes no sense."  It was the weird year and I can't bring much of it to mind but I know I'd been writing three things on desks:  why don't I care? the Grand Inquisitor was right, and Big Nurse killed Billy Bibbit.  I was there but I wasn't.

I'm being disingenuous maybe:  during my junior year, the dean of students told me, he'd gotten nine notes from the president passing on protests from what the dean of admissions had called our "unusually loyal constituency" and wondering why something wasn't being done.  It hadn't been and wasn't then because I was clean, didn't drink smoke dance or anything else fundies need not to do and my grades were ok.  I just wrote, no crime but the paper went all over the conference of churches funding the school, so they were fighting words.

Reviewing a Doors concert was pushing it and breaking the movie ban by doing Zeffirelli's Romeo and Julietwas verily strategic but the last straw, the allschool banquet I programmed and emceed at the end of my junior year when professor's wives walked out crying and girls passed petitions around the dorm afterward saying moreorless "we don't care what President Lundquist does to Chuck Myrbo," that wasn't my fault.  I'd submitted the entire script for approval, no surprises, a fact that later stood me in good stead, but I'd heard a freshman jug band thumping in the dorm and put them on.

They made two albums later and I haven't yet seen a band thrill a crowd the way they did routinely but so far they hadn't performed and were scared shitless.  For four jugfolk cottonfields down by the riverside numbers no problem but without stopping (as they hadn't yet) to say a word they went into "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" in pure jug and I was suddenly Samson.  I felt the Holiday Inn roof fall but the show went on and when real soon everyone knew the band had done "What a Friend" in good faith, the furor found me and remembered sketches flirting with what fundies call "the world" and we call the real one, and a particularly damning blackout to a spotlight on a row of four folding chairs facing the audience, a couple sitting and another approaching to ask, "Are those seats saved?" "No, but they're under conviction."

All but unpardonable, so I had it coming but that's a long story and I was back in the fall.  I digressed to introduce the term "fundy" short for "fundamentalist," too handy to be denied to the public another month of Jimntammy (to the tune of "Little David":  little dough goy, play on our hearts, all that loot, all that loot, little dough goy, play on our hearts, all that loot"), Oral Roberts, his kid Anal and all the rest.  At Bethel "fundies" was casual, matteroffact, without rancor or quotation marks.  It was what they all were despite the dizzying denominational array (fundies are just what my mother called "fighty"), a demographic profile par excellence caught in a riddle:  Why don't fundies fuck standing up? because it could lead to dancing.

The affliction is biophobia (more about which soon) and the gospel a godsend for keeping victims off the streets to which the sixties nonetheless took it and the Bethel bitter battle was the same one on skewed turf.  It had me reaching beyond my grasp else what's a heaven for? so its scathing critique notwithstanding Iíll enclose the October thirty-first Pepperland:

I saw "A Thousand Clowns" again last summer.  I fell in love with the girl again, and I was just as impressed with Murray Burns.  Scene:  the abandoned Chinese restaurant under Murray's apartment in the Bronx.  Enter Murray and his brother.  Murray is trying to explain why he walked out on several job interviews that morning.

He speaks:  "One day several months ago I was riding the commuter train home from work, and for a few minutes I couldn't be sure, without really concentrating, what day it was.  It could have been a Monday, or a Tuesday, or a Thursday."  As he mentions each day there are scenes of a crowded New York sidewalk.  He speaks again:  "I gotta know what day it is."

For several weeks during June the Midway National Bank had on its neon bulletin board (which dominates the Snelling/University intersection) a slogan designed to make Twin Citians better people:

One weekend we went to a cabin on the St. Croix to help the owner clear the brush off his beach.  His son Geno, age five, played at helping us for a while, and then lay down on a lounge chair, closed his eyes and said, "This is living."

Murray Burns in the Chinese restaurant made me think that Geno O'Brien is at five years old ready to write material for the Midway National Bank, and that my twenty years had brought me to the door of that same Chinese restaurant-- with a bad taste in my mouth from a big bank and a little boy.

The music department insisted rock and roll was the issue and did bring in a reformed rocker who insulted everyone's intelligence:  "Rock music is the heartbeat of hell in these last days to gain control over young lives . . .  If you like rock music, you're not right with God."  He may have spoken for many in the audience but he was very paranoid and heard someone tapping to irritate him ("OK, whoever it is you can stop your snapping and leave right now."  Someone told him the heat pipes coughed and from then on he was pathetic.  The sports column said anyone who missed it missed out, "the only speaker in Bethel College history to be put down by radiator noises."  A student wrote that it "was hard to believe that anyone who dislikes hard rock as much as I do could come out of a meeting defending it to the hilt."  The news editor raked the exrocker over the coals and Pepperland read:

From the Daily Calendar, November 8, 1969:

Bethel Community

In the interests of clarification of policies that have been taken as a consensus of the campus community, and that now need to be explicitly stated and critically examined, the Student Services Office publicizes as its current operating principle:

that recreational dancing is viewed as detrimental to the psychic and spiritual health of the community and is forbidden as a form of campus and/or Bethel-directed activity.

Student Services Office

From a book by Piet Hein called Grooks:

CIRCUMSCRIPTURE

As Pastor X steps out of bed
he slips a neat disguise on:
that halo round his priestly head
is really his horizon.

Given that hard rock has a potentially dangerous power over the biology and psychology of American youth.  Given that this power is often used dangerously.  That it is nowhere near as dangerous as Mr. Larson claims it is I am prepared to argue but that would take the kind of time (and opportunity to choose appropriate facts) that Larson had, so I won't do it here.  Find me on campus sometime and I'll talk to you--unemotionally.

But one thing I will say now.  Larson's main point was that the effect of rock music, because it is unconscious and above our poor power to resist, is evil and must be fought.  He stretched his case completely beyond the limits of logic and his evidence, but he was right that some rock musicians use their power dishonestly and immorally.

So you can talk about the psychological and biological effects of hard rock.  But you can also talk about the psychological and biological effects of a persuasive speaker, about the emotive power of words, about the overpowering effect of a barrage of well-chosen illustrations, and the even greater power that the evocation of the Holy Spirit as the guiding force in a meeting can have over the emotions of an audience.

Tent meeting evangelists since Jonathan Edwards have used their persuasive power to pull tears from audiences and to pull audiences to altars.  They have used that power dishonestly and immorally.  Adolph Hitler used the same methods to make a whole country watch while he killed six million Jews.  The means were the same--and the fact that the ends were different in no way justified those means.

The music Larson played was, neither in volume nor in quality, representative of rock.  His logic was faulty.  And he used the same type of power to sway an audience that he condemned in rock musicians.  So I still say, with Chuck Berry (grandfather of rock), that "it's gotta be rock 'n' roll music."  And I'll still keep the Beatles at the top of my column.

Pepperland December 5:

The following are excerpts from Life, Time, Newsweek and the Minneapolis Tribune, relating to two murders which shocked the American people.  The first took place in Chicago during July of 1966 and was on the front pages of every paper in the country only hours later; it will be referred to as "Speck."  The second took place in Mylai, Vietnam, during July of 1968 and didn't hit the papers until twenty-two months later; it will be referred to as "Mylai."  The first must have been by far the bigger crime.
 

Speck: In an incredible, nearly soundless orgy of mutilation and murder that took place in the early morning hours, a single male intruder herded together and murdered, with packinghouse precision, eight pretty student nurses.
Mylai: The army Monday ordered a lieutenant court-martialed on charges of the premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese, including a 2-year-old child, in the alleged massacre at Song My village.
 

Speck: "In my six years as coroner, and in many years as police surgeon, I have never seen anything as bad.  This is the crime of the century."
Mylai: "The people who ordered it probably didn't think it would look so bad," says Sgt. Michael A. Bernhardt.
 

Speck: . . . a heart-rending, stomach-turning spectacle.
Mylai: The South Vietnamese government, which has conducted its own investigation, says that Mylai was "an act of war."
 

Speck: . . . savagely killed their eight friends.
Mylai: "So I might have killed 10 or 15 of them."
 

Speck: How can any man give himself over to such an exercise in savagery as the calm and methodical murder of eight other human beings?
Mylai: In one major accusation, Calley is accused of killing "an unknown number of Oriental human beings, not less than 70, by means of shooting them with a rifle."
 

Speck: . . . poignancy was accentuated by the youth and decency of the victims.
Mylai: "This really tiny little kid--he only had a shirt on, nothing else--he came over to the pile and held the hand of one of the dead.  One of the GI's behind me dropped into a kneeling position, 30 meters from the kid, and killed him with a single shot."
 

Speck: . . . grisly dimensions of the massacre.
Mylai:  Medina got back on the horn and said, "I have a body count of 310."
 

Speck: What obscene signals drove his brute hands?
Mylai: "It was a ditch.  And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them, so altogether we pushed them all (80 or so) off, and just started using automatics on them.  Men, women and children.  And babies."
 

Speck: . . . by any standard, it was one of the most horrifying crimes in US history.
Mylai: Says the company's Corporal William Kern, "I can't figure out why everybody is so upset.  Especially Ridenhour, who wasn't even there.  How can it bother you if you're not even there?"
 

Speck:  Above all, why?

The incident at Mylai was a "war atrocity" and that implies that there is something that happens in war that is not atrocious.  My draft lottery number is 291, so I am safe.  If my birthday had been the first one drawn, I would have worn that number ONE proudly, and it would not have been a bit more likely that I would ever serve in the armed forces of these United States.

Over semester break I married and moved, then took the credits I needed to graduate by transferring them back to Bethel, permission for which was hard come by and on condition that I stay away.  So there was a note by my name in the program after all, one I'd've picked. Magna cum laudemight've been nice, but in absentiahad a real ring.  Meanwhile the Beatles broke up (my sister had a friend with a band who dedicated a dance that night to the fabs:  "The second stage of my life started when the Beatles hit.  The third begins tonight."),  "Let it be" came out and my daughter was born on May first, between Cambodia and Kent State.  The sixties ended cinematically enough:  once when I went to the hospital the arm loaded with plum blossoms was banded black.

I'd lost student teaching and certification in the shuffle so I went (why not?) to grad school to get a master's in teaching in English, did it typically with assistantships, diapers and food service jobs.  In the fall of seventy-one I took American lit/the twenties, an immersion in the decade, something substantial by everyone and the historical, cultural context.  Suddenly the sixties I'd seen and this I was seeing shifted into place as two manifestations of one process, lightning striking in the same configuration twice.  Enter teleology.

I couldn't put a compelling case on paper and would've needed years to lay out a weak one but in subtle ways I knew that history was repeating itself and that the second scenario would end like the other in a bust.  The first problem is that history as we moderns view it shouldn't happen this way once, much less twice, ought to meander in random statistical demographic sequences, not the literary one apparent here.  Both the twenties and their aftermath and the present, given a collapse, are morality plays of the highest order.  That they are one and the same suggests much not dreamt of in our philosophies.

At the same time it seemed I had realized that another collapse would be terminal and I was horrified but (can't remember why) I read in Revelationabout the fall of Babylon.  I'm a born naturalist raised Baptist with a literary bent and it seems to me that contrary to popular belief the Bibleisn't replete with nonsense, that Shakespeare makes a better bible than the Bibleand vice versa:  that as a field for literary criticism the biblical text is coherent sui generis. In any case I know a fit when I feel one and the collapse I'd seen coming so exquisitely matched that in the apocalypse that the ancient text can only be a description.  Again, this would have taken too long to prove.  I decided to take it to be true and find out why.

Despite years of what Newton called "donkeywork" ahead at this point the game was won.  The nexus was an entirely natural outcome which could also be seen in its entirety as divinely ordained.  This meant the apparent contradictions between theism and naturalism could be resolved and that however keen sight it took to see it, there was evil enough here to justify a sudden demise.