the rocky point where the fisherman stands. He is insulated, puffed with down and kapok, his boots rubberized, his cap synthetic fur with earflaps pulled all the way down.
In his left, heavily-gloved hand he holds his pole; the right, ungloved, he tucks into his left armpit.
The pole jerks. He sets the hook. Another jerk, another sharp pull upward. A third jerk, another sharp twitch. He almost reluctantly pulls his hand from the warmth of his armpit and reels the catch in. The pole bends almost double and is alive with the struggle of the fish. The first breaks water, and he works it as he hauls the second and the third toward the surface. Now all three are moving with the current, strangely passive as though they’ve given up and, unlike trout, are ready for the net. But no such dignity as nets for whitefish, and he cranes them up, the rod almost an “O” with the weight of three foot-long fish.
With long-nose pliers, he unhooks each one and throws it back into the snow, where a heap of whitefish is growing, maybe twenty or thirty. From a plastic tube, with his right hand, he extracts a maggot, fat, white, but almost inert in the cold, and puts it on one hook. He puts a second maggot on the next hook, and a third maggot on the final hook. He puts his fingers to his nose and smells the putrid flesh in which the maggots were nurtured, the scent of death.
He casts the rig out and waits for the jerk-jerk-jerk of the struggling fish.
Tropical Thoughts
Depending on one’s mood, the tropics are either fetid or fecund. The two images, both pervasively green, are, on the one hand, of mildew, scum on stagnant water, ophidians waiting flickeringly for prey, vines strangling nobler growth, the stridently green cries of extravagant birds with grotesquely large bills, Roquefort striations on the milky pallidness of an orchid, a mossy crocodile lying inertly below the surface, only its unblinking luminously green eyes and its snout visible, impenetrable walls of smothering greenness—or, on the other hand, verdure: growth superabundant and languid plenty, the brilliance of a cockatoo uplifting its emerald comb, ripe fruits hanging golden among the leaves, a monkey chattering as it flashes from branch to branch, the ogle-eyed lemur looking through us into its future.
It occurs to me that some inhabit, slither about in, the fetidly figurative while others dwell, thrive, in fecundity. Or, to put the matter another way, some stagnate in greenness while others flourish in verdure.
But I’m not about to name names, not I, no sir, for I’m not a backbiting, wrongheaded bigot.
The Orgone Experience; or, Renewal Is Possible
AUGUST 10 (White Mountains in Maine)
Rain, from drizzle to downpour to drizzle.
We drove to Rangeley and visited the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Shrine.
Reich erected (or had erected, for he was, of course, the great proponent of erections) a granite, three-story Bauhaus atop a peak in the White Mountains. Perhaps fifty yards from the house is the tomb, overlooking valley and mountains: lakes and dense maple and birch forests. Next to the granite tomb (atop which is a bronze bust of the Master) sits one of Reich’s most important inventions, a “Cloudbuster,” which is a large metal frame supporting aluminum or steel tubes perhaps twenty feet long and a spaghetti-tangle of high-power electric wires. With his Cloudbusters, Reich called down the orgone power in clouds to create deluges (when needed by local agriculturalists).
In his first-floor laboratory, the Master had, among other scientific paraphernalia, a large, black microscope, through which he could view the orgone wriggling of the seed of life; on the top floor, the Master had a great brass telescope, through which he could view the cosmos, powered in its mighty churning by the selfsame orgone that propels the sperm toward the egg. Microcosm, macrocosm.
Awed and inspirited, my wife and I sat in an orgone chamber, feeling the power of the cosmos flow into our aging, failing selves. Emerging from the chamber after some twenty minutes of absorption, we raced, through the mud and rain, to the Buick Regal that we had rented from Alamo ($148 per week, unlimited mileage) and turned toward our home-away-from-home, the Spillover6 Motel in Stratton, Maine. Our Navy-blue Buick (we would have preferred white or silver!) churned down the muddy road from the Shrine onto Maine Highway 6 and glided faster, ever faster toward the Spillover.
After careening into the driveway and sliding sloshingly to a halt before Unit No. 6, we leapt from the auto; I fumbled, almost in a panic, to unlock the door. We entered. Our raiment flew hither and yon. We plunged onto the queen-sized bed, hardly aware of its thunking collapse, and, our muddy hiking boots still on our feet, we strove for the great, shuddering, liberatory orgonasm.
Later (liberated, Lahd Amighty, Free at Last!), we sat propped in the broken-down bed, sipping diet Coke and watching, beyond the toes of our muddy hiking boots, the Lawrence Welk Show, taped in Escondido. In a small canoe, Guy and Rona paddled about the artificial lake and sang, “My Cup Runneth over with Love.” Suzie and Bobby had fun at the pool, dancing to the lively strains of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” A basso profundo, contentedly angling as he crooned, climaxed (the Reichian influence is pervasive) “Old Man River” by pulling a rubber trout from the artificial lake.
We had dinner at the Stratton Diner: broiled haddock and real mashed potatoes and gravy.
God’s on the thorn, the snail’s in heaven, and all’s Reich with the world.
The Ceremony of Innocence
In my library is a single-volume collection of works by the Marquis de Sade, a book that I obtained for scholarly purposes long ago and read in a strange way: I skipped the dirty parts and followed the amoral, rationalist philosophy that stitched the episodes of pornography together (and that, undoubtedly, in the fertile, fetid mind of the Marquis, justified the Sadism—philosophy as rationalization). I don’t claim that I didn’t here and there sample the sodomite extravagance and frigid cruelty, for I am, after all, humanly curious.
* * *
Some years ago, my wife and I, clinging to one another in the security of our bed, protected by our down comforter, watched Al Pacino as “Scarface,” lurid curiosity and disclaimers about the horrors of the film overcoming our repugnance at the brutality. We shared a huge bowl of popcorn, and as the machine guns rattled and the chain saws snarled, we abstemiously, delicately, one by one, crunched the kernels. Looking down on us from above the bed were portraits of my wife’s parents, righteous and undefiled, innocent, in their Mormon youth: lovely Marcella glancing slightly away from the scene beneath her in the bed and in front of her on the television screen, a rose held delicately in her hand; Maitland smiling enigmatically, his high starched collar unfamiliar to a farm boy and clearly uncomfortable.
* * *
My elder son is an omnivorous reader. When he was in high school, he grazed prodigiously through my library, sitting under the lamp in the family room until all hours, devouring book after book: Conrad and Mailer, Dickens and Tom Wolfe, Iliad and Odyssey—and his own Rolling Stones and other arcana about which we still don’t chat since at the farther reaches of his literacy he explores landscapes as alien to me as the mythical planet Golob, on which, our Mormon legend tells us, God lives.
One night—actually a very early morning—I needed my “sleeping pill,” an orange, to provide energy for another period of serious log-sawing. Stumbling through the family room on the way to the kitchen, I discovered my son reading, though it was not
