A Journal: February 1979

TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY. In Malibu this morning running down a geology report. The sky was full of sunshine and thick white clouds. Turned up Malibu Canyon and climbed swiftly up the grade. Ahead and below I could see fragments of black clouds blowing through the canyon from the East toward the sea. In the bottom of the canyon the creek was foaming and muddy. In a couple minutes the sky grew dark and suddenly I had to close the window and turn the heater on my feet.

I drove through the tunnel and down into the little valley. North of the road the rolling hills were covered with thick green pasture where cattle grazed mindlessly. Black clouds blew toward the sea, tearing through the oak trees on the ridgelines. A golden palomino mare lay down in the wet pasture. As I whizzed by I expected to see her roll over and scratch her back but she lay there on her belly nibbling at the young oats. Suddenly I was inside a thick fog bank, everything closed down, and I was in a different world.

Just as suddenly I shot out of it and the blue sky appeared and the sun shone down brilliantly. A couple surfers, their boards fixed to the top of their Volkswagen, had followed me closely through the canyon. I slowed down to turn into the water district office and they honked their horn. I half expected them to. I hadn't appreciated how closely they had been following me. I put my arm out the window and gave them the finger. The boy in the passenger seat replied in turn. I saw by the expression on his face that he was annoyed. Parking, I wondered what had made me do that. It had been wrong.

Driving North on the Ventura Freeway. Heavy black clouds and white clouds and little patches of deep blue sky, the wind blowing softly. Ahead in the distance the clouds parted to reveal a sky that was pale and tinted strongly with a grayish green. Canelletto did some of his skies with a similar dark gray green. I never particularly cared for it.

My thoughts wandered off onto the news reports of the lettuce strike down in the Imperial Valley. It occurred to me to go down and see for myself what's going on there. Not to do news, but just to keep the diary, see what comes of it. But to what point? I asked myself. I don't want to use the situation for my own entertainment. I don't want to use a conflict between real persons merely for my own amusement. I don't want to live the life of a reporter.

Took care of some business with our geologist, then stopped in Thousand Oaks for breakfast and to read the papers. I ate, finished the paper where there were lots of interesting, even exciting stories, paid the bill and stepped outside. I couldn't figure out where I was. I didn't recognize the shopping mall or the street that ran past it. I tried to remember the reason for my being where I was but I couldn't. I couldn't recall if I had walked to where I was or had driven, or what I was supposed to do next. I was utterly lost and confused. I felt as if I were empty, as if I had no connections to the past or the future, as though I were standing on a single point in time. Then it seemed to me that I saw my truck. It was parked a few feet off to my left. I didn't have a sense of what the truck was for, but it was familiar. I knew I was associated with it. Then I remembered that I had arrived where I was in the truck. Then, over the next few moments, I remembered all the rest. It was like a window being raised in an empty room, slowly, inch by inch.

On the television this evening there were remarkable films of the public hysteria greeting the return of Khomeini to Tehran. The old man could have been killed by his hysterical supporters. It was very exciting to watch, but pathetic. I've watched his story unfold each night on the television at seven o'clock. I've wanted the adventure he is making of his life to go on to fulfillment. I wanted him to be successful. It's been too good, too exciting, too rare. I've allowed — as I have so many time in the past — the excitement of events to overwhelm my sense of how it must be for those caught up in the real events.

It's being pointed out that this revolution in Iran is the first in thirty-five years to be created by its own people for its own reasons, and not those of a foreign ideology. What difference does it make? I can imagine what a violence Khomeini will visit on those people. His inexperience, his exclusivity, the parochialism, the violent rhetoric, the narrow religiosity — the same old stuff. No better, no worse.

FRIDAY, 2 FEBRUARY. Dreamed that the frames to my eyeglasses were made from crooked spider's legs. In the dream I looked at them uncomprehendingly. Folded up my bedclothes in the dark and piled them in the rocking chair as I do every morning. Put my foam rubber pad behind the couch and went to the bathroom to dress. I was standing in the lighted bathroom doorway pulling on my sweater when I observed that my mind was racing, racing. Then I thought: What does Jaynes' idea of human society, created without human consciousness — what significance does that have with respect to the Buddhist idea of bringing the mind to a standstill? How do those two ideas relate to each other? Do they relate to each other? Was Jaynes' citizen, living and waking unconsciously in an unconscious city, living in the “moment?” If the Buddhist acts out of the “unconscious moment” and acts well, why did Jaynes' unconscious citizen act out of the “unconscious moment” and do it so badly so often, following the “voice” of his god?

In the L.A. Times today there are a couple stories on how the Soviets are scared to death of the proliferation of office copy machines. I note that the copy machine was developed by American entrepreneurs without the help of government and that now it threatens the security of Government everywhere. On the television I watched films of the Rockefeller memorial. Everyone was there. Kissinger told them what a wonderful president Rockefeller would have made. I thought about all the years Rockefeller had been governor of New York and what a commonplace administration it had been. I thought about what a liar Kissinger is, what a threat to human life. I've never before been so disgusted by the sight of the man, by the sound of his voce, by the sense of his brutality and cruelty as I was tonight watching him respectfully extol the virtues of his dead patron and friend.

TUESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY. Dreamed I heard Mother cry out in an anguished voice. I woke felling awash with apprehension. I got up on my knees on my pad and listened for her breathing. It was all right. Out the front window the sunrise was orange and gold.

The Chinese People's Daily has reported that per capita food grain production in the People's Republic was no greater in 1977 than in 1955. Is that possible? After all the killing, all the terror and brutality? What an incredible statistic. The China News Analysis has estimated that 50 million persons died in the wake of the 1959-61 famine. Is that possible? Is it even believable? Half that many? One quarter? All the numbers about China sound so incredible. It is commonly reported that there are one billion people in China now, or close to it. One billion! The figure of one billion is used to encourage all sorts of cooperation with the Chinese government. When was the last time a demographer was in China? Forty years ago?

I don't know what to think about the estimated population of China, about how many people have starved to death, about the level of happiness of the farm worker on the great communes. What's easily observed is that the persons who live in China are not allowed to read, not allowed to think aloud, not allowed to move, not allowed to do what pleases them. What is easily observable is that the government of China is a horror, as it always has been, and that there's nothing in the wind that suggests it's going to change very much. One doesn't have to be an expert to feel comfortable with that sense of things.

WEDNESDAY, 7 FEBRUARY. At eight o'clock this morning I drove through Malibu and turned up Latigo Canyon toward the new site. The music on the radio, the paper cup of hot coffee in the palm of my hand, the cold air coming in through the open window, the heater on my feet, the view to the West of the vast ocean reaching out to the horizon, the soft, misty blue sky — the awareness of the immensity of what exists how the abundance of life swirls through that immensity grew so overwhelming that I began to weep and had to pull off to the side of the road.

Later in the morning one of the radio disc jockeys told a joke that made me laugh. A seven-year-old boy went to the father of his little girl friend and asked for her hand in marriage. The girl's father, amused, asked how the boy would support her. The boy explained that between them they got eighty-five cents a week allowance and he thought they could make it on that.

“But what if you have a baby?” the father asked.

“Knock on wood,” the boy said. “We haven't had any problems yet.”

Several times during the day I found myself laughing over the joke. At the same time, I felt embarrassed that such a little joke should make me laugh so much. I comforted myself by recalling how the disc jockey, when he told it, had laughed helplessly into the microphone.

This evening I took Jeffrey and a friend of his to see Richard Pryor's new movie, the taping of a live program that took place in Long Beach recently. Waiting in line I told Jeff and his friend the joke about the seven-year-old boy. They laughed a little.

The Pryor movie was the most charged, driving, high-energy, comic performance I've ever seen, especially the first half of it. Much of the funniest parts had to do with race. He was very insightful, which I expected. What surprised me was a chauvinism and purposeful attachment to “Blackness” that I had never particularly noticed before. One of his tricks was to contrast weak and clumsy Whites to strong and graceful Blacks. It vitiated some of the sense of what he was trying to get over, as well as weakening his comedic effect. It was touching to watch how insightful he is about race without having been quite able to rise above it. It was touching to see how eager he was to make sure Black always came out well.

THURSDAY, 8 FEBRUARY. It's reported in The Nation that when Carter fired Bella Abzug that both she and Carmen Votaw cried. Why? One would like to know why, precisely, they cried.

Tonight there was documentary on television on the “new philosophers” in Paris, Levi, Glucksman et al. Listening to how they've turned against the Russians and the Chinese and the Cubans, I grow excited. Maybe the tide will turn. Maybe there's some new hope. If a French intellectual can discover what's dirty, anyone can, and there's hope for all of us. I thought about how I could never buy the Left, even when I had no good idea why. I just didn't like the way it smelled. If intellectuals on the Left could just get a whiff of what it is they're pushing, they wouldn't touch it with a long stick.

FRIDAY, 9 FEBRUARY. A headline in the paper reads: “Reports of Arab Torture Denied by Israeli Minister: Not a Single Case.” The words “Not a single case” are a dead give-away. One immediately assigns the Israeli minister to the place where all great liars go. One doesn't even bother to read the story.

SATURDAY, 10 FEBRUARY. Peter Brown (in the New York Review of Books) on Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World. “According to Crone and Cook, Islam proper came into existence after the conquests, more than a generation after the death of the Prophet in 632, at a time when the Arabs found themselves in close contact with the settled populations of Syria, and especially with the Jewish and Christian populations there. It was these provincials, most notably the Jews of Palestine, who set about to turn the malleable and ambiguous opinions of their new Arab masters into a world religion. They did this, so Crone and Cook believe, because they had long been groping for an alternate identity to that which they enjoyed under the metropolitan, basically Hellenistic, culture of the Byzantine Empire….”

Is that a new idea? My ignorance of the Moslem world is immense. It sounds sensible, likely even. I've never been able to get a feel for the Moslem “mind set.” The Koran seems to be mostly gobbledygook. And now I see people turning to it as if it were what it claims to be. Brainlessness and desire run rampant. Tonight on the television there are the stories about Iran and Khomeini, talk of a holy war, crises and confusion, and then some film taken in Cairo showing Moslems at prayer, down on their hands and knees, their foreheads to the stone, their faces odd and unfamiliar. Watching them, recalling how I had read only this morning of the incredible extent of Moslem influence all across the world, reflecting on what state of consciousness they must be in, I felt a trace of anxiety. I purposefully reassured myself. If the faces I was seeing were dressed as I am dressed, laughing at the same dumb jokes I laugh at, feeling the same tenderness I feel, they would give me less pause.

It isn't easy to stay straight with strangers.

SUNDAY, 11 FEBRUARY. Tired from running, I was sitting on the floor, my back to the couch, my legs spread out before me, when Mother wheeled in.

“You look like that guy who slept for two hundred years,” she said. “What was his name?”

“You mean Rip Van Winkle?”

“That's him,” she said laughing. “You look just like him.”

“He slept twenty years,” I said.

“You should just be able to see yourself,” she said, laughing happily.

MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY. A critic writes: “Jane Austin conceives her plots in terms of moral parallels and antithesis hierarchically arranged.” The idea excites me.

SATURDAY, 17 FEBRUARY. Passed the entire day in the office typing and reading. At dusk I went down on Las Palmas and headed toward the pickup. Across the street, sitting on a low stone wall, three big Blacks in their mid-twenties are laughing loudly. One of them is calling across to the side of the street where I am. “Are you bleeding?” he yells. I feel uncertain as to who he is yelling at and precisely what he is saying. “Are you bleeding?” he yells. Then I see a very young, pretty White girl approaching me on the sidewalk. She's about fourteen years old. She appears very distracted, perhaps afraid, and is looking straight ahead as she hurries past. I realize then the question that's being yelled across the street is aimed at her and is sexual in nature. The Blacks laugh at the way she scurries off.

MONDAY, 19 FEBRUARY. At the newsstand this morning in a light rain. China has invaded Vietnam. I couldn't believe it. The news vendor, a young Israeli said: “Yes, and now Russia has invaded China.” I couldn't believe it. “The next thing,” he said, “is that they'll hit us.” He meant the United States. We grinned at each other incredulously. I bought the papers and there on the front page was Khomeini greeting Arafat and the story that the Israelis are being expelled from Iran. “A signal day,” I thought. “A signal day.” I went into the Gold Cup and bought a large coffee as I do most every morning.

As it turns out, one can't believe everything one hears from a news vendor. Still, it was a signal day. When I reflect on how the Government of China has actually attacked Vietnam, just as it said it would, and how I had thought they never would, I am forced to reflect on how innocent I really am.

TUESDAY, 20 FEBRUARY. A dark, cloudy, chilly day. Drove up Topanga Canyon to speak with an asphalt contractor. I pulled down off the road, drove across the creek and up under the oak trees where his equipment was parked. On the windshield of his truck I saw the reflection of a hawk sailing through the oak trees overhead.

I was tired today. My mind ran rampant. It started off on forced taxation, then turned to immigration. It wearied me to be thinking about those things again but I couldn't stop my mind. I thought about how for hundreds of years people have wanted to come to America and how they still do and how no one has ever wanted to go to Russia and still don't, and the stupidity of the Left and their mendacious, purposeful blindness.

This afternoon I ran into Anna the psychologist. Somehow the subject of unionism came up. “Oh, I quit politics when Martin Luther King was killed,” she said. “I was in the South with him, you know.” Many questions had come quickly to mind, but Anna was called off on business. Had she meant that the man was more important to her than her own reason for doing what she was doing? Was she into leadership? I wondered what actually had happened. Her words had sounded to sentimental, but one can't be too careful with the subjective life of another. I suppose.

SATURDAY, 24 FEBRUARY. When I woke this morning I didn't get up right away as I usually do but lay there on the floor loafing and after a moment I saw a newsroom in a foreign country crowded with intense beleaguered men and one American female correspondent who was fair and pretty. The American woman was about to interview a Moslem, a big lumbering man who was either an Iranian or a representative of the PLO. He was dressed in army fatigues but had additional Moslem wrappings around him in the rag-tag way of Mideast guerrillas. Just as the woman correspondent was about to begin the interview the big Moslem took the microphone out of her hand and wearily but with complete self assurance said: “Here, I'll do this….” or words to that effect, in a way that dismissed the woman entirely. Without a moment's hesitation the woman correspondent slapped the big Moslem across the face. It was a terrific blow that she put her whole body behind.

I'd been watching the picture half-aware that I was dreaming. But when I saw the woman slap that guy I sat upright on my pad, immediately fully awake. I felt enchanted — there's no other word for it — with what I had seen. I felt laughter and bemusement and admiration for the woman. The first thought that came to my mind was that the incident could be the cornerstone to a play. Then the mind thought: “But I don't know what a woman is. What can I do?” Then it thought: “I can make myself into the woman.” The idea excited me and seemed right. Other advantages occurred to me in quick order. That using a woman to reveal my own personality would allow me to use myself precisely, and to separate myself irrevocably from the character at the same time. I felt that in only a moment I had overcome one of my great weaknesses as a writer — my disinterest in creating character in the face of my interest in defining my own. I thought about the woman enthusiastically and with a light heart. She could be cooperative rather than competitive, open rather than exclusive, reconciling rather than provocative. She could be everything I think it would be good for me to be and that I am not. And then it occurred to me, in a shameful capitulation to my desire to be respected by all, how feminists would appreciate me for having created this terrific woman.

Mort Sahl is back on radio and was interviewed in the Examiner. I've never much liked Sahl, I don't like the way he laughs and laughs at his own jokes, but he said something interesting in the interview. “Women want to fight and lose,” he said. “Men don't want to fight, but when they fight they want to win.” That rings a bell with me. Not theoretically, but out of my experience. I have no idea why it should be that way, but that's been the drift of my experience. Saw a movie by Bunuel last night. Made in Mexico thirty rears ago, laughable in places, but with a sustained look at character that couldn't be laughed away. Here and there a flash of comic horror. But once again the story of a rich man who shames (thereby accusing) his class with his craziness, his greed, and his need to manipulate others for his own profit. Bunuel, along with so many on the Left, persist in thinking that “the very rich are different from you and I.” What a trite and superficial little attitude. It's easy for men who make movies to hold vague Leftist sympathies; they make all their money off their exploitation of the sensibilities of the poor but remain distanced from them at the same time, shielded from their victims by the production money of the entrepreneurs.

There's a new play in town featuring a powerful Black actress doing a presentation of six different (probably) Black women. I have no interest in attending because I imagine I know what I would see if I did go because I can well imagine what I will not see if I do go: I would not expect to find anyone on stage who is racist, or a stupid feminist, or an exploiter of Whites, or a child beater, or an anti-Semite, or even a slow learner, or a self-justified welfare cheat. Perhaps I would, but I would not expect to, and that's why the presentation holds no interest for me.

SUNDAY, 25 FEBRUARY. Passed the morning in the office filing papers, putting manuscripts into order, throwing out newspapers and magazines I've accumulated, most of them unread. Couldn't help but note how many socialist publications I've picked up over the last two months, and the fact that I haven't read any of them. I want to read socialist material, I feel I should, but I don't. I read only a few words, a few sentences perhaps, in the National Guardian or the Young Worker and then something annoys me and I throw it aside. I tell myself to look at my anger closely, to examine my rigidity.

I've been following the lettuce strike in Imperial Valley in the L.A. Times. The Times coverage is biased in favor of the United Farm Workers. I wouldn't have thought it would be. Replacement workers are referred to as strikebreakers — as if strike breaking were the reason they want to work. Chavez's most inflammatory language goes unreported. The bullet that killed the union farm worker is referred to as the “murder slug” even before the arraignment is held and the charges filed. Vandalism by the strikers is not reported in detail. It isn't made clear that the method the union has of dealing with replacement workers is to insult and intimidate them with the threat of violence. No observation is made on the contradiction between Chavez's claim to lead a movement of “love and non-violence” and the pro-grammatic use of intimidation and violence that is actually part of the daily activities of his striking union.

The Times is not merely biased in its attitude toward the UFW; it is reporting the news inaccurately to the point of dishonesty.

This evening I was lying on my pad in the front room reading Mother Jones — an article titled “The First Post Oil Society” by Richard Parker. Parker had an interesting point of view, but when I came to the sentence: “China is socialist, a virtue that allows it to plan its future,” I got angry. I caught myself, stopped right there, and tried to figure out where the anger came from. My reaction seemed to center around the word “its.” It made me angry that Parker used the work “it” to refer to China, as if everything in China were to be embraced by his concept of “it.” In reality, “it” refers to the Government of China and nothing else. “It” doesn't represent the Chinese people, their preferences, or even maybe their needs. But Parker would have me think that “China is socialist,” and that “it” can plan “its” future. The Government of China governs through the force of arms and the totalitarian repression of the Chinese people. The Government of China can plan the future of the Government of China so long as it continues to embody in itself the military and is willing to use “its” power to crush the citizenry.

I think my disgust with the socialist is that at every turn he is willing to sacrifice my liberty, my freedom, to his idea. I don't like it and I'm not going to buy it. Why is his theory more important to him than the simple wish of people everywhere to just by left alone? I want to be allowed to think and feel and move around without having someone with a theory breathing down the back of my neck, threatening me, for my own good. Always for my own good, or someone else's good, but always threatening.

WEDNESDAY, 28 FEBRUARY. I was down at the Me and Me eating egg-plant and tahina, thinking about how I'm not watching myself closely enough. That I'm allowing the news to draw me away from myself. Not into action but into a process of endless thinking. Thinking for the thinking itself. For the mere pleasure of it. Ideological gossip. Sometimes I make myself sick with the thinking. A moment later, on the canned sound system in the tiny cafe, I heard a love song that's always touched me. A sweet pain passed across my heart.

In Harper's there's an article titled “One Man's Nuclear War” by Edward Abbey, who's a good writer. “Careful students of the matter such as Daniel Ellesberg, estimate the size of the American stockpile at something between 11,000 and 30,000 nuclear bombs…. a $1.7 billion annual business…..” It's not really a business, however, in that the organization paying for the bombs doesn't have any money of its own but takes the money it needs by the threat and force from those of us who do have it. That is, almost everybody in the nation. What a spineless, ignorant, uncaring thing it is to do — to give money to the United States Government so it can fund the purchase of nuclear bombs. I'm going to find a way to cut in on that — somewhere, somehow.

Gore Vidal was on the television tonight. It's the first time I've seen him speak. He mentioned in passing that he's socialist, and that America s “the most hated country in the world.” It would be more accurate to say that Socialist intellectuals hate America more that any other country in the world. They have good reason. Millions of the world's workers want to come to America, millions already have. Gore Vidal, the intellectuals of the Left, understand how humiliating it would be for them if they attempted to get workers to go Russia or Cuba or Angola or Bulgaria or China or to any of the Socialist countries. Workers would laugh in their faces. It's the Left intellectuals who are bemused by such horrors as the Cuban or Chinese Governments. Workers have an instinctive aversion to authoritarianism. Workers as a class have a delicacy of sensibility that Left intellectuals have lost in their grasping scramble to direct the lives of others.

One ponders the vast empty lands of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. One reflects on the awful emptiness of the ideas of the Left.

END OF FEBRUARY 1979

Click here for the January 1979 entry