On Wednesday I posted a tribute to the late John Barth in which I talked about a review I wrote about his 1968 collection: Lost in the Funhouse. I want to say some more about the writing of that review, but I want to place that in a larger context. First I want to talk about an experience I had when playing in my sandbox as a young child, then I’ll talk about experiences I had in the academic year 1968-1969. Writing that review was one of those experiences, but there were three others, all different.
Sandbox Lost
When I was a young child my father built a large sandbox, which he placed in the backyard of our home on Cherry Lane in Johnstown, PA. I spent countless hours immersed in imaginary adventure play in the sandbox. I would sculpt the sand into whatever configuration of forts, battlements, and terrain suited the current fantasy and then happily deploy my collection of small soldiers, spacemen, vehicles, and weapons – in various colors, I remember that, the colorful variety, moving them around to suit the needs of imagined exploration and battle.
I assume that is what I did, but I only have one specific memory of my fantasy play in that sandbox. That memory is of the time the magic ceased to work. No matter how hard I tried, no matter what maneuvers I had them enact, my toys no longer absorbed me in their actions the way they used to. I was now outside the action, operating on it, no longer from within it.
Was that the last time I played with my toy figurines, weapons and vehicles in the sandbox? Perhaps. More likely I tapered off over time until I no longer had any interest in that kind of play. But as I said, other than that day of loss, I have specific memories of what I did in that sandbox.
What happened? I don’t really know, but I assumed that I had crossed some developmental Rubicon and my mind no longer functioned the way it once had. It’s not that I had gained new information, absorbed more facts. No, the mind itself had changed, its structures and functions. That’s the point of the story, the change in mental function. In Piagetian fashion I was moving from one developmental stage to another.
That’s what these various personal stories are about, the mind doing things it hadn’t done before.
Lost in the Funhouse
My experience in reading and writing a review of John Barth’s 1968 Lost in the Funhouse was that kind of experience, but much later in life. All the experiences I recount in this post are from a period later in life, my early adulthood, my early 20s.
The Funhouse experience needs some larger context. The 1960s saw the first-wave of post-modern fiction, much of which involved meta-fictional gamesmanship. John Barth was one a prominent practitioner of the craft, others include Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Barthelme. While these writers didn’t invent meta-fictional games – consider that Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was jammed with them, Shakespeare made his own moves in that direction in the play-within-a-play in Hamlet and Prospero’s concluding address to the audience, and who knows what hi-jinks the Homeric fabulists accomplished with a wink and a nod in live performance – they cultivated them in a new and more intensive way. No one had read anything quite like it. That’s one thing.
And then there’s the simple fact that I was a college student. I was being educated it, learning to think. It was all new to me.
The cultural new and the personal new collided in Lost in the Funhouse to produce a minor existential crisis. The book haunted me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, which didn’t know what to do with it.
Imagine a man put a gun to your head, handed you a card that said “What’s written on the other side is true” on one side and “What’s written on the other side is false” on the other, and then told you that if you picked the wrong side he’d pull the trigger. The card alone is a transparent trick, but the man with the gun, that’s something else entirely. That’s a bit how I felt about Barth’s book. I wrote the review to placate the man with the gun. When the review had been published, the man and his gun vanished, forever.
The Romantics
I don’t recall just when in 1968 I wrote that review, but 1968-1969 was my senior year at Johns Hopkins. I took Earl Wasserman’s two semester course on Romantic literature that year. My mind chose to betray itself in the process of writing two papers in the Fall, the first on Keats and the second on Shelley.
[Warning, I am about to summarize and plagiarize from myself. The original passage is in my unpublished MA Thesis about “Kubla Kahn” from 1972. But you can find a longer quotation in my autobiographical piece, Touchstones.
I wrote my Keats paper at the last minute. It was late at night, I was tired. I was arguing that in his poem “To–[Fanny Brawne]” Keats was faced with a contradiction between what he espoused as a poet, that love is higher than art, and his fear that love–his for Fanny–would destroy his poetic gifts. As a matter of rhetorical strategy I placed him between the horns of a dilemma, thus, “does Keats remain a poet, or does he hew true to the poet’s creed and become a lover and perhaps a doer?” At this point in the revision an impulse hit me, a way to produce a deft ironic twist. I typed, “Unfortunately, he did neither. He died.” As I typed the word “died” something snapped in my mind. To continue with my original text was impossible. I went on to type a passage from one of Keats’s last letters to Fanny:
“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me–nothing to make my friends proud of my memory–but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you – now you divide with this (may I say it) “last infirmity of noble minds” all my reflection.
God bless you, Love.
I experienced the act of copying these words into my paper as though they were my own. The feelings I had in those moments lead me to the second stanza of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which I then typed into the paper:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Again, while the Keats was the author of the words I was typing into my paper, I experienced them as my own. How did my mind do that?
[End of self plagiarizing.]
The experience had been both remarkable and distressing, remarkable for what it revealed about the mind, MY mind, and distressing because it was a surprise. I knew that minds did various things, I’d experienced dreams, many times, I’d smoked marijuana, I’d read about all kinds of altered states of consciousness, as such phenomena had come to be called. But not THAT, which was, as these things go, rather modest and unassuming. But also strange. I didn’t know what it was or how to think about and interpret it.
This experience spoke to my interest in literature in a challenging way: If it is possible experience a literary work as though it was your own, then what’s the point of writing an interpretation of it? What more is there for you to know if you've already inhabited that world?
That was at the middle of the semester. At the end I had to write a paper about Shelley. I forget what poem I chose to write about. But, as with my Keats paper, it was late at night and I was tired. Once I started typing my mind took over and finished the whole paper for me, straight out. My fatigue was gone, I felt light, and the words just flowed automatically. No stopping for thought, then starting up again, stop, think, pace the floor, think again, sit down and write, none of that. I didn’t have to think.
That experience wasn’t distressing in the way my experience with the Keats term-paper was. Perhaps the Keats experience had alerted me to the possibility that my mind could play tricks on me. But then, I could identify that experience as a kind of automatic writing, which I had read about.
Those two experiences have not repeated themselves in half century that has elapsed since then.
During the second semester of that course, in the Spring of 1969, I also had to write two papers. The first was on Wordsworth, perhaps my best undergraduate paper. Wasserman thought my Shelley paper was “a mature contemplation of the poem” – though I forgot just what poem I’d written about. The second was on Coleridge, specifically, on “Kubla Khan.” Nothing strange happened during the writing of either paper.
What happened to my mind during the course of that year – the Barth review, the two strange papers in the Fall, followed two not-strange papers in the Spring? One of them was the best I’d written to that point. The other, the “Kubla Khan” paper, was the first step in a long intellectual journey.
White Out!
One last experience, this one originating in music. Let me quote from a collection of anecdotes I’ve been assembling, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance. A large majority of the anecdotes are about the experiences of others which I’ve found in various publications over the years. But some of them are about my own experiences. This is one of them:
During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.
That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music.
That experience haunted me for several years. Would it happen again? Perhaps during this performance? Did I want it to happen? Does it matter?
Who is in possession?
As I have indicated here and there, what all of these experiences have in common is that, in them, my mind revealed itself to me. A strange formulation, I know, but it seems apt. It’s one thing to know that you have a mind in the way the you also know that you have ten toes, which are visible, and a stomach, which is not, and that you have dreams, which are yours alone, strange, difficult to recall and recount, and so forth. Those things are common knowledge, things you learn in the course of growing up.
These various experiences, though, are a bit different. I attribute them to my mind because, well, what else is available? But they aren’t things that I did in the way I raise my arm or eat a meal. They happened to me through no will of my own. They happened and I’ve had to deal with them, in various ways according to the various natures of the individual experiences.
Thought them I have learned that, while my mind IS my mind, not someone else’s, it is not my possession. Rather, if there is any possessing going on, it goes in the other direction. My mind possesses me.
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