International literary, arts and ideas journal. Always read free at sareview.org.
Our sulky gods cried
acid rain, when prayers dried
within earthen pots.
Aanuoluwapo Adesina is a Nigerian-born poet and MFA student at Butler University, USA. He is the author of Emocean, a poetry book published in 2016 by Kraft Books (Nigeria). He has been published in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, HEBE, Brave Voices Magazine, ROPES Literary Journal and elsewhere. Aanuoluwapo lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Always read free at sareview.org.
Slavery didn’t end in the United States on January 1, 1863, with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As the National Archives notes, the proclamation
applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
Page three of “The Emancipation Proclamation” specifies the states to which it applies. Source: National Archives, 6 Oct. 2015, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation.
In fact, it wasn’t until the summer of 1865 — two and a half years after the proclamation — that slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major-General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 to the people of Galveston. It stated:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Original version of General Order No. 3 from General Gordon Granger. Courtesy of the United States National Archives.
General Orders, No. 3. U.S. House, 54th Congress, 1st Session (H. Doc. 369, Part 2). “General Order Number 3,” 1896. U.S. Documents Collection. Y 1.½: SERIAL 3437
Juneteenth, celebrating this announcement of abolition over two years after the proclamation, is the name given to Emancipation Day by African Americans in Texas. Similar celebrations are also called Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Juneteenth Independence Day, and Black Independence Day.
The practice of slavery didn’t end in the United States didn’t end on Juneteenth either, though.
As the Congressional Research Service remarks in its factsheet for elected officials,
Even after the general order, some slave masters withheld the information from their enslaved people, holding them enslaved through one more harvest season.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed January 31, 1865, but wasn’t ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states until December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18, 1865:
13th Amendment/Amendment XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This ended slavery in the Union border states of Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky.
Yet still officially sanctioned slavery survived in the United States.
For a few months more, Native American tribes on “Indian territory” were allowed to continue to hold slaves, as explained by J. Gordon Hylton:
By Indian Territory, I refer to that part of the unorganized portion of the American public domain that was set apart for the Native American tribes. More specifically, I use the term to refer to those lands located in modern day Oklahoma that was set aside for the relocation of the so-call “Civilized Tribes” of the Southeastern United States: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.
These tribes were the only Native American groups to formally recognize the institution of African-slavery. As Southerners, the Civilized Tribes had accepted the institution of African-slavery, and at the outset of the Civil War, African-American slaves made up 14% of the population of Indian Territory occupied by the civilized tribes.
As it turns out, neither document applied to Indian Territory, and consequently, slavery survived in that part of the United States for several months after it was abolished everywhere else with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December, 1865.
Slavery didn’t officially end in the United States until treaties with each of the Civilized Tribes were entered into in mid-1866, more than three years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
. . . in each of the 1866 treaties the tribal signatory acknowledged that slavery would no longer be recognized as a legal institution by the tribe.
If we simply go by the dates on which the Tribes ratified these treaties, slavery in the continental United States came to an end as a legal institution on June 14, 1866, when the Creek Tribe agreed to abandon African-American slavery. The was, somewhat ironically, the day after Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment.
Slavery's end in the United States has a long, delayed, long-delayed and staggered history. Official recognition of Juneteenth celebrations traversed a similar path until the summer of 2021.
Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas and spread to other parts of the country as Black people migrated over the years. It was declared an official state holiday by Texas in 1980.
On June 15, 2021, the U.S. Senate passed by unanimous consent Senate Bill 475, declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday.
On June 16, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 475.
Image of Congressional Record — Daily Digest of June 16, 2021. Available at Congress.gov.
The following representatives voted against recognition:
President Joe Biden signed the legislation on the afternoon of June 17, 2021.
Image from whitehouse.gov.
Untitled (Chispitas), 15”x12”, (framed), acrylic and gouache on paper, 2021, Andrea Muñoz Martinez,
when i fall plummeting sure as an arrow into the deep waters of love it doesn’t matter that it's black as the pit my eyes are faulty but my heart is sure
yet navigating by the heart is a tricky business akin to being a privateer marauding the open ocean for a prize
there is none warranted to issue an act of grace hence we with no protection are held accountable for all we do
and in the court of love judgment albeit made by arbiters with scant and often flawed illumination is not only swift but final
no point in reappearing in the ragged threadbare cloak of the appellant no point in moving for mistrial for once the sentence is pronounced it is immutable and graven in the record for all time
*RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in* Uno: A Poetry Anthology (Xlibris, April 2002), New York City Haiku (Universe/NY Times, 2/2017), Coffin Bell Two (Coffin Bell, March 2020) Winter Anthology: Healing Felines and Femmes, (Other Worldly Women Press, 12/2020), Now We Heal: An Anthology of Hope, (Wellworth Publishing, 12/2020) in print: in 2River, Adelaide, Door Is A Jar, Event, Gargoyle Magazine, Genre Urban Arts, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Prairie Schooner, San Antonio Review, Southword, York Literary Review among others and appears in numerous online literary journals.
*Andrea Muñoz Martínez is a visual and performance artist currently living and working in Austin, Texas. She has an MFA from UC Davis and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Her work can be found in private collections around the United States and has been exhibited at ICOSA Collective, Artspace111 and at Camiba Art. Martínez paints a colorful, vibrant imaginary space she calls Borderlandia. Her works include series on dogs, targets, roaches, chispas and caras malas. Martínez grew up in the borderlands of South Texas and her paintings and performance art take the border and boundaries as their subject. Her painting exhibition, “Dogs Heal in Borderlandia,” can be viewed online and at Link & Pin Artspace in Austin. Her paintings are available for purchase at xoxoam*
When she holds the tin up to her ear, she could swear that she hears a voice. Not enough to recognise. It is, without doubt, one of the boys there for the season. One of the new friends her brother recruits every summer. Never the same — they seem to outgrow him, all of his games, from one year to the next. And then, buzzing resolves itself. The words are clear.
“Come in, Dan Dare, come in.”
Pa has already hauled Euan away to have the skin off him for wasting the twine on his tin phone. For wasting time. For doing something, anything at all.
Rhona puts the tin to her mouth. Pulls the string as taut as she can.
“Mayday, Digby. Mayday.”
The twine goes slack. The voice doesn’t return. She hears the dull thudding of shoes across the turf as he runs away.
Even in the dark, Euan’s eyes are very blue. Not like some that go grey on a dark day. They are bright, even from beneath his bed.
“Come on, come with me,” she says. She can always talk him out from under. “There are all sorts of nasty things under there. Mice. Beasties.”
He holds on to the bed slats. If she pulls him, those slats would be wrenched out of the frame before he would let go. She doesn't have the heart or the strength to do that.
“Did you see the frogspawn by the gate?”
There is a silent nod and she tries to think of other things that boys might like. The big barn cat and her latest litter of kittens, he likes them. And there is the chance that the shop might have the latest copy of The Dandy or The Beano. He shakes his head: No, they do not. Some other boy has already been and reported.
In the end, she lies on her side on the floor and he slowly creeps toward her. She holds him and feels his little boy heart pounding under her hand. They both listen for the door.
When does he stop telling her everything? The year he comes home from university at Christmas with a green scarf instead of the red one that she had packed him off with, the one that she had bought. Rhona tells him that green is a fairy colour and that the fairies will steal him away from her. Just a wind up, the kind he gives her.
But in the summer, it isn't him that comes home. He doesn't speak any more. Not the way he had. She goes to his room, sits on the bed, and asks him if he remembers when the men used to come for work. Travelers, he says to call them. Not what their father did. There was the woman with the sad, sad songs, the man with the sea shanties. Even Pa would get out his whistle and play. Euan ran every morning to walk to school with the other boys and she envied the girls’ ponies.
And one morning, when the work was over, he would run out and the barn would be empty. All the children gone. There were some bright boys and girls there, she had thought, boys and girls who would have been something if they’d gotten more school. The teacher had said as much.
“You’d stand and cry. You’d cry for days. Do you remember that? Crying for all your little ti — Traveler — friends that had gone away.”
“Because they hadn’t taken me with.”
He was the only child for miles who couldn’t be frightened by the idea of someone taking him away in the night. Of being stolen. Peter Pan was an escape manual to him, the plan for the way things could be done. Kidnapped was a recipe for the kind of wild life he wanted to live. It would have just been off and away to adventure for him. No thought of what would be left behind.
Euan pulls her through the crowd as it streams away from Murrayfield. This is half a lifetime ago; she is only thirty-five and he is barely twenty. No, he is older than that, he must be, but she always makes him more the baby than he is. He says something about the rugby but, between the rain and it being about the rugby, she can’t get a word of it. She would be lost without him. She could listen to him forever.
“You’ve got longer legs. Slow down.”
“If we stop, we won’t make the train.”
And she runs beside him until she has a stitch in her side so sharp that she can barely breathe. They make it the mile to Haymarket in time to see the train pull away.
‘“We’ll say it was my fault. I couldn’t keep up. You can tell me what you were saying about the French side again —“
The shutter has come down, though, with a snap. There isn’t going to be any more. He watches the train recede. There is rain dripping from his nose, from his hair. It’s another losing year, another year of coming out on the very bottom.
Pa doesn’t come down hard, not really. Not for missing a train. Any fool can miss a train, he says, and he’s right. Anyone can be just the tiniest bit too late for something. Euan would stay up all night, waiting for enough light to go out to the barn for his friends. But somehow he had always missed saying goodbye. Fallen asleep just a few moments before,
“You two can do what you like, after all. Best that you’re happy. Follow your whims until you’re in the ground.”
And he is right again, they can do as they like, her and her brother, like he never could. They can come and go. It has been different for him, he has had the land and the farm and the children to look after. She mustn’t forget that they owe him that.
In July, he rings to give her his news, sounding like he might as well be calling her on a tin can and a piece of twine.
“At my age, she says, I'll die with cancer. Not from it.”
But what sort of age is it? It's no age at all.
“Rhona?” He shouts down the line. “For God's sake, Rhona, I'm paying for this time.”
Euan stands in the hall. Just after Hogmanay. He’ll be away again in the morning, gone back to school with his strange green scarf. More a stranger now than he ever was before. He comes through when Pa gets Rhona by the hair. It’s only caution — he saw his own granny catch fire at a paraffin stove and die.
“You tie this up. I don’t want to be eating it for my tea.”
“Yes, Pa.”
Euan’s back in Aberdeen, back at University, already. She can see the miles back there ticking away in his eyes, taking him further and further. He isn’t here, not with her and Pa. It makes it hard to look at him for long, so she looks away.
When he gets himself thrown out on his ear, he doesn’t dare come home. It isn’t Pa he’s afraid of, he writes. Rhona knows it is her. He’s out there with his cardboard suitcase because he has made himself too much of a stranger to know where to go.
“You can come back,” She says to him when she rings from the post office phone. “You can come home to me.”
He is quiet for a long time, until they are almost cut off. But she puts in more coins.
Rhona hears someone walking up the stair. Somewhere in Glasgow, using a phone set out in a hall. She knows that it is cold there. Bitter. She can hear his teeth rattling. She asks if he has enough for a room or if he is dossing in hallways, in lobbies, any place he can find.
“Tell me how much money you have. If you don’t have any, I’ll send some. I’ll send you a ticket. Tell me where you’re staying.”
‘“That Christmas,” he says at last. “When he let me go back to Uni after Christmas. How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not now.”
“What did you do, Rhona?”
His voice is so small and so very sad that she has to put the phone down. She hangs up the receiver. Then she picks it up again, expecting to hear him again, but there is nothing. There is someone else waiting for the phone. It’s past time for her to be home with the shopping.
Pa couldn’t last forever, but Euan doesn’t come home for that. It’s funny how it happens: Pa is riding along in the tractor, a big yellow thing, and picking up more and more speed. It must be funny, because she laughs. He crests the hill, just as he always does, and begins to come down it. But something is changed now. The tyre strikes a rock, sinks into a burrow. The angle and speed are all wrong. She looks out the windows, even comes to the door. And in that moment, as it rears up, she knows that if she screams she can stop time, hang the tractor there forever. She laughs. One short bark, but a laugh all the same. And the tractor rolls. It rolls and rolls.
It is the neighbours who come and make the tea and who do the washing up. They carry the coffin. They do not ask Rhona if she doesn’t have a brother somewhere that could be doing these things for her. Are you all right alone, the neighbours ask her. But she isn’t alone. Euan has been there. She knows that he has been — for a few moments, anyway, while she was at the kirk. He has left things changed to let her know. The cup of coffee that she had forgotten has been tidied away. The tea towel hanging from the drawer pull is damp. He must have been there. She has only just missed him. He is already up and running ahead again.
The voice on the phone asks where she is. It’s breathy and nasal. American. Or Canadian. It doesn’t have that hollowness that transatlantic calls used to have. That sound of all the miles being crossed, of being in the past.
“Grantully. In Scotland. Grantully, Scotland.”
“Are you at home?”
Yes, she is at home. She is in her bed, making a very early night of it. She has a book that she will never finish and hot water bottle that will be cold before she puts her feet under.
“Is there anyone with you? Maybe you can get someone.”
She holds the phone away from her ear and only hears bits of what they are saying. Nothing that she understands. It’s a long way for someone to call to have a joke. She asks who it is, and they tell her again. They ask again if she wouldn’t like to get someone.
She sets the phone down on the kitchen counter and goes round to the neighbours in her slippers. The wife comes back with her. She does well not to stare too much at Rhona’s dressing gown, her baffies, not to ask questions as to why she has been fetched away from her television. They speak to her and then she speaks to Rhona. Whatever they have told her to say, not a word of it makes any sense at all. A game of Chinese whispers, though she mustn’t call it that any more.
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
It’s very kind of her, but Rhona can’t see any reason why she should. She sends her back to her family.
The train to Edinburgh is delayed at Perth, then it is cancelled. There is a replacement bus service, instead. When she arrives, she collects her forms that entitle her to a refund of the difference in price. All to be posted off at a later date, but no more than thirty days past the date of travel marked on the ticket. There is no sense in paying the price of a train journey for riding on a bus.
She leaves her bag at the bus station and walks up to Prince’s Street, past Jenners. Never the sort of place she’d shop, no, because it would be a terrible waste of money. Those clothes on this body. But there are some very handsome things there; Lovely things, shining under spotlights in the dark windows. The street and pavement are a mess of fences and hoardings from the trams they’ve been promising. They put down the rails, but with no trams to run over them, to keep them in place, they have warped. They need taken out and laid again. Their Pa was right. They'd lived to regret the day they got rid of the old trams, sold them off for scrap.
She would like for Euan to be with her here. His shoulders and elbows would get through the scrums of shoppers and tour groups. Her folding walking stick used to do the job — take it out, and the crowds would part. Now she needs it to keep from being knocked over on the torn-up paving stones. If he were here, she would turn right and walk with him back to Murrayfield, find out what it was he'd wanted to tell her about the French side outside that café. She turns left, down to the parliament.
He hasn’t seen the parliament in person, only on her postcards. She’s told him time and again that he’d like it, even if he couldn’t tell what it was meant to be. If only he’d come to see it himself. It’s a beautiful place, the low grey concrete entryway lifting up, giving way to steel, oak and glass. It’s like coming out of the darkness, out of the past, she says. Like being born. She isn't sure if she's read that somewhere or thought of it herself. It is the only time he sends the same postcard back, with her words scored out.
“Over budget. Behind schedule. Ugly, ugly, ugly,” he writes.
He apologises later and asks for another card. She sends him a new one, one with the puffins on Orkney. She sends the rugby scores, too. He can’t complain about puffins. Instead, he complains about getting the wooden spoon again. Another losing year, one bleeding into the next.
She tells Euan that the building is meant to look like boats. Like hulls and bows and sails. A fishing fleet. Like the fleet has only been pulled in for the night and is ready to set off again in the morning. When the design was first announced she’d told him that. She can't remember the year. The last year that Scotland won the Calcutta Cup, maybe. That makes sense to her, he would have had more important things to remember then. Trys and conversions. The names of captains. How many points they had beaten England by.
She runs her fingers through the words carved into stones on the Canongate side of the building, into the outlines of the old town pressed into the concrete. A wodge of green gum is packed into a corner. The guide she has says that this is the view of Edinburgh that the architect had from his hotel window. She thinks about him, the architect. He never saw it finished. Not in stone. Cancer.
Here are the swans, just as always. And Euan goes charging up toward Arthur’s Seat, storming up it, trying to find the place where they found those strange little dolls from the museum. Burke and Hare’s bodies, some people say. Witching, maybe, or guilt. Or are they meant to be the sailors that never had a grave, that never came home? Half of them are gone to dust now.
He leaps and skips and their mother is calling for him to slow down. He's part mountain goat, she says. He must be. Such wee legs, but so strong. So fast.
A car slows down for directions. They put down their window and she goes over to them, ready to tell them she’s only a tourist herself. The egg arcs over her shoulder, but the flour strikes home. They speed away. Now that she looks, she sees the explosions of white powder all up and down the path.
“What’s happened to you, dear?” says the woman behind the desk of her hotel.
“There were some lads —”
“Oh, you’ve been lucky. Sometimes it’s bottles of wee.”
The flour comes out of her coat. Enough of it, anyway, that she doesn’t feel ashamed to wear it back out. It’s her only good coat. The rest have been eaten to pieces in the cupboards.
When she heads back out, the woman at the desk calls to her that she should keep away from the dark places, the gardens and the parks. There’s no respect in them bairns these days. No one teaches them any anymore.
Euan’s voice is on the answerphone. This is an apology, too, like the one for the postcard. He knows she doesn’t pick up, not unless she knows who is meant to be calling. There are sales calls at all hours now, and the only thing she has found to stop them is not picking up at all.
‘“I’m sorry to have missed you.”
She would phone him back, only it is easier, he tells her, to wait for him. Then he can ring from places that have good lines. His calls have that sound to them, the sound that they are coming from someplace unreachable. A metallic echo. She presses the button again. And again. This voice from six hours and seventy years go.
“I’m sorry to have missed you,” he says again. His words rattle around. Buzz in the speaker.
When she finds a place to sit inside, she can’t decide off the menu. Rhona asks the boy what he would pick. Fish pie, he says, but that’s something she can make at home for herself. If you only get out now and then, it’s better to have something you’d never make at home. She asks about something that calls itself Chicken Rob Roy and he shrugs. It’s not a thing she would dream of making for herself, so she orders that. She gets a pint of beer, too, because she won’t be driving anywhere. How long has it been since she’s had a pint? A very long time. People talk when an old woman drinks alone.
Two young things come in to the ladies’ after her, a couple of classy lassies by the sound. They go in the stall together, one to hold the drinks for the other. When it’s empty again, when they have gone away laughing, Rhona comes out to splash her face with cold water. She passes her hands over her face and pulls the skin taut. She doesn’t open her eyes.
If she were to see herself now, see herself as she was, as Euan knows her —she drops her hands and blinks at the mirror. There is the ghostly spot of flour, glowing over her heart in the blue light. She can’t turn the tap off and there are grey lumps of toilet roll blocking the drain. She leaves before the water crests the side of the basin.
She should protect him more from Pa, she knows this. He's like a dog that can scent an outsider and Euan is the poor little stranger. He smiles at the world and she has tried to show him the world smiling back. It isn’t the fault of either of them that she's been left to play Mother. She will drive him back to the train, get him back to school. And Pa, if she takes enough care today, tonight, he won't stop them. She knows how to speak to him, sometimes, make him see. What to do to ask him for what she wants.
In the corner of the pub, it’s snug and warm. There’s a fine mist of rain coming down and no better place to be than inside. It’s early yet. The lights are on, the music is still low, and the fruit machine is vacant. She watches it go through its routine — first dark, then a green glow for the start of play. The lights build, moving from green to gold to orange. Winner, the top light flashes in bright red. Winner, winner, winner. It goes dark and starts again. She feels its excitement. A night out in the city, a trip to America and no one to answer to, not even the postman.
There was a postcard from Euan, not so long ago. New enough that it is still in the kitchen, still by the door, where she sees it first thing when she comes in.
“There is a girl,” he writes.
That takes up almost the whole card. He doesn’t have a sense of waste. Takes as much space as he likes. The second line is smeared, almost beyond legibility — he’s dragged his hand through the ink before it has dried. They had tried to make him right-handed at school, like they did for her, but it never took.
“A beautiful girl.”
The word ‘very’ floats between the two lines, anchored by nothing at all.
There is a picture of a home on the front. A hogan, the card says in small print, traditional dwelling place of the Navajo. The kind of card she would have picked. This is home, he says, my home, with a beautiful girl and a hogan. She minds that old comic, the one with the wee cowboy, that was meant to be in Arizona but was still, somehow, in Glasgow. The name is on the tip of her tongue.
He is her blue-eyed boy, still, and he is happy. With a house and a beautiful wife. He has stopped his running, there in the desert. It’s a lie, it certainly isn’t a truth, but it’s the kind of untruth he knows that she would like to believe. She buys a copy of The Beano. Passes over The Dandy on the racks. There is no Eagle to read, not any more, because all the little boys who loved Dan Dare and his time machine, they’re all old men now.
When the plane lands in Newark, she tells them where she is going, where she will be staying. Passes them her landing card. There isn’t a house number, she says, not out there. But there have been delays; her flight has landed after the expected time.
When she asks if she is in the right place, the woman tells her that she can’t answer any questions, she must wait in the line. She spends twenty minutes in a queue to be told that she has been waiting in the wrong place the whole time. She should have been passing through security, stripping down for her next search. And now, now there won’t be the time for her to reach flight to Phoenix.
‘You won’t make gate. It’s already closed. They’re taxiing. Now, we’ll get you a voucher to spend the night, and put you on the first flight in the morning.’
“Help me. My brother —”
‘“You can call and let anyone expecting you know. Does it really matter when you get there? Six tonight or six tomorrow morning?”
It doesn’t matter, she tells him. Not at all. Euan can't die again.
Only he does. Over and over. And she opens her mouth. Pushes her fingers in. No sound comes. And then it comes all at once.
A. S. Robertson is a writer and artist who lives near Glasgow, Scotland. Their work has appeared in Cherry Tree and Prairie Schooner.
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies Erik Davis MIT Press, 2019 Audiobook narrated by the author
Rating: One Star
Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who study esoteric subjects, a much more fraught and murky intellectual/emotional space for me. It is impossible to disentangle these strands in “High Weirdness” and pointless to try. In the end, the challenges involved in taking this book in have helped make it, for me, one of the best books I’ve read this year.
I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and sci-fi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history-obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.
Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects, the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role-playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.
This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonauts — materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”
And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history Ph.D. — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.
Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days, if they could stop laughing at what they saw as countercultural clownishness long enough.
It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers' efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.
But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six-year-old desiring magic power, but the twelve-year-old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.
Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography. I basically agree with this notion but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.
Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks. I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society, but there wasn’t much peace and love there. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.
Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.
Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick — “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson — Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.
Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses. Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work.
Peter John Berard, Ph.D., serves as San Antonio Review’s Book Review Editor. He is a historian, writer and organizer in Watertown, Mass.
In the New England dirt, freshmen parents planted roots. A mom, dad, and child drove around town spotting fledgling land. Settlers without blueprints, a family built a home. Dreams in hands clutched like scratch-off tickets for the jackpot.
Dandelion fuzz blown from lips of suntanned children, on egg-on-a-sidewalk evenings. Herds fanned out, playing in hamlet plots and cul-de-sacs. Recycled songs blared on intercoms, piggy banks were dumped onto beds, quarters counted. Little feet darted for the ice cream truck on its route.
Music blasted from cars racing down the bite-sized town highway. Drivers dented crooked stop signs, revved up mowers and gasoline smell. Overgrown grass had its haircut, the neighbors were out front and back. Sipping cold brews on porches, setting in the distant sun, years spent young.
*Ash Slade lives in Wolcott, CT, and enjoys reading and writing poetry. His work has been published by* Trouvaille Review, The Unpublishable Zine, and Pages Penned In Pandemic. Work is forthcoming in The Lincoln Underground and October Hill Magazine.
Brief comments on recently read literature.
William O. Pate II is the founding editor and publisher of San Antonio Review. He lives in Austin.
Mainstreaming Black Power** Tom Adam Davies University of California Press, 2017 9780520292116 328 pages**
I read this out of a desire to get a more finely-grained picture of the recession of the Black Freedom Movement in the 1970s, and what came after. The more I think of it, the more I think that this defeat shaped everything that came after, in much the same way as late nineteenth-century Europe lived under the shadow of the suppression of the Paris Commune. I’ve been thinking of the ways in which being born and living under the shadow of this defeat — even if people didn’t acknowledge it very often — must have affected my generation and the generation before mine. Basically, the “cancel culture” flap over the summer and a few other things had me thinking thoughts about “Gen X” and . . . .
Well, this is all getting far afield from the actual subject of this book. The phrase “Black Power” scares people, to this day, white people generally (but not exclusively). When I was in grad school, it was often treated as a hard, fast dividing line — there was the Civil Rights Movement, then there was Black Power. People had different ideas about the valence of that shift but agreed that it happened, and agreed that black power was a shift into revolution, the sort of thing the Man can’t touch, for better or for worse. You can see why, given the long (and continuing) tradition of Black Power martyrs and the way people like J. Edgar Hoover freaked out over the concept.
This was never the whole story. Davies opens this book by discussing a memo circulated in the Johnson White House about how Black Power is actually good, that it promised to bring Black people into the political and economic system, to get Black people, to use subsequent President Richard Nixon’s phrase, “a piece of the action.” You can say that’s white politicians appropriating something and neutralizing it, and that’s not entirely wrong. But it was awfully soon in the concept’s career for that, and as Davies makes clear, Black Power meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For some people, who it’d be hard to dismiss as not really “getting it,” like CORE leader Floyd McKissick, Black Power was absolutely as Nixon described it. There were always conservative and capitalist strains in black nationalism. Among other things, the Black Power emphasis on “unity” made it hard to draw lines within the movement, even if people had been inclined to, that might solidify the concept and keep it out of the mouths of white politicians like Nixon and Robert Kennedy.
Nixon and Kennedy represent two of the standard means through which the political structure as it existed could make use of the Black Power movement/concept. Nixon, as mentioned, went in big for “Black capitalism.” Davies seems to think he meant it, for whatever it was worth, but I wonder how much it was just a placeholder for the guy, whose heart was never in domestic policy and certainly not in improving Black lives, something to say that was a little more cautious than the softened George Wallace-line which Reagan eventually perfected. Robert Kennedy, for his part, was a great proponent of the War on Poverty and for the participatory elements therein. If people in ghetto communities could get involved in Community Action Programs and the like, people like Kennedy and the social scientists behind him figured, they could build up their own political and economic power in such a way that doesn’t threaten the basic integrity of the American system. Like a lot of liberalism, it was about channeling popular energy away from revolution and into incremental change within the system as it stood.
Black Power-influenced groups got involved in both types of action. Much of the book is about how that went, primarily in New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. It’s a sad story of some substantial accomplishments — new schools, job programs, Black “firsts,” etc. — but consistent frustrations as white power structures saw to it that Black Power manifested itself in ways nonthreatening to the racist system as a whole. Easy to say from here, and I’m not trying to fault the militants for working with what they had, but it seems inevitable that both Kennedy’s and Nixon’s approaches were bound to fail. “Black capitalism” without substantial and basically un-capitalist redistribution of wealth is just setting up Black people to scrabble against each other for the scraps white people left behind. Kennedy’s people-powered (but strictly managed) welfarism is at least a little closer to redistribution, but still leaves white people in charge of the commanding heights of the economy and political system and Black and poor people at their mercy. Black mayors elected around this time could run the gamut from race-proud Maynard Jackson in Atlanta to race-neutral ex-cop Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, but either way, they found themselves up against the cold realities of racialized capitalism.
I guess if this book gets across one thing relevant to why I picked it up, it’s how fragile, contingent, and brief the window for serious change really was. The War on Poverty included as much community participation as it did because LBJ didn’t fully understand what he was signing, Davies argues. White backlash was already stirring before “Black Power” came along to scare everyone, and that backlash, combined with the economic damage that came along with neoliberalism, combined to make mass incarceration the central reality of American racial politics after the 1970s. There was never a moment where either militants or reformers (and the two categories weren’t nearly as distinct as you might think) could be confident that they had much room to maneuver- they were in constant emergency mode.
Anyway, this book was pretty good. It did its job and got into the nitty-gritty of community efforts in its three subject cities without making any really outsized claims, I guess appropriate for a recent Black history book written by a white British guy. It’s what I think of as “dissertation-y,” all cautious and somewhat plodding, which I guess makes sense as it probably was the guy’s dissertation. The academic history ladder is such a slippery pole that for a lot of people, getting their dissertation out is all they can do for a good decade or so book-wise, which sucks as they probably have more interesting writing and ideas rattling around. Some people, of course, don’t even get that far and just write about people who do in reviews that aren’t even peer-reviewed! Oh, life.
Peter John Berard, Ph.D., serves as San Antonio Review’s Book Review Editor. He is a historian, writer and organizer in Watertown, Mass.
newton said that energy is neither
created nor destroyed. in her favorite
restaurant, i can still hear my grandmother
gossiping with the waitresses 一 she used to
come so often, they fed her free of charge 一
electricity sparking in her eyes; in her old
apartment, i can hear her slippers
shuffling to the kitchen 一 my mother bit her
lip to refrain from scolding her 一 and the
tapping of finger pads against ceramic mugs; in
the hospital, i hear her rustling in her paper
gown 一 even in her prolonged exhaustion, she
never cared for the hospital robes much 一 and
scoffing at the forest of needles embedded in her
forearm. when i listen to the wind, i can still hear the
symphonies of a thousand years playing her to sleep.
Julia Vu is a pansexual Vietnamese American high school junior from Bay Area, California. She is the Editor-In-Chef of the literary magazine Café Au Lait Magazine and works to amplify the voice of the underrepresented. Julia founded Operation Dopamine, an international mental health advocacy organization, and has worked with ambassadors from 9 countries to stimulate discussion around mental health. As an IB Diploma student, she is actively conducting individual research on nivolumab-ipilimumab combination immunotherapy in metastatic melanoma. A survivor of depression and eating disorders, she documents her cycles with decline, relapse, and recovery through her poetry. Her works have been published in the anthologies Songs of Peace: World's Biggest Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 2020 and A Celebration of Poets 2020, as well as various literary magazines. Julia hopes to empower others and embrace the beauty of her own mental illness by sharing the letters she never intended to send.
Book Reviewed: Semiotic Love [Stories] Brian Phillip Whalen Awst Press, 2021 128 pages ISBN: 9780997193893
Semiotic Love, published by Austin’s Awst Press, is a collection of flash and microfiction that ranges over a wide variety of human relationships — specifically, love in its myriad forms.
The recurrent theme, at least among the larger pieces, seems to be that of communication within these relationships. The middle section of the book, which gives the collection its name, is the most prolonged and the most “scientific” of these analyses, drawing on the Greimas Square of semiotics which illuminates the relationships between opposing concepts — here, male-female — and charts the unraveling of a relationship.
One could, if one was so inclined, draw this same semiotics square over the collection itself, with the short pieces titled ‘Men’ and ‘Women’, falling in the first and third sections, respectively. Here lives are sketched in miniature, in opposition to each other, the women viewed only through their relationship to an unnamed man.
There are small, regular intervals where the reader is presented with telegraphed phrases and anecdotes perhaps slightly reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For instance, there is related in a single sentence that ‘Popa’ came to be when he misspelled ‘Poppa’ on a Christmas card. And while they are occasionally amusing or pithy, and do fit the theme of communications and miscommunications, they do not, on the whole, provide any great depth to the larger explorations.
The microfictions fall somewhere in between these little gathered phrases and incidents and the longer pieces in the collection. Parents are lost to disease and the inexorable march of time onwards, a visiting writer bends physical balance into a mental/spiritual balance and a promise to never kill an animal is not really one.
Where this collection does take off is in its longer stories and more sustained inquiries into love and loss. “Una Vida Mejor” is a deft exploration of the relationship between brother and sister, as is “Broadcast” which closes with a sad and stunning image of a promised land.
The real standout of this collection is also its longest. “Brothers” is a study in absence with its supposed celebration of a marital union in Prague undercut with missed moments, missing words and, finally, hauntingly, missing brothers.
(Note from the Editorial Collective: Semiotic Love was provided free for review.)
Brian Phillip Whalen’s work can be found in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, Poets.org, the Flash Nonfiction Food anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia, and elsewhere. Brian holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany and is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency. He lives with his wife and daughter in Tuscaloosa, where he teaches creative and first-year writing at The University of Alabama.
Awst Press is an independent literary publisher in Austin, Texas, featuring impressive work from diverse voices.
Ash Lange is San Antonio Review’s Prose Editor.