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Galen Green
msmith2210@aol.com
mythoklast@mailstation.com
816.807.4957
Kansas City, Missouri

Monday
December 17, 2007
(Blessed [Almost] Solsticetide)


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The Making of the Happy Peasant Heretic


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Every picture has its shadows / and it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight
The perils of benefactors / the blessings of parasites
Blindness, blindness and sight . . . . .

-- Joni Mitchell, from “Shadows and Light”
on The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)


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We say God and the imagination are one . . .

-- Wallace Stevens,
from “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”







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The rain it raineth every day / Upon the just and unjust fella,
But mostly on the just because / The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

-- Baron Charles Bowen

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Dear Shannon (& Co.),

Hope your holiday season is treating you kindly. As you'll see from what follows here, I'm still trying to "make hay while the sun shines." Please allow me to stress once again that it's been only by the happiest of coincidences that I've been blessed with the time to write as much as I've written to you, over the past couple of months. It's an absolute certainty that my circumstances at work will change for the worse, at some unforeseeable date in the next few weeks or months, driving me back into relative voicelessness. That's just the way it always seems to happen; and it is, of course, the only reason I haven't, as yet, been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Seriously though: I wish to reiterated here, for what it's worth, that I fully understand that you're not going to be able to respond in kind anytime soon. It's never been my expectation that you would. I very much respect and admire the important work you're doing -- and have been doing -- and are likely to continue to be doing, far into the foreseeable future. And if you ever find yourself with a few minutes to say a few more words about your work, you'll find me to be eagerly receptive.

What follows here is, as much as anything, a stylistic experiment. Hence, I'll be quick to admit that it may prove to be one of my more flawed prose offerings. Being a writer yourself, I'm counting on you to understand and forgive. If it's "about" anything of discernible focus, I suppose that that thing must be said to be the process of putting together a memoir -- political, literary and psychosocial -- perhaps even a full-blown (Life & Times & Works of ----- ) autobiography. That last part is yet to be seen, and may remain to be seen for a very very very long time.

I confess also that I spend an inordinate amount of time and space in this particular installment talking about "Dumb Luck." For me, this is meant primarily as a relatively convenient means for oozing (later on) into a much more fully developed discussion of that prevalent (if controversial) philosophical debate topic sometimes called "Free Will v Determinism."


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Ever since the day I first grew ears, I've been hearing about the "self-made man," and yet I have yet to see one. What I've seen a whole lot of, instead, are men and women to whom Dumb Luck (hereafter, for the purpose of this discussion, to be known as "Fate" and/or "the party of the first part") has been unusually generous.

As for me, I'm just plain lucky. If ever there was a diametrical opposite of a self-made man, it would be me, Galen Green, The Happy Peasant Heretic. Given the myth-infested atmosphere in which I've found myself living this life that keeps on happening to me, I'd love to be able to say, along with all these mendacious mythocrats whom I find surrounding me here, that I'm a self-made man and proud of it. After all, it's the height of fashion -- the thing to say. But for me to make such an outrageous boast would defeat the purpose of my bothering to talk to you at all, that purpose being to tell you a little bit about how I came to be the way I am.

The short answer to any and all questions as to how it is that I got this way is this: Dumb Luck, Fate, the party of the first part. I can't take any credit. That isn't to say that, looking back over the years, now as I eagerly anticipate my 60th trip around the sun, that my life hasn't been one of hard work and struggle. It has. The point I'm trying to make here is that locomotion by struggle and locomotion by The Winds of Destiny are hardly the same thing.

I wouldn't express this degree of urgency in making my point here, were it not for the fact that the tendency on the part of most 21st century Americans to conflate these two distinct phenomena shows every sign of being on a tragic upswing in recent decades. This conflation or confusion or mixing up to which I'm referring involves what's frequently called the post hoc fallacy. To wit: "I've worked hard all my life, and that's why I'm enjoying such a good life now." A more accurate statement would go something like this: "I've worked hard all my life, and that's why, with the help of family money and Dumb Luck, I'm enjoying such a good life now." A variation on this more supportable syllogism might even go something like this: "I've worked hard all my life, and I'm enjoying a good life now, and any connection between these two phenomena is strictly coincidental." History teaches that these latter two statements describe reality, while the former, alas, does not.

No one seems to want to admit (all glaring evidence to the contrary) that they've relied on family money, Dumb Luck, slanted playing field, marked cards, loaded dice, favorable tail winds from The Flow of History or any other type whatsoever of crutch or floatation device to get them to where they've been gotten. That's where I differ from most folks. No. Let me correct that: I should have said that that's one of a hundred ways in which I differ from most folks. In some sense or other (metaphorically or literally), I've relied on every one of the Calvinesque dysequalizers I've just mentioned. My confessing these unfair advantages, however, is but a small part of what makes me a heretic. I confess to being the luckiest man alive. I accept no credit whatsoever for my having arrived here in the good life I'm living, nor for the one I've traveled through to get here.


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Before evolving into The Happy Peasant Heretic, I was merely Galen Green. And before that, I was Wayne Slater. And before that, I was I know not. I'm here with you today to focus mainly on how Galen Green evolved into The HPH.

To paraphrase a well-worn proverb: In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I understand how that notion came about, but it's simply not true.
To wit:

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man (or woman) is stoned to death for seeing what no one else can begin to understand is even there to be seen.

In other words, in the country of the blind, to be able to see anything real is a dangerous blessing. And it most certainly makes any "sighted" person (even the partially sighted) an unacceptable inconvenience to those who are living like pampered parasites off of the stress and sweat of those less lucky.

Please don't get me wrong. I don't mean to complain. I'm perfectly happy (Oops! There's that word again!) to be stoned to death for seeing what a very small percentage of my fellow Americans can begin to understand is even there to be seen. How did I come to be this way? I'm not sure. But here's my best guess:

I'm guessing that I'm happy because I'm a heretic -- and that I'm a heretic because I'm a peasant. For what it's worth, I'm quite sure that I'm a peasant because that's the hand I was dealt. Most Americans still believe that America is a "classless society," But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the mother's milk of the American economy is not merely social class stratification, but social caste stratification. In many ways, the American economy resembles less the feudal systems of medieval Europe than it does the caste systems of south Asia. Thus, the mother's milk fueling the American economy is, in reality, orphans' tears.

But let's not talk about the American economy. Let's talk about me. I'm much more interesting than the American economy. Yet, try as I might to come up with a better explanation for how I came to be a heretic or a peasant or a happy anything than the explanation I've already named "Dumb Luck," I find myself
returning to that same lame non-explanation again and again and again.


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When I first began drafting my memoir, The Toolmaker's Other Son, this non-story daubed ever so carefully into the interstitial texture of the wattle of my days and ways, I was forced to start considering in a new and more public way the weave of that wattle. What I came up with is reflected very superficially in the "Table of Contents" which follows.

Even though I envision my memoir-in-progress as something other than a story, every life (including my own life) is, as I've already acknowledged, a story. Yielding to this ineluctable fact, I console myself by telling myself that I'm providing my readers with the chronological framework they're used to and have come reasonably to expect from any book involving anybody's physical earthly journey.

In point of fact, it is most likely I who am still in need of growing into a set of more realistic expectations vis-à-vis the craft of memoir, even this radically unconventional literary, political, psychosocial memoir. For the time being, then, here below is the layout to which I've resigned myself, as I continue to continue to smell my way toward the Dover of this great leap I feel myself already very much in the process of making.

As you can see, I've included here as well the little "Preface" I composed. It reflects what I was thinking at the time, two years ago, about the focal point in the night sky of my imagination which seemed to be serving, at the time, as my Bethlehem star. What I didn't get around to saying next, back in the autumn of 2005, mostly in the interest of brevity, was that the age-old disconnect between truth and illusion, of which Shakespeare spoke perhaps more eloquently and comprehensively than any other writer in all of human history and of which I myself keep setting out to try to begin to speak, may in fact turn out to be an astonishingly curable ill. If not curable, then it is surely treatable. Supposedly, that's what science is for.

But more to the point that I keep aiming at (with embarrassingly mixed success): Those of us who take human language most seriously and who've gone to the most tediously outrageous lengths to anatomize and retool human language (And I admit to playing but a "bit part" in this massive drama.), those of us for whom human language and its dynamic lines of interconnectedness to both the inner and outer lives of human beings throughout history and throughout the world are a source of limitless childish fascination . . . we live every minute of our lives immersed in the unshakable paradox that it is that which is most dysfunctional about human language as a tool which also seems to cause human language to function with the mystifying vitality it does.

Here, then, is what I set out to say of this subject two autumns ago, along with one of several available models for arbitrarily chronologizing my autobiographical substance. Perhaps I should take just a minute to mention here that I've cut and pasted this excerpt verbatim from my longer draft manuscript. In the two years since I composed this first draft, I've changed the name of the Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research to the Mythoklastic Therapy Institute. I mention this only to clarify for anyone reading this that these two entities aren't distinct but, rather, one in the same.


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THE TOOLMAKER’S OTHER SON


A Memoir by Galen Green

First typed draft copyright 2005 by Galen Green
All Right Reserved

(Prose text begun on November 14, 2005; 3:00 a.m.; typed draft begun on December 4, 2005; 12:45 p.m.; Kansas City, Missouri




Ecclesiastes 9:16




Table of Contents


1. Contents
2. Acknowledgements
3. Preface
4. Prologue with Jigsaw Puzzle
5. The Willows (1830 – 1949)
6. Wichita (1949 – 1972)
7. The Deep South (1967)
8. Mexico (1968)
9. New York (1969)
10. Rural Kansas (from 1830 on)
11. Cambridge (1972)
12. Boston (1972 – 1973)
13. Salt Lake City (1973 – 1974)
14. Columbus (1974 – 1981)
15. Out West (1976)
16. Tick Ridge (1980)
17. Philadelphia (1981 – 1982)
18. Park City (1983 – 1984)
19. Seminary (1983 – 1984)
20. Wichita Redux (1984 – 1990)
21. Kansas City (from 1990 on)
22. Brookside (1990 – 1998)
23. The Ambassador (from 1998 on)
24. Chestnut Circle (from 1992 on)
25. Wichita Revisited (2002)
26. Everywhere & Nowhere
27. Afterword
28. Appendices (A – Z)
29. Notes
30. Index
31. About the Author

Preface:


Mission Statement
Of The
Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research



i.

Ecclesiastes 9:16 says it best. The wisdom of the poor is despised. I submit my life’s work as a case in point.

But it’s not about me. It’s about what’s most in need of fixing. Lip service on this topic abounds, so pay it no heed. Decide for yourself. What price are you willing to pay to be even a tiny part of the solution, instead of a part of the problem?

When we strip away the agreed-upon lie we call The Real World, what we’re left with is the real world, which coincides chillingly with the wisdom of the poor referred to by the wise little Jew who wrote Chapter 9 of Ecclesiastes and who just happens to be my personal role model and hero.

We here at the Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research (I.M.T. & R.) honor and seek the wisdom of the poor. But doing so requires us to expose as an enslaving bamboozlement the ostensible “wisdom” of the majority. And this is where the trouble begins. For Mythoklastic Therapy & Research poses a threat to those whose livelihood is the slave trade.


ii.

Given the world we’re given, what might we say, with any accuracy, is going on here? No, I haven’t driven our car off the road and into the ditch of philosophication. Heavens forefend! Rather, I’ve attempted to point out the Bethlehem star upon which history has taught us to rely to guide us through this darkness. And were we simply three wise folk traversing afar, debate would be unnecessary. But we’re not.

The night sky is filled with bright little dots and it seems at times that each of us is following a different one. Yet even this would be preferable to the tragic reality of who’s following what for what I cannot help but see – and therefore cannot help but paint for you here – is a nest of ninnies following what isn’t even there.

Slavery has been the cornerstone of human civilization – and still is. But in recent centuries slavery has needed mythocracy to fire its boilers and cover its tracks. Hence, this folly, this con game, this bamboozlement whereby most folks chase after black holes.


iii.

Perhaps what led Plato to his notion of there being another world, a parallel universe, a reality hidden inside of another dimension and completely apart from the one we think we see, was nothing more than his ordinary daily interactions with the people around him.

Certainly, that’s what’s done it for me, as well as for numerous others much smarter than me. Everyday conversation, especially, leads me there, time and again. When I hear the words and phrases we use to describe this world we share, I’m reminded of how mistaken we are, how paltry our beliefs, how inaccurate our supposed “understanding.”

Even if this were the totality of what Plato and I have in common, it would make me want to go back and study him more closely, him and his most influential imitator, Saul of Tarsus, alias Saint Paul. But that’s a subject for another day, another book. Today, here with you, I’m in the mood to explore how it is that things are so seldom what they seem. It’s my personal belief that the reason for this is not that there is a world of the “spirit” lurking here in this room with us, but rather that we have been coerced into lying to ourselves and to each other about what is actually going on here in this world we share.

-- Galen Green, Founder & C.E.O., Institute for Mythoklastic Therapy & Research; autumn 2005______________________


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Well . . . so . . . that was it. That's how The Toolmaker's Other Son would have begun, had I had but world enough and time, back in the autumn of 2005, to complete my first draft of the manuscript. Rereading it here just now, my secret hope is that I can do somewhat better than that, when the time comes. But knowing how I am, I suspect that I very well may decide to go with what you've just read. A "Preface," after all, isn't necessarily supposed to provide any kind of definitive statement, either thematically or substantively, of what will follow. This preface in particular is intended primarily to provide the thin edge of the wedge with which I hope to penetrate the reader's preconceptions regarding those issues upon which I intend for my book to focus.

As for the above "Table of Contents," I'm approximately 87.3% dissatisfied. First of all, it reflects little more than the superficial fact of the geographical locations where I've lived various portions of my life. I keep thinking that an alternative arrangement would make more sense -- for instance, one which would categorize events in a more dramatically compelling configuration. A laundry list of "peak experiences" might make sense. So might a dividing of my life's chronology episodically, with each of the 10 or 20 selected episodes or "passages" emphasizing some particular theme. On the other hand, doing it that way smacks of my old bugbear, false constructs. Moreover, almost any "thematic" pattern of organization could easily lead to a highly undesirable loss of a certain sense of "inner necessity" which sticking to a straightforward chronological structure tends to fortify (if not exactly to enhance).


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Have I already mentioned that this installment of my Mandle-Oz Memoranda is mostly about the process of writing about the process of writing? If I haven't mentioned it already, please to forgive me; I meant to warn you about it earlier.

And if, in the end, it turns out that circumstances force me to cease my writing altogether before I've been able to write about little more than the process of writing about the process of writing, well then, that's OK, too. Worse things could happen.


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As a matter of fact, it's getting late. I really ought to be going, ‘though it feels to me as though I just got here. Perhaps that's because I still haven't fulfilled the implied contract I made with you when I entitled this installment The Making of the Happy Peasant Heretic. For me, the mere act of thinking about myself as lucky is a somewhat frightening new experience -- not to mention the trepidation triggered by my trying to talk about it. I was raised to eschew any notions relating to "luck" of pretty much any kind. All blessings came from God, and anything bad that happened was my own fault. But, as I mentioned at the beginning of this installment, all this talk about my being the luckiest man in the world . . . blah, blah, blah . . . contains the hidden agenda of my laying the groundwork for (I'm hoping) an extensive exploration, further along into my book, of my personal take on the "Free Will v Determinism" debate.

However, I see any such extensive exploration as being many months down the road. Until then, I intend to continue to try to think and write in relatively small, manageable pieces. For instance, I'd like to say at least a little bit more about growing up in Wichita during those years which are currently (strangely) known as "The Civil Rights Era."
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Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen


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Coda:



ALL WE GOTTA CHANGE IS EVERYTHING

(To the tune of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”)




1.
All we gotta change is everything...everything...everything..
All we gotta change is every thing...And I think I’m gonna
start with me.

2.
Gonna change the way I do my day..do my day...do my day...
Gonna change the way I do my day...Cause I’m ready for
somethin’ new.

3.
Gonna change the way I touch the world...touch the world...
touch the world...
Gonna change the way I touch the world ...And the way
it touches me.

4.
When I come to a problem, gonna figure it out...
figure it out...figure it out...
When I come to a problem, gonna figure it out...
‘Cause I know it’s up to me.

5.
Gonna risk my neck for a better world...better world...
better world...
Gonna risk my neck for a better world...’Cause, otherwise
what’s the point?

6.
When I see oppression, gonna call its name...
call its name...call its name...
When I see oppression, gonna call its name...
And warn the children to stay away.

7.
Gonna give myself a great big hug...great big hug...
great big hug...
Gonna give myself a great big hug...To practice up for you.

8.
All we gotta change is everything...everything...everything...
All we gotta change is everything...And I think I’m gonna
start with me.


Words by Galen Green c 1989


/gg