19 Cent Notebook

Marcel Duchamp was a French painter and sculptor. He is associated with many of the 20th Century’s most consequential and controversial avant-garde artistic movements, such as Cubism, Dada and “conceptual art”. He once painted a replica of the Mona Lisa with a moustache. I, for one, took this to be a joke, as if a vandalizing teenage Warhol had broken into the Louvre with his black Sharpie.

Duchamp died on October 2nd, 1968 in Neuily-sur-Seine, France at the age of 81. Among his most famous paintings is, Nude Descending a Staircase. It is abstract; or let me revise that and say that it is representational (and here I’m attempting critical analysist somewhat beyond my competence) only in that it shows the fragmented, mechanized movements one might see on a strip of film, back when film came in strips. Maybe Duchamp was imagining our digitized 21st Century future. Good for him. It was time better spent in his studio than messing up a Da Vinci.

In any event, the average person looking for a nude descending a staircase in that painting will see only a kind of bouquet of twisted tin. It would have been jarringly new to the eyes and artistic sensibilities of the average person in 1912, just as Stravinsky’s Sacre du Prentemp (The Rite of Spring) would shock the ears of many the following year. I happen to like the Stravinsky; I’m not all that fond of the Duchamp — or any Duchamp. Maybe my eyes need to catch up with my ears. Or, maybe I should trust my eyes and declare Duchamp worth only of a glance or two.

But the journal The New Criterion has offered a transcultural anecdote from the last days of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It involves, however obliquely, the artistic vision of Marcel Duchamp and belies America’s “woke” cultural blindness when it came to dealing with Afghanistan’s dominant Muslim culture. I submit it may well have confused and disenchanted Afghans to the point of softening their resistance to re-domination by the violent and zealous philistines known as the Taliban. You might say they were looking for cultural bread from America, and we handed them a funny-looking stone.

It seems that, before our cataclysmic withdrawal from the country, as part of a cultural outreach program we sponsored some art education programs. A video from one of those classes has surfaced and shows an American academic instructing a small group of Afghan men and women about the wonders of conceptual art. A slide pops up on a screen in the darkened room and the group finds itself looking at a Duchamp work called The Fountain. It is, in fact, an unadorned urinal. Duchamp impishly sprang this little novelty on the art world in 1917.

“Anyone know what this is?” asks the instructor.

“A toilet,” answers one Afghan gentleman very tentatively, as if he can’t believe he’s being asked this question or being shown this object in the name of art. The camera reportedly captures the expression on the faces of some of the women in the room. My reporter relates that it was “priceless” in its degree of bemused puzzlement. The instructor assures one and all that Duchamp is a very important figure in Western Art and that The Fountain found its way into an art gallery, flushing away (pun intended) age-old conceptions (this being conceptual art) of what did or did not constitute art. He declared that this was a huge artistic “revolution”, elevating the mundane above works meant merely, in Duchamp’s estimate, to please the eye.

I happen to believe in revolutions in art. They shake up and unexpectedly augment our vision of the world. But I suspect the mortals gathered for this little art class in Afghanistan, while doubtless eager to learn about Western art, were also painfully familiar with the destructive possibilities of any revolution. They could not fail to be conscious, while this docent was working to raise their art consciousness, that they faced the strong possibility of being swept out of that classroom and into yet another violent revolutionary maelstrom brewing on the streets. Beyond the serene luxury of that moment, they knew their fragile, preciously-bought freedom and their homeland might once again be descending civilization’s staircase.

And here they were, as if as a preview of coming attractions, being asked to admire a pisser.

Now there is some irony here. It is that Dechamp himself would comment years later that, “I threw the urinal (and other objects) into their (the commissars of the art world’s) faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their artistic beauty.”

Was his “challenge” therefore actually intended as a kind of joke? Well, artists do like to have fun with us. I told you my opinion of his mustachioed Mona Lisa.

Duchamp may have been a bit of a clown. But, as a matter of fact, I see no problem with offering up objects, no matter how functional, pedestrian or seemingly unworthy of celebration, as appropriate for our aesthetic attention and appreciation. I once toured the museum contained within the Wisconsin headquarters of Kohler, the famous makers of toilets. Among other things, it featured a huge, attractively lighted pyramid of porcelain Kohler privies. It was a surprisingly lovely display, suggesting, too, an antic Duchampian streak in Kohler’s corporate museum designers. And who’d have thought….well, you know, that a mound of toilets could be so visually edifying? I, for one, welcome the elevation of the lowliest of ordinary objects above, in this case, their urinary purposes. True, Duchamp’s “fountain” seemed more in the order of what you’d find in rows in a squalid, malodorous city bus terminal. That was probably his point. Ever stop to look at them while you were using one of them? The point of Kohler’s privy pyramid was undoubtedly advertising. And, of course, advertising has often been offered up as art.

But I’m afraid I see this pre-Afghan collapse art class as belonging to an order of purblind modern (again, “woke”) pedagogy. It reveals the transcultural priorities of much of the West’s and U.S.’s cultural and educational elite when it came to Afghanistan. I submit that they were in the toilet.

For instance, it has been reported that the United States, as part of its twenty-year, multi-trillion dollar Afghan adventure, spent $787 million on “gender programs” — a real challenge, since a writer for the journal The Spectator noted that neither the Dari nor Pasho languages of that nation contain any words for gender, per se. (I cannot confirm this, nor the companion assertion that the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was only invented by a sexually abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s. I’ll be anxious to check out that incendiary claim, which, in light of the more dubious manifestations of the Sexual Revolution, seems not altogether implausible.)

I’ve also read that Dr. Bahar Jalali, putative founder of the first Gender Studies program in Afghanistan, noted sadly on August 30th that after teaching eight-and-a-half years at the American University in that nation, all his work was being “snatched away so needlessly.”

To which I’d say — all the while thinking it needless to say it — that Gender Studies Programs were the least of what we lost and the Taliban destroyed or rejected when that nation fell back into their hands.

I suspect the ancient, long-suffering Muslims, Christians and masses of abandoned, free-thinking, freedom-loving folks in Afghanistan could have done without the mother lode of “woke” modern cultural twaddle some of us set about heaping on them. But I’m sure the Taliban will make good use – which is to say evil use — of our heaps of left-behind weaponry and our fleet of Black Hawks. Too bad we didn’t snatch them away.

How might the waggish Marcel Duchamp have conceptualized Afghanistan’s horrible fate? Well, in dust, wire, glue and varnish he created something called, A Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. It was broken into pieces during shipment to its final permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Every Afghan is familiar with broken thing. They might discern a universal statement in a shattered heap of glue, varnish, dust and wire. It might resemble the current state of their homes.

They’d get after it with a broom.

Somewhere in the cosmos it must be possible to detect the grand rhythm of the planet Earth emanating from its core to its jungles. Imagine the ear-to-the-seashell sound swarming up on some imaginary, very delicate measuring instrument able to detect human audial interaction from, say, the crowds at Piccadilly Circus to the bird squabble of jungles and the roar of Victoria Falls.

Then, on our side of the planet, from Time Square to the prairie where a lone rancher might, at this moment, be sitting strumming his guitar on his rickety front porch. Just imagine it! And let us not leave out the roar of the waves breaking along the ocean and gulf coasts and in the rocky shoals of Lake Superior and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Blended, it all might resemble the effusive finale of our National Anthem. Or “God Bless America.” Or, perhaps, “America the Beautiful.” We might hear crickets chirping along the ridges of those “Purple Mountains majesty.”

So what sound announced the coronavirus’s release? The release of that otherwise silent, invisible-to-the-naked eye microbe into the vastness of earth?

I speak of the virus that has, for nearly two years, brought the entire planet to heel and plunged every mortal into panicked pandemic mode, including, for instance, even occupants of any ocean-going vessel far from any infected port of call who might nonetheless fear that one of their cruise ship hosts might be transmitting this unseen microbe to them on the three-inch circumference of the glass of sherry they’ve gently proffered to them. My imagination envisions such once unimaginable things.

Yes, what sound did it make? Was it the airy rush of a laboratory tray being opened in the wrong manner under the wrong circumstances, carelessly violating some lab protocol at exactly 3:23 p.m. one Wuhan afternoon? Was it the faintest of sounds made by the accidental shattering of a small lab beaker?

It was that sound at that moment, whatever and whenever it was, that has for so long painfully trammeled our civilizational interactions. And there is beginning to emerge, reluctantly, a scientific consensus that, unbelievable as it seems, the billion-plus occupants of Planet Earth at this moment early in the 21st Century, have seen our lives transformed, possibly irrecoverably, by a Goof Heard Round the World.

How might one write that in Chinese? For there seems little disagreement that the virus began in Wuhan, China.

Now we have a new report that investigators have not been able to definitively conclude just yet that this virus somehow began in nature, not as an accident. They cannot at this point prove it jumped from an animal to man at, say, a Chinese wet market. That was the theory favored and then initially foisted on us at the outset — by experts.

Yet, last January 4 — I write here on August 25, 2021 — New York magazine carried a cover story by Nicholson Baker strongly suggesting, while not exactly concluding, that the coronavirus pandemic could well be the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan. On January 15, the U.S. State Department released a fact sheet about the virus’s origin that drew no conclusions, either, but added one curious new detail:

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the (Wuhan Institute of Virology) became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

It has been reported that “from the first days of the pandemic, the Chinese government arrested doctors, suppressed warnings, and denied that the virus could spread one person to another. We have heard that Chinese officials have dragged their feet with the World Health Organization. Xi Jinping and the rest of China’s ruling cohort clearly don’t want a full and thorough investigation.

So I ask a vital question, like the anonymous author of that famous Zen koan who asked, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

I ask, what is the sound of a lie? Of a string of lies?

Of an insistent, broken-rhythmed rhapsody of mendacity?

Listen! Is it coming from Wuhan? From Washington?

Listen!

As of late July, 2021, 1585 U.S. personnel were still missing from the Vietnam War, according to the latest figures from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the arm of the Pentagon tasked with finding and returning lost but not forgotten military.

That’s the kind of information that gives a superannuated baby-boomer pause in the last quadrant of his life.

The information was contained in the August 3nd New York Times, which was also reporting on the recent recovery of a U.S. aviator lost way back in 1967.

O, the times of our lives!

I was working at Kings Canyon National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains during that July which simply does not feel like 54 years ago. I was twenty years old and blessed to have that national park adventure as a congressional appointee to the trails and grounds crew and was ultimately given the relatively soft job of caring for the exhibits in the Visitor Center. I had plenty of time to spend with fellow summer employees, many of whom –especially the girls — worked for Harvey Company which operated the restaurant and gift shop.

My brother Doug was working for a California
Congressman John Tunney. Hence, the congressional appointment. Thank you, Doug.

We were listening to the Beatles “Sergeant Pepper” and “Rubber Soul” albums that summer and the Doors’s single (the long version) “Light My Fire” was on the radio often. We’d drive down the mountain now and then into “The Valley” (San Juaquin Valley) to Fresno, where it was hot and flat, for dinner or a drive-in movie, occasionally staying overnight in a downtown hotel, ( guys in one room, women in another; it was the 60s but we were not participants in the proto-hook-up culture blooming in those times.)

At night, in cars or random radios, in the Valley or in the mountains, we’d hear the howls, legendary exuberance and gravelly voice of the D.J. called “Wolfman Jack” originating from — where? That was kind of a mystery. He’d been on a “border-blasting” frequency out of Mexico early in his career and heard all over the country. Where was he now, L.A? Still in Mexico? (The 1973 movie American Graffiti, in which his radio voice was ubiquitous, had Richard Dreyfus’s character find him in a tiny studio under a huge transmitter in the middle of nowhere (though I believe the movie was shot in Modesto, California, down the mountain and not that far from our Kings Canyon perch.)

Wherever he was, we would hear Wolf Man howling in the night.

It was the “Summer of Love” to the west in San Francisco. When our Summer of Work was over at the park early that September, four of us — Dave Fanning, Melody Jones, Josie Gaitan and I — went on a lark, traveling to San Francisco (where I’d never been) in Dave Fanning’s two-tone blue 1955 Chevy Bel Air with its busted back shocks that sent the back seat bumping and bucking rhythmically up and down for a laughing period after going over a bump. It was fun, riding in that car. A nice memory. Life has not always been so much fun since then.

We drove through Height Ashbury, where the hippie phenomenon had only recently been birthed and its many counter-cultural souls come to reside. We gawked during that brief passage at the aftermath, or residue, of that “Summer of Love” among our fellow boomers. All in all, I got a faint, decidedly gray (maybe it was a cloudy day) rolling impression of desuetude and squalor . It almost struck me- the shabby storefronts and ragged foot traffic — as meeting the definition of a slum. Probably not a very “hip” thing to be thinking, then or now — and I did, and do, want to be at least “semi-hip.”

But hippiedom had its gray to dark side.

Joan Dideon was a journalist on the ground among those blocks of cultural revolutionaries that summer and wrote a famous account for the Saturday Evening Post, later anthologized as, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” She took the title from the famous W.B. Yeats poem in which “things fall apart, the center cannot hold” (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”)

As Joan saw it, the “rough beast” of social and cultural “atomization” had roosted upon the deracinated, runaway hordes that had come to reside, like desert birds, in those blocks where the streets named Height and Ashbury intersected, a fascinating but not-altogether pretty phenomenon in one of America’s prettiest, most iconic cities. She might have intuited that it would slouch on for generations, birth an ethos of hellucinogenic transport and deliverance among self-exiled souls who had come to form disparate, semi-cohesive units in “The Height” and, thanks for the increasingly pervasive and influential mass media, that free-wheeling “hippie” ethos would march across the land and around the planet.

In Vietnam, meanwhile, just a month or so before our youthful excursion, two American B-52s had collided over the South China Sea as they approached their targets in a war that was reaching its violent apex. Bombardment from on high, visiting death down below so impersonally and so devastatingly, was a controversial aspect of the last World War ( in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki); no less so in this war in which it was proving so difficult to gain any clear advantage by any conventional means.

Thirty-five-year-old Air Force Major Paul A. Avolese of New York was the navigator on one aircraft and was among those aviators lost and just this month found. He was older and perhaps not typical of the young men of my generation who, to name just one outfit, were serving during that same summer with the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta where they were suffering many losses at the hands of the Viet Cong Communist guerrillas. I once watched a documentary on their tour in that swampy and difficult battle ground. The whole unit had sailed out to Southeast Asia from, as it happens, San Francisco in early 1967, passing right under the Golden Gate Bridge. This was typical of World War II military troop shipments, but not so typical in 1967 and no longer typical of how U.S. division Army divisions have gone to war since (the Marines, perhaps, being Navy-affiliated, excepted). They almost always fly over now and not necessarily as an entire division; they can be fragmented units, replacements for the casualties of an ongoing conflict chewing up fellow combatants. It’s how it became in Vietnam, a sad war of attrition. It was “escalating” controversially in 1967.

But war kills — in singles and in groups. And much war lay ahead in 1967. I’d be drafted in October, 1969.

My Fort Dix Drill Sergeant wore the 9th Infantry patch and was a Vietnam Veteran. We had our conflicts as he tried to transform me into a soldier. He could be cruel and profane. I could be slow, resistant, terrified, exhausted, picked on by fellow platoon members for holding them back as a unit, wishing I’d found a way to avoid the draft.

I wish I knew where Sergeant Douglas was now, if still alive. He claimed to be 27 at the time in the fall of ’69 when, two years after my two summers in California, first in the mountains, then on the seashore, I found myself in the military. He was probably on that 9th Infantry ship out of Frisco, bound for the Delta.

I’m glad I did serve. I’m proud that I served. But I faced nothing like what many of my contemporaries faced. I was blessed. And nobody gets drafted now. You volunteer.

Yes, I’d been blessed to avoid Vietnam (I wound up far safer in Korea) and blessed to have had to summers in the west.

As for those for whom they are now searching in the South China Sea….

It had to be terrifying, that mid-air collision in July, ’67. Seven crew members escaped, six remained missing and could not be found by Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard units. For five decades, families of those missing crew members have had to live with the fact that their remains were out there somewhere, perhaps never to be found.

The search continues….

Eight days after the crash, an Air Force Colonel told Major Avolese’s parents in a letter saying the exact cause of the crash was unknown and that “every man here in the 4133 Bomber Wing shares your anxiety over your son.”

A few days later, Major Avolese was declared dead.

Recovery efforts to bring back the lost have focused for decades on land in former conflict zones, recovering soldiers and Marines from “leg units.”

Now the Pentagon is utilizing Robotic underwater and surface vehicles, long established for ocean science and exploration, locating and surveying wrecks. Land sites have been exhausted, but people are still missing. So, underwater technology has proven, in the words of one Admiral, to be a “force-multiplier” in searching for sunken objects.

But we must now and then think, what was it all about? Vietnam is a tourist destination now.

And Afghanistan. What was sit all about?

The search goes on…

But me, I can only search the murky waters of my memories of that summer of love and war that ended with a SF Giants game against the Astros in Candlestick Park which ended with an extra-innings home run by, I believe, Willy Mays who was near the end of his career. (If it wasn’t Willy’s homer, I know I saw him play that day.) We were joined by another couple — Dan Upton from New Hampshire and his girlfriend, name forgotten, sadly, both Kings Canyon employees. (I wonder if they stayed together? I never saw them again and they left in a different direction that day. Dave and Melody were married the following June in Tucson. I was one of their groomsman.)

There was a moment that September day when we feared we might all have to leave the park early as the game lingered into those extra innings — just because I had to catch a flight back to Boston.

But we got to the airport on time. In the rush, I somehow got separated in the terminal from Dave, Melody and Josie, and so boarded the flight, sorry I’d missed a chance to say goodbye.

Then, suddenly, there they were! On the plane, walking down the cabin to my seat! Something had happened that would rarely ever happen even then and, due to post-911 security, would be impossible now. The gate staff allowed them to come aboard and bid me farewell before closing up for the push-back.

I so appreciated it — and remember it.

But I’m thinking today….Major Avolese, aviator and war casualty, is finally coming home and it’s unclear, after all this time, who will be there to greet him. But I’m glad I saw that Times article, given how seldom I look at the Times these days.

Let’s go on remembering that 1585 other Americans of my baby-boomer generation , and doubtless some, like Major Avolese from a generation well before that, who were at war in the Summer of Love.

At one point in that summer in the mountains, I recall being in some government housing alone, away from my own cabin in a pine groove, waiting for the women to come and get ready for a gathering that night, maybe for a party. We had some good little parties. Yes, those were leisure times. But I recall being overtaken by a sharp sense of consciousness of the moment, as if my mental and emotional vision were focusing and I was entirely in the present moment, free but nonetheless not totally at peace; perhaps, despite every effort to ward it off, having thoughts about the future — about what might happen from there on out in my life; from that moment in that ordinary room with the table and chairs and record-player, no longer looking off at the mountains vistas, no longer a child or teenager; a little bored but a little anxious, even though these had been to that point happy times far, far away from home and college and any daily cares.

Up until then, I’d been having “the time of my life” as they say. And yet…

I started to end this at 2:04 p.m. of this Thursday. I have things to do , don’t I? Suddenly, it’s 2:45.

I’ve had a dead car battery; AAA came and I had to pay for a new one. That was morning. I ate lunch. That was afternoon….and I’m thinking….

That day in the mountains, I guess I was also thinking, ‘it’s later than I think,” even though I hoped so much life was ahead of me. And I knew I would resist, as if paralyzed, every impulse to undertake the hard work of being a writer,l which was already very much on my mind. I was fighting that cold inertia in that moment that makes a body waste time, course idly through life, incident to incident….

So now, over a half century later, I’m thinking (Oh, God!) as I thought then:

Get busy! You’ve been blest, given years and years and, I pray, more.

And I knew the military might be in my future. One hearty, burly soul who worked with us in Kings Canyon was in the reserves and was called up and seemed unconcerned, perhaps even welcomed the prospect of action. He’d trained as a paratrooper. He would take a practice jump once he was active. I have no idea what became of him, or even remember his name. I hope he survived and is, like me, a boomer in the last quadrant of a life for which we must be grateful.

I also spent the summer of 1968 in California — in Laguna Beach. After college, I took one last drive to California in September, 1969. My draft notice caught up with me where I was making a nostalgic re-visit to Laguna Beach. I was inducted in Boston on October 27 of that year, narrowly missing being inducted into the Marines, and was taken by bus to Fort Dix.

I will go on thinking about those times.

For deep in the sea — or somewhere on land — are the remains of 1584 souls whose fate it was never to come home from that drawn-out jungle war.

Eight summers of war followed that Summer of Love. You’d think we were done with war.

Wrong.