The utopias of the past are always a little sad. Jim steps into pants, pulls on a shirt, pads through his ap and looks out the front door.
Sunny day. Overhead looms the freeway, with its supporting pylons coming down in backyards or on streetcorners. Kind of a big concrete thing, squatting up there in the sky, crossing it side to side. The Foothill Freeway, in fact, extended into southern OC around the turn of the century. The land it needed to cross was by then completely covered by suburbia, and homeowners objected strenuously to having their houses bought up and torn down. The solution? Make the new freeway a viaduct, part of the elevated autopian network being built over the most congested parts of the Newport and Santa Ana freeways. Values for the homes below the flying concrete would plummet, of course, but they would still be there, right?
Now it’s a perfect place for white-collar poor folk like Jim to live, in apartmentalized old suburban homes. The cars above aren’t even that loud anymore. And the shade of the freeway can be pretty welcome on those hot summer days, as the real estate agents are quick to remind you.
Jim goes back inside, feeling blah. Hung over, confused. While he eats his cereal and milk he thinks about Arthur Bastanchury. Good old Basque name, from shepherds who came to OC when James Irvine used his land to raise sheep. Arthur still looks a little Basque: dark complexion, light eyes, square jaw. And they have a good long tradition of active resistance back home in Spain. Not to mention terrorism. Jim doesn’t want to have anything to do with terrorism. But if there’s something else that can be done—some other way… He sighs, eats his cereal, stares at his living room. His living room stares back at him.
Books everywhere. The OC historians, Friis, Meadows, Starr et al.
Volumes of poetry. Novels. Stacks and stacks, anything anywhere.
In the corner under the window, the Zen center: mat, incense, candle.
CD disks all over an old console, on a bookcase of bricks and boards.
The desk is buried in paper. The couch is tattered, bamboo and vinyl.
Paper everywhere. Newspapers, mail, scraps.
A poem is a grocery list.
We eat our culture every day.
How does it taste to you?
Oops! Someone’s forgotten to do the dishes.
No one minds a little dust, either.
“We believe that the truly staggering amounts of money and human effort (which is what money stands for, remember) that are being invested in armaments represent the greatest danger of our time,” Arthur said to Jim later on the night of their poster blitz. “Nothing that we’ve tried in the legal channels of American politics has ever slowed the military-industrial complex down. They’re the biggest power in the country, and nothing can stop them. We wanted to stay nonviolent, but it was clear we had to act, to go outside politics. The technology was available to attack the products without attacking the producers, and we decided to use it.”
“How can you be sure you won’t hurt anybody?” Jim asked uneasily. “I mean, it always starts this way, right? You don’t want to be violent, but then you get frustrated, maybe careless, and pretty soon you fall over the line into terrorism. I don’t want to have anything to do with that.”
“There’s a big difference between terrorism and sabotage,” Arthur said sharply. “We use methods that harm plastics, programs, and various composite construction materials, without endangering people. Then we select what we think are the most destabilizing weapons programs, and by God we take it to them. Maybe later I can go into more detail. But we’re patient, you see. We aren’t going to start escalating just because we don’t get results right away. It might take twenty years, forty years, and we know that. And we are absolutely committed to making sure people aren’t physically hurt. It’s vital to us, you see. If we don’t hold to that we become just another part of the war machine, a stimulus to the security police industry or whatever.”
Jim nodded, interested. It made sense.
Now, eating his breakfast, he is less certain about it all. On the poster-blitz night he told Arthur he was interested in helping, and Arthur said he would get back to him. That was what, a week ago? Two weeks? Hard to say. Would Arthur bring the matter up again? Jim doesn’t know, but he isn’t easy about it.
Upset, he decides to meditate. He sits in his Zen corner and lights a stick of incense. Preparation for zazen; empty the mind. No thoughts, just openness. Watch sunlight pierce the sweet rising smoke.
The no-thoughts part is hard, damned hard. Concentrate on breathing. In, out, in, out, in, out, yeah there he was doing it! Oops. Spoiled it. Start over. Must have gotten off five or ten seconds, though. Pretty good. Shh! Try again. In, out, in, out, in, out, wonder who the Dodgers are playing today oops, in, out, in, out, pretty smoke curl shh!, in, what’s that out there? Ah, hell. Don’t think, don’t think, okay I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking, hey look at that I’m not thinking!… Oh. Well. In? Out?
It’s useless. Jim McPherson must be the most wired Zen Buddhist in history. How can he actually stop thinking? Impossible. It doesn’t even happen in his sleep!
Well, he did it for about fifteen seconds there. Better than some mornings. He gets up, feeling depressed. Mornings are typically low for him, must be low blood sugar or the lack of the various drugs that are usually in him. But this one’s a special bummer. He’s pretty confused, pretty depressed.
Might as well go with the flow of it. Jim puts on his “Super-tragic Symphony,” a concoction of his own made up of the four saddest movements of symphonic music that he knows of. He’s recorded them in the sequence he thinks most effective. First comes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, grand and stirring in its resistance to fate, full of active grief as an opening movement should be. Second movement is the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the stately solemn tune that Bruno Walter discovered could be made into a dirge, if you ignored Beethoven’s instruction to play it allegretto and went to adagio. Heavy, solemn, moody, rhythmic.
The third movement is the third movement from Brahms’s Third Symphony, sweet and melancholy, the essence of October, all the sadness of all the autumns of all time wrapped up in a tuneful tristesse that owes its melodic structure to the previous movement from Beethoven’s Seventh. Jim likes this fact, which he discovered on his own; it makes it look like the “Supertragic Symphony” was meant to be.
Then the finale is the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, no fooling around here, all the stops pulled, time to just bawl your guts out! Despair, sorrow, grief, all of czarist Russia’s racking misery, Tchaikovsky’s personal troubles, all condensed into one final awful moan. The ultimate bummer.
What a symphony! Of course there’s a problem with the shifting key signatures, but Jim doesn’t give a damn about key signatures. Ignore them and he can gather up all of his downer feelings and sing them out, conduct them too, wandering around the ap trying feebly to clean up a bit, collapsing in chairs, crawling blackly over the floors as he waves an imaginary baton, getting lower and lower. Man, he’s low. He’s so low he’s getting high off it! And when it’s all over he feels drained. Catharsis has taken place. Everything’s a lot better.