Lost in the Cosmos

Jeffersonian splendor—and sometimes does both at once, like Temple Drake getting corncobbed by Popeye at the old Frenchman place in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. The latter-day Northern writer, lacking either tradition and having nothing to offend against, must rely on an act of gratuitous and comedic violence—like Michael Milton getting his penis bitten off by Helen Garp in Irving’s The World According to Garp.
    An observation about disguises: The New Orleans French Quarter has long attracted artists and writers and homosexuals for the good and understandable reasons given above: Latinity, quaintness, moderate exoticness, Mardi Gras, the usual para-Catholic aura—and the easiest way to get out of Mississippi and Ohio. But it is also a para-creative aura. Just as the denizens of the Vieux Carré live in the penumbra of the cathedral, they also live in the penumbra of art. Surprisingly little first-class art has come out of the French Quarter, even though it rather self-consciously imitates the decor of the Left Bank, habitat of many great artists years ago. This life style, as it is called, reminds one of the urban cowboy who secretly believes that if he dresses and walks like a cowboy, he may be a cowboy. Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New Orleans, not merely geographical and perhaps sexual modes, not merely alcohol, but also a regular repertory of disguises. In the Vieux Carré he made appearances as a wounded veteran with swagger stick and a bogus steel plate in his head, a hard-drinking pre-hippie vagrant Left-Bank type—and wrote Mosquitoes, a not very good novel. It took the ultimate reentry, the return—he had to go home—to write The Sound and the Fury. Even then, he had to “be” a farmer on the side. Later he made the grandest Southern reentry of all, as a Virginia horseman.
    A prediction: What with artist types and writer types and homosexuals (who must be applauded for their good taste in cities: New Orleans, San Francisco, Key West) taking over such places as the French Quarter, and business types and lawyer types going cowboy, I predict that working artists and writers will revert to the vacated places. In fact, they’re already turning up in ordinary houses and ordinary streets long since abandoned by the Hemingways and Agees. Soon they’ll be wearing ordinary shirts and pants and Thorn McAn shoes, not altogether unconsciously, but as a kind of exercise in the ordinary. What else? Where would you rather be if you were James Agee now and alive and well: stumbling around Greenwich Village boozed to the gills, or sitting on the front porch of a house on a summer evening in Knoxville?
    (7) Reentry by Eastern window. Angle of reentry too shallow, skip back into space, out of singular self in a singular place back into Cosmic Self, and out of linear time and into the cycles of reincarnation and the Eternal Return. Comet orbit.
    The self escapes the burden of itself and achieves satori through the negating of self, the atman, with the Cosmic Self, the Brahman of Hinduism.
    Such a disposal of the self was ever an attractive option, what with the perennial inability of the self to perceive itself, but in this age is more attractive than ever as a consequence of the modern historical predicament of the self. The movement of science tends to abstract the self from the world both for the scientist and for the layman, who is willy-nilly abstracted by the triumphant spirit of science without, however, being compensated by the joy of the practice of science. The movement of art is toward the isolation and sequestering of the artist as individual in pursuit of art.
    Hence the openness of the Eastern window, particularly in California, where the options of reentry often make their first appearance.
    There are characteristic affinities between the mode of reentry by the Eastern window and certain other modes of reentry, e.g., the travel and exile modes, often with a dash of science for seasoning.
    Examples: English writers in Hollywood—Huxley, Isherwood, et al. Reentry by travel (geographical) plus travel (homosexual) plus Eastern window, the multiple reentry mode underwritten by science (mind-altering drugs opening the doors of perception and assisting the self in its escape from itself).
    It is no accident that the post-Protestant English in the van of the scientific and industrial revolution for two centuries were also the discoverers and