In the Jungle The Indian Knows All

[Steelhead]

RE: THE LATEST MALICED MISSIVE FROM DYB,
DELIVERED TO MOI FROM A WELL-MEANING P-LISTER

As I type this, in my unseasonably cold office/garage, on this Saturday
morning, when the fogs of the Willamette have been invoked, called forth by
the Old Gods of the Clackamas and Mollala tribes, to sidle up the hillside
for a near death embrace with our little town, a village raised on ancient
pox-scarred bones and fallen timbers, with only my Newfoundland at my feet,
and the radiation of the flourescent lights--which flicker on and off in
some fractal code, as if David Lynch were just outside the door at the
switch, smiling malignly--to warm me, I am wearing a shirt pilfered from
Edward Said. It is cream-colored, pliant, weathered to a singular softness
by years of thoughtful use. The fabric of the sleeve on the left arm is
slightly worn and thinning. Damage that occurred during the intense
writing--or so I imagine it--of Orientalism.

Said is dying. Acute myoblastic leukemia is replicating itself in deadly
waves through his body. The treatment is more painful than the disease, but
Said is no quitter. Amid the ebbing and cresting of this black tide, there
are essays to write, books to read and re-read, students to chat with and
(more importantly--a notion Blaine seems never destined to entertain) learn
from, operas to be seduced by.

It is from Said that I remain confident that the teaching of the reading of
books is not a vain and solipsitic endeavor. I remember distinctly a long
conversation with him on GR (about the time we were trying to make sense of
the Tinasky letters) and he described being compelled, astounded and
appalled by the book--which is, of course, the only possible honest
reaction. Strikingly, Said spoke as if the text of GR (which, admittedly,
was not one of his favorites) lived. Yet for all his amazing powers of
erudition, Said doesn't talk or write in the latinate terms and inscrutable
curlique syntax of the pomo critics, whose rheological analysis of books
reveals, in the end, only that the Text has been killed off by their own
eager autopsy.

Said's genius, his unflinching passion for justice and art, is matched only
by his humility. Compare this attitude, then, to the foul-mouthed,
smug-as-ice, and ultimately meaningless screeds of Diane York Blaine (a
teacher who disgustingly demeans her own students in order to project
herself--"Shall I project a World?," indeed--as bringing feminist
Enlightenment to the befuddled populace of N. Texas), whose latest maliced
missive is a perfect metonymy for the elitist orbit of her so-called
discipline. It is typical and not surprising that professors like York
Blaine have absolutely no idea of the intensity of the revulsion with which
80 percent of Americans rightly hold them. They are the sedulous Automatons
of Cookie Cutter Lit Crit, who practice the Hermenuetics of Self.
Fortunately, since they choose not to partake of the World (only its
academic simulacrum--oh, you close readers of Lacan), they will do little
permanent damage to it.

Blaine makes some wise ass crack about whether or not I really seduced a
fatuous professor of structural anthropology into giving me an A by
stroking his ego. And the answer is: Of Course! And he was far from the
only one. A-and it was so-o-o easy...they scarcely knew what was happening
to them. My attitude then was: any time you can turn the tables on an
intellectual sodomist, just--as MJ sez and does so gorgeously--Do It.

On the wall above my Macintosh, between a poster of Vineland's wonderful
cover, announcing "Pynchon's Trilling Return," and a print of a painting by
Morris Graves (America's greatest living painter) titled "Winter Bouquet:
Rosehaws and Hellebore," there is an old gilt-edge frame encasing a fragile
display of gold and green feathers. It is a child's head-dress given to me
a dozen years ago by a 10-year old girl of the Kayapo tribe. I was covering
an expedition of ethnobotanists. We had crossed the Andes on foot and
dropped down through the cloud forests into the viridescent basins of the
Upper Amazon, down into the Gorotire. There we came across a small village
of Kayapo where a girl was dying of influenza, brought in by gold miners,
or loggers, or anthropologists or writers. Who knows?  The botanists
watched the tribe's shaman scour the forest for plants and roots and animal
parts and mix them into applications for the girl. They catalouged the
plants, monitored the doses and interviewed the shaman. I spent days with
the girl, Eessh-ey--Kah-tiri, listening as she told me in the flute-like
Kayapo language stories about her cousins and animals and love and fearless
faith, as daily thunderstorms scuttled across the hidden sky and howler
monkeys abreacted with the night in eery cries. I held her hand as she
died, smiling. Here was the meaning of moieties, in the world of the flesh,
of the living and dying, not in whimsical theories, not in the basement of
some wretched brick building being subjected to the droning of some asshole
with advanced degrees on a mission to re-write the meta-narratives of the
world to his/her own liking. It is bullshit, and everyone outside the
hothouses of academia knows it. Na bo-e-si, in-gi sabe ala sani. In the
Jungle, as the Surinamese say, the Indian knows everything.

I have no doubt that York Blaine developed a close and intimate
relationship with  Norman O. Brown, tracing the feminist contours of Love's
Body. And that she is deeply versed in the works of Freud, assuredly
reading the Old Satyr, the only way he can be read--or else the Text (and,
hence, the Sexist) is not Freud, but Brill or Strachey (or the even
better--when you can find it--Ernest Jones)--in the German. (Though from
the frigid tones of her prose, Di of York sounds more like a Ferenczi girl
to me. My grandmother was analyzed my Firenczi. She said it was a
fructifying, if not exactly cozy, experience.)

But Blaine seems to have transgressed WAY Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Indeed, this appears to be a princess who has locked herself away in an
Ivory Tower, with no intention of ever opening the vaults of her bailey to
any Knight Errant--or Knight's Templar, for that matter. Now we really know
who Guber and Gilbert were talking about in the Madwoman in the Attic--not
the delicious and demented Maria Schneider as Martha in Jane Eyre at all.
No, York, and her "ilk" (the Feminist Pedagogues) are Prisoners, Norman M.,
not of Sex, but of their own Enervating Narcissism.

As for Foucault, I studied with the militant philosopher in the fall of
1980 at Berkeley. I was there for the infamous Howiston Lectures and twice
drove him and his friends around an abbreviated facsimilie of the noted
49-mile loop, as they scouted for new drugs, gay bars and baths in the
Castro and the Haight and lamented the devolution of critical theory from
the promising days of Adorno. I visited him two summers later at the
Bibliotheque du Saulchior--on the eve of the anniversary of the French
Revolution--where we exchanged our admiration for Saint-Just and Marat and
he, in his haltingly precise English, claimed never to have understood
Pynchon and to have been appalled by the feces-eating scene in GR. I took
this as a joke. It was courtesy of Foucault that I got my first article
published in Liberation. But perhaps your knowledge of him, Ms. Blaine, is
more intimate. In which case I would recommend a yearly blood test.

In closing, we implore you, Lady Blaine, not to quit your job. When the
Cultural Revolution comes, and, baby, it *will* come, we want to know where
to find you. An exquisite torture has been planned. Hours upon hours of
reading back to you your own writings by your own revenge-minded students.
Death by boredom. Even Mao himself never envisioned anything quite so
excrutiating.

Steely