I asked my friend Frank Dixon if he would be my first guest blogger here. He agreed. The following text, which is excerpted from his e-book The Several Roads to Serfdom, is his contribution. Frank has previously published another (physical) book titled Spinoza's God. I'm pleased and honored to have Frank appear on my blog.
I do not intend to burden you
with long excerpts from the novel, only a small part Catherine
particularly enjoyed and about which she made a remark pertinent to
the story unfolding here. The words Catherine liked were spoken by my
novel’s hero during a disturbing period of his life. He was
mourning the proximity of the St. Elizabeth’s asylum and a sewage
treatment plant to a beautiful flock of geese he had seen flying in
over the Potomac River. His lamentation refers also to a derelict man
my hero had seen sitting on the curb, crying into his hands at Laurel
Race Course in some distantly prior time. I have to print the excerpt
here so you can understand Catherine’s comment, and so I can relate
her comment to my inquiry into Hayek’s book.
Ever since Joanna [the
hero’s current lover, not another name for Catherine]
seduced from me the words describing that broken man, a thought has
started recurring, unbidden. It’s of the birds and their sunlight,
and of the asylum. Maybe this stretch of road also helps the image
appear. When I pass this way I’m turned from my internal gears and
pulleys and shoved out into the world of feeling things. I start
thinking thoughts far different from those of the machine who sees
numbers and bets accordingly.
We’ve deluded ourselves into
believing the birds and the morning light atone for the stench of
Blue Plains and for the depressing idea of St E’s. We believe the
beautiful things of the world are somehow separate from the ugly
things, that pure, God-like forces and evil, satanic forces, working
apart from each other, create separately identifiable molecules of
reality; and we believe that if we can make ourselves rich enough,
smart enough, thin enough, or numb enough we can completely surround
ourselves with the products and notions of goodness, and all ugliness
will disappear.
Artists
create similar illusions. The painter isolates a flock of geese,
takes it up out of the world and sketches it on canvas. The edges of
his picture separate the beautiful scene inside from the horror
beyond. Framed there, the birds exist simply as a flight of geese,
elegant and unconcerned. But in the artless world of horses and men,
the real geese appear in the same frame with the metaphorical geese
cooped up behind the fence at St E’s. Only one picture exists, only
one world, the beautiful and the grotesque kept apart by a kind of
blindness. And no matter how many mechanical routines I put into
place to insulate my life, I cannot separate the ugly and the
beautiful. They’ve fused into an amalgam of themselves, destroying
the possibility of parts. The bright shining wholeness that contains
geese-geese and human-geese as beings occupying the same universe,
pours over the edges of the frame, into everything outside, dazzling
and stunning the frail view of prettiness to which the simplicities
of the eye fasten our gaze. Staring into the light of that
brightness, I cease my existence as an imperturbable machine and
enter the world of sorrow, not simply brother to the man crying on
the curb, but substantially, actually, him.
Catherine reminded me of the
persona confusion the passage may create in its readers. “I do not
normally think of horse players as people who speak that way, or
think that way.” But I let that part of her comment slide. Persona
relates primarily to matters of style; it typically has nothing to do
with meaning. That part of her comment was, in any event, only an
oblique mention. The important thing
she
said about the piece
had nothing to do with style, and everything to do with meaning.
“You’re a Spinoza freak, and
that explains the dual aspects you have given the asylum, the sewage
plant, and those ‘beautiful’ geese. You’ve made St. Elizabeth’s
and Blue Plains sound like bad things, when actually they’re good.
Try to imagine all those crazies running loose, all that sewage
piling up in the streets. And those geese! God, but they sh_t a lot!
[She actually deleted the profaning letter.] You clever devil! You’ve
taken those beautiful institutions, and those ugly geese, and have
shown how our minds can be made to tremble back and forth between the
two different ways those things, and all
things, can be made to
appear, the beautiful and the grotesque together, their physical
reality overlaid by feelings.”
Compliments come my way too
infrequently to be cavalierly cast aside, so perhaps I should not
tell you that Catherine gave me credit where none was due. But truth
is too dear to be shucked for a kind word. I may not know what Neil
LaBute had in mind when he wrote The
Shape of Things, but I
swear that Catherine’s thought was nowhere near the mind of Frank
Dixon when he wrote that lyric. I had actually traveled the Anacostia
Freeway. I had actually seen that man sitting on the curb at Laurel.
I had felt the recurring, pulsating depression. The scene was not
created. It
was reported.
But Catherine was right. I am a
Spinozista.
I should
have been conscious of
the way the eternally reverberating appearance of things and thoughts
about things distorts reality. I should have seen that everything
that attracts our attention comes packaged in an envelope of emotion.
And even as I write these
words, I begin to see
that even if the scene from the novel were
reported, it was not
merely
reported. The words of the report—each individually selected—were
products of an emotionally driven process. I may have intended to
write an objective account of a series of phenomena, but more than
the objective world made its way onto the paper. I could not separate
the words describing the things I intended to report from the ocean
of feelings in which they swam. As the piece makes clear, all is
One, even those things
which seem isolated from the rest.
Copyright © 2012, Frank Lonzo Dixon, Jr.
I am self-educated, having graduated without honors from Murphy High School in Mobile, AL in 1949. I worked many jobs at gradually increasing pay, and retired in 1994 as a computer security guru. I live now with my dear wife Bonnie in the Virginia Blue Ridge. I look vaguely like the attached pic which was taken about four years ago. The date of my death is not scheduled.
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