Catch-23

It was love at first sight.

Second sight, too, for that matter.

And a few years later, third sight.

I not only don't expect things to change, I have a fresh copy of Joe Heller's archetypal novel, Catch-22, at bedside and had indeed begun my fourth venture inside its labyrinthine and mischievous pages. This was to have been the week, the Golden Oldies week in my review series for the Montecito Journal.(See link below)

Then the package came. I'd actually forgotten making the order and so, when I saw on the label, from The New York Review of Books, I openly wondered what they were sending me and why.

They were sending me The Horse's Mouth, that delightful romp by Joyce Carey, and an all-but forgotten classic by a woefully undervalued author, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson. Thus had I resolved Golden Oldies through the cruelty of April. (BTW, I have never found April to be even mean spirited much less cruel, and I like to think of it as some personal flaw in Eliot for having rendered April with such distaste.)

I made the mistake of browsing the first page of The Horse's Mouth.

Love you like a brother, Yossarian. Identify with you all over the place, and I willget back to you. Promise. If I had a cell phone, I'd make your number--1-800-catch-22--the first on my automatic dial. In a lovely, catch-22 of its own that you'd appreciate, Gulley Jimson, the fine artist of such epic proportions in The Horse's Mouth, so got hold of me that I'm even checking to see if he nicked my money clip.

Jimson may or may not be a great artist; such things are always difficult to tell, even more so when they appear as characters in books, plays, films. A writer giving the mantle of greatness to a fictional artist runs the immediate risk of undermining our credibility. Somerset Maugham saw this in his character, Charles Strickland, whom we are to assume was a fictional rendition of Paul Gauguin. In his novel, The Moon and Six Pence,Maugham expertly skirted the issue of calling Strickland great by having another character realize, when seeing Strickland's nude portrait of his wife, that Strickland had done more to his wife than paint her. Roiling with jealousy and betrayal, the cuckolded husband is about to destroy the canvas but, at the last moment, relents because even he can see its inherent greatness as art.

I do know Jimson's on-going vision, which seems a plausible rendition of the way that kind of artist would look at the world about him. Also known to me is the way Jimson's art has him in thrall to the point where he thinks only of it. His survival techniques center on how to come by paints, brushes, canvases, or other surfaces on which to render his massive visions. Gulley Jimson will lie, cheat, steal to get the money to buy the tools that will allow him to catch his vision, to trap that lightning in the bottle of his imagination.

He is accordingly gritty, not to be trusted, probably not one to be down wind from for too long. He is a reminder to all of us who have visions that we must check in frequently with an assessment of our own progress. Have we seen any of the on-going miracle before us? Have we looked hard enough, leaped high enough, bent low enough? Have we trod the boundaries of sanity, hoping to get closer to our subject, to send back a message of what it was like inside that insanity? Have we made the connection that insanity is as much a part of the human condition as sanity? Gulley Jimson's great influence was William Blake, arguably a squatter in the wretched buildings of insanity.

As a kind of parting gift, one of my two mentors gave me the exercise of imagining I were a Mars probe, sent off to a remote locale to collect artifact and data, then send those back to Earth so that those here could understand and make use of the information to be gleaned from them.

Don't get me wrong about Yossarian. He surely saw the insanity and duplicity of war. the enormous bureaucracy of deceit and self-interest that moves the young as though they were pawns on a chess board of political gain. Joe Heller, his creator, was gone before Mad King George came to power and established his own catch-22, his version of the Tar Baby. Yossarian has become nothing less than Jungian archetype, and so I set him aside with a wrench in my gut. But Gulley calls as the Sirens called.

Junk--the Verb and the Noun

My dog, Sally, has outed me.

I am neither neat nor tidy. At some point in the day, I manage to appear neat and tidy, but soon enough--all too soon--cosmic forces collide most notably with my shirt, tie, sweater (if the weather warrants). If my jackets often slip under the radar, the back seat of the Camry makes up for it.

Work areas--the worked-over two-car garage now euphemistically referred to as "the library," and that portion of my room where a desk, computer, printer, and bookshelves seem to present themselves like dogs up for adoption at the animal shelter--become a multiple and mixed metaphor, a Sargasso Sea, a Bermuda Triangle, a mine field, a cemetery.

This is not something I have set forth with deliberation to achieve, nor does it emerge from any desire on my part to rebel against authority or conventions (Writing is my ally in that struggle. The condition has been with me as far back as memory extends; it is best defined by two pleasant but remarkably different forces, an archaeologist and my late father.

Brian Fagan, even though now emeritus from the academy, is a world-class archaeologist. I first met him as editor to client, but by now, at least a dozen books later, that line is seriously blurred. We meet, as friends do, to gossip, drink coffee, and describe the world to one another, only incidentally addressing a particular chapter or two of a particular book in progress. "Archaeologists," Fagan maintains with voluble force, "are glorified junk dealers. They cherish items you would be hard put to charge ten cents for at a garage sale. What is the archaeological wing of a distinguished museum but a well-labeled rubbish heap?"

Somewhere within the clutter of my desk is an empty Altoids Mint box. True enough, I did eat the mints, but having found at one time a web site filled with interesting second uses for Altoids tins, I keep the box, eternally hopeful a second- or third-generation use for it will emerge. Besides, think of the range of social and historical significance were my one Altoids tin to grow into a collection, demonstrating size, flavor, and design.

So there you have an example of the Fagan effect on me: Altoids tin as artifact; junk as definition, trash as cultural evidence. Did the Cro-Magnon not have bad breath or dyspepsia? What they did not have was a tin to carry about their Altoids, and so my wannabe collection assumes the status of a tree ring or core sampling.

Jake, my father, was not an academic, but he was hardwired with neatness and organizational skills of such significance that he drifted into a radical change in occupation. Auctioneers fought for his skills in preparing commercial sites for sale at auction, these skills including an ability to make junk look important. "Make junk look important, and people will pay for it," he told me, shortly before yet another of his demonstrations to me of what worked in life and what did not work. At the same auction, a dustpan filled with the lees of a large floor I'd just swept, sold for seven dollars. The contents of the dustpan included sundry screws, bolts, and a few brass washers. Dumped into a corrugated box with neatly trimmed edges, then labeled as Miscellaneous Machine Parts, the contents of the dustpan brought in more money than the chuck of a lathe, worth at the time at least twenty-five dollars.

I am at heart a collector. Over time I have collected pulp mystery magazines, pulp science fiction magazines,cereal boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, baseball trading cards, miniature Oriental rugs once used as a premium in Murad cigarettes, lithographed drawings of airplanes included in packages of the now-defunct Wings cigarettes, Big-Little Books, playing cards with interesting patterns, kachina dolls emblematic of Hopi and Zuni supernatural figures. I won't talk about National Geographic magazines or toys from boxes of Cracker-Jacks, or those old Dell paperback mysteries with the maps on the back cover because everybody collected those, and not a word about my current passion, fountain pens.

There is something comfortably filling about having such collections, of a piece with having had an enormous steak dinner at Gallagher's or Smith & Wollensky in Manhattan. These collected things are artifacts of a time, a place, a way of life, a culture. True enough, they take space in the garage that could otherwise be used for, say, cars; they occupy space in closets and drawers that could provide splendid homes for first-aid items, clothing, cleaning implements, things bought in large quantity from COSTCO.

As a young man, Brian Fagan worked in Africa, in fact, with Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. At one point, he relates, he found a small, hand-shaped wedge used to split logs, and was told, Well done. He is not likely to go on digs now so his sifting and searching is mostly in libraries or direct interviews with men and women still working the fields. I liken his fascination for wrist watches to something more than the status symbol of owning an expensive time piece. Even though I can and often do wear a Timex, I can relate to the sense of beauty one senses under the crystal and well into the inner workings of a hand-made watch.

With some exceptions, I can lay my hands on most of the stories that appeared in the issues of Black Mask Magazine I collected, mourning with each new addition to the collection the fact of the demise of Black Mask before I could submit stories to it. Somewhere in that garage-cum-study, there is an actual Black Mask cover, announcing that within these flimsy pages, you could see a story by Dashiell Hammett.

Junk, Jake would say, using the Yiddish word tinnif for it, gold for you who wants it and even more for the person who owns it and knows you want it. This was not said with scorn, mind you, but with the vision of a man who kept himself, his home, and one of his kids neat. He, on the other hand, had a virtually photographic memory, obviating his need after a time to keep a collection of The Daily Racing Form, that lovely data base of equine velocity relationships, the sines, cosines, and tangents, as they were, of what Horse A did against Horse B over six furlongs on a fast track.

Junk. What we once used and threw out--and which becomes valued by someone else. The detritus of one society, the artifacts and relics of another. Also the items we thought we wanted and can no longer live with. Items we once thought contained the lightning in a bottle of beauty. Or meaning.

Found art; unrelated cast-offs, put in proximity by a person with "an eye for beauty."

I once saw, hanging on the wall of the church at Acoma Pueblo, a sconce of preternatural loveliness, a candle within it casting mystical light through the textured surface of the glass in which it was embedded. Closer inspection revealed the secrets of the sconce and candle holder.

The metal from which the sconce was cut, bent, teased, and painted was once a tin bearing a Hormel ham. It was later revealed to me that the glass candle holder was originally a container for Welch's grape jelly.

Can anything be found in or made from the clutter in my work area? Hope springs eternal in the breast of man, Alexander Pope has told us. There are ideas and bits of energy in those piles. Like the archaeologist, I sift through them for artifacts, hearing Jake's voice as a reminder that if it is treated with respect, possibly, just possibly, something might come.