You can’t live in Los Angeles without a car. I mean, that’s what a lot of people say. It’s not true, but many L.A. residents believe it. Of course these are the same people who constantly gripe about gridlocked traffic, aggressive drivers, and scarcity of parking. Parked vehicles are routinely towed from streets where the multitude of cautionary parking signs practically requires a law degree to successfully navigate. Some LA residents act surprised when I tell them a clean subway runs under downtown LA that stretches north through the Hollywood Hills to Burbank, and reaches south all the way down to Long Beach. Above ground, buses operate frequently on every major street. In fact, out of any major U.S. city, the relatively flat terrain and temperate weather here couldn’t be more ideal for bike riding.
Some of the advantages to ditching the car, even for one day a week, aside from the obvious beneficial environmental and economic factors: you will interact with life in the city in a more intimate way than you ever could in the insulated bubble of a leased Beemer. Old ladies in Koreatown will smile at you toothlessly and simulate flexing their muscles as you lift your bike onto the bus rack. You’ll cruise down fragrant Hollywood tree-lined streets on cool nights. Your right bike handle gets caught in a bush but as you fall two strangers catch you and laugh. The people-watching on the subway is stellar, and the skyscrapers tower overhead on the long escalator ride up from the underground into the sunlight downtown. If you’re pissed off you can pedal fast and hard, blaring music into one ear. Walking with friends to get cupcakes in Larchmont makes you feel like a kid again. And when you ride a bike you arrive at every destination feeling slightly invigorated. Okay, maybe a little sweaty.
I’m not going to lie, it’s not all cupcakes and meet-cutes, especially if you’re a woman. You’ll meet men who make helpful offers like, “Girl, I’ll teach you how to ride that bike.” I literally had two different men, one young, one old, say this to me within an hour of each other. I don’t know what it means exactly, but I’ve got my suspicions. My bicycle seat was stolen after I left the bike locked to a street sign for 20 minutes to run an errand. A few weeks ago, I grabbed the last vacant seat on the bus only to discover that my seatmate was sniffing an unidentified substance out of his hand. And like driving, bike riding on city streets is not without its dangers. Our mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, on his first bike ride out in years, was recently hit by a cab and dislocated his elbow. Thankfully, he wore a helmet that morning. This unfortunate accident thrust bicycle safety concerns into the spotlight, and concrete steps have been taken by local government to more aggressively expand LA’s bike lanes over the next decade.
Ultimately, walking, biking, and commuting by public transport reduces pollution, increases physical health, saves money, and leaves you open to fully experience the people and locations that embody a city. There’s a certain life-enhancing vulnerability in talking to strangers and launching off of cracks in sidewalks. This is not to say that I won’t ever own another car. The siren call of heated leather seats is not lost on me. For now though, life is good and interesting without them.
Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the maple, alder, elm and cherry trees with which the town abounds are songs of desire, and only the almonds of ancient Palestine can awaken the hungry pores more quickly.
-Edward Dalhberg, from Because I Was Flesh
The place to which I first belonged, which belonged to me then in flesh and belongs to me now in memory – memory visual, aural, tactile – was a 165-acre Hudson Valley farm. On the east bank of the river, just north of the village of Croton-on-Hudson, itself some forty miles north of New York City, overlooking the river from the crest of what seemed such a great hill to me then, the farm was no longer worked, but it was kept well.
Willard Brinton, a Quaker from Philadelphia, an engineer by training, owned the property with his wife. We had moved to a house that abutted the farm when I was four years old. Not long after I met two brothers, Mike and Geoff Sutherland – one older, one younger than me. They lived on the farm itself with their parents, who had bought a house from “old man Brinton”, as he was called behind his back. We became explorers and scouts, walking the property’s bounds, exploring hay ricks and caves, skirting the lake where, with our fathers, we would fish while our mothers sat on the steps of the cabin that fronted the lake and drank cheap sherry. We flushed a giant one early fall evening and went running to our fathers to tell them. Having encountered giants themselves when they were young, they did not discount our story, but instead went off in search of him. He was gone by the time we returned.
Ever restless, old man Brinton was always having something done on the property. One of the greatest of his works was a series of cascading ponds, formed by building a series of small dams on the stream that ran through the property and down into the Hudson. One was fitted with a diving board. There we swam, trying hard to jump on each other as we ran off the board. One day we spotted a huge snapping turtle in one of the upper ponds. “Big Mike”, my friends’ father, was able to lift it from the edge of a pond into a 55-gallon barrel filled with water. I don’t know why it deserved such confinement. We knew it could be dangerous to us, but his pond was not where we swam.
From the house where I lived, I could walk through the woods down to the railroad tracks that ran along the Hudson. Today’s parents would not think of letting their children do what we were allowed to do: cross those tracks to get to the river bank. But my father had grown up in New York City and my mother, an Englishwoman, had survived the Blitz in wartime London, so what harm could come to us? The tracks were a source of coal that fell from the steam engines’ coal cars and a source of the odd equipment – shovels, lanterns, mysterious tools and pieces of metal – that fell from the trains. One day my friend Geoff and I were standing on the river bank when a huge fish broke the water’s surface: its back seemed to go on forever. We ran screaming from the bank, flew across the tracks with no regard for what might be coming and fled through the woods back up to the house. Only years later did I realize that it was a sturgeon, probably one of the last of the very old ones that would migrate up the river.
We moved not long before I turned eight. My mother was expecting another child and the house which we rented was too small for four of us. So we found a house in the village itself. Was I now to live east of Eden? I don’t remember ever feeling that way. Before I had ridden the school bus, now I could walk to school. Having walked the metes and bounds of Brinton’s farm, having made it my own, I could now walk the village. Before the dangers were hayricks that could collapse, or mud that could suck you in if you weren’t careful. Now I needed to watch out for yard dogs off their leads and, worse, bullies whose prey I could become.
But the dangers were minor compared to what lay before me now. I could be sent on errands, walking and later riding my bike into the village center from the knoll where we lived. I had friends in every direction. Best of all I could walk to the library.
The library was housed on the second floor – no, I think it was the third – of the Municipal Building, an otherwise undistinguished three-story pile of brick that housed the village and the town offices, the police department and the local justice court. Tall-ceiling’ed, the walls lined with shelves, the shelves supplemented by free-standing bookcases that thrust out into the room like Manhattan piers, the library was presided over by a stern-faced woman who wore tweed suits and sensible shoes. The deference of children to adults was a given then, in the mid-Fifties and, as the librarian, she was to be treated with especial respect. Her’s was the final word on behavior: if she threw you out, there was no appeal. Rumor had it that several children had died under her stern gaze, but we never found their bodies and suspected that she encouraged this belief to keep us under control.
I needed no control in the library. It was the world made large for me. I could walk into the books on the shelves and inhabit them, living inside the worlds they contained for as long as I liked. Then, as now, I would return home laden with books. I would haul them up to my room and only then discover which ones I really wanted to read. Looking now at my online library record, I see that I have out far more books than I can read in the time I have them. At least back then the librarian would look at my record and inform me that I had hit the limit and would have to bring some back before I took out any more.
Layers of place accreted over the years. Later, in high school, I discovered a passion for biology and would roam the woods and paths of my village. Heavily developed now – I no longer live there, but visit occasionally – then there were still large parcels of undeveloped land. They were not posted or, if they were, we paid no attention. My chief prey were the bullfrogs that inhabited a particular pond and swamp. I would return home covered with muck and reeking of swamp odor and would be directed to the back of the house where I stripped naked, hosed myself off and, wrapped in an old towel reserved for the purpose, ran upstairs to take a shower before dinner.
All places have limits which we must sometimes cross and I crossed the limits of mine when, during Vietnam, I went into the Air Force. Returning “home” in 1968, I realized that it was not home any more and, anyways, I had planned to live in New York City. Which I did for several years, then moved overseas for a year. Only when I came back and then only when I moved upriver about twenty miles, did I begin to replant myself.
Perhaps it was then that I began to develop some wisdom and realize that, like a river, life tears at the banks of our lives, constantly reshaping them. Mine had been reshaped – by the war (though I was fortunate and did not serve in Vietnam), by life overseas and the attendant collapse of my first marriage – and I knew that I needed to stay in one place for a while. Which I have, thirty-five years, thirty of them in the same house. Which stands just one block back from the Hudson River, closer than I was to it when we first moved to Croton in 1950.
Can a river be a place? It can, but you have to step back to see it, to see how the river shapes the land as much as the land has shaped the river. To understand, as I did one bright morning, that I live not only on a river’s banks but on the coastline, because all the way up to Albany the Hudson River is, in fact, a tidal estuary, filling and emptying twice every day. It is the place where we launch our yellow kayak – a beamy little boat reminiscent of HMS MINNOW, Rat’s boat in THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. We paddle out and then turn around to see the land from the river’s point of view.
Will I die here? I don’t know. I have tried living away from here and it does not work. Place is not simply a location, longitude and latitude. It is a wave from a car window, a “hello” yelled across the street, a joke shared over breakfast, a moment of silence for a friend suddenly dead by his own hand. The texture of the hand rail that you’ve gripped thousands of times, the sound that your tires make running over a particular stretch of road, reminding you that you’re coming up to a dangerous curve. It is, in the end, a vast web that runs wide and deep. Like the spider’s work, it can be repaired, but only up to a point. It requires diligence and hard work to be maintained.
Without it, though, we are dead long before we die.
Royal Typewriter, circa 1950s. Photo credit: mrtypewriter.tripod.com.
The Typewriter
By John Unger Zussman
A year after I’d lost him, I taught myself to touch-type. I relished our old Royal, his old Royal. I loved how the keys plunked and the typebars clattered, how the letters appeared neatly on the line, one after the other. I reveled in the ping of the bell and the thwack of the carriage return. By the time I finished the lessons, it was not the typewriter’s music I craved but its lyrics: a powerful word, a deft sentence, a paragraph that leaves you breathless.
Although I knew my father had written, I didn’t expect the thick envelope of manuscripts my mother presented me when I turned forty. From it spilled war stories and postwar stories, war poems and love poems, the first chapter of a novel. He’d dreamed of a life as a writer and, judging by his professors’ comments, showed promise. Then he joined my grandfather’s warehouse business so he could marry her and have me. He packed those pages away, planning, I suppose, to return to them when the business got to its feet and we kids could make our own way to school.
My manager and my writing mentor want me to write something commercial instead of another passion project. I see their point. But I conjure the smoky late-night staccato of my father at the Royal. No. I don’t think so.
◊
Today’s post is the third of three in tribute to my father, Myron “Mickey” Unger, who would have turned 85 in August. In September, I posted a reaction to an old baby picture of me in a stroller, laughing, with my parents on either side. Last month, fifty years after his death, I continued the story with a poignant essay on life and parenthood that my father wrote in the ’50s, called “Upon Reaching the Age of Three.”
I am grateful for your interest and comments. It is comforting to know that my father’s words, even now, can move those who didn’t even know him.
Two recent novels by French-speaking authors blend close psychological analysis with free-flowing lyricism to tell deceptively simple love stories. One of those books, In the Train, by Christian Oster, was released by Object Press this year. Object Press, out of Toronto, is an indie press established in 2008 and with only two titles to its name so far. But if In the Train is any indication, they are off to a promising start.
Oster’s novel is small, not quite 150 sparsely printed pages, and the story it tells is a modest one. Frank, nondescript in every aspect except his tendency to overanalyze and his habit of seeking out women on train platforms, meets Anne, a woman carrying a large bag at the Paris station. He offers to hold the bag for her and thus their romance begins. Anne is cautious at first, but Frank insinuates himself into her heart through a series of maneuvers ranging from half-gestures to outright stalking – or what would amount to stalking if we weren’t charmed by Frank’s voice and thus made to trust his motives.
I’ve not read another novel by Oster so I can’t say if this voice is his or one cleverly adopted for Frank. But whether he’s chosen the perfect character for his style or created the perfect style for his character, it’s a match. Comma-heavy, this style involves long sentences, full of clarifications, elaborations, asides, and disclaimers – many of them seemingly unnecessary; and yet they charm us while drawing us closer to Frank, and so, I think, are essential.
Here is Frank analyzing Anne’s reaction after he offers to hold her bag:
She looked tempted by my offer, although still undecided. Then she looked at me and thought that, at worst, I was interested in her, not her bag, and she handed it to me… I took the bag, thinking this woman was actually pretty relaxed, with men, unless she was doing everything possible to be left in peace, but I wasn’t sure this was the best way to go about it, with a man. But with me, I don’t know.
There are plenty of phrases here that an insensitive editor might remove, but to do so would be to miss the point. And besides, there’s enough meat in the story that we don’t get sick of this style. Not only is there Frank’s questionable behavior as he knocks on every door of the hotel to which he has followed Anne – is this gesture romantic or creepy, and more importantly, how will Anne see it? – but there is another man, a successful and interesting author who uses Anne as a plaything. When Anne first takes off her robe for Frank, in her hotel room while waiting for the author to return, we are not sure whether her behavior is the result of genuine attraction or revenge on a man who has hurt her. We go on questioning her sincerity throughout the story: even when she does succumb to Frank’s love, we can’t help but feel she’s settling.
The overly explanatory style doesn’t always suit Oster’s purposes perfectly. The bag in the aforementioned passage comes to symbolize many things – an obstacle to Frank and Anne being fully united; the weight of their separate pasts; the burden of love – but Frank makes all these meanings explicit to us, and in doing so, they lose some of the impact they might have had were we allowed to figure them out on our own.
All in all though, this is a strong novel in the European mode – if I might be allowed such a generalization. European novels tend to privilege abstraction and the explicit elaboration of thought and feeling, while American novels approach these things obliquely, through gesture, dialogue, loaded description and telling action. Both are useful and worthy methods, but it’s books like this that give rise to the lie at the heart of the worst American fiction: that we do not elaborate our feelings and thoughts to ourselves; that we are acting, not thinking, beings and that we approach our consciousnesses indirectly.
Running Away, by Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is roughly the same size and scope as In the Train. Released in 2009 by Dalkey Archive Press, it tells the story of an unnamed narrator who, on business trip to Shanghai, becomes involved with a mysterious woman named Li Qi. What follows is a whirlwind, dreamlike romance.
Like In the Train, much of this book takes place on the move – in trains, yes, but also on planes; and there is even a high-speed chase by motorcycle. As in In the Train, the romance is complicated by a third party – in this case, the narrator’s business partner, Zhang Xiangzhi, who has an ambiguous, probably romantic, relationship with Li Qi. And like In the Train, the story is told in the observant, lyrical voice of its first-person narrator. But while In the Train roots us in Frank’s head, Running Away focuses more on the physical world, providing lengthy descriptions of Shanghai, Beijing, and the Mediterranean.
At places, this book reads like the best travel writing. Here are the narrator and Li Qi after they first meet at a Shanghai art gallery:
Sound checks could be heard from the warehouse, and sharp bursts of Chinese heavy metal…filled the calm surroundings of the summer night, causing glass panes to vibrate and sending grasshoppers flying in the warmth of the air. It became difficult to hear one other on the bench and I moved closer to her…
Compare this to Frank’s meeting with Anne. In that passage, the focus is entirely on the two characters – just look at how many times the words “she” and “I” are used; and then notice how comparatively empty of pronouns the passage from Running Away is.
While it is nice to have a visceral experience of teeming China, Toussaint’s descriptive gifts often push us away when we should be drawn closer. Just as we become interested in the menacing, yet oddly passive love triangle (Zhang seems to know what’s going on between the narrator and Li Qi and yet doesn’t seem angry about it) we are dowsed in lyricism that gives a poetic lift to a situation that, psychologically, can’t support it. Where Oster uses lyricism to extract his characters’ motivations, Toussaint trains it on the outer world. And so the trio who races via motorcycle through the streets of Beijing could be anybody at all, the nice tension between them dropping away into mere action:
We turned off the freeway to escape our pursuers, braking to take an off- ramp, but the sirens kept following us, seeming to multiply in space, coming from everywhere at once, as when a number of police cars converge on the scene of an accident at high speed…
There’s a reason high-speed chases aren’t thought of as literary. Running Away does provide a deepening context to the passage: the narrator is “running away” from a previous romance; and the chase, his constant movement between countries, and his quick plunge into the arms of another woman all reflect that. However, Toussaint misses opportunities to complicate this idea, or I should say that the natural limitations of his style – its tendency toward superficial, poetic effect – prevent him from realizing these opportunities. It is when this book, yes, runs away from the very things that make it most European that it loses us, too.
As someone once said, it’s not easy being green, at least not in the United States. Even here in Illinois, where the Green Party has had enough support to be an “established party,” theoretically on a par with the Republicans and the Democrats, you run into all kinds of logistical difficulties when you try to support your party. I’m not just talking about how difficult it can be just to get a yard sign from a party that has no money and few personnel. And I’m not talking about the eye-rolling you get from Democrats who blame the Green’s Ralph Nader for being the spoiler for Al Gore (for the record, I voted for Gore that time out). And I’m not talking about the snickering of Republicans who figure you’re some kind of birkenstock-clad deep-woods tree-hugger (my feet are too ugly for open-toed sandals, people, and I admire nature mostly on the Discovery Channel). Nope. I’m talking about the difficulties one runs into at the actual polling place itself. Even with the Greens officially established in Illinois, and election officials legally bound to ask you whether you want a Republican, Democratic, or Green ballot, problems continue. On several occasions I’ve been told by election judges that there was no such thing as a Green ballot (not true). Once, when someone behind me overheard this and asked the judge if the Greens were a real party, the judge told her that they weren’t. I don’t think this was malicious: I think it just didn’t compute, for this person, that there were more than two parties on the ballot. I mean, a lot of people actually believe that the two-party system is constitutionally ordained, a permanent (if perhaps not always satisfying) part of the American political landscape.
And this brings me to why I think voting Green is a Situationist act.
Situationism — the movement we tend to think of as starting with the Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1957 — had its roots about a decade earlier, in Sartre’s essay “Pour un théâtre de situations.” Here, Sartre argued that what theater should do is, one way or another, to show “simple and human situations and free individuals in these situations choosing what they will be…. The most moving thing the theatre can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life.” That is, theater, ideally, exists to break our sense of complacency and limitations. It exists to kick us out of our sense that our hands are bound, and expand our sense of freedom and agency. It’s sort of down the same street as Brecht’s thinking about theater: Brecht saw his own “epic theater” as something that, by breaking down narrative and the wall between the players and the audience, could wake people up from their spectator-stupor and make them active. Sartre was a more conventional playwright than Brecht, but the goal was the same. I mean, think of that moment in “Huis Clos” when the characters, who have been locked together in a room in hell, pull on the door and find, despite all their expectations, that it pops open. They don’t leave (out of fear, out of various psychological weaknesses that bind them to one another) and we, the audience, are infuriated. We want them to go, and we’re angry at them for refusing their own freedom. We leave the show exasperated at their weakness and bad faith, and (ideally) we feel more fired-up about our own freedoms and possibilities.
That’s the idea of the “situation” — it is the moment when we realize we are freer than we thought we were, and have more options than we thought we had. This can be something very small (“I don’t have to put up with that guy at work’s bullshit anymore”) or something large (“the King isn’t really ruling by divine right — let’s storm the goddam Bastille already!”). And whatever their disagreements with Existentialism may have been, the Situationists took the idea of creating such situations — not just in the theater, but in daily life — as fundamental. Their main techniques were designed to take us out of pre-fabricated ideas and a sense of passive spectatorship.
Consider détournement, in which one takes an existing cultural product (a comic book, say) and modifies it (replacing the dialogue with lines from Nietzche or something): we’re clearly meant to get the sense that we are not mere consumers of culture, but can intervene in it. Or consider the Situationist dérive, a kind of boundary-crossing ramble over a built environment, without respecting the prescribed uses for the various kinds of space. This is meant to help us realize that we don’t have to follow the ordinary paths, and use things as we are implicitly and explicitly told to use them.
So. For me, voting Green is less about expressing a desire to save the trees and keep the water clean (though I believe those are good things to do) than it is about a desire to keep the Green Party on the ballot (you need 5% of the vote to do that in Illinois). It’s about creating an environment in which one realizes that the way things are now is not the way they have always been and must always be. It’s about creating a sense of expanded options. It’s about creating a situation.
Robert Archambeau is the author of Word Play Place (Ohio/Swallow), Home and Variations (Salt), and Laureates and Heretics (Notre Dame). He is Professor of English at Lake Forest College.
For a time he lived between my legs
where our urgent collisions seemed more
than the common fuck, more like he wanted
to break through the boundaries of skin
and mind and dissolve himself in the depth
of a woman who, he insisted,
did not remind him of his mother. A woman
more pliant and yielding than the clumsy
young girls who offered themselves cocooned
in their own interests, a woman who knew
that his sickness drove him to seek
shelter on the inside of someone
who provided herself like an abandoned cabin,
whose heat was seasoned by distant fires,
hard nights, needs beaten to a sheen.
And when his breath caught
and he breached, almost, the sovereignty
between him and me, filling the space with sound,
my emptiness echoed his cry: the purr of wind
through loose windows, thrash of deer through brush,
the call of faraway trains at night.
POCKET KNIFE
What struck me most was how gently
his left hand cupped the elbow to steady
the arm and turn out the white expanse
near the wrist where the veins are visible.
And how slowly, tenderly, he positioned
it, held as one would when cutting a steak
for which one felt only the mildest hunger,
his thin wrist bent slightly over his work.
The almost translucent flesh dimpled
under the pressure and formed two plump
ridges on either side. I told him once
that I would be willing even
to bleed for him.
And when the flesh split, and the line
he drew down my arm turned scarlet
and welled up and ran thickly toward
my hand, I felt the bloodless despair
that cutters describe
rush out of me
and the room swirl almost
with the rhythm of his breath.
And weightless I rose
toward a beckoning twilight
as we sat leaning over
the slow flow that startled us awake.
(“He Comes” and “Pocket Knife” were originally published in The 2River View. These poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)
Georgia Kreiger lives in Maryland and teaches creative writing. Her poems have appeared in The 2River View, poemmemoirstory, Literal Latté, Poet Lore, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Outerbridge, Backbone Mountain Review and others.
Editor’s Note: In truth I am at a loss for what to say about these striking poems. Thoughts fly through my head like cars on a freeway, crossing one another at record speeds. Of course I would love these poems. How brilliant, how honest, how raw. How painful, and how beautiful the pain. Kreiger wastes no time in cutting deep, in sticking her arms in up to her elbows as if midwifing or keeping a heart beating with her bare hands. Sex, violence, mental illness- there is no subject taboo, no aspect of the human/female/relationship experience that is off limits. I am inspired and humbled by Kreiger’s grasp on the art of the poem.
William Eastlake was a highly regarded American novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, but his reputation began to sink like a stone in the late 1970s and by the time of his death in 1997 he was a forgotten figure. I would argue that this obscurity was largely undeserved, yet understandable. After all, the author himself is on record as saying, ” When you’re dead, you’re dead. I don’t care what people will think of my work when I’m dead.’ But it is undeserved because Eastlake began writing about the American Southwest long before Cormac McCarthy or even Tom Robbins. His Southwest was one “whose comic and tragic dimensions, as well as its hard beauty, encapsulates American myths and nightmares much in the way that Faulkner did with his Yoknapatawpha County.”
Biography
Eastlake was born in Brooklyn in 1917 to English parents. His family soon relocated to Caldwell, New Jersey. A few years later his mother would be permanantly confined to a mental institution and William and his younger brother would be sent to a boarding school, where they would remain until graduation.
After high school, Eastlake took to the road and worked his way across the country. He ended up in Los Angeles in the early 1940s and worked as clerk in Stanley Rose’s bookshop. This shop was a hangout for West coast writers such as John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and Theodore Dreiser. Eastlake ‘s time there was important for two reason’s. First, it was while working at the shop that he first committed himslf to writing. Secondly, he met Martha Simpson, a painter, who he would marry in 1943.
In 1942 Eastlake joined the army. After basic training he was assigned to Fort Ord to “look after” Japanese-American draftees. This proximity to Japanese -American troopes would lead him to express his frustration and contempt for the suspicion and racism that Japanese -Americans faced during World War II.
As American involvement in the war increased, Eastlake would later be transferred to a replacement company. He would see action in D-Day, and having survived, would fight in France and Belgium. He received a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge, where he was seriously wounded.
After the war, Eastlake and his wife travelled around Europe for several years. In 1950, the Eastlakes returned to Los Angeles. In order to support his writing and her painting, he borrowed money and became involved in real estate speculation. During this time, Eastlake often visited his brother- in -law at his summer home in the Jemez mountains. This inspired Eastlake to buy his own four hundred acre ranch in the Jemez Mountains near Cuba, New Mexico.
Eastlake’s ranch was located between a Navajo Reservation and an Apache Reservation and he became especially friendly with the Navajos. He often hired them as ranch hands. More importantly, he would learn much about Navajo customs and beliefs from his friends and neighbors that would mark his fiction.
It was during his time in New Mexico that Eastlake began to appear in print. His first stories were published in 1954 and in 1956, his first novel Go In Beauty was published. In 1958, he brought out The Bronc People. In 1963, Portrait of the Artist With Twenty-six Horses saw daylight and in 1965, Castle Keep. Eastlake subsequently published four more works of fiction before his death in 1997.
Lyric of the Circle Heart
Eastlake’s first thre novels form a trilogy which he would later title Lyric of the Circle Heart. I will try to smmarize their contents.
Go in Beauty (1956) is the story of two brothers, George and Alexander Bowman, who fall into spiritual, and in Alexander’s case, literal death. The book is set in the New Mexico part of the Four Corners region , which Eastlake fictionalizes as the Checkerboard, and the story revolves around the troubled relationship of the brothers. Alexander runs off with his younger brother George’s wife. The wife, Perrette, is a fancy easterner who has never warmed up to life in the sticks and George really doesn’t protest too much. Paracelsus, the oracle-like medicine man, has predicted that something out of the ordinary will be stolen from Indian country and with this theft will come drought that will plague the land. And so it does. The prophecy becomes the reality around which the story revolves.
Alexander and Perrette flee to Europe where they lead a life that is almost a parody of the Lost Generation. Alexander does succeed as a writer, penning stories set in the Checkerboard region. As he wears out his material he wears out his life, because his guilt will not allow him to return home to recharge as a man and artist. He evetually becomes more and more dissolute until he commits passive suicide by allowing himself to murdered in a Mexican back alley, which is the closest he can come to home.
Alexander’s inaction has upset the balance of nature at home, which results in drought. Perhaps he is not guilty of theft, but he is guilty of allowing himself to be stolen, and the results are the same. The plot is more complicated than this , for it involves a sin of omission on George’s part, one which he allows to consume him, rendering him as unable to act as his older brother. Alexander hides in writing and George hides with the Indians. Writing and helping the Navajos are ways of avoiding the self. Even so, Eastlake ends the novel on an affirmative note. What was stolen from Indian Country- Alexander- is returned for burial and the rain has returned. From nature’s perspective, balance has been restored. The people of the Checkerboard, can “go in beauty.”
The second novel of the trilogy, The Bronc People (1958), is a rite-of-passage story that focuses on the quest for selfhood of another pair of brothers: Little Sant Bowman, son of Big Sant and Millicent, and Alastair Benjamin, the African-American boy the Bowman’s take in after his flight from an Albaquerque orphanage. alastair had been placed in the orphanage by Indians who had witnessed his escape from the burning house in which his father died. His father, called the Gran Negrito, had been the proprietor of the Circle R Ranch and the owner of a watering hole much needed by George “Big Sant” Bowman of the Circle Heart Ranch for his thirsty cattle. The novel opens with the argument between the two, escalating into a gun battle that sets off the fire at the Circle R. Two Indians serve as commentators on the fight, which neither man wanted, but leaves the Gran Negrito dead nonetheless.
As the novel unfolds, Alastair discovers the details of his father’s death. He must come to terms with his anger at his adoptive father and Big Sant must deal with the guilt he has carried around for years. Meanwhile, Little Sant searches for an identity as a bronc rider, and his mother, Millicent, sifts through several religions trying to find her place in the world. The book is also peopled with a broad cast of characters, including a priest who has gone native; Afraid of his Own Horses and The Other Indian, friends of Little Sant and Alastair; My Prayer, the old Indian shaman; and most notably, his white counterpart, Blue-Eyed Billy Peersall, an old Indian fighter who now realizes that the frontier people and Native-Americans should have joined forces to combat the “civilized” easterners instead of each other.
The final novel of the trilogy, Portrait of the Artist With Twenty-Six Horses, appeared in 1963. Eastlake again depicts the coming of age of two young men set against the backdrop of Indian country. The action takes place in a single day as Ring Bowman and Twenty-Six Horses undergo rites-of- passage. Furthermore, like the central characters of The Bronc People, one of the protagonists must come to terms with a father figure while the other seeks fulfillment with his own calling in life.
Portrait is episodically structured around Ring Bowman’s recollections during the eight hours he is trappped in arroyo quicksand. His life does not flash before his eyes, but meanders, as does the story, through his consciousness as he struggles with questions of identity. He wants to know why this is happening to him. In coming to terms with himself he learns the lesson of coming to terms with nature as well. At the same time, Ring’s father and Twenty-Six Horses, his artist friend, search the desert for him and in so doing confront their own questions of identity.
In telling this story, the author employs a technique in which the narrator weaves disparate strands of story which in the end become “of a piece.” In this way, the loom that Twenty-Six Horses uses to create his Navajo rugs is an apt motif in the book. Structurally, Portrait consists of Ring’s present tense commentary (set off in italics) interwoven with a number of apparently unrelated stories from the past. Although these chapters and parts of chapters appear extraneous to the thrust of the novel, they all involve the common theme of death or near-death in some fashion: the death of Tomas Tomas, the death of Tom Tolbek, the near deaths of a poet, a Nazi, and the passengers of Clearboy’s white Lincoln- not to mention the near death of Ring himself as he fights to stay afloat in the arroyo for eight hours- all point to an existence that is hanging by a thread. This understanding of humanity’s tentative existence is an essential element in Ring’s coming-of -age.
Go In Beauty, The Bronc People, and Portrait of the Artist with Twenty-six Horses all went out of print in the 1980s. To rectify this situation, the author revised these works and sought to publish them in a single volume under the title The Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy. The volume would be published by The Dalkey Archive Press in 1996. Once again a great piece of fiction would be available to new generation.
Taken as a whole, the work of Jean Paul Sartre is that of a sensitive man with a good heart gradually coming to understand the distinctly social aspect of human reality—that while we appear to ourselves as alone and struggling to make sense of things from within our own isolation, we are actually always powerfully connected in our very being to each other and, through the networks of reciprocity that enable our material and spiritual survival, to everyone on the planet.
Sartre’s early work for which he is best remembered in mainstream liberal culture–the period in his thirties and forties which produced the novel Nausea, the philosophical work Being and Nothingness, and the plays The Flies and No Exit among many, many other writings—were all addressed to “the man alone” struggling to find authentic meaning in a world without God and in a world pervaded by false images and false conceptions of what matters in life. To a young person like me gradually emerging into the radical awareness of the 1960’s, this work was thrilling. I was brought up within the image-world of upper middle-class New York culture, taught by word and gesture to accept that artificial world of the bourgeoisie as if it conformed to some real “essence,” as if the right thing to do in life was to do well in school, dress nicely, acquire my share of wealth by entrepreneurship or inheritance, get married, fit well and admirably into this or that pre-given role, and have a solid obituary. But to use the famous phrase drawn from one of his lectures, Sartre showed that “existence precedes essence”—that all of these pre-constructed forms or identity, worth, and value were actually made up, that it was “bad faith” to allow our longing for superficial security to rationalize draping them over ourselves as if they would safely install us in some kind of “reality,” that we are free to accept or reject every form of received wisdom and, even more that we are personally responsible to make these choices and by these choices to give our own stamp to reality and take our own stand for all of humankind about the kind of world we ought to be creating.
As important as these insights were—as empowering as they were to me as a young man trying to find the strength to choose to align myself with the idealistic aspirations of the movements of the 60’s and take the risk of rejecting the class destiny to which I was bound by the erotic ties of family loyalty and devotion—Sartre himself came to realize that they were skewed and limited by the liberal individualism of his own upbringing; these early insights illuminated the world from within the pathos and solitude and psycho-spiritual struggles and relative material privilege of the floating or unanchored bourgeois intellectual. Thus his early philosophical understanding of “relations with Others” as elaborated in Being and Nothingness and in his early plays reflected the Fear of the Other that he came to see later as the unconscious foundation of “individualism” itself. To the early Sartre, the Other is mainly a threat whose gaze “steals my freedom” by pinning me in an image-for-the-Other that is colored with pride or shame and from which I must recover myself as a free being through a kind of ontological struggle, a struggle captured in the famous concluding line from No Exit: “Hell is Other People.” In many ways, as radical as Sartre’s early ideas were in rejecting the conformity of inauthentic social life and its mores, roles, and hierarchies, they remained quite consistent with the aspect of liberal Western society that defined “man” as a free being inherently separate from and in conflict with the freedom of the Other—no doubt one reason that his “existentialism” is today taught in every liberal university while his later conversion to Marxism and social commitment and his brilliant reconciliation of the insights of existentialism with those of Marxism are almost nowhere to be studied and learned.
That later integration began to take place when Sartre served in the French army in World War II and through his conscription began to grasp that he was involuntarily bound to others by social forces much larger than the mainly two-person interactions that he was in those very years exploring in his philosophy, and his deepening awareness of the inherently social nature of each individual’s existence was accelerated by the encounter that every serious intellectual had with Marxism and its “really existing” embodiment in the Soviet Union following World War II. But in spite of the sympathy that Sartre had for the Soviet Union’s egalitarian ideal in the face of McCarthyism and the increasingly reactionary cast of western capitalism in the early 1950’s, he knew that the Soviet Union was grossly distorted manifestation of Marxist ideals and that its distortions were in no small part the result of the limitations of the state of Marxist theory itself—indeed, of its very failure to give sufficient ontological priority to the subjective, qualitative experience of actual human relations that was the central concern of his own work. Thus he felt it fell to him as a kind of moral responsibility to throw himself into showing how Marxism had become false to its own human aspirations by the hyper-objectivity of its own pseudo-scientific theory, how its transformation from a culturally complex and human historical materialism into a mechanistic and externalized “dialectical materialism” had led it to rationalize a new form of class society and social oppression as if it were a near-messianic embodiment of social progress.
Published in 1960, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to show that while Marxism was correct in giving primacy to materialism—to the need for food, clothing, and shelter as being the key shaping force that had thus far connected all humans to each other and mediated their relationships to one another in a milieu of material scarcity and the struggle for survival—it had to incorporate into itself the relatively independent longing for human freedom and the transcendence of the inter-subjective and distinctively social facts of oppression, exploitation, and alienation of self from other to accurately understand and portray the truth of social life and offer a path to improving it. In this later philosophical work and in his later plays like The Devil and the Good Lord and The Condemned of Altona as well as several volumes of essays and a three-volume biographical study of Flaubert, Sartre replaced his earlier emphasis on the “man alone” struggling for freedom and authenticity with the social individual bound to all living others through the necessities of economic production and also to prior generations through the medium of the world of “worked matter” that we have inherited from them and which directs and limits our possible forward motion. In place of the floating and unanchored individual seeking to recover his or her authentic being from the inauthenticity of a fallen society living in bad faith and in flight from itself through a kind of ubiquitous personal and moral inadequacy, Sartre makes a powerful and original argument for a collective, intersubjective, distinctively social recovery of our authentic human capacities through the “praxis” of collective action to transcend class society and the alienating reciprocal conditioning through which we have enslaved ourselves and each other to dehumanizing socio-economic forces over which no one has control.
John Gerassi’s new book Talking with Sartre is a transcription of a fascinating series of interviews conducted with Sartre by Gerassi over the period from 1970-74, just as Sartre himself was coming to question whether his own later theory of existential Marxism was adequate to either offer a new path to human liberation for the Left or account for the extraordinary dynamics that had been sweeping the world in the form of “the 60’s” during the previous decade. Gerassi, the son of longtime family friends of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and already an established independent left intellectual in his late 40’s at the time of these interviews, serves as a comradely inquisitor of Sartre. The great philosopher was approaching his 70thbirthday and could not but see the shortcomings of the social movements of the 60’s beginning to manifest themselves in historically decisive ways. The interviews are in a certain sense a first-person evaluation of the state of the Left world-wide, as they reflect Sartre’s thoughts on his own visits to the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, as well as his own participation in the radical groups in France—in particular the gauche proleterienne whose newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, Sartre had become the editor of.
To readers of Tikkun who today are working toward the creation of a spiritual-political progressive movement, the most important sections of the book deal with Sartre’s evaluation of his own ideas about how we are to overcome the social alienation that at the time of these interviews and still today seems to separate us from each other and disable us from banding together to create a more loving, egalitarian, solidaristic world. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre had developed two important ideas that remain relevant to us to day as we try to build a new movement and understand the psycho-social dynamics that inhibit our efforts. One is the idea of “seriality”—the idea that when we are thrown by socio-economic forces into relationships based on competition for survival and are conditioned by the weight of historical traditions and social ideologies to accept our situation as necessary and even desirable, we each become stuck in a kind of social quicksand in which other people seem to be constantly receding away from us like threads in an inside-out shirt and in which we ourselves each become “one of the others” to each receding other, collectively casting one another into a mutually distancing, one-and-one separation that we can’t seem to get out of. Whether we are languishing in the passive rituals of family life, or passing each others with blank gazes on the street, or carrying out the repetitive routines of work in offices or on assembly lines, when we are trapped in the one-and-one “series”, we exist as passive occupiers of social slots without a common active or creative purpose that unites us in any sort of original collective project: We cannot seem to translate our longing for vitalizing social connection into any form of meaningful action that would allow us to recover our spontaneity and freedom. A key question for Sartre in the Critique had been what form of collective action was possible through which we could manage to lift ourselves out of this self-reproducing separation that actually was the central dynamic reproducing capitalism itself, an anti-human system that we all feel trapped in as if it were coming from “outside” us, like a non-human force over which we have no control.
Sartre’s answer to this question in the Critique had been that under certain favorable conditions combining the right material circumstances with the right spark of cultural (or countercultural) inspiration and also the irreducible power of human freedom exerting itself against its own self-reproducing constraints, human beings could break through reciprocal imprisonment of “the series” to form what he called “the fused group”—a movement toward mutual freedom and solidarity would overwhelm the external conditioning that renders us passive, atomized, anonymous (in the sense of lacking in authentic presence and lost in robotic roles and routines), and interchangeable. Drawing on the inspiration of revolutionary historical moments such as the seizures of the Bastille and the Winter Palace, the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors, and the spontaneous sit-down strikes through which workers during the labor movement suddenly reclaimed their own sense of collective power and agency from the factory machines and their owner-operators that had turned them into passive objects, Sartre’s description of the emergence of the group coming into fusion provides a social- ontological and intersubjective foundation for the possibility of transformative social change that goes beyond the external categories of much of social theory—for example the external category of “class struggle” within the history of Marxist theory itself which could not account for how the revolutionary class would recover its agency as a living social process. And Sartre’s new concept prefigured exactly what would take place five to ten years later during the upsurge of the 60’s, when human beings (like myself) who had been trapped in the passivity and distance of our socially separated and artificial lives, would emerge into authentic groups in which our essential Presence to each other could suddenly become visible, and through which we could generate an extraordinary, social energy that could “move” into a movement, ricocheting invisibly but decisively from Berkeley, to Mexico City, to Prague, to the general strike of Paris ’68.
The social paralysis of being trapped in and of being an unwitting agent of “the series”, and the always potential transformation of the series into the group-in-fusion through which we can overcome our alienation and recover our reciprocal presence to one another as Here and as One (or as “the common individual” in Sartre’s terms)—these are very important ideas that Sartre has contributed to establishing the link between the transformation of spirit and the egalitarian and ecological transformation of the material world. But as Gerassi brings out in his interviews, there was something essential that was lacking in these later formulations that was becoming apparent in the world itself in the early 70’s—in the very decay and gradual dissolution of the movements of the 60’s that was beginning to take place at the time of the interviews and that is palpable in them. In one key exchange, Sartre has been describing as a kind of illustrative mini-example of the group-in-fusion a bus ride in which a group of bus passengers who had previously been merely a disconnected series, a line of people waiting for the bus at the bus stop, had transformed themselves into a fused group by persuading the driver to go off his normal route and to drop each of them at their destinations, which in turn leads to the able-bodied passengers taking pleasure in assisting an old woman in a wheelchair to get off the bus and get into her home, and to an overall atmosphere of joy and free conversation erupting into the dead space where there had previously been merely a collection of anonymous strangers. Gerassi responds by saying, in effect, that’s that’s all well and good, but those passengers will inevitably go home and the next day they’ll be back in line, the weight of historical forces will again overwhelm and condition them, and their hot moment will go cold—just as the sans-culottes of the French revolution returned their power to the elites and lost their transformative energy, just as Paris Commune had failed to sustain itself, and just as the youth of the 60’s were seeing their groups dissolve into internal squabbles or get coopted by the political parties or become overwhelmed, as we would say in Tikkun, by the legacy of generations of Fear of the Other that is more powerful than the momentary unity made possible by the moment of fusion. “To avoid defeat the group-in-fusion must remain in fusion, “says Gerassi: “But how?…If the group-in-fusion is always bound to fail, no matter how much of a residue it leaves around the edges for historians to contemplate, why risk starting it again?”
It is difficult to read these words and not feel that this is exactly the world-wide dilemma of the present moment, that because of the failures of prior social movements and the defeats or distortions of the fused groups that these movements were formed by and inspired, we are unable to risk starting it again and to surrender to the radical hope that this requires of us without a new step in theory to guide and express some new form of social practice. Sartre’s own answer to Gerassi is that the process is not circular or hopelessly repetitive, that each such transformative experience is internalized as a historical memory that is passed on, however silently in the culture and moves the ball forward and furthers the liberatory development of humanity. But even if there is some hope and validity to be found in that response, it seems clear to me that the Sartre of the early 1970’s could not yet have grasped that his own thinking was inherently limited by the secular nature of his own conditioning, by his failure to realize that the breakthrough permitted by the fused group can only truly be sustained if it is accompanied by a distinctly spiritual elevation of the heart that requires other another and deeper form of communal self-recovery than is conveyed by the idea of the revolution, the rebellion, the instantaneous and sudden rupture of the artifice of the status quo. What is needed is a theory and practice of human connection that has sufficient spiritual depth to gradually heal the Fear of the Other that has been installed in our hearts by the shocks of our generational and personal conditioning and to elevate the fused group into a beloved community. Sartre helped us by showing that we are always connected even when imagine we are most separated and that by turning toward each other in meaningful, life-giving social action we can become the source of each other’s completion. When will we have gone far enough beyond his formulations to actually take the next decisive steps toward this redemptive end to “risk starting it again”?
–Peter Gabel
Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.
This piece was first published in the September/October issue of Tikkun magazine. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.
I’m sitting at my desk in my room upstairs. The light from my desk lamp casts trembling shadows against the pale cream walls, just like in a monk’s cell. In front of me, a calendar counts the days until my departure. I cross out and count the remaining days each morning. I am alone in the quiet house, alone except for the dogs.
Idefix is lying on my bed, shuttering in a dream, emitting an occasional whimper. I wonder if he too is counting the days. He will be dead in less than a month. The bad smell that has been coming from his mouth for weeks should be a sign to me. I take it for simple bad breath. Occasionally, I put toothpaste on my finger and coat his palate to cover up the smell.
The room is very still, the kind of still that is thick, padded, drugged. Like antihistamine, like trying to breathe through a damp wool blanket that’s been draped over your face. The woods outside are quiet.
Suddenly, a loud skidding noise fills the room, my ears, my skull. Like a knife cut. It’s the kind of skidding you know will result in a metallic crunching sound, a heart-skipping, life-shattering crunching sound. I brace for it. It comes, deafening, piercing. I am startled out of my seat. Idefix awakes abruptly and looks at me with that strange ruffled look he has when waking suddenly from a dream, one ear pressed warm against his head.
I jump up and run down the stairs in two bounds, out the front door, down the dark driveway, to the empty street. I look to the left. Smoke and glass and red light and liquid are everywhere. It is surreal, a silent dream in daytime. Only thing is it’s night. I run to the wreck. A car is lying upside down on another car. How did it get there? The smell of gasoline fills my nostrils. I am the only one here. No. A man runs screaming down the street, fading into the darkness. He runs in slow motion. Everything is in slow motion.
I creep up to the cars. The top car is billowing smoke. Is it going to blow up? I go to the car’s broken window. A woman is trapped in the driver’s seat, suspended upside down by her seat belt. She is crying. Upside down. Dark tears trickle down her forehead. Her eyes are open. She keeps looking at me. Her eyes don’t blink. We look at each other for what seems like an eternity. Do we recognize each other?
“Go call 911!” says a voice behind me. “GO!” It’s my neighbor. I turn and run back to the house. By the time I get back to the wreck, the police have cordoned off the intersection. I look at the neighbor. “She didn’t make it,” he says. I walk back to my house and lay on my bed, hugging Idefix. I wonder… is he still counting the days?
–Andreas Economakis
This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.
In his seminal 1890 novel, Hunger, Knut Hamsun wrote, “I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all.” In writing about issues of food, food prices, and hunger, I have become painfully aware that both hunger and the hungry remain largely on the edge of our social consciousness—a problem that seems at times to be untouched and unseen by all. Occasionally we hear about the continuing increase in food stamps participants. Or food banks like Second Harvest overwhelmed by longer and longer lines of America’s new poor. Arizona, a state that pre-recession ranked second in national job growth, has now seen demand on food banks double in the last 18 months. Throughout this entire recession, I have continued to return to the writings of Piven and Cloward and their utter condemnation for the hatred and blame that American society inflicts upon the poor. You would think that a recession of this magnitude would have challenged this ideological narrative that the poor, largely facilitated by failed HUD policies during the late 90s, somehow created the mess that we’re in today. Forget about 60 to 1 leverages, the Ponzi-like bundling of mortgage backed securities, or the one trillion dollar recapitalization of “too big to fail now too rich to lend” banks under TARP. No, the fault of this complex economic crisis, as proposed by conservative and libertarian pundits, rests mostly at the feet of the poor, and the malice unleashed by these pundits toward them—I’ll also include immigrants in this category—remains quietly unchallenged and accepted.
Global hunger seems to be following a similar trajectory, and I fear new kinds of economic investments in food, coupled with an utter contempt for the hungry, will lead to an even more nightmarish future for food. While I am largely a true believer, no matter how naive it might seem at times, in a sustainable food revolution, I have not fully bought into how this Schumpeterian process of creative destruction will be brought about. Of all the future sustainable food projects, the one proposed by professor of microbiology and public health Dickson Despommier seems to be both the most promising and garnering the most national recognition.
Recently heard on the Dianne Rehm show, Despommier likens his vision to the stacking of greenhouses, one on top of the other, into vertical farms for densely populated urban locales. In Despommier’s vision, “High-rise food-producing building will succeed only if they function by mimicking ecological process, namely by safely and efficiently re-cycling everything organic, and re-cycling water from human waste disposal plants, turning it back into drinking water” (Despommier 2010). The success of Despommier’s idea centers on the construction, to use cybernetic language, of an agro-closed system loop in which water would be purified and filtered throughout an entire vertical structure. Abandoned skyscrapers could be retrofitted into these multi-level farms with food grown by using sustainable greenhouse and hydroponic techniques. Despommier’s idea is brilliant, visionary, and absolutely necessary for our future.
Urbanization—the shift from the rural to the city— is not a fad of the 20th and 21st century but a permanent reality. As Despommier cites, by 2050, nearly 80% of the world will be living in urban areas, and the necessity for cheaper, locally grown food will help to reduce Co2 admissions and control chaotic fluctuations in food prices. However like any grand scheme, funding—how we go about creatively destroying a project into fruition—becomes the essential question. Despommier is obviously aware of this reality and concludes that, “strong, government-supported economic incentives to the private sector, as well as to universities and local government to develop the concept” will be required to fund this project (Despommier 2010).
As unemployment continues to remain painfully high, especially in the construction field, the creation of vertical farm pilot projects could work to offset some of these numbers. In cities ranging from Detroit to Miami, the different variables of each place (weather, population density, and temperature) could lead to the development of a myriad of vertical farm prototypes, and in the process link together start-up companies, universities, public research grants and private investors. The technology developed out of these projects could be streamlined into cities as unique as Cairo, Mexico City, and Shanghai—America would be laying the foundation for the future of global food development. As a side note, I should add that I see this as one of many strategies for creating a new global food system paradigm. I would also include returning to local and traditional forms of agricultural practice, reducing meat consumption in highly-developed countries (HDCs), and reprioritizing, in the words of Graham Riches, the idea that access to healthy and safe food is a basic human right.
As November rolls closer, I am less than optimistic about this prospect. And while 2010 may be the beginning of the age of austerity — I thought that’s what the last thirty years were — 2050 will more than likely be seen as a demarcation line for global food production. With the recent recessions pushing global hunger back to the 1 billion person mark, the UN has concluded that food production, in order to keep up with 3 billion additional people, will need to double in production capacity by 2050. The blueprint now being developed, largely by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), seems to be more line with Monsanto than Vertical Farms. Let us take, for example, Dr. Jacques Diouf, FAO Director-General, who says that while, “[organic agriculture] produces wholesome, nutritious food and represents a growing source of income for developed and developing countries. But you cannot feed six billion people today and nine billion in 2050 without judicious use of chemical fertilizers” (FAO 2007). Instead, the FAO reports—using the World Bank’s World Development numbers—that “low fertilizer use is one of the major constraints on increasing agricultural productivity in Sub-Sahara” (FAO 1997). While this may be quantitatively true, it is indicative of an “agro-revolution” mindset that the green revolution of the future—the one which we will need to advance greatly over the next 15-30 years—will mimic the “green revolution” of the 1950/60s: i.e. high chemical inputs, genetically modified seeds, price fixed into a global market, heavy usage of pesticides, and all brought to you by an oligarchy of transnational corporations.
Nevertheless, a 2009 FAO’s article, How to Feed the World by 2050, articulates succinctly many of the problems and reality facing food production in the early 21st century. The two most significant points raised in this article are as follows,
“Purchases and leasing of agricultural land in Africa by foreign investors for food production in support of their food security…This development involves complex and controversial issues –economic, political, institutional, legal and ethical – that need to be addressed by policy”
“[Less development countries] become more exposed to international market instability with the result that poor households are extremely vulnerable to the risk of short-term increases of prices of basic food stuffs” (FAO 2010).
The FAO’s first point is about the recent rise of foreign countries “landgrabbing” arable acreage throughout predominantly sub-Saharan Africa. Critics of landgrabbing have likened the process to a new frontier in “agro-colonialism,” where foreign countries buy land leases for the purpose of exporting crops back to their own countries—largely seen for these countries as a preventive measure for hedging against fluctuating food prices. Along with the process of landgrabbing, the investing in food may lead to further food price volatility—mostly in staples like corn, wheat, and soybeans—possibly making the post-recession period even worse for many developing countries.
Two years after the 2007/08 food crisis, wheat and rice prices have still not returned to anywhere near their pre-crisis levels. The drought that has decimated wheat crops in Russia, the world’s third leading wheat exporter, and the Ukraine, is now being compounded with news of less than stellar harvest reports in the US corn industry, creating new spikes in the cost of wheat and corn. And, since large quantities of meat produced in the world are fed these two grains, increases in cereal prices invariably raises the price of meat.
The next frontier of investing may soon be shifting away from gold, which is at an all-time high, toward grain, as increases in population and the expansion of food production create a lucrative environment for speculation and investing. As one investor notes, “We’ve already seen trouble. There were food riots in some countries two years ago. Wheat, coffee and sugar prices have rocketed this summer. Canaries in the coal mine? ‘We expect to see a resource war around 2020’”(Arends 2010). For Forbes financial contributor, Joshua Brown, “The food riots of 2008 were just the shot over the bow, in my estimation. The recent bullish action in ag commodities may be the start of the actual melee” (Joshua Brown 2010). Is this where the future of food now rests? A new bubble to speculate on? A new war to fight over? New profits to be made at the expense of health and human life— no matter the cost? And the nightmarish reality of food should be even more self-evident: the financial world is betting on a more chaotic and unstable global food system future. To quote global food reporter Jessica Leeder, “instead of a supply crisis, what has dawned is a new era of increased volatility. Unpredictable spikes and tumbles in some of the world’s most vital food commodities, most of them grains, are becoming more frequent” (Leeder 2010).
In the end, the 2007/08 global food crisis may become emblematic of a larger shift, a geo-political repositioning of food as the next battlefront both internally and between nations. In June of 2008, after more than a week of riots over the rising cost of food prices, the Haitian government ousted then Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis. As the world prepares for another potentially devastating food shock, it should come as no surprise that developing nations are beginning to hoard food surplus reserves. As countries begin buying up arable tracts of land throughout Africa, the future of food appears to becoming increasingly more hostile than cooperative. What many leaders in these countries seem to have learned from the 2007/08 food riots is how food shortages can so easily threaten a government’s legitimacy. As the famed historian E.P Thompson once wrote, “It is notorious that the demand for corn, or bread, is highly inelastic. When bread is costly, the poor (as one highly-placed observer was once reminded) do not go over to cake” (Thompson 1971:91). People can deal with all sorts of abuse, all sorts of traumas administrated by their own government, but everyone must eat, and this reality seems to be driving, even more than issues of hunger, the future of food development.
I fear a future that has become pleasantly empty to the plight of the hungry. A future where divisions between people are no longer determined by class or geographical position but between the fed and the unfed. A world where the obesity rate in certain countries pushes well past 50 and 60 percent mark (it is predicted that three fourths of Americans will be either overweight or obese by 2020), and it will be normal to read about a 2 billion or even 4 billion people starving daily. As we look toward 2050, we must continue to be both creative and simple in our approach to food, and strive for a future in which food is truly recognized as a basic human right.
References
Arends, Brett. 2010. “Farmland: The Next Boom?” Wall Street Journal. September 24.
Brown, Joshua. 2010. “Grain over Gold.” Forbes. September 27.
Despommier, Dickson. 2010. “The Vertical Farm: Reducing the Impact of Agriculture on Ecosystem Functions and Services.” [Retrieved October 23, 2010] http://www.verticalfarm.com/more?essay1
As It Ought To Be 