Angle of Repose (75 page)

“Ugh,” Oliver said, unmoving.

Half uncovered, she lay on her back. The night air moving sluggishly from the window tightened her damp skin. She tried to speak casually, and heard how badly she failed–what a bright falseness was in her voice. “How did you know he’d been here?”

“He left his gloves on the railing.”

He reared up and leaned and found her cheek with his lips. She did not turn her head, or respond. Quietly he lay back.

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Her cheek burned as if he had kissed her with sulphuric on his lips.

For several weeks now I have had the sense of something about to come to an end–that old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air. But different now. Then, during prep school and college, and even afterward when teaching tied my life to the known patterns of the school year, there was both regret and anticipation in it. Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer. But now it is not an ending and a beginning I can look forward to, but only an ending; and I feel that change in the air without exhilaration, with only a heaviness and unwillingness of spirit. With a little effort I could get profoundly depressed.

Part of my uneasiness comes as a direct result of living my grandmother’s life for her. For the last few days I have been studying the Xeroxed newspaper stories that finally arrived from the Idaho Historical Society, and though they do straighten out for me some facts that I have never until now understood, they also raise some questions that are disturbing. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

But another part of what obscurely bothers me is the probability that Shelly will be leaving very soon, with consequences to me and to my routines that I can only contemplate with anxiety. And yet there is a sort of comic relief in Shelly, too. One result of throwing away all the maps of human experience and the guides to conduct that a tradition offers, and flying by the seat of your moral or social pants, is that you fly into situations that are absurd or pitiful, depending on how indulgently one looks at them. My own indulgence is wildly variable. Witness this afternoon.

Through most of the summer Shelly has worked seven days a week, the way I like to work, but the last two weekends she has taken off. I supposed she was getting organized to go back to college, but Ada tells me she has been seeing Rasmussen. “She don’t tell me, but I know. Ed saw him over in Nevada City last week, purple pants and all. Honest to John, what she sees in that . . . What’s he hanging around for? What’s he want?”

“Maybe he’s really fond of her.”

But that only got a glare from Ada. She doesn’t
want
him to be fond of her.

Nevertheless, neither Ada nor I should expect a girl of twenty to sit in this quiet place very long, working seven days a week for the Hermit of Zodiac Cottage. For reasons best known to herself, she chose to cut away from the Berkeley scene and rusticate herself here. But here she is a stranger to everybody she used to know, including her old schoolmates. They have nothing to offer her, she has nothing to give them except an occasion for a lot of lurid gossip. Probably she
was
the brightest student in Nevada City High, as Ada resentfully says. Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything–though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.

Anyway, this afternoon when I was sitting on the porch after lunch she came in and without a word, with only a prying, challenging sort of look, puckering up her mouth into a rosebud, handed me a sheet of paper. It was mimeographed on both sides, with stick figures and drawings of flowers scattered down its margins–a sheet that might have announced the Memorial Day picnic-and-cleanup of some neighborhood improvement association. I’ve got it here. It says me, moodily running a rubber band through her front teeth like dental floss. She said nothing, so I turned the sheet over. On the back were three quotations:

The practice of meditation, for which one needs only the ground beneath one’s feet, wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities. The belief in a serene and generous fulfillment of natural desires destroys ideologies which blind, maim, and repress–and points the way to a kind of community which would amaze ‘moralists’ and eliminate armies of men who are fighters because they cannot be lovers.

The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious, through meditation. In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit Communist economy, less industry, far less population, and lots more national parks.

GARY SNYDER

 

Let these be encouraged: Gnostics, hip Marxists, Teilhard de Chardin Catholics, Taoists, Biologists, Witches, Yogins, Bhikkus, Quakers, Sufis, Tibetans, Zens, Shamans, Bushmen, American Indians, Polynesians, Anarchists, Alchemists . . . All primitive cultures, all communal and ashram movements . . . Ultimately cities will exist only as joyous tribal gatherings and fairs.

BERKELEY ECOLOGY CENTRE

 

I passed the sheet back.

“Keep it,” Shelly said. “I’ve got more. What do you think?”

“I like the part about the home-grown vegetables.”

“Come on!”

“What do you want me to say? OM?”

“Whether it makes
sense
or not.”

“It’s got plenty of historical precedents.”

“What do you mean?”

“Plato,” I said. “In his fashion. Sir Thomas More, in his way. Coleridge, Melville, Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, in their ways. Brook Farm and all the other Fourierist phalansteries. New Harmony, whether under the Rappites or the Owenites. The Icarians. Amana. Homestead. The Mennonites. The Amish. The Hutterites. The Shakers. The United Order of Zion. The Oneida Colony. Especially the Oneida Colony.”

“You don’t think there’s anything in it.”

“I didn’t say that. I said it had a lot of historical precedents.”

“But it makes you smile.”

“That was a grimace,” I said. “A historical rictus. One aspect of the precedents is that the natural tribal societies are so commonly superstition-ridden, ritual-bound, and warlike, and the utopian ones always fail. Where’d you get this?”

“It was handed to me.”

“By whom? Your husband?”

“So to speak.” She scowled at me, pulling her lower lip.

“Are you being asked to bring what you have to this joyous tribal gathering?”

Letting go of her lip, she smiled with a look of superiority and penetration, as if she understood my captious skepticism and made allowances for it. “I didn’t say.” But then the smile faded into a discontented pucker, and she burst out, “If something’s wrong with it, tell me what. I’ve been trying to make up my mind if anything is. It’s idealistic, it’s for love and gentleness, it’s close to nature, it hurts nobody, it’s voluntary. I can’t see anything wrong with any of that.”

“Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.”

“That sounds pretty cynical.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to corrupt you with my cynicism,” I said, and shut up.

But she kept after me; she was serious.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you why I’m dubious. These will be young people in this garden commune, I assume. That means they’ll be stoned half the time–one of the things you can grow in gardens is
Cannabis.
That won’t go down well with the neighbors. Neither will free-form marriage or the natural-credit Communist economy. They’ll be visited by the cops every week. They’ll be lucky if the American Legion doesn’t burn them out, or sic the dog catcher on their wild life children.”

“None of that has anything to do with
them.
It only has to do with people outside.”

“Sure,” I said, “but those people aren’t going to go away. If they won’t leave the colony alone I’ll give it six months. If it isn’t molested it might last a year or two. By that time half the people will have drifted away in search of bigger kicks, and the rest will be quarreling about some communal woman, or who got the worst corner of the garden patch, or who ate up all the sweet corn. Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. And women may be equal to men, but they aren’t equal in attractiveness any more than men are. Affections have a way of fixing on individuals, which breeds jealousy, which breeds possessiveness, which breeds bad feeling. Q.E.D.”

“You’re judging by past history.”

“All history is past history.”

“All right.
Touché.
But it doesn’t have to repeat itself.”

“Doesn’t it?”

She sat regarding me in a troubled way, puckering up her mouth and making fishlike,
pup-pup-pupping
noises with it. “I don’t see why you’re
opposed,”
she said. “It’s one thing to think it’s sure to fail, but you sound as if you thought it was
wrong.
I suppose you think it’s lunatic fringe, but why? You can’t think the society we’ve got is so hot. I
know
you don’t. Haven’t you sort of copped out yourself? What’s this but a rural commune, only you own it and hire the Hawkes family to run it for you?”

“Do you resent that?” I said.

“What? No. No, of course not. I was just asking something. Take marriage, say. Is that such a success story? Why not try a new way? Or look at your grandfather. Is this manifesto so different from the come-on he wrote for the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, except that he was doing it for profit? He was trying something that was pretty sure to fail, wasn’t he? Maybe it wasn’t even sound, maybe that sagebrush desert might better have been left in sagebrush, isn’t that what you think? All that big dream of his was dubious ecology, and sort of greedy when you look at it, just another piece of American continent-busting. But you admire your grandfather more than anybody, even though the civilization he was trying to build was this cruddy one we’ve got. Here’s a bunch of people willing to put their lives on the line to try to make a better one. Why put them down?”