(h) A radio repairman from Santa Fe, looking for the priest in the crowd. He has fixed the radio. The pueblo, the Corn Dance, the spectacle are old stories to him. All he wants is to find the priest, deliver the Philco, get paid, and get home in time for a cold beer or two before supper.
(i) A technician from the metallurgy lab at Los Alamos, a pale, plump, mustachioed, youngish man, native of Camden, New Jersey, employed by the Manhattan Project but also by an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Only son of not impoverished but nonetheless dreary middle-class parents living in the dreariest double-house on the dreariest street in Camden. For him, revelation broke like sunlight through the Jersey winter when he discovered Marx and read him sitting there in a public library like Marx himself, constipated and alone and exhilarated among strangers as the light broke around him. All at once, he saw how it all worked, saw the very mechanism of his sadness and therefore the means of rising above it. Above it he was and above all this, the people whom now he understood, the Indians, the tourists, even the scientist whom he knew by reputation. They, not he, were puppets worked by strings they could not see. But he knew, could see the strings and, best of all, work them himself — for the good of the Soviet Union and therefore for world peace.
(j) A tourist from Moline, Illinois, who is too busy taking pictures with his excellent Leica even to take a look for himself, whose concern is only with lighting, focus, composition; who is already casting ahead in his mind to the slide show he’ll give at Rotary, and then perhaps he’ll take time to take a look at what he recorded — or will he watch the faces of the viewers to gauge his worth from their approval, the way a joke-teller watches the face of the joke-hearer? Yet by no means is he a discontented or unworthy man, being a good husband and father, operating, as he does, a successful chain of dry cleaners in northwest Illinois and even in Davenport, enjoying not only his family but his bowling team and his Masonic lodge. He is an American Legionnaire, a decorated veteran of World War I, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, an authentic hero who risked his life to save a comrade and who has thought not much about it since.
(CHECK ONE)
Thought Experiment: Draw up an existential-semiotic self-profile or diagram indicating the self’s relation to its world (transcending? immanent? intact self among other selves?), identity of self (success or failure of self to perceive itself as a self), self’s relation to other selves (world community? elite community? loss of community?), movement of self vis-à-vis world (types of orbit, difficulties of reentry), placement of self in world as evidenced by mood and utterance.
Thus, each character can be plotted, so to speak, on a system of self-coordinates and a rough-and-ready profile of the self arrived at. Such a profile might be called an “existential semiotic graph” of the self. By means of such graphs, selves can be readily compared and contrasted in their salient features — and one’s own self more easily identified.
For example, four characters from the Taos Ten:(1) The nuclear physicistSelf’s Relation to World: Transcending.Self’s Relation to Other Selves: A restricted community of a transcending elite (scientific, political, philosophical, musical); also a modified transcendent-immanent sexual Jove-Europa community such as his relationship with blond grad student. E.g., she may not be quite fit to discuss the Bhagavad-Gita with or Planck’s equations with, but eminently fit to sleep with.Identity of Self: A high degree of correspondence between self’s habitual mode of existence as transcending self and actual here-and-now life, e.g., scientific project at secret mountain installation, small elite community set down in an immanent world — pueblo, Indians, Corn Dance, tourists, priests — of which he is the onlooker.Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Traveling, orbiting, wandering; for a transcending self, one place is as good as any other place to the degree that it provides the immanent raw materials (climate, plutonium, Indians, girls, indigenous culture — Pueblo or Roman Catholic) by means of which the self can both arrive at scientific principles and satisfy its own immanent needs.Placement (Mood) of Self: Overtly apocalyptic, covertly exultant. Covert exultation accruing from temporary appropriation of godhead by transcending self, e.g., “I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds,” “We have known sin,” etc.(2) The radio repairmanSelf’s Relation to World: Immanent, with intact elements.Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Concentric social communities — family, business, social, marketplace, church (Presbyterian), politics (Republican), American.Identity of Self: Unreflective, consumer-oriented, partly specified by being against them (Hispanics, Indians, Catholics), but also against those, the transcenders (scientists, Communists, professors, liberals); yet also to a degree specified as intact self by religious transcendence, i.e., he would say if asked that he believed in God, that he was not God but a son and creature of God, that other men were also sons and therefore his brothers.Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Placed in a place, once Texas, now Santa Fe, New Mexico, but not placed like the old Pueblo Indian at the center and navel of the Cosmos. Mood of placement: often aggrieved and frustrated, but also exhibiting a core geniality, reliability, and goodwilclass="underline" “How you doin', son? Well, all right. You lookin’ good. Let me give you a hand with that.” Etc.(3) The divorcée from WestchesterSelf’s Relation to World: Problematical, with elements of transcendence and immanence. She has left what she conceives as an immanent world of a failed marriage and the boredom of housewifery and is seeking a new world with some vaguely transcending components such as “art.”Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Loss of old community; isolated, but with prospects of new community. She envisions both immanent and transcendent relationships, sexual adventures perhaps, but, more important, a meeting of minds with a certain person on such things as reading, ideas, and a co-savoring of local immanent features, e.g., the Corn Dance. Further, she has begun an expensive collection of primitive kachina dolls and regularly visits all festivals at the pueblos. She has also registered for a course in flamenco guitar.Identity of Self: Tentative and problematic. Her own perception of herself is subject to others’ perception of her. For example, at this very moment at the Corn Dance she is aware that the scientist and his friend have noticed her, and so she is acutely conscious of not appearing to them either as tourist or as local dried-up leather-skinned dykeish Anglo. So she’s dressed casually in jeans (long before the current craze) and Eastern blouse. Her silver-and-turquoise jewelry is old, heavy, and oxidized and not the new tourist junk. Even her mien, her way of looking at the dancers, is both casual and calculated: I’ve seen this before, true, and some of it is hokey and put on for the tourists, but still it’s a fascinating spectacle, isn’t it?Movement of Self vis-à-vis the World: Exilic. She’s left her old home for good, glad to do it, and newly arrived at her new home, where she’ll stay. She’s begun her new life but has not yet quite achieved total reentry into her new world.(4) The Catholic priestSelf’s Relation to World: Specified by relation to God, i.e., self, world, and other selves seen as created by God; selves in the world yet capable of transcending world through love of other selves and of God. Yet this relation has for him grown perfunctory and quotidian over the years, giving ground to loneliness, dislike and fear of bishop, and consumership, e.g., Lux Radio Theater, Brooklyn Dodgers, a nip or two or three of Bushmills before supper. A humble and mediocre man, he is actually a better priest than he knows, a soft touch for beggars and drunks, and dutiful in the discharge of his priestly obligation.Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Good-natured and dutiful, with tendencies to accept both the deferences accorded his social role as priest and the ambiguities of his priesthood as perceived by the Indians who accept him — and the kachinas of the West — with varying admixtures of indifference, belief, and unbelief.Identity of Self: Intact and secure in its relation to God, yet hardly afire with love of God and fellow man. Secure also in his identity as a member of a special class of selves, i.e., the priesthood, with its promised reward in heaven, yet aware too of his failings and accordingly staking a great deal on the mercy of God. Differs from transcending community of scientists and artists in his recognition of his own creatureliness and limitations. His major semiotic self-deception is his acquiescence in the sign and role with which the world invests him, that of a priest with attendant mien and costume rather than the signified, a man who has a vocation and acts accordingly.Movement of Self vis-à-vis World: Ambiguously at home; that is to say, he is at home in his homelessness in that he would assent to the proposition that, like all men, he is a pilgrim and wayfarer not at home in this world and bound for his true home elsewhere; but he is also at home in the worldly sense of being at home, e.g., like the radio repairman, he enjoys the comfort of his rectory, his good Indian cook, the companionship of two good friends, three Bushmills before supper, and above all the prospect of a Dodger-Yankee World Series. Though he accepts his identity as pilgrim, wayfarer, priest, and servant of God, he dreads the likelihood of being assigned to the Hopi reservation, the true boondocks.