Lost in the Cosmos

is real by taking on the world, usually by political action and, more often than not, revolutionary. Even if one is imprisoned by the state—especially if one is imprisoned—one can be certain of being human. Ghosts can’t be imprisoned. This stratagem is more available to European writers, who are taken more seriously than American writers. The secret envy of American writers: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Despite their most violent attacks on the state and the establishment, nobody pays much attention to American writers, least of all the state. To have taken on the state and defeated it, like Solzhenitsyn, is beyond the wildest dreams of the American writer. Because the state doesn’t care. This indifference leads to ever more frantic attempts to attract attention, like an ignored child, even to the point of depicting President Johnson and Lady Bird plotting the assassination of Kennedy in Barbara Garson’s MacBird!, or President Nixon having sex with Ethel Rosenberg and being buggered by Uncle Sam in Times Square in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.
    Still, no one pays attention.
    A paradigm of this generally failed reentry option: a lonely “radical” American writer standing outside the White House gate, screaming obscenities about this fascist state, dictatorship, exploitation of minorities, suppression of freedom of speech, and so on and on—all the while being ignored by President, police, and passersby.
    There are worse things than the Gulag.
    Thought Experiment: The Reentry Quiz
    Object: To enable you to calculate your own apogee of transcendence and your corresponding need of reentry.
    Method: Score yourself by checking those avenues of reentry which you find peculiarly, even compulsively, attractive.
    Reentry by
    (1) _________anesthesia (alcohol, pot, cocaine, etc.)
    (2) _________travel (geographical, e.g., Appalachian Trail,
    Greek Islands, etc.)
    (3) _________travel (sexual)
    (4) _________return (back to Valdosta, back to downtown
    Philadelphia, etc.)
    (5) _________disguise (e.g., Southern male writer as good ol’ boy, Northern male writer as Brooklynite turned Connecticut Yankee with L. L. Bean boots)
    (6) _________Eastern window (pilgrimage to Katmandu or to Trungpa’s commune in Colorado)
    (7) _________deep space (suicide)
    (8) _________reentry deferred, permanent orbit (Salinger in the woods, Boo Radley holed up in Alabama house for forty years)
    (9) _________sponsorship (conversion)
    (10) ________assault (murderous political hatreds, fantasies of assassination or taking vicarious pleasure in same)
    ( CHECK APPROPRIATE OPTIONS, ADD SCORE )

    N OTE: A high score measures the apogee of your orbit but is not necessarily bad. Faulkner might have scored a 5 (see reentry options 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), Malcolm Lowry a 6, William Burroughs a 7, and Erle Stanley Gardner, for all I know a 0.
    A high score does no more than measure without prejudice the apogee of one’s orbit of transcendence with its attendant triumphs and miseries.

    * Graham Greene, albeit a Christian, was observed by Evelyn Waugh to perform a curious rite before he could get to work. He went out to the street and watched the stream of traffic. When asked what he was doing, he replied that he was waiting for a particular combination of numbers to turn up on a license plate—777. When it did, he went cheerfully to his writing desk.
    * It is a nice ambiguity that Catholics have the least use for the very thing, if not the only thing, for which they are admired, the artifacts, the accidentals, of Catholicism, e.g., the buildings, folkways, music, and so on. Thus, a trivial by-product of New Orleans Catholicism, Mardi Gras, has been seized on by tourists, appropriated by local Protestants, promoted by the Chamber of Commerce, as the major cultural attraction. Nice ambiguity, I say, because each party is content to have it so. Nobody is offended.
    The Catholic is content to practice his faith in a dumpy church in York, while the tourists gape at the great nacreous pile of the York minster, an artifact of a former Catholic culture, as beautiful as the shell of a chambered nautilus and as empty. It is not argumentative, I think, to note the niceness of the ambiguity because, if the Catholic is content to have it so, so is the unbeliever. Thus, the esthetic delight of, say, Hemingway in the Catholic decor of Pamplona would perhaps be matched by his contempt for actual Catholic practice in Oak Park, Illinois. It is an ambiguity because it can be