[MD] F*CK YOU, God!!!

[Joseph Maurer]

On 7/25/09 1:04 PM, "John Carl" <ridgecoyote at gmail.com> wrote:

> "The Prince of this world cometh, and he hath nothing on me"
> 
> 
>                                       Jesus
Hi Ron'

I was reading Maurice Nicoll's PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARIES: "When I was a
pupil of Dr. Jung in Zurich, he said one day: [I have to go and address
Zurich University in Psychiatry (he was a professor there) on the idea of
psychological factors in insanity.] (This was the beginning of what was then
called Psycho-Analysis.)  After we had been talking for a long time in his
villa, he stood up and said: [Come, Nicoll, I have to give a lecture
to-night at the university.  Of course, it will be hopeless.  No one will
believe what I say.  But come Nicoll LET'S GET TO IT.] " Now, I ask you all,
was that willing what he had to do?" p. 1389 vol. 4

> 
> 
> Bill and I moved apart through the years.  He married my wife's best friend
> and ex-roommate and so you'd think there'd be nothing but harmony and joy
> ever after, but alas, that was not to be.  My wife's best friend and
> ex-roommate can not stand me in the smallest doses, and so it has put a
> strain upon our relationship.  I haven't heard from Bill in years.
> 
> 
> One of the times I did see him was at this event called "Wordslingers".  And
> it is something of a literary event here in our pretentious burg of Nevada
> City.  I should say a few things about Nevada City...
> 
> 
> It's quaint.  Are you acquainted with quaint?  Its where a buncha victorian
> gingerbread has been slapped over "Ye Olde Ice Cream Shoppe"  along with
> stores selling T-shirts proclaiming, "My folks went to Nevada City CA and
> all I got was this lousy t-shirt" and there is a very seriousness in the
> local paper and chamber of commerce about "tourism".
> 
> 
> That sort of quaint.
> 
> 
> But beyond the quaint there is the  pretention, which has a different source
> than "ye olde mining town picturesqueness".
> 
> 
> The main source of annoyingly pretentious liberal intellectualism is that
> bastion of all things right and righteous, San Francisco, but 2 1/2 hours
> away.  From whence a whole stream of consciousness flowed to these fair
> hills back in the day - mid to late 70's.     Jack Kerouac and Allen
> Ginsberg and Neal Cassady always talked about buying some land in the
> country where they could get back to the land, grow herb and groove on being
> in-tune,  peasant bodhisattvas.  Jack got stuck with fame on the road, Neal
> lost his path on a railroad track,    Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg ended
> up buying a hundred acres near here and Gary settled in the hills.  Lots of
> like-minded people followed and began the melding process of redneck sons
> marrying hippie daughters.    And the successful and town-oriented
> gravitated naturally to Nevada City and it has quite an artsy following with
> lots of quality music, theater and events.  I didn't recognize anybody at
> the wordslinger's festival, but I did have Bill to talk to in a big room
> with around 40-50  hushed and serious looking professional new age types.
> 
> 
> The sad news was, Kesey couldn't make it.  He'd just in the week prior
> suffered a debilitating stroke.  It was just gonna have to be Ed McClanahan,
> whom I'd never heard of before.  It turned out ole Ed was probably a more
> entertaining speaker and reader than Kesey.  I bought this book he was
> selling there, Famous People I have Known and it has become one of my
> favorites.  Ed's from Kentucky.  Good friend and neighbor there of Wendell
> Berry.  Who's probably dead by now, but I digress, as usual.
> 
> 
> Ed met Kesey at Stanford, where he was on some kind of fellowship and he
> fell in with this amazingly crazy crowd on Perry Lane... his writing of that
> time is worth the whole book for there was a literary and intellectual
> community around that time that was about to change the world, but he also
> reveals the inner secret workings of the mind of Little Enis, the worlds
> best upside down, left hand guitar player who is a better singer than Elvis
> and has a bigger dick.   Unfortunately he's only 5 foot 2.  But his
> pompadour adds a good six inches.
> 
> 
> The evening consisted of Ed reading a story from his book about the time
> Kesey was down visiting an institution we shall term (in the story) the
> "Harvard of the West" from his farm in Oregon and was invited along to hear
> a French intellectual in the company of the Black Panthers berate the white
> liberal establishment for its great evil, at a faculty tea at the home of a
> prominent academic.  Great opportunity Ken thinks, to go and flaunt some
> American STYLE and wear a psychedelic shirt and enlighten the whole affair
> with a story of the time his brother's basketball team shamed the referee
> into calling a straight game where a bunch of black guys were getting the
> shaft.   It was a great story and I kept nudging Bill and looking around the
> room, because to my eyes, the exact people skewered on the point of
> McClanahan's insightful wit, were the same serious-minded bozos in the room
> around us.  I thought it was delightful.
> 
> 
> Before the things started, we'd had an opportunity to write down questions
> on slips of paper and Ken Kesey was going to answer our questions as read to
> him over the phone by his old friend Ed.  And speak to us via the long
> distance call over the PA.  When that time came, it turned out the only two
> questions from this hall of people were from Bill and me.
> 
> 
> The questions were read mine was read first, and it was probably the most
> embarrassed I'd ever been.  It was anonymous but Bill and I stuck out so
> much, that everybody knew where the only two questions in the room had come
> from.  I felt that way, anyway.
> 
> 
> For another thing, the question period came after Kesey gave his little
> talk.  A sort of set speech that he gives to aspiring writers, a sort of
> test and definition of greatness.   I would not have asked the question I
> asked if I knew the nature of the talk it was following.   Ahead of time,
> with my mind on other things, my mind came up with a question reflecting
> those other things.  After he gave his speech, which I learned from reading
> in Ed's book he always finished up with,  I would have asked a completely
> different question - what the hell did THAT mean???    Fortunately I bought
> the book and got my real question answered.  Unfortunately, when my initial
> question was asked over the phone to Ken Kesey, taking out time from
> recuperation to listen to Ed's stumbling over my writing in the long
> rambling and ridiculous question, it was one of the biggest thuds I've ever
> experienced in public.  There was a Lo-o-o-n-g silence.  From Ed.  From Ken.
>  From everybody in the hall, while I squirmed and squirmed.
> 
> 
> 
>  I mean it's lame, but there's this fun celebrity thing you wanna spring on
> people that's an egotistical thrill.  It's a vicarious thrill, but
> nevertheless.  And there was this social factor of being so overlooked by
> everybody  (when we were both just newlyweds, Bill and his first wife Kathy
> and Lu and I shared a house together in Nevada City), that he and I  had
> looked forward to going "tah dah" and experiencing Kesey's delight at
> meeting Neal's grandson out of the blue like that.
> 
> 
> So foolishly, I tried and capture some of that in this  complicated question
> I got from interviewing a friend of Neal's in Mexico that time Bill and I
> went down there to see where his grandpa died.  It was this friend's
> assertion that Kesey's nickname "Chief" came from Neal, and it wasn't to do
> with Kesey being the boss, it had to do with Kesey being analogous to the
> narrator in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.  The narrator was the Indian
> watching Murphy trying to be free.  Neal, according to this guy we met
> identified strongly with Murphy and that's why he sought Kesey out in the
> first place.  At that time, Neal was locally famous for being Moriarity in
> On The Road and Kesey hadn't had a movie made of his book yet... so he was
> the lesser known.
> 
> 
> Like I said, it was a big dud. It didn't translate at all into any kind of
> coherent question that can be read over the phone to a guy who'd just had a
> stroke.  Here I thought I had some special inside information into the
> insight of a character and all Kesey said in response, after about five
> seconds of awkward silence,  was "no".
> 
> 
> Bill's question came as a relief.  Do you have anymore stories about Neal?
>  Tell us a story.    Those always save the day.   I don't quite remember the
> story Kesey told, but I sure remember his advice to writers.
> 
> 
> 
> Kesey's explanation of how to be a great writer went something like this...
> 
> 
> In order to be a great writer, first you have to be a good writer.  A good
> enough writer to attract some attention and get a little success.  But to be
> a great writer, you have to pass a certain test.  You don't know where the
> test will take place or when the test will come, but if you are to be great
> you must meet this test someday.
> 
> 
> The test will come when out of the blue the voice of God will come to you
> promising fame, success and riches.  If you hear the voice of God clearly,
> then you must raise your middle fingers, of both hands, pump your fists with
> middle fingers extended and yell at the sky as loud as you can,
> 
> 
> "FUCK YOU, God... FUCK YOU!"
> 
> 
> Only then can you have any hope of being a great writer.
> 
> 
> There was something so wrong about that speech.  And yet something sort of
> right at the same time.  The shock value carried a subtler message.  Ed
> explained it in the book as troubling him also as being a mite bit
> blasphemous even for an old agnostic hippy to be too comfortable with, but
> then one day he realized, hey, that's not God.  That's the devil.  And the
> faithful are enjoined to say "fuck you" to the devil.
> 
> 
> When I heard it, I thought of Pirsig.  I thought of the God of celebrity and
> fame being a different God on a different level than the God of truth and
> intellect.  The story made sense to me on a certain level because I
> understood the underlying morale patterns.  It took me a while and some
> thought to rationalize it, but the immediate moral feeling was real.    But
> regardless of my correct understanding or Kesey's correct understanding,
> good ole Ed illustrated with a story of his own from his book, which also
> has a Lila tie-in so I'll let Ed's be the last word on the subject.  Or
> rather, Ed quoting Wendell Berry, an old acquaintence from the Deep Ecology
> days.
> 
> 
> "I do have one local Famous People story, though, about my neighbor and
> longtime dear friend Wendell Berry, celebrated poet, novelist, essayist,
> farmer, and ecology curmudgeon.  When Wendell's The Unsettling of
> Americawas published a few years ago, his editor called oneday, very
> excited, with
> the news that Robert Redford loved the book and was giving copies to all his
> friends for Christmas.   Whereupon Wendell, as he hung up the phone, turned
> to his wife, Tanya, and said, "Queenie, who in the hell is Rober Redmon?"
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