He was only another name, another guru, until I read Sally Kempton’s article in New York Magazine. Sally had written for Esquire a couple of years ago about her liberation as a woman. Now, she was writing about a different kind of liberation.
Spiritual Fascism In America
A problem for anyone deciding to surrender to a Religious Master in our culture is that he can’t have every bit of his personal-individual-separated-everything consciousness and be spiritual too.
The Bicentennial is not deceptive. It is quite simple. Two hundred years of freedom from Great Britain. Like an anniversary, it is a notation of time.
So it is that every fourth year we are treated to a seemingly new series of causes and slogans that are destined to end up being a further boost to special interests and privileged classes to which none of us belong.
A Manifesto Addressed To The Inhabitants Of America On The Following Interesting Subjects: Restraint, Bankruptcy, Selection, Dialectic
The approach and arrival of the Bicentennial year has evoked considerable analyses of North American political retrospective. While most diagnoses conclude an ailing bi-centenarian suffering from blunted thrust to blemished future, few prescribe remedies for this ailing body politic.
So here I stay, along with the others who shamefacedly admit that yes, they too graduated from the university years ago and no, they cannot think of a better Southern spot in which to live and perhaps grow old.
I live now like a deposed king, which is to say, with a slight air of once-proud nobility I cling to as I cling to the rags and tatters of my existence because it’s all I’ve got left.
Certainly it’s difficult to survive as a writer in America, but it may be more difficult to sustain oneself once having been published than it was in one’s first, frustrated, unpublished silence.
ARK-BRUTE the LARVA
zone-chief No. 1, a human potentate related to the present author, a duck-shirted Uranian Rememberer, PULVERO, Overseer of Earth’s eastern seaboard.
Power is neither good nor bad. Power is focused ego producing or preventing change. We are children of America: power is our creed.
It might be a sin against space or reality to try to concretize things into words. Then again there is this urge to describe the moment. What is this urge? Why is it so?
The two big trees fascinate me. . . . I watch the very tiptops of those trees and wonder if I can poise my consciousness in those leaves at the top long enough to BE there. I try.
It is often difficult, usually frustrating and seldom appreciated, but those of us who continue to live our lives faithful to our beliefs and ideals are truly patriots and lovers of freedom.
My thumb was out and Interstate 86 out of Providence, Rhode Island was getting hot. Me and my St. Bernard, Roger, were thumbing across America. It had been a messy morning.
*NOTE: Original copies of this issue are no longer available. Unbound, laser-printed copies will be provided for print orders.
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