From Anlauf to Reedsport: Escape from Eugene and the Devil's Racecourse

The Reedsport Public Library. Reedsport, Oregon. Not far now from the Oregon coast. Have been driving along one of the most quietly picturesque highways in many a day. Others were spectacular, dramatic, like the mountain passes through Colorado and Utah especially. But this is Highway 38, the western route, through miles and miles of mountain forest land, where the road is bordered in the shade of tall spruce and pine on either side, curving down along clear streams and rushing rivers. Far from the madding crowd.

Yesterday’s drive took me into the very heart of the madding crowd, through the rush hour traffic and into the urban life of Eugene, Oregon. I should have known better, but I was remembering the Eugene where I had spent some happy months nearly fifty years ago. It was a place of intelligence and culture at that time, still lacking in those abominations of our time, the tangled labyrinths of six lane roads to Everywhere and Nowhere and as fast as you can and must go (even if you don’t know where you’re going). So I stopped in at a 7-11 “convenience store” to ask for navigational help in exiting Eugene by the nearest back road leading nowhere near any devious link to the Devil’s Racecourse.

An altercation was in progress. One of the thousands of lost souls, all too common in Eugene as in almost every urban population over 537 or so, high on pot, meth, heroin, or all at the same time, was threatening to shoot the manager of the store for infringing on his freedom of speech. The trouble being that his speech was more of a bellowing rage against all and everyone of an ethnicity or color different from his own. Probably without his understanding why, the police were called and he was escorted Elsewhere.

As I said, this scene has been a burgeoning part of nearly every urban environment I have passed through since leaving Cincinnati. The media refers to it as an opioid epidemic, or crisis. But behind the drug related epidemic is another – the crisis of despair that we seem unable to understand, let alone transform. Why is this? Again, I quote Jung:

“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop. It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.”

I have emphasized part of the above passage because it echoes what the Sufi, Idries Shah, said in a 1970’s interview with Elizabeth Hall, published in Psychology Today:

Elizabeth Hall: For the sake of humanity, what would you like to see happen?
Shah: What I really want, in case anybody is listening, is for the products of the last 50 years of psychological research to be studied by the public, by everybody, so that the findings become part of their way of thinking. At the moment, people have adopted only a few. They talk glibly about making Freudian slips and they have accepted the idea of inferiority complexes. But they have this great body of psychological information and refuse to use it.
People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn’t got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge.

Postcards: Impressions from Life on the Road

Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas

Once upon a time, there were white squirrels in Olney. White squirrels with pink eyes. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and they were everywhere, just like the ubiquitous gray ones we see in our own parks and back yards, and not too far from Olney. But, there in Olney, though you may search both hither and yon for hours, about the only white squirrels you will see are those pictured on the sides of municipal park trucks, or on the sleeve patches of the constabulary. There is also a street called "White Squirrel Lane". I drove along the Lane for a mile or so with nary a glimpse of any kind of squirrel, let alone one with pink eyes. Finally, I stopped and asked a native.

"What'taya wanna see them for?" he asked.

"They're interesting creatures, I think. And we don't have any where I come from."

"Huh... Well we ain't got 'em here, neither. Not no more."

He (and the white squirrel) leaves our story here.

***

Missouri has the most exhortations to follow Jesus that I can remember ever seeing anywhere else. Also, hundreds of billboards with messages personally endorsed by God. And crosses, everywhere. To be properly God fearing and trusting in the Lord seems also to require at least one high-powered rifle and lots of ammo in Missouri. Ammo stores abound. As do the other billboards advertising the latest cures for despair and cheerful deterrents to suicide.

As it was too hot to sleep in the van, I stayed at a motel. In the morning, as I was packing up, a lady came through the parking lot handing out pamphlets. She put one into my outstretched, waiting hand. The cartoon image of Jesus was a little silly (Jesus himself would probably have thought so, too) but the message was something about making the world a better place, so I took what was offered and said, "Thank you. Let me share something with you, along the same lines." I pointed to my bumper sticker and its quote from C.G. Jung:

"The best antidote to the menace of the times lies in the 

cultivation of a more comprehensive consciousness."

The lady had been friendly enough, with a cheery smile, so it seemed possible we might have a moment of conversation. Instead, she scowled and grabbed the proffered pamphlet out of my hand before hurrying away with a muttered, "Have a nice day!"

***

Kansas had fewer gun shops and crosses, but many more grain elevators. Actually, I like grain silos and elevators. Their altogether inventive and practical architecture is a wonder of functional design. There was even a time when I might have enjoyed working in a grain elevator as much as I would have enjoyed being a movie projectionist or flying a zeppelin. But when you are driving along mile after mile of unceasingly flat countryside, and the next town (like the last) is mostly boarded up cafes and gift shops, the sense of déjà vu provoked by yet another grain elevator on the outskirts of another ghost(ly) town is eerily dreamlike and hypnotic. Taking a self-guided tour of one such town, with a wide avenue of cobblestones over which a lone 4x4 rattled along flying the Stars and Stripes, I saw that even the local Senior Recreation Center was closed. A sign read, "No more bingo." Had the last of the senior citizens passed into the celestial realms? I tried to imagine living here. Even living in a grain elevator, even before bingo was no more. Easier to imagine dying, going off to war in anyplace but here.

***

Glad to cross the Kansas border I headed westward in search of Colorado's mountains. While I could see them indicated on the pages of my Rand McNally atlas, I was still a long way from them in real time and space. I had first to pass through the urban desolation of places like Pueblo and Denver, lost for hours in labyrinths of suburban streets, industrial parks, shopping malls and broad avenues of down and out young people who wandered in a drug-induced trance, begging for food, for money, for a way out. And all around these impoverished scenes of dystopian life rose the glittering corporate palaces, the financial institutions offering "Everything you could ever want, and more. More!" The illusions of prosperity. I thought of the one billboard I had seen in Missouri that asked the essential question: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

Stuck in mid-week-mid-morning traffic and driving the incomprehensible loops and circles of  Great and Greater Denver I finally stopped and refused to go any further until a knowledgeable guidance, divine or mundane, could direct me to the mountain route. Even my GPS Lady was lost. I called 911 and told the lady that I was an elderly man with a dog, far from my homeland, with an unreasonable aversion to Interstate highways, which I call "The Devil's Racecourse", and that I needed her expert navigational help. I actually said all that. She asked me where I was. I replied that I had no idea. As it happened, her shift had just ended. Nonetheless, this Lady of Perpetual Help stayed on the phone with me and became as my personal navigator, guiding me street by street and turn by turn until I could just make out what appeared to be distant mountains through the haze of exhaust fumes. I was free again.

***

Driving along less traveled roads through the mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming is like visiting another planet. Except in the photographs of Ansel Adams, or the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole, for example, I cannot recall ever seeing such extraordinary scenic vistas. Spaciousness gives way to spaciousness, amid ever changing combinations of light and shadow on rock and plain. And in such an environment of vast spaces, thought too, takes wing like a bird released from caged confinement. 

I said I had never seen anything like this, yet there is something like an ancestral memory, like the Alpine vistas of the Harz Mountains and the Schwarzwald... a vision or memory from the collective unconscious. I think it is so. 

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

wie treu sind deine Blätter!

***

Today I am in Idaho, somewhere still among the mountains, the pine forests, the cold mountain air. The place is called Swan Valley. As yet, I have seen no swans. But I may see one. Perhaps, one day, the Swan of Kala-Hamsa. Who knows? In any case, there are ravens here, and they are calling me out into the day.

At the Movies in a Little Border Town

Just on the border between Wyoming and Idaho is a defunct movie house, "The Allegory Theater". Kukla and I walked around to the back and found an alleyway door standing partially open. I peeked inside and felt a hand on my shoulder.

"You'll have to buy a ticket," said the janitor (for that's who he was). "Fifty cents. The dog can go in free. Go on up to the balcony."

I paid for the ticket and we went inside. To my surprise, there were lots of other people already seated in the audience.

The lights went out and an image flickered on the screen, just long enough for me to make a photo with my Kodak. Then all went dark again and I found myself standing in the alley with Kukla, on the border between Wyoming and Idaho.

Signing off now, until tomorrow.

Here's the photo:

Hiatus

To My Friends, All & Some, who have been tuning in here during the past weeks and perhaps wondering where I have got to and why I haven't written anything...

Please Stand By!

Before this week is over I fully expect to be able to arrive in a Place and Time that will permit me an opportunity to write at least something of a synopsis of the days and nights since setting out from Bloomington. Travels through Illinois, Missouri and Kansas were intolerably hot and humid, with temperatures often ranging from 95 - 100 degrees in the shade. This meant that I couldn't leave Kukla in the van while I enjoyed some quiet and comfortable respite from the road in the local Carnegie library reading and writing room. I am now in the cooler mountain climes of Colorado and, effects of altitude notwithstanding,  the Oaxacan Angel on my dashboard still points mostly north and west and sometimes elsewhere too, while exhorting me as always:

"Zugzwang!" 

Travels in Times of Turmoil

  "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth 

and every common sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light."

__Wordsworth, "Intimations of Immortality"

"Does anyone think it's easy to be a creature in this world?"

__Patchen

"So, this is Mars?"
1950's 'Space Pioneers' TV

To my mind, we are all refugees, orphans of the storm, strangers in a strange land. And this, quite apart from our cherished illusions to the contrary. My own included.

For the past two days I have been staying with my friends, Matt and Jennifer. After dinner, last night, we took a tour of the city. I wanted to see something of the streets and landmarks remembered from the years I had lived here during the 1980's and 90's, and I suggested a walk past "People's Park" on Kirkwood. "It's changed a lot, recently" Matt warned. He was right.The park had lately become a site of heavy drug dealing and dereliction. The same fate has turned the historic park at Seminary Square into an encampment of lost souls, wandering ghosts looking for a fix or a bottle of anything to quell the pain of their exile.

Seminary Park had once been the home of Indiana Seminary, which later became Indiana University. This was at a time when education was prized under the banner of "Lux et Veritas" and touted as "an energetic quest for the meaning of life". Today the students gather for their notion of  the "wide and luminous view" at Kilroy's on Kirkwood where they can souse themselves into manic oblivion and perpetual fun. The university has a 49 % dropout rate. I don't know what the current rate of "wilted & forlorn" might be, but I would suppose it to be even greater than it was only a few years ago, before the opiod crisis took hold.

Matt, who is a psychotherapist, told me that opioid addiction accounts for growing numbers of the permanently lost and forgotten of this once shining city of learning and culture. As we were walking around the central square this morning, we came upon a man lying in a heap on the sidewalk. Scores of people looked at him briefly and then crossed over to better hear the music that blared from mega megawatt amplifiers set up on the courthouse lawn. Some pointed and giggled. I was reminded of the Eloi in H.G. Wells' tale, The Time Machine. "You see it all the time," said one who stopped to wonder if the man was still breathing. The condition has become commonplace, meaningless, invisible. We give it a name, "the opioid crisis", but this crisis has its roots in deeper ground and gives rise to that yet more pervasive Crisis of Despair about which even less is known, let alone understood.

The psychologist C.G. Jung already understood the matter, and with brilliant insight in his own era, believing that "the more secular, materialistic, and compulsively extraverted our civilization becomes, the greater the unhappiness, senselessness and aimlessness of our lives". Moreover, in an essay Jung wrote in the 1930's, he described what he termed "psychic epidemics", the outward manifestations of disorders rooted in the psyche of man. The "crisis of despair" that is emerging in our world and time can be recognized as just this kind of epidemic. And there is no pill, not even "as seen on TV" that will cure it.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, and rampant lunacy in high places notwithstanding, I will end today's travel notes with another quotation from the venerable Dr. Jung, certainly as pertinent today as ever and ever:

"Finally, the best antidote to the menace of the times lies in the cultivation of a more comprehensive consciousness."

Setting Out

   "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place."

 __G.K. Chesterton

"Wake up, Kenny. We're in No Man's Land"

__ my grandfather, Oscar Harz

"Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to a 'possum that it could be done."

__Anonymous Wisdom disguised as a Joke

In any case, I came this far (Bloomington, Indiana) in order to keep an appointment with my dentist. That it has taken me nearly seventy-five years to get here occurred to me around three o'clock in the morning and kept me awake for nearly two hours, which was as long as I could productively ponder the matter before drifting back into Slumberland - where everything is possible and neither requires any explanation nor a passport to cross its borders. Seventy-five years seems to me a long time to get anywhere at all, though it is a mere drop in the cosmological bucket, but memory of the outset of the journey is not as clear as it once was. And, as I began today's notes, "in any case, I came this far" and here I am again.